Transcription
If there is a war in Europe, it will be because of NATO's expansion and the consequences of it. And secondly, because we have too few intellectuals, too few knowledgeable people, too few good advisers about security, peace, mediation, and things like that.
Europe made its huge mistake by allowing the bombing in '99 of Yugoslavia, which was from that day, I would say, uh, NATO has become an illegal organization or a criminal organization or a law-offending organization.
Welcome to World Affairs in Context, everybody. I'm Lena Petrova. Today, I'm honored to welcome Dr. Jan Oberg. Jan is a Swedish peace and conflict researcher, author, and co-founder of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, which you can find on Substack and other platforms that I will link in the description below. Jan is known for his independent analysis and outspoken criticism of militarization. He has spent years examining the deeper forces driving geopolitical conflict from the Middle East and Ukraine to the growing tensions between the United States, China, and Russia. Jan, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you so much also for the beautiful introduction. I'm glad to be here.
Well, it's my pleasure to host you. You've spent decades, of course, studying peace and conflicts. And when you look at the world today, are we entering a fundamentally more dangerous era than the Cold War, or is this a different kind of global instability altogether?
Well, I think since I lived through the first Cold War, as they call it, um, ending with the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union falling apart, um, I think this period is more dangerous. Um, but I'm not, I don't belong to the doomsday people who say we're in the beginning of the Third World War and blah, blah, blah. I hate this type of, uh, unscientific emotional frustration airing because it takes away hope from people. Uh, and there, there's no theory for when a Third World War would, would, would start and whether or not it would be conventional or with nuclear weapons.
But the reason I say that the old one was a safer place was, first of all, politicians knew something. Politicians at that time had either parents or had themselves experienced the Second World War. They knew that war was something that should never happen. Secondly, they were people who could read and write books, many of them. Third, they were personalities with a vision, from Willy Brandt or Olof Palme or Bruno Kreisky or on O'Rourke and or Gaul, if you want, up to Gorbachev. Uh, they were people who knew that these kinds of things are dangerous, potentially, if you make the wrong decisions.
Furthermore, there was more of a balance between the two systems, uh, in the sense that the Warsaw Pact were always about 60-70% of NATO's military expenditures. Meaning there was some kind of reason to say that, uh, peace has to do with balance. Where we are roughly balancing each other, there is a better chance of not of, of, of, well, not having peace, but at least mutually, uh, understood positions. Um, and one very strong one would not throw himself over a very, uh, weaker one.
It was also the period in which we had contacts through the, what was called the Iron Curtain at that time. Um, military people would meet each other, have dinners together, talk about each other's exercises in order to avoid that an exercise could be interpreted by the other side as the beginning of a war. That's why you had the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which was an excellent thing, including also, uh, uh, the US and Canada at the time. But that was a forum for discussion.
This perverse idea that has been introduced after the Russian invasion or special military operation in Ukraine. I've never seen that in the, in the first Cold War, namely that you cut off completely everything. You cannot even have a, a Russian young pianist playing in the Western world. We can hardly go there. I think there are only two airports in Europe for which you can go to Moscow now. Um, embassy staff has been reduced, forced to be reduced. We have stopped energy cooperation. The Americans destroyed Nord Stream and what have you. All these things are, in my view, um, making the present situation more dangerous because everything I just said now is what we don't have today.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, its military expenditures were 8% of NATO's, and NATO is arguing that we must have more and more and more, 5% of gross national product and blah, blah, blah. Uh, if there is a war in Europe, it will be because of NATO's expansion and the consequences of it. And secondly, because we have too few intellectuals, too few knowledgeable people, too few good advisors about security, peace, mediation, and things like that in the ministries of foreign affairs, defense ministries, and prime minister's office. There's nowhere in the world, but certainly not in Europe, anyone who has an advisor in peace, just somebody who's educated in peace, non-violent conflict resolution, mediation, reconciliation, those types of things doesn't exist.
Europe made its huge mistake by allowing the bombing in '99 of Yugoslavia, which was from that day, I would say, uh, NATO has become an illegal organization or a criminal organization or a law-offending organization because it's a purely defensive charter or treaty that says that the members shall come to each other's rescue if one is attacked. Nobody was attacked. They intervened in Yugoslavia, in which they had nothing to do. NATO has nothing to do in Yugoslavia, Serbia, and Kosovo. I was a mediator for four years in the Kosovo conflict. I know quite well what was happening. NATO has nothing to do in Ukraine. Nothing. Had nothing to do in, you know, Libya or whatever. It's out of area, but it's also out of law, out of treaty operations.
Now, the Europeans went along with that because the Americans wanted it that way. And so what makes us more, the situation more dangerous today is that Europe is totally submissive, unable to distance itself from, uh, a more and more, um, violent, um, unpredictable, dangerous, militarist, half-fascist, proto-fascist United States of America, which it was not at that time. So there are many reasons, I would say, it's more dangerous today to be in Europe.
But I would also hurry to say there was one factor at that time that did not, that does exist today, but did not exist at that time, and that was the rapid decline and demise and final fall of the US empire. There was nobody talking about the US empire falling in the '60s and '70s. Um, almost nobody. We were a few that it will fall because all empires fall, but that was a kind of, you know, gross statement. But the fact is now that it's getting more and more desperate in the Western world because the United States is losing basically everything it once had, and turning, and the rest of the world is turning its back on, on the US. And that makes it very, very significant and very tragic that Europe has not been able to give you, to, to represent, let's say, a different or another West that the rest of the world could work with.
But that submissiveness, this, this totally, we do, we do and say what we're supposed to say. We just listen to his master's voice in Washington. You know, you could just as well close down foreign ministries and defense ministries in Europe. They have never thought an independent thought the last 20 years. I say that because I sat in the Danish government's commission for security and disarmament all the '80s and I know what kind of intellectual capacity went into decision-making in Denmark. As a so-called footnote nation and a nation that was had decided not to have American bases, not to have foreign, uh, weapons, not to stored, and not to participate in, in, um, NATO's nuclear planning group. We were special in Scandinavia. And I don't have to tell you now, we're totally militarized with, uh, 43 American bases in Scandinavia, a membership of NATO for Finland and, and Sweden. You know, the whole thing is going to fall apart because these are decisions that won't last because NATO is falling apart too.
So, yes, more dangerous, but also that dangerous period is going to be short. And if we survive it, and if you and I see, and the rest of the world see a world without the US empire and without NATO, it's going to be a fantastic world. Think about the kind of world we could have when these two factors are gone. I'm not talking about America. I never mean anti-American. I'm saying the empire. There's no empire that has lasted forever, and this one is going down. It will be the last one in human history. The Chinese are not that stupid.
Yan, there is a, um, there is an argument to be made that any state that hosts US military bases is not truly sovereign. Do you feel that there is, is there any substance to that argument? Would you agree with that?
Absolutely. Absolutely. I have been an advisor both to the Danish and the Swedish government since I'm a Danish citizen and lived most of my life in Sweden. Uh, to the government, to the ministries of foreign affairs in the '80s when I was the director of the Lund University Peace Research Institute, which was closed down in '89 over and above my head. We did a lot of studies on common security, on what is deterrence philosophy, what is D. And we were paid by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for writing books. I said books, not just two pages, but I said books, things that were later published as books. Went up to Stockholm and sat for eight hours and members of the, of the staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs going through everything we had written, you know, with red lines to say, well, how does this relate to what you said 20 pages earlier? You know, that was an intellectual input. And that's why I said the, the situation is dangerous in Europe because there's nobody who has security and peace and foreign policy intellectualism anymore. It's, it's anyone who has will not join politics. I'm sorry, it's a very arrogant statement, but I can compare what we once had in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, and up to somewhere in the '90s, and what we have today. It's embarrassing to listen to the Swedish prime minister or foreign minister talking about international affairs, but Olof Palme could do it. Brandt could do it. Willy Brandt knew what Ostpolitik was and how to keep an open door as a former Berlin mayor and then as Chancellor of, of Germany. It's a totally different, we are in a situation today which I call kakistocracy, and kakistocracy means government by the least able and least good people. I'm sorry, but that's where I stand in comparative perspective.
For the past four to five years, it seems that Europe has been slowly becoming militarized, divided, and as we mentioned before we went live on, um, went live here, economically fragile. Economically speaking, Europe is, is, is deteriorating. What do you make of the rapid militarization that is happening across Europe while it is economically deteriorating, and particularly in Germany, in Poland, and of course the Baltic states?
Well, I used to say to people who don't know better, there is not one study anywhere in the world, as far as I know, that proves that military investments give you more development, uh, jobs, employment, investment, uh, trade, goods production, consumerism. It's, it's a total lie that the investment in the military industry has great effects throughout the society. And we can pull up Europe's economy by having setting off 5% of the gross national product for, um, military, for weapons production on, in gross defense, defense purposes.
Um, if you want to, if you want now to improve the, um, uh, European economy, what you do is you disarm and start talking with the opponents you may think you have, which I disagree with. Russia, China, whatever it is that you point out today or tomorrow. I'm 75. I've heard for 75 years that the Russians are coming. And, you know, I say jokingly, you cannot trust these pesky Russians because for 75 years they have not come. Uh, it's like Netanyahu saying, you know, since the early '90s, that means well, 30, 35 years that Iran is going to have nuclear weapons. Well, an idiot who has so many and so bad predictions done repeatedly and does not change his views cannot be a person to be followed. Neither can those people in the military-industrial media academic complex in Europe who are now destroying the European economy.
And so, um, I, I, I think it's a very dark perspective for Europe. You have the, the energy, cheap energy that we have said no to because the Americans had an economic warfare on Europe by destroying Nord Stream, and I'm not in doubt that they did. I cannot prove it, but any, any other theory is worse. And you have American top politicians, including Joe Biden at the time, and Madame Nuland, and others who said, "We are going to do it." Now, the rest is somebody in the media who thinks that, oh, you can't say that America did this. Of course, it was America, maybe with the help of Norway, according to some theories, by Ola Tunander, who's a very qualified researcher, by the way.
And so we're in a situation where you invest enormously on a weaker and weaker economic base, in which China and other countries are growing enormously and surpassing us on point after point in terms of resource, research, education, uh, new products, by cars, etc. I mean, build your dream. Right there's not going to be a dream in Volkswagen in Germany in the future. I suppose that the, the Chinese will be building Volkswagen in, um, in Germany in the future because we're way behind. And Funck does not understand any of these mechanisms. She's a former defense minister, and she's a person who cannot think independently from Washington, obviously. And that leads us to catastrophe. I'm sorry to say so.
We could have a wonderful Europe. We could have a wonderful Europe with cooperating, not loving necessarily, but cooperating with Russia and Ukraine. We could solve the Ukraine question, which is not a Ukraine conflict. It's a NATO-Russia conflict that leads to the violence in Ukraine. We could solve that long ago, in my view. But everybody's obsessed with discussing weapons, what happens on the battlefield, will we have a ceasefire, and all that. And in the end, you know, nobody's talking peace, conflict resolution, mediation.
Uh, if you ask me, there were two persons in 2016 or '17 who said the United Nations should come into Ukraine in the Donbas, and one of them was Vladimir Putin, and the other one was Jan Oberg. Now, imagine what 300,000 UN troops could have done in Ukraine at that time for a negotiated solution. Taking the weapons away from the parties, both parties, and sit down and talk. You know where they did that? They did it in the Krajina regions of Croatia. I happened to be quite a lot around. I was, um, partly educated in Yugoslavia. I was down about 100 times. I did mediation with all my colleagues down there, six, five, six people in various places such as Krajina. I knew worked with four or five UN missions. If we had done what we did in Croatia, we could have long ago solved and lived peacefully with each other, in my view.
But that was not what the West wanted. The West wanted to defeat Russia through the immoral war of letting Ukraine's young people pay the price. It's a disgusting, immoral Europe we have had. Whereas you had moral leaders earlier like Willy Brandt, Charles de Gaulle, etc. I'm not saying I agree with them. Um, Olof Palme was a deeply moral person in this, in the talk about anti-nuclearism, disarmament, common security with the other. The simple formula: I cannot be secure, feel secure if the other party is insecure with me. We can only have common security.
What we have built up now with a provocative NATO and hopelessly outdated, it always was, deterrence philosophy and saying, "We want to have weapons by which we can kill you, but we have no intentions to do so." You know, this is why you have armament all over the world because from East to West to North to South, everybody talks about deterrence, and they've never studied a one word about what deterrence means. To put it on a simple formula, deterrence means that I put a pistol up to your head and say, "Now, Lena, shall we talk?" That's how security is built today. You know, it's, it's, it's a civilizational catastrophe that there's nobody thinking otherwise, whether China or America or Africa or Scandinavia. They're thinking that deterrence, long-range weapons, nuclear weapons, long-range missiles, and all that is a road to peace. Excuse me, I may be the only one, but I think it's a stupid, stupid theory. If it worked, we would have peace long ago.
And, and what's shocking to me is this global normalization of violence. When we, you know, from, from Gaza to Ukraine to Tehran, it seems that the public is, is sort of growing used to seeing these horrible images. Of course, nobody can forget those images that we saw coming from Gaza. And, and it, it seems that this, this perception of violence happening somewhere has been normalized, even though that violence is being inflicted by our governments. But then it seems that there is a very thin line between that violence being somewhere thousands of miles away and then that violence being here domestic when it actually starts to affect those people who previously chose to ignore it. Talk to us about this normalization of violence and, and normalization of war.
Well, I really don't know, um, how this has become possible. One reason is that what everything you and I would call ethics, and let me thank you for raising this question. I think you're the first one who's ever asked me that question in a video. Um, if we start out with ethics, ethics play no role anymore in politics. These, you know, you can, you can get away with bombing Iran, and the Western countries will not even, uh, distance themselves from bombing Iran, but they will accuse Iran for answering against US bases. You can have a genocide going on. You can have interventionism going on. You can have a ridiculing of the United Nations, which is the most Gandhian, whose charter is the most Gandhian and most important document governments have ever signed. You can quote me on that. We cannot do without that type, and the non-violent ethics is embedded in the UN Charter. And the UN Charter, the UN as such has been sidelined completely since at least Bosnia, if not earlier.
And so, long story short, when you have a militarist culture, which we did not have in the first Cold War, but if you have a militarist culture, these kinds of things are okay. Criminality is okay. Violation of international law is okay. United Nations violations is okay. Arrogant politics is okay. Presenting yourself as Jesus is okay because you have God on your side, and you can do what the heck you want outside your exceptionalist country, the United States and Israel, what I call Israel. And so, uh, that's possible.
The normalization has to do with another thing, and that is the Western world has lost philosophy. It has lost humanity. It has lost everything that cannot fit into a market. So our universities become places where you get an education to get a job on a marketplace. Who cares about ethics? The market. You sell your work and your knowledge if you have one. Knowledge is smaller than it's ever been in the 50 years I work with knowledge production and been a professor around the world. Um, so if you cut that out, and everything is technology, natural science, let's do what we can do, where ethics is to decide, "We can do this," but for moral reasons, we decide not to. Means full blast for immoral activities, for counterproductive and even self-destructive activities, because I mean, militarism does destroy yourself, just as Gandhi, Gandhi said, "Okay, if you use a gun, you kill another person or you harm another person, but you also harm your own, your own soul," because everybody who does bad things are aware somewhere, uh, that they do bad things, the wrong things.
I have a dream, not to quote Martin Luther King, but I have a dream. I have this dream to put Western leaders on a plane and bring them from one war zone, war zone, not just hotels, capitals. Bring them down in a war zone where they will risk being shot dead and killed. Okay. To have a flag jacket, okay? And bring them from one war zone where people are dying and killed to another one for about one month, and then bring them back again, those who survive. My hunch would be that some of them would stop doing what they do now. But to most people in the elites, warfare is a game. We have war games, you know, it's kind of thing that happens out there. It happens on a screen. But I have worked in 20, 30 conflict areas, war zones over my life. I've not only been an academic, I have been done mediation. I've done conflict analysis. I've talked with people. I've seen people getting killed. I've seen people losing their minds because they went out and killed, particularly in Yugoslavia. And I know that there is something good in most human beings. And if you could give people the experience of seeing what is the ultimate consequence of their policies, I think at least some of them, let's say 50% of them, would be enough human beings to say, "I cannot go on doing this." It'll be a little bit like Chaplin's dictator, you know, where he rises and say, "I'm not going to, I'm not going to be a dictator. I'm not going to be a militarist. I'm not going to be a warmonger. I'm not going to kill people in the future."
But we need a huge discussion about political ethics. I don't know who can bring it up. I don't see any country that is particularly good at it, would be good at it. But you're raising a hell of an important question. What happened to ethics? Because ethics will also tell you what is right and what is wrong to do to human bodies, to children. Not only children, but children in particular, and men and women. How on earth can we keep on devastating one country after the other? I've seen the destruction in Syria. I was in Aleppo in December '16 when Aleppo was liberated from al-Nusra, four and a half years occupation. How can you keep on destroying a place of such an amazing history, culture? That was the last point of the Silk, the old Silk Road, Aleppo, Eastern Aleppo. And now they're destroying culture and civilization and the Golestan Palace in Iran. And it doesn't seem to raise an uproar. It doesn't seem to make people say, "What the hell is going on? This is not warfare. This is a bestial lack of civilization. You don't bomb UNESCO heritage places." And don't tell me it's by accident because 60 places or something, something like that in Iran that has been bombed by that method. So it's, it's, you know, it's a war on civilization and culture. And that's because the Iranians have much more culture and civilization than anybody in the United States and Europe. War has become a profitable business. And, and I think that's probably one of the reasons why the lobby that, uh, stands behind certain policies, um, has remained in place and has been so successful.
How much of today's global instability do you think is being driven by economic interests that are tied directly to the military-industrial complex, both in the United States as well as in Europe?
Let me say, um, I've coined the term MIMAC, and that is an extension of Eisenhower's old military-industrial complex that you mentioned, and I include the military-industrial media academic complex.
Because the academia has become the priesthood, those who interpret what is the right thing to do. They are sitting in all these state-financed institutes, including SIPRI in Stockholm, which is no longer doing anything relevant for peace, become a security institute, state-financed, and therefore is not free research, cannot say and do anything that is against the policies of the governments that support them. And we have very little free research left. The one you talk with now is an example of free research because we are only people-financed. We have no government and no corporate support, and we will not have it, never ever. And we turned 40 years this year. So it's possible to do things differently.
But there's no doubt that economics isn't a reasonably important driving force with those who produce the weapons. And you have these swing doors. You know, somebody was a minister, Pentagon, and then becomes a CEO of a military company. And you have the media. I'm sitting in France at the moment, and Le Figaro is owned by the largest aircraft, military aircraft owner. That's the. And so you think that is a free media? You think American re, um, advertisement-financed radio and TV stations financed by, uh, military companies, uh, give people like Kucinich, back in time, a chance to be on, on these shows? Of course not. I know exactly how censorship works. We could do another program on censorship. I have tried, experienced myself.
So I refuse to believe that there is one factor that explains such an extremely complex thing as today's Western militarism. It is economic, but it is also a way of thinking. It is a kind of perpetual war because you have this destruction of capital. You have this destruction of countries that then needs to be rebuilt, and you have this destruction of weapons that then have to be rebuilt. And you invent an enemy. That's what intellectuals, among others, do. They invent or endorse views about who is a threat. Like say, the foreign policy institute of some country in Europe will say, "Oh, yeah, we agree Russia is a huge threat." You know, the moment I hear that, I know it's propaganda because there's no argument behind it. It's enough today to say 5% of the gross national product, no matter where, whether there's a threat or not. You know, it's like you and I saying in our families, we set off 5% of our monthly income for medicine, nobody, no matter whether anybody is ill or not in the family or looks to be ill in the family and become ill. So the whole thing is now put on the economic formula. It's the economization or, um, commodification of military. The argument is just, "We need maybe five, maybe six, maybe three." And I tell you, Lena, it might surprise you. There is no other person but me who has written articles critical of that measurement itself, setting off 5%. If we did, I mean, we never done that for health, we never done that for culture, we never done that for infrastructure, we never done that for anything or investments or research or education. What that means is that you don't have to make a threat analysis. You know what a threat analysis was earlier, 20, 30 years ago? It was that you had a number of intellectuals and politicians and diplomats who would sit down and say, "What threatens our country on a time horizon of 10 or 20 years, militarily and in civilian terms?" And then you would come with a, you know, some scenarios of what could happen in the world. It goes well, it goes not so well, and whatever. And if it goes not so well, we will have to plan for those in the middle threats that we can cope with, that are big enough to be relevant, and also within our economic means. And then you would have a public committee report that would be discussed by people and the governments, two or 300 pages, and then you would decide how much to set off for your defense budget in your country.
Now, all this is too intellectually demanding, and therefore, because you just have to call Washington and ask his master's voice. And therefore, 5% is all you need. And then you invent. That's what most people don't understand. Threats are invented expost. When you set off, off your, your what you want to pay for it, 5%, then we invent it. If, if Russia disappears tomorrow and falls into the ocean, they, it'll take them two weeks to find a new country that is a new threat, or they will say, "Oh, uh, China is a much bigger threat than we ever thought it was." Or, um, you know, I don't know, Nepal. Uh, I'm joking, but this is nothing to do with intellectualism anymore. And that's why you have academics in this. And the media will turn out this and never ask a question.
Let me give you a perverse example of it. The Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, when she goes into the synagogue in Copenhagen to, for the commemoration of the 7th of October attack by Hamas on Israel, she says to a journalist, quote, "And if we don't look up, we may also risk that Hamas comes and take Denmark." And the journalist has no questions. You know, we don't have journalism anymore in this field. And we have no peace research. Peace research was a Scandinavian thing. And that's why I'm talking about this because academia is part of the MIMAC I talk about. We don't have that. We used to have peace research at 10, 12 universities in Scandinavia. They are all mainstreamed into international relations or security, military security, like SIPRI, like the university institutes. It was a heavy tradition in, uh, with Elise and and, um, Kenneth Boulding in the United States in the '60s. We had two branches of academic peace. We had 800 programs around the world in which peace, non-violence, conflict resolution, reconciliation, forgiveness was taught. I've been a teacher of peace studies in a number of countries myself. Today, it's gone. It's gone. There's nobody studying it. I think it was Trump took over the American, the US Peace Institute and called it something, you know, that's where we are. It's been Trumpified. Uh, I used to say peace has been disappeared, and that's what it has.
Um, I refuse, I'm too old to do something new, and I would never do anything else in my life. And so I consider myself being a specialist in peace and future research with a heavy influence from Gandhi and my colleagues over 50 years who taught me a lot. Among them, I always name mention Johan Galtung. So long story short, whatever could have been part of an alternative to the MIMAC, uh, is at the moment gone. But it won't be gone in the future. I'm totally optimistic, uh, beyond, let's say, five, seven years from now. If we survive the next five, seven years, we're going to have a fantastic world, and peace will come back as a beautiful thing, and we will not have a corrupted Nobel Peace Prize anymore.
Jan, I also wanted to ask you about the worldview, the Western worldview versus the Eastern worldview. Because we see now that China is becoming not only a reliable global trade and investment partner, but also it is, uh, helping nations rebuild ties. For example, it brokered a peace deal or some sort of a rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia several years ago, and that was,
Yes, that was a significant achievement. So, uh, China is definitely asserting itself as a global power and also getting engaged in peace-building initiatives, while President Trump just bombed seven countries in the last 12 months. Talk to us about the difference between the United States and China's worldviews and their approaches to peace, tolerance, and, uh, coexistence.
Well, you know, China comes out of having been a victim of Western and Japanese imperialism and interventionism. Secondly, they have had their own turmoil. And that means that they are much better at mediation and looking at things from more than one perspective. Has a little bit to do with Chinese-ness of China. It has a little bit to do with Confucianism. It has to do very much with Buddhism and Taoism. It has also got to do with the fact that the Chinese society today is, by far, in my view, the most interesting and historically unique country because in 30, 40 years, it's developed in a way no other country and people has managed to do. I was in China for the first time in '83, and I can tell you how poor and dirty it was. But I also felt that there was an energy in that society that would make it rise. And long story short, uh, it has now a, a moderation policy when it comes to trying to look at, uh, all sides of a conflict.
If you notice, the peace initiatives the Chinese do are framework initiatives. They might, when you read them, sound a little bit, um, "And so what? There's nothing concrete." It doesn't say how the people should live together in the future. No, exactly. That's what you do when you are a peace researcher. You say, "What are the frameworks within which we can hope to push the parties to talk about what is the essential mechanism of conflict resolution?" It's not the past. It's not the present. It is to give people ideas about how the, the world or their lives could be better in the future if they did something else and keep on fighting each other.
Let me give you an example, not that I'm more important than China, but to give you an example. If you are having a conflict about Donbas, you could also say, "Let's turn Donbas, which has very many resources and industrial center. Let's turn that into a zone like Shenzhen, uh, in China, an economic free zone that benefits Russia, Ukraine, first of all, and the rest of Europe. Let's build that as a place where Ukraine is a neutral country with guarantees from all sides. And let's move the United Nations headquarters to Kyiv because the US does not deserve to have it, such as the way it behaves as a host." And secondly, imagine that you would have a United Nations there, and in close cooperation with Switzerland, where the other half of the United Nations is, and you could begin to see something where maybe the Ukrainians would say, "Oh, if we could do that." And the Russians might say it too. "Oh, if we could get to that, that would be much better than keeping on losing more men."
But you see, that's why peacemaking is a science. You've got to know a little bit about how you go about and analyze a conflict and what is in the bottom of it. How you talk with people and all that. How you set up a mediation machinery. But the rest of it is an art, and that is the art of imagining how could things be in the future that would be better for all parties. Maybe not giving them 100% what they want, but some, everybody getting something with which they could live better than continuing the present. And you know, there's one thing you cannot expect people in war to do, and that is to see these alternatives. They, they are blinded by, "There's nothing as blinding as warfare. There's only one thing: we must win. The others are totally bad. We are totally good." I mean, it's total tunnel vision that leads nowhere. And that's why it's so important that independent people could come in and organizations could have come in in any conflict in the world. And that's exactly what, what I described now is exactly what the Chinese, how the Chinese are thinking about this. They have their own interest. I'm not saying that it's not just idealism, but they don't come and tell you what to do. They come and say, "Can we facilitate a framework for peacemaking discussions?" And you pointed to that one, and there's a one for the Palestinians also. And I'm very curious to see what came out of the meeting between China and the Iranian foreign minister two days ago. I don't have, haven't seen it yet, but I'm sure there's some kind of idea what could be done.
And so that has to do with something we also never talk about, and that is cosmology, ways of thinking. What makes us in the West, which is 12% of humanity, thinking differently? I'm not saying bad, necessarily, but by how do we think differently? From, let's say, people in the Orient, if you take those, you know, Yo-Yo Ma used to say, maybe the accident is an accident. Um, I'm not going into that. But social cosmology is ways of thinking. And the Chinese would have much more both-and thinking and eclecticism, where we have either-or thinking and only one way ahead. Has also to do with the three monotheistic religions in the Middle East. These two are fighting each other. If you have a little bit more that you're allowed to have more than one God and one truth, and a Gandhi kind of eclecticist thinking, then the whole thing is not so black and white anymore as it is in the Western world.
So if you look at the Chinese development, the last 40 years, it's capitalism imported but changed. It is party imported but changed. It's Marxism imported but changed. It is adding their own thinking about everything. And it is a tremendous curiosity about the West that we don't reciprocate in the West in any curiosity about China. I'm appalled by the fact that so many people are not interested in China, including scholars who ought to be interested, sociologists who ought to say, "How the hell did they do it the last 30, 40 years from poverty to a well-functioning super society, modern, pleasant to be in, everything works." I mean, just that should, when everything is falling apart in the West, it should, we should be interested in how the heck have they done this. There's no interest. There's a Cold War campaign financed through Pentagon, State Department lies about Xinjiang, genocide. I've been to Xinjiang. I've seen it. I, I can't say I've, I've not seen the camps, but I can say this, this is ridiculous because the story is much more complex, but there's no genocide in Xinjiang or against all Muslims in China. It's Hong Kong. It's Tibet. It's, uh, Taiwan. You know, if you ask me, Lena, I think it's a bunch of fools because the two biggest countries cannot not cooperate if humanity is to survive. You don't have to love the Chinese. You don't have to be against China. You have to be curious about China. And the moment we are that, the world becomes better. But now we only have that everybody else is an enemy. We only have confrontational policies. We only have threats, wars, tariffs, sanctions. It's the only message from the West. Now, it's very tragic to see because the West genuinely, at the bottom, the West is much better than what comes out in politics from the European Union, NATO, and the United States Empire. But it has to go. And everything, as I said, will be much better the day it's gone. I hope you survive it.
I hope so too. Uh, we often discuss multipolarity. And some people, of course, it's fair to say that the Trump administration is trying to preserve US hegemony, while the rest of the world sees the benefits of, of retaining their sovereignty, of having the ability to protect their economic and political sovereignty. Is, is the rise of multipolarity making the world safer through balance, or is it making it more dangerous because of competing power centers?
Well, my interpretation is everything that is black and white and divided into two is the most dangerous. That means military alliances against one enemy. That's the most dangerous configuration. If you have many kinds of balancing, like we've always had in Scandinavia, we used to have what was called the Nordic balance. Every Nordic country had its different profiles and foreign policy, security, defense, and all that, but we always took each other into consideration. So we had a balance, even though Finland had a special relationship to Russia, Sweden was a neutral country, Denmark was a footnote NATO country, Norway was another way of being a NATO. Iceland had no military, was but was NATO member. The beauty of diversity and coordination is also the beauty of peace. I'm not saying that cannot be a bad guy who would start fighting everybody. I'm, I'm not saying, I'm talking about models. Now, a, a multi-system that balances and takes each other into consideration is a much more peaceful future world than the present we have now, uh, where you have basically one empire fighting everybody and losing and losing itself and destroying itself on the way. That, that, that's a tragedy of the West more than anything.
And so when you say multipolar, I know that that is a word used, but I'm not so happy with the word pole because pole is something, you know, like a Greek temple that goes steady on the ground. I would talk much more, I think somebody once called it nodes, N-O-D-E-S, nodes, connection points. I think we will have a dynamic world in which national interests will still be important, but global interests will be much more important. Again, the nation, if you ask me, Lena, the nation-state, what we call countries, could, could go tomorrow. It's, it's, it's, it's always been artificial in the sense that there's only one humanity. And why should France behave one thing and Germany behave in another way? We are human beings. We're Europeans. We are part of the world. So the more we can do over national, that's why we call our foundation the transnational one, that means all the people-to-people relations under the government and states, and all the transnational, be it corporations, be it global peace movements, being, you know, culture, music, or whatever it is, those are the most interesting things. Those go under the government, the government level, and over the government level, not the government-government politics is extremely boring. Intellectual, actually, if you ask me, I'm so tired of it. But when I listen to music, and I go to a country, and I see how they eat, and how they think, and how they, uh, play, and how they look at children and education and all that, I say, this is interesting. But, you know, all their weapons, uh, all the things that the government has, is something you could have lived in a world without it. I don't need to be a Danish-born citizen or a people person living in Sweden. I mean, what does it mean? It's outdated. It belongs to, you know, the Peace of Westphalia, 1648, if I remember correctly. It's time, maybe time to invent something else, and a global community in which we are helped by modern technology. You and I can sit here across the world and talk with each other. I mean, Lena, this was not possible 20 years ago. Lots of ways we can connect. We can do diplomacy. We can have with 500 people in Russia and China and the West and talk about a better world. That's what I'm looking forward to. I couldn't care less about governments. They are boring. But they think they, and the government are the ones who are running the military. It's not the United Nations or supranational organizations. The governments are the culprits when it comes to militarism and war, conscription, and all that. You know, it was for a better world. Every moment is wasted for a better world with these kinds of thinking. So China being a different type of government, I think is very encouraging. Fantastic development for 1.4 billion people. I'm not happy with nuclear weapons and armament, but I think they might find a different way in the future too. Maybe the first to just scrap a few nuclear weapons and invite others to do the same. And that would be an interesting psychological experiment if they do.
I'm also working to introduce peace research in, in China. Because at the moment, it doesn't exist. And I think they deserve, with their policies, to have a backup of intellectuals, university departments of peace. For instance, in Nanjing, where there is some, some of it, but also in Beijing and Shanghai and where elsewhere, they have excellent institutes for international relations and security and all that. They don't have anything for peace and nonviolence. Yeah.
And maybe the last question for today. I know we're running out of time here. The European Union fundamentally transformed from a peace project into a geopolitical and military actor. And we have been witnessing the normalization of war ethic among political leaders and media outlets, as you mentioned earlier, and it, and it's been happening on a variety of topics from Gaza to Tehran. As a peace researcher, I know you often speak about conflict transformation rather than a concrete military victory. What does that approach look like in practice?
Sorry, could you repeat that? What would?
Yes. What does that approach?
Yes. What does that approach look like in practice?
Oh, it would be something like the following. I'm just blowing initiative off my head, not in the sequence of a list. 1, 2, 3, 4. Peace education in schools, as much as history and violence education in history books. It would mean peace ministries, not only defense and military ministries. It would be advisors to every leader who, I'm not against military, military advisors, okay? Legal advisors, political advisors, diplomatic advisors, and peace advisors and conflict resolution expert advisors. It would mean turning the European Union into a place where you have a mini United Nations. When we have problems, we feel we have problems with each other, or and with Russia, God knows whom, we sit down and talk in a forum that resembles the United Nations. Some kind of, you know, let's grasp the conflict before it gets into violence. You know, it's like you have a cold. If you.
ignore the cold and you get you get really sick. But if you take early warning systems, monitor what people are saying, what governments are suddenly saying, who is taking initiatives about certain things and you can take it up at an early stage and say, "Hey, can we discuss what it is you are doing now as a member of European Union because we need to talk about this on behalf of the whole union because the Lisbon treaty on which the European Union rests is says that its most important goal is peace. peace inside the European Union and peace in the rest of the world and they use the classical Indian formulation of unity and diversity for the European Union.
Now you say you're completely right that the tragedy of the whole thing is they are no longer a peace organization if they ever were. But I think you could have mechanisms, frameworks, education, an early warning that would make and that is the trick. Military weapons, military doctrines, threats, nuclear weapons, redundant. And you say, how will that happen? I can tell you, Lyanna, one one way to make it happen would be that everybody has defensive weapons. Meaning, we cannot threaten you on your territory, but if you come to my territory, I can give you help in two ways. I can blow you up with military means. And I have a very strong sustainable society. I can sustain the crisis. If you cut me off from trade or put sanctions on me, I can survive. I have civil defense and I have nonviolent defense. I will never cooperate with an occupier. You know, she does turn the whole thing away from offensive deterrence to defensive deterrence mix but distinguishing time and space, military and civilian defense. You would have a multi-olar defense, a multi-defense, not only weapons.
I mean, think it through. The the perversion of our present cultural situation is when people say the word defense or security, people's minds are weapons. The first thing they think of is weapons. Excuse me, but to be safe, the first thing is for a human being, the first thing is not to take a medicine or become a drug dealer, a drug dependent. This perverse crisis society of the west at the moment has made weapons a drug that it cannot live without. It always need a little bit more and that is very fine for one or two years and then something else happens that means we must have more of the drug. That's what we should get away from and you would not have that and you would not have an arms race if everybody had defensive defense.
Let me give you an image. The present west is like a street where everybody has a submachine gun and a street where you know people are sitting on top of their roofs and are able to shoot on those who walk by. Imagine instead a a city where the streets are filled with people who can do yso threatening nobody but able to throw down the person who attacked you. You know these kinds of things. I I'm not saying I have the solutions. I've just been thinking a little bit about it. And I think these are things we ought to discuss. But we don't have such a discussion because we have a militarist culture where people like I are censored. I have no relationship and I'm never asked by mainstream media in mainstream media in the west. And if they call me and say yan what do you mean about this and said then they take half an hour of my time and I give them some views about why I think NATO membership for Sweden is a stupid idea. For instance, a Swedish television ask me that and then they say, "We'll want to do an interview with you on thursday. I'll come back to you tomorrow." Then they go to the editor and the editor say, "Uhoh, we're not going to do an interview with Yanover." I know it works that way about two or three times a month. Whereas I can work a lot with media around the world. I work mo work mostly today with 10 large Chinese media. They love to discuss peace and that gives me hope. If China is interested in peace, there is hope. There's no hope in America being only interested in warfare.
>> Absolutely. I couldn't agree more with you, Yan. Thank you so much for joining. It's been a fascinating conversation and I encourage our viewers to follow Yan's work on Substack and across other platforms. I will share the links in the video description below. Yan, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here.
>> Thank you for your wonderful, uniquely good questions that made me talk.
>> Thank you.