[This article by Jan Oberg was first published by Transnational Foundation & Jan Oberg. You may read it here.]

The Western world has lost its consciousness, perception, and instruments of conflict analysis, resolution, peace-making, and reconciliation.

They’ve been squeezed out by militarism’s kakistocrats – a political science term that means government by “the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous people.” Consequently, there is now a risk of more than 50% that a major war will happen in Europe.

I’ve been observing silently for weeks and months now how geopolitical experts – also very qualified ones – and people who comment independently as well as in the mainstream media and many others have worked on the tacit, implicit assumption that President Trump would help create peace in Ukraine; they seem to believe that what we have witnessed has anything to do with knowledge-based, professional peace-making or would have even the slightest chance of leading to peace.

I appreciate, of course, that Trump took the phone to Putin to begin with, but I have not shared what looks like illusions of virtually everybody else. It seems to me that we see is 100% illiteracy about peace, conflict analysis, peacemaking, and mediation – not to mention the taboo word nonviolence.

There has been no discussion about these ‘peace’-making activities per se. Or about the possible phases of professional peace-making. Everything done – like the one-hour “negotiations” in Istanbul on June 2, 2025, immediately after the Ukrainian military attack thousands of kilometres into Russia – is nothing but games played. By all sides. Probably, none of the parties has a clue about what to do to achieve peace – having put themselves on the autopilot of re-armament, militaristic attitudes, hatred and continued warfare.

The discourse is, again 100%, on war, ceasefire, deal-making, more arms to Ukraine and other things that are totally irrelevant/counterproductive for genuine peace work. If you genuinely wanted to stop a war, to do something constructive about the underlying conflict, and try to mediate or in other ways produce a sustainable peace between former adversaries and combatants, none of this would take place, and experts would have commented on it as a game – a futile media-seducing game – and not as if it was professional policy activities.

Just consider one example of this conflict illiteracy: that people seemingly do not think of the simple fact that a mediator must be completely neutral among all parties to a conflict and have no interest in any particular solution or future arrangement. The peace illiterates seem to believe that Donald Trump – the leader of the single most responsible country when it comes to the conflict and with a mountain of personal, corporate and political US interests – can step in and play the role of mediator seeking to find the best solution for all these complex conflicts’ parties.

Many Instruments Are Available, but They Are Not Used

The world has many means and instruments for peace-making. Not perfect, not as efficient as the weapons and war organisations, but we do have the United Nations, the only organisation with a peace charter as well as decades of accumulated experience in peacemaking, peacekeeping, disarmament, ceasefire, and more. We have the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE.

We have civil society organisations, CSOs, that are specialised in conflict analysis and reconciliation, peacemaking, etc. We have former diplomats who are well-experienced in these kinds of things.

However, what we do not have are peace and conflict experts serving as advisors in the offices of presidents, prime ministers, ministers of foreign affairs, and ministers of defence. They obviously believe that they can manage only with military expertise wearing uniforms on the outside and civilian people wearing inner, politically-correct “intellectual” uniforms who are unable to raise fundamental questions, devise scenarios and strategies, and estimate long-term consequences of these war policies – the Western groupthink narrative.

Like so many others, these leaders – on all sides – have no respect for peace as a distinct field of knowledge and expertise like, say, political science, international law, or medicine – and seem, therefore, to believe that they are themselves experts in everything related to peace.

Or, consider the mentioned one-hour meeting in Istanbul; the tables are set wrongly if the purpose was to further a dialogue: two long tables with the adversaries confronting each other, ready to verbally attack, with somebody at the end in front of some flags. There is no strategy, no method, no idea about an agenda and how to set up phases to follow up. It lasted about one hour, and that is why we can state that without having been there.

Only conflict illiterate people would set it up that way and without professional procedures and methods. Only peace-illiterate people believe that you can take participants straight from the battlefield or command centres, put them down at such a table arrangement to facilitate a ceasefire.

[Image: All images are AI-generated by the author, a couple of them part of a series on “The Museum of The Ministry of Eternal Warfare.”]

No, a professionally devised strategy would start out with a truly respected mediator(s) and mechanisms and begin interviewing each party at a time (without others present) about things like this: How do you define the conflict – what is it about as you see it? What are you afraid of now and in the future? What do you want in the future, and what are your priorities? What is your ideal future, and what less-than-optimal futures could you imagine to live with? Do you see any point in time and space where there is a kind of affinity between you and the other parties? What things do you have in common with other parties to this conflict? When back in time did you experience a better relationship with the others? How do you want to proceed, what is your desired mediation plan? What kind of expertise do you think is needed – and how do you feel about ways to achieve reconciliation at the human/citizens’ level – and that sort of things – here just mentioned as illustrations of some of the issues that will, over a long time, have to be addressed with one party at a time and then with pairs of parties.

Tell you what? Only after a very elaborate process taking many months and when the mediators have a sense that there is some common ground – do the parties meet at a table. You do not start there – because failed meetings only confirm that peace will be impossible.

Furthermore, these helter-skelter meetings for ‘ceasefire’ are predicated upon a cynical and ignorant idea in Europe that NATO country troops can suddenly play the role of peace-keepers. They can’t. They have no training for that. The idea is akin to suggesting surgery performed by a person who has never opened a medical textbook.

More elements of peace and conflict illiteracy and quackery and why people believe in it.

This is the intellectual level today. The reason is that war is in focus, not the underlying conflict, which is the key to peace. The battlefield, the violence is never the key to peace – only the underlying conflicts that led to the violence.

A conflict can be seen as a problem that stands between the parties and needs to be solved, and if the parties do not know how, they fall into the violence trap that makes everything worse.

The European interest – even with the US’s relative withdrawal from that already lost war – is to keep the war going in some kind of way, seeking, as has been stated many times by NATO countries’ leaders, to destabilise and ultimately defeat Russia.

It so happens that we have a world organisation, the UN – whose Article 1 states that peace shall be established by peaceful means. The UN is geared, trained and experienced in peacekeeping, civil affairs, civil policing, disarmaming combatants and putting weapons under lock in stores, and forcing combatants to then sit down and discuss the future in local communities and elsewhere. And – mind you – take care of the civilian, suffering people in the (former) war zones and helping them start a normal life again.

Furthermore, the kind of quackery peace-making we witness completely lacks every sense of the importance of building peace from below.

It seems to be a common (mis)understanding that presidents and other top elites who’ve been fighting and killing each other’s people suddenly can be peacemakers. We’re forgetting that millions and millions of people, ordinary citizens of all walks of life, shall be living with whatever ‘peace’ plan these presidents, out of only their own interests, on all sides, may cook up in total ignorance of their people’s ideas, needs and visions.

That’s how it is often done. Remember the Dayton Accords in 1995? Or the talks at Rambouillet that served as a pretext for NATO’s (unlawful) bombings of Serbia? Even if they did put a lid on the fighting and killing, they caused more problems and solved none. Quackery peace-making creates failed states that are unravelling as of today, 30 years later, building up to new outbreaks of violence.

The word ‘peace’ and the thinking and knowledge associated with it have been largely eradicated from government circles, the media, research, and, I fear, to a large extent, among ordinary citizens of Europe. Peace is not on any elite agenda. A whole science and an art are systematically ignored. Would any of these leaders play doctors on themselves if they fell ill? No, they would consult the best doctors they could find – but they’d never turn to a conflict doctor or qualified mediator. They probably never even thought of doing so.

The Western NATO/EU world has become mediation illiterate. Peace illiterate. Conflict illiterate and reconciliation and forgiveness illiterate. These knowledge fields are huge, complex and woefully under-researched because militarists don’t want them. Peace shall emerge, they think, from a focus on the violence, the war, the battlefields and the (non-monitored?) ceasefire. They do not even know that the key to peacemaking lies in understanding the underlying conflicts that led to the violence in the first place.

It’s like a doctor who gives you a painkiller when you say you have a headache and ignores a deeper diagnosis and prognosis, and therefore does not find the deeper reason: that you have a brain tumour and will die soon if nothing serious is done.

Without any knowledge, interest in, curiosity about, or openness to conflict analysis and peacemaking, there is no alternative to war.

Of course, they all know what sounds good in the media, misinformation and propaganda departments. For instance, that they themselves are innocent victims while their adversaries are 100% responsible for the situation. They will all say that they want the war to stop – like Trump, who says that far too many have died in Ukraine but fully supports Israel’s genocide, bombs the Houthis, makes mindboggling multi-billion arms deals with Saudi Arabia and embraces a major terrorist like Syria’s new president. They will all say that they want a ceasefire and then a stable peace characterised by justice. How boring! It is so dull that it can be quoted again and again by the world’s media, which, gallantly/submissively, do not point out just how phoney these peace wishes really are.

Don’t trust any of them on any side. If they wanted peace in Europe, there would never have been a NATO expansion into Ukraine or a Russian Special Military Operation into it. There would never have been a Ukrainian leader who played the role of puppet for Western militarism and de-stabilisation of Russia no matter the price to be paid for his own country and people generations into the future.

If they wanted peace and knew what peace is or could be and how to make it, the war would have stopped long ago and be seen as a tragic mistake/misunderstanding.

If they were interested in sustainable peace and common security, they would have listened to each other and engaged in dialogue, rather than ignoring one another, provoking and cancelling each other. They would never have built long-range, incredibly destructive deterrence weapons, nor would there have been any nuclear weapons on earth or 650 US bases in 130 countries. There would have been ministries of peace, civilian conflict-solving institutions, peace education in schools and peace advisers in all decision-making offices.

We’ve become a sick, militarist society, and people do not even see it.

And not to be misunderstood: I do not refer here only or mainly to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Weapons and violence were part of everythingUS/NATO did from the coup d’etat and regime change under the Obama administration in Kiev in 2014, 11 years ago, over Trump 1.0, Biden and the present Trump Regime.

It was CIA all over Ukraine from that year, biological weapons laboratories, building a Ukrainian army that began killing Russians in Donbas, in order to prepare for Ukraine’s future NATO membership even though there was never more than 15% of its all the Ukrainians who wanted NATO membership before the invasion; they wanted a security agreement with Russia. Many talk about Ukraine in NATO, but the relevant perspective is NATO in Ukraine from about a few months after it became independent – 30+ years ago. NATO suffers from extreme hubris and exploited – unwisely to be diplomatic – Russia’s weakness and cheated on its well-documented promise to never expand NATO if the two Germanies were united in NATO.

Unfortunately, one may argue today that Russia fell into NATO’s trap and the invasion – small crime compared with Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, Libya and lots of other US/NATO-created warzones and – could then be given full propaganda blast: “Look Putin has taken the first step to conquer all of Europe.” Citizens who are told to fear that they’ll be attacked – they are victims of their elites’ fearology – mostly believe it, but it is a scenario that has no realism on this earth.

So peace is out. Or war is peace. And when there’s nobody talking peace, there is only war left. Peace is a matter of culture. This is a matter of education. It is a matter of civilisation. While any drunk idiot can start a fight in a pub – or a war – it is not within everybody’s capacity to make peace. Which is why we have prizes for peace but not for invasions, wars, genocides, mass murders or nuclear warfighting…

Conflict happen! There will always be conflicts – big and small anywhere – because we are different and want different things, have different visions about the good society. But there doesn’t have to be violence. There are conflict without violence, but there is no violence without a conflict. Solving conflicts elegantly and intelligently is to employ as little violence as possible the problem – which corresponds to the vow of medicine: Do as little harm in the healing process as possible – but do heal!

This what the UN Charter is all about. NATO’s Treaty is a copy of it. It’s just that NATO violates its own treaty 24/7 since it bombed Yugoslavia/Serbia in 1999.

Imperialists, warmongers, narrow-minded power-holders and cynical militarists who could not care less about human suffering of course do not see it that way. They choose violence either because they have an inner urge – such as hubris, hatred and revenge or are unhappy humans, perhaps even evil – and/or because they do not have a clue about conflict resolution methods and peace-making.

They choose war because there is – everywhere – a MIMAC, a Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex of elites who make decisions to benefit themselves, not their citizens, and who would likely eliminate any important leader who would pursue true peace…

The post-conflict-resolution phase – sustainable peace.

A conflict is only solved when it never comes back in the same form and shape as before – but it does not mean that new conflicts cannot turn up. If we imagine now that some kind of comprehensive, real solution has been found and violence is no longer taking place among the parties – and no party plans to take up weapons again or seek revenge, then comes all the things nobody talks about today – things like truth commission, reconciliation, forgiveness, cooperation to reduce the risks of new conflicts, other violence prevention measures in the future – and lots of other difficult things.

After more than 10 years of this conflict and more than three years of heart-breaking mass killings and destruction, I have not come across one single discussion about issues such as these – neither seen one visionary plan for a new Europe where all that we have seen now cannot possibly happen again. None!

Even peace people tend to be focused on the weapons dimension instead of devising peace plans and new peace and conflict-resolution structures that promise to prevent a repetition. And scholars would likely lose their government project funds if they seriously engaged with such issues…

Conflict and peace illiteracy prevail because of the misguided notion that peace can be achieved through the accumulation and use of weapons. Excuse me, but if weapons could bring us peace, how come that NATO, which stands for almost 60% of the world’s military expenditures, is now the major party to a conflict that threatens Europe and perhaps the whole world – with increasing probability – to blow up in conventional and (perhaps) nuclear exchanges?

Excuse me once again, but the US/NATO Emperor’s clothes are not new, they are old and dirty.

So, in summary, all these militarists and war-mongers on all sides paradoxically have one thing in common: Violence and war is all we need! Wedo not need conflict analysis, mediation, or peace-making. We do not need the UN or anybody else. Peace is a residual when the weapons have spoken and sufficiently many have perished.

There appears to be a lack of awareness among decision-makers, security experts, and the media that we need innovative proposals on how to secure Ukraine’s future, address Russia’s legitimate security concerns, and coexist in peace in Western Europe – and with China. Conflict resolution and peacemaking are about seeing a better future beyond militarism and destruction. It can never grow out of an obsession with the present and the past.

Militarists and other people in power hate if people out there who a) have smarter ideas than they have – and that is not so difficult – and b) oppose their militarism, groupthink and propagandised narrative. War times are not times of lively dialogues and many competing scenarios. It’s times of intellectual emptiness, authoritarianism and moral decay.

The more war and militarism, the less tolerance and creativity, and the less democracy and freedom…thinking. Militarism and war-mongering has its own laws and dynamics and takes Herculian efforts for a leader to stop and begin to think and – do something else. For the train goes to destruction.

That is what we see in today’s West, which is engaging in constant confrontation because it knows deep down that it is in decline and, as it seems, cannot reinvent itself in even the smallest ways and become an attractive partner in the future multi-polar cooperative and more peaceful world.

For years now, geopolitical experts, media, scholars and most citizens have focused on the war. They focus on the present and the past, and who did what to whom. They do not engage in ideas about the future, the better future for all. It seems that they would rather start all over on the ruins and debris after a conventional and/or nuclear war just to prove how right they were and how wrong everybody else was.

None of the parties has presented a vision of what the future European security system should be that could satisfy the minimum requirements and legitimate needs and interests of all the involved parties. And where there is no better vision, continued war fighting looks relatively more attractive and so natural.

So that’s where we are. No politician, editor or researcher of some power see it fit – or is capable of – saying: Hey, if all this has not worked and we are now in such a dangerous situation in the name of ‘security’ politics, perhaps we should ask ourselves: What has been wrong about the ways we have thought out security since 1945? How come that the sum total of the arms-based national security paradigm has caused us all endless waste of resources, millions of dead fellow human beings, devastated whole countries and now threatens to annihilate humanity? How should we do it in the future to achieve a real peace instead of the militarised peace of the graveyards and – together – invest everything in solving humanity’s real and serious problems instead of wasting and losing everything – instead of militarising ourselves to death?

H. C. Andersen invented the little boy who saw the deception, the misinformation – and spoke up. He is nowhere to be seen in today’s Western world.

It is the limitless armament and offensive deterrence – the classical security dilemma– a totally wrong-headed thinking that can never bring the world peace – that has led us to where we are now. Increased military spending, now even tied by NATO’s anti-intellectual church congregation to the GNP – that has led us to where we are now.

NATO’s and Russia’s offensive deterrence theory, albeit different, has led us to where we are now. After all, they are both Western societies thinking alike on fundamental dimensions. Two scorpions inside the same Western bottle.

It’s a dead dangerous perpetuum mobile that is kept going by a drug addiction-like propensity to always need more weapons – and do with less and less thinking. Constant upward militarism and war-planning have always been accompanied by intellectual and moral disarmament. So, the only answer that this religious community will come up at NATO’s next summit is to increase the self-destructive medicine called armament to even 5% of the gross national product and for the EU to waste a further € 100 billion on more drugs of militarism. But they will tell you – and perhaps believe themselves – that its for ‘defence’ in a ‘defensive’ alliance that will bring peace if only it gets a little more money…

Three results will follow: a) an increased risk of war; b) a destruction of the civil economy and c) the West will become weaker and weaker on all indicators vis-a-vis the rest of the world.

I don’t know how you feel, but I feel that a society that has cancelled peace, every bit of it, not even preserving 1% but has given 100% to militarism, is a society that will break down – militarise itself to death like the incurable drug misuser and can not, will not and deserves not to survive.

Militarism and warfare are now the primary forces that hold the West together. It will destroy no one but the West itself – neither Russia nor China nor anybody else, all of whom have never been out to destroy the West. The Western elites of the MIMAC – the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex – do that brilliantly themselves. The enemy is us.

Therefore, it’s as safe as tragic to predict that the Western decline will accelerate. And the Rest of the world – 88% of humanity – will deplore but mostly applaud it. The last empire in human history – no, it is not in the Chinese genes to build an empire – is crumbling, but will its collapse in a nuclear catastrophe?

The Soviet Union’s nuclear empire dissolved peacefully, largely due to its visionary leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Frightening as it is, no Western leader today reaches his socks.

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Jan Oberg is the director of the Sweden-based think tank Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn

(All images are AI-generated by the author, a couple of them part of a series on “The Museum of The Ministry of Eternal Warfare.”)