Thinking Peace 7: Dr. Nan Tian: Do High Military Expenditures Really Make Us Safer?

“I’ll briefly kind of end on the point about what’s the link between conflict and military spending.  I mean, it’s really like the chicken and the egg problem. It’s no easy answer, because, you know, countries that are in conflict will spend on the military,  because they need to be part of the conflict, defend themselves, that’s given.  But if countries also, you know, expect the conflict to start,  maybe they see non-state actors, you know, this is how West Africa is becoming more active,  maybe wanting to secure the country, so that military spending will increase also.  So military spending will, like, increase before conflict and during conflict. So it’s really not a very simple kind of correlation that each can pack.  But the central question that we want to bring up, maybe beyond as well, does high military spending make us safer? That’s something that perhaps we will get to later on.
But that’s the pressing question, is that it might not actually be so, because of the idea of security dynamics.  As countries want to spend more, become safer, ally, not ally, but see this as a threat,  perceive threats as, you know, that they also need to increase their spending.  And suddenly we’re entering into this arms race, action-reaction cycle,  where each country is investing more on, essentially, high-tech defense systems,  kind of racing against each other, pencing each other’s developments,  which ends up not making anyone safer,  because you’re kind of casting each other out of technologies,  and also increases the chance of, you know, misinformation, misuse, misinterpretation.
And because these weapons are extremely, you know, well, for I can tell,  they are very capable of being very accurate,  also have large levels of destruction, they can actually have large impacts on the speed of information that you use.  So suddenly the risk of kind of abuse of the capabilities becomes high.  So again, it’s a question of, well, maybe we’ll get to that later,  but it might not actually make the world safer,  but actually make it, you know, more unstable,  given, you know, the amount of weapons that are potentially being stockpiled.”

– Dr. Nan Tian, Roundtable “The Necessity of Armament? Between Security, Profit, and the Illusion of Peace”, Thinking Peace Series