TheAltWorld Are we in the middle of an escalating global arms race?
Global military spending reached its all-time highest level last year. More NATO countries than ever before spent two percent of their GDP on defence. China recorded 30 unbroken years of increased military spending, the longest streak of any country in modern history.
That’s all in response to a world that’s seen as becoming less safe.
Generations have grown up around the world in an era of arms control – so is that at an end?
And what’s at stake when the world’s richest countries are engaged in a game of brinksmanship?
Presenter:
Neave Barker
Guests:
Michael Boyle – Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University–Camden and author of The Drone Age.
Elijah Magnier – Senior Political Risk Analyst and a regional military expert.
Fabrice Pothier – former Head of Policy Planning at NATO and a senior defence and strategy analyst.
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Sickening to hear people only able to talk about war, there is no alternative. They even admit that it is not affordable or sustainable – Pothier going so far as to say that it should be privatized because governments can’t afford it – ignoring how the governments will have to pay the private sector, or how this is the way Europe waged its wars of empire. No challenge to the murder for profit option here.
Boyle makes the tired old lie that there is feedback from arms manufacture into commercial civilian uses and is not challenged that most of the technology is only for war and if everything was for civilian use, the profits and efficiency would be so much higher.
Magnier tries to make some zero sum game of nuclear obliteration as a sensible race to parity.
Nothing here about how to avoid wars, no mention of the number of deaths, barely a reference to cuts in welfare, education, the takeover of the military by the corporate sector, the consolidation of military spending in fewer corporations