In November 1985, during their first summit in Geneva, Switzerland, then-US president Ronald Reagan and then-Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev slipped away from the official proceedings to speak privately. Only years later did we learn what they discussed. Gorbachev told the broadcaster Charlie Rose that Reagan had asked him a startling question: “What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?” Gorbachev replied: “No doubt about it,” to which Reagan responded: “We, too.”
Although the two superpowers were locked in a nuclear arms race and staring each other down across Europe, they could still imagine uniting against a common existential threat.
Four decades later, humanity finds itself locked in another arms race. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reports that global defense spending reached a record US$2.7 trillion last year — an inflation-adjusted increase of 9.4 percent over the previous year. After nine consecutive years of such spending increases, this surge is unprecedented since the end of the Cold War, with little indication that it will slow. Dozens of countries are expanding their militaries, and more governments are making long-term commitments to boost their defense budgets.
The reasons are many, and some are understandable. In addition to Russia’s war in Ukraine, there are rising tensions in East Asia and the Middle East, as well as vulnerabilities in cyberspace and space. More fundamentally, this escalation reflects the collapse of globalization as we knew it — a rules-based order anchored in multilateralism, open trade and international cooperation.
It is easy to forget how different the mood was just a decade ago. In 2015 — the high-water mark for the most recent wave of globalization — world leaders delivered three landmark agreements: the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on development financing, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and the Paris climate agreement. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and then-US president Barack Obama shook hands in Washington, signaling — at least to many observers — that a new era of sustainable, inclusive and resilient globalization was at hand.
The resulting optimism proved short-lived. Within a few years, trade wars, nationalist and nativist politics, and geopolitical rivalries had undermined the previous consensus. Today, tariffs, subsidies, industrial policies, refugee crises and the new arms race all attest to a world where cooperation has lost its luster. As the French historian Arnaud Orain argues, the “end of history” thesis has given way to a world once again conceived as finite — as a pie to be divided, rather than expanded. According to this mindset, what is mine is mine, and what is yours is negotiable.
However, the existential threats that inspired Reagan’s thought experiment are still here, and they are more pressing than ever. Climate change, ecosystem collapse and widening social inequalities endanger us all. They have been thoroughly documented, their consequences are already visible, and strategies to confront them have been elaborated in countless policy documents and experts’ reports. Yet they are perpetually treated as secondary to the immediate fear of aggression by one’s neighbors or rivals.
Future historians — if the profession still exists — would wonder why, in the mid-2020s, Homo sapiens poured unprecedented resources into preparing to fight each other, while neglecting collective action against obvious planetary threats. The sums involved are staggering. The nearly US$3 trillion devoted annually to defense could cover a significant portion of the investments needed to decarbonize our economies, adapt to climate change and preserve biodiversity.
Instead of extending the cooperative logic of globalization to planetary survival, we are re-engineering it with walls, tariffs and weapons. Call it “barbed-wire globalization.” Humanity would remain interdependent, but relations would be managed not with common institutions, but through spheres of influence. Meanwhile, the planet would recede from political consciousness.
As Sophocles warned: “Evil can sometimes seem good to the one whose mind the gods are leading to ruin.”
It is mad to obsess over relative geopolitical power while ignoring the absolute reality of planetary boundaries. If there is to be any hope, we must invent something new: not globalization, but “planetarization” — the recognition that preserving our fragile world is the precondition for everything else. Upcoming gatherings, such as the UN Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belem, Brazil, offer opportunities to advance such a perspective, even after this year’s disappointing negotiations to address plastics in our oceans. However, the window is closing.
Some would argue that the picture is not so bleak, because humanity is living through an extraordinary period of scientific and technological innovation. Given the progress in artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, renewable energy and advanced materials, why not place our trust in human ingenuity to see us through?
The counterargument is sobering. A century ago, revolutionary discoveries in physics, chemistry and medicine also promised a golden future, ultimately leading to what the French called the “30 glorious years” after World War II. However, before getting there, the world endured a devastating depression, fascism and a global war waged with those new technologies. The Manhattan Project produced nuclear weapons before the energy contained within the atom had been put to civilian use; the science that gave us modern fertilizer also created chemical weapons.
Today, AI and other breakthroughs might likewise transform society. However, if history is any guide, military applications would outpace civilian uses. As ever, we should “follow the money”: Defense budgets dwarf climate investments. The danger is not that the technology would fail, but that it would be harnessed first for conflict, not collective survival.
Unlike earlier historical turning points, this one offers no second chances. Resources are finite, the carbon budget is shrinking fast and planetary boundaries are strained. The choice is stark: Globalization could be reorganized into a militarized array of political blocs, where resources are consumed by trade wars, culture wars and real wars, or we can embrace “planetarization,” and start pursuing strategies to survive together with dignity.
Bertrand Badre, a former managing director of the World Bank, is chair of the Project Syndicate Advisory Board, CEO and founder of Blue like an Orange Sustainable Capital, and the author of Can Finance Save the World?
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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