Militarism, Inequality and Poverty: Ways Out of the Vicious Circle

IN FOCUS, 3 Aug 2026

Vijay Mehta – TRANSCEND Media Service

Introduction

28 Jul 2026 – While the world carries on business as usual, humanity moves from one tragedy to another. Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen and many more. With bodies scattered, broken families, cities in ruins and endless suffering of people, it seems all value to life is lost.

Armed conflict is now a defining feature of our time and society is increasingly organised around the logic of war. Across continents, the rules and limits that should protect civilians in war are being stretched, ignored or dismantled. Conflicts are spreading, lasting longer, and becoming more complex. Civilians – the very people international humanitarian law exists to protect – are those who suffer the most.

War is not only a political and military activity. It is embedded in systems of profit making criminal activity, it’s a business and a racket. Modern conflicts are sustained by arms trade and organised political violence.

According to Director General of ICRC, “If what we are seeing in Gaza, eastern Congo, Sudan and Ukraine is the future of war, we should all be extremely concerned, as this would shake the very foundations of our humanity.”

Two Point Eight Nine Trillion US Dollars

Let me give you a number.

Two point eight nine trillion US dollars.

That is what the world spent on its militaries in 2025 alone. In a world where close to eight hundred million people go to bed hungry every night. In a world where universal primary education for every child would cost roughly twenty-six billion dollars a year – a sum so modest it would barely register against the global arms budget.

Now, I did not invent this number. I did not invent the contrast either. But I want you to hold both of them simultaneously, and ask yourself: how is this not the central scandal of our time?

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” – President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

Eisenhower was not a radical. He was a five-star general who had commanded the liberation of Europe. He understood – from the inside – what militarism really costs. And he said it plainly.

His warning was ignored.

In the decades since, the machine he warned about has grown larger, more sophisticated, and far more deeply embedded in the political systems that were supposed to constrain it. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council – the very nations tasked with maintaining global peace – are also, not coincidentally, the world’s five largest arms exporters. That is not irony. That is the system working exactly as those who built it intended.

The Factory That Cannot Stop

When the Second World War ended, something curious happened. The factories did not close. The defence contractors did not dissolve. The generals who had developed relationships with boardrooms did not forget those relationships.

Instead – gradually, methodically, through lobbying and donations and the quiet revolving door of people between the Pentagon and the private sector – the apparatus of war stitched itself into the fabric of democratic politics.

Today, the top five American defence contractors receive over one hundred and sixty billion dollars in government contracts every year. Lockheed Martin alone received more than seventy-five billion in a single recent year. Their profit margins do not depend on peace breaking out. They depend on the continued existence of threats – real or perceived.

And here is the moral reversal at the heart of this story: the more the world burns, the higher the share price. When missiles are fired – whoever fires them – weapon manufacturer’s shares are going higher all the time.

This is not conspiracy. It is accounting.

Russia’s economy became grotesquely militarised after 2022. Defence spending grew to consume roughly forty percent of its federal budget. Its GDP actually grew in the early phases of the Ukraine war – driven by weapons production. For the men running that state, war is not merely ideological. It is the economic engine keeping the apparatus solvent.

And France, Britain, Germany – none are blameless. Each approved arms exports to regimes that used them against civilians. The British government licensed weapons to Saudi Arabia throughout the Yemen war, even as documented civilian casualties mounted. The economic logic was never hidden: jobs, revenue, contracts. These are democracies. Their populations broadly prefer peace. But their economic structures have learned to profit from conflict backed by powerful vested interests.

Who Pays, Who Profits

Military spending does not merely divert resources from the poor. It actively concentrates wealth among the already wealthy – and then uses that concentrated power to ensure the cycle continues.

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” – President Franklin D. Roosevelt

Think about who fights wars. In wealthy nations, it is overwhelmingly young people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Not because they are more courageous. Because they have fewer alternatives. A recruiting sergeant offering a steady wage, healthcare, and housing to a nineteen-year-old from a deindustrialised town with forty percent youth unemployment is offering something genuinely valuable – because everything else has been stripped away.

We have built militaries that are, in practice, a poverty tax – levied on the bodies of those with nowhere else to turn. The children of senators and surgeons are rarely in those uniforms.

In my book, The Economics of Killing: How the West Fuels War and Poverty in the Developing World, describes how globalisation and theft of resources from poor countries has brought poverty and inequality and the Military Industrial Complex traps the developing world in a cycle of perpetual violence and poverty. The theft continues. In modern day politics, poor people are blamed for their personal misfortune and architect of their own destiny. Full burden of austerity backed by aggressive policy and prison sentences are imposed on them.

And in the Global South, poverty does not only fill the armies of foreign powers. It feeds the armed groups and militias that make large parts of the world ungovernable. The Sahel region of Africa is a devastating case study. Decades of structural adjustment programmes that cut public services and dismantled state capacity created vast zones of absence – of government, of law, of economic opportunity. Into those zones stepped armed groups offering income, protection, and belonging to young men who had nothing.

Western nations then responded with military interventions that further displaced populations, further destroyed livelihoods, and further fed the cycle. They spent billions on soldiers. They spent a fraction of that on schools and clinics and governance.

And then they expressed bewilderment that things did not improve.

“If you want peace, work for justice.” – Pope Paul VI

The Circle Itself

Let me name the mechanism, because naming it is the first step to breaking it.

Powerful interests lobby for high military spending, arguing it creates security and economic benefit. Military spending stops investment in public goods – education, healthcare, housing – that would reduce inequality and lift people from poverty. Inequality grows. Social mobility stalls. Communities fracture. The instability that results – crime, unrest, extremist recruitment, armed conflict – is then used to justify the next round of military spending.

And the circle continues.

This is not a conspiracy. It does not require shadowy figures planning the world’s suffering. It is a system – a structure of incentives and institutions that, without deliberate intervention, tends toward this outcome. The arms manufacturer does not need to be evil to lobby for contracts. The politician does not need to be corrupt to fear the charge of weakness. The young man does not need to be foolish to enlist when there is no other path.

But the system, taken whole, is deeply, structurally unjust. And it is sustained by an ideology – a set of assumptions so embedded in our political culture that they rarely get questioned: that security is primarily a military problem; that strength is measured in weapons rather than wellbeing; that the world is so dangerous we cannot afford generosity – when the evidence suggests the world is dangerous precisely because we have not been generous enough.

“The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm, but because of those who look at it without doing anything.” – Albert Einstein

There is also the assumption of inevitability – the shrug, the sigh, the resigned declaration that this is human nature. That assumption is both historically illiterate and politically convenient. Historically illiterate because societies have achieved dramatic reductions in violence and poverty in short periods when they chose to. Politically convenient because it lets those who profit from the current arrangement off the hook entirely.

What Else Is Possible

I do not want to leave us here, in the circle. Because the circle is not a law of nature. It is a political choice. And political choices can be unmade.

Consider Costa Rica, which abolished its military in 1948 and redirected those resources to education and healthcare. Today it has a higher literacy rate, a longer life expectancy, and greater social stability than many of its militarised neighbours. Not utopia – but instructive.

In my book, Peace Beyond Borders, I have explained in detail that European Countries after fighting for centuries achieved relative peace for the last 80 years by the formation of the European Union. And they achieved peace dividend which is documented.

After the Cold War, European nations that reduced defence spending and reinvested in civilian infrastructure watched their populations become healthier, better educated, more economically productive. Peace, it turns out, is not economically naïve. It is, on the evidence, the better investment.

The United Nations estimates that ending extreme global poverty would require approximately one hundred and seventy-five billion dollars a year. That is less than ten percent of current global military spending. Every pound spent on conflict prevention saves, on conservative estimates, sixteen pounds in subsequent military, humanitarian, and reconstruction costs. This is not idealism. It is arithmetic.

What is needed is not only disarmament, but also reorientation. Asking hard questions about which expenditures actually produce security, and which simply produce profit. Closing the offshore tax havens where forty trillion dollars sit, extracted from public budgets and concentrated in private hands. Investing in governance, rule of law, and economic opportunity in fragile states – not as charity, but as the most effective security policy available.

Way Forward

The decisions of going to a war are made in finance ministries and boardrooms and defence committees, in the capitals of nations that approved arms licences and blocked ceasefire resolutions and kept the siege in place. The poverty was a choice. The blockade was a choice. The bombs that fell were made somewhere, sold by someone, approved by a government that knew what they would do.

It is the vicious circle made visible – stripped of the comfortable distances that usually allow us to look away. Decades of impoverishment, dispossession, and blocked political horizons, followed by violence, followed by the violence being used to justify more impoverishment. Poverty feeding conflict. Conflict deepening poverty. The circle, turning.

What is constructed can be deconstructed. What is chosen can be unchosen.

History gives us reason to believe that. Within living memory, colonialism was the natural order. Apartheid was defended as practical necessity. The subjugation of women was treated as biological destiny. None of these proved immovable. They moved because enough people decided they would not accept them – because conscience became, in the end, more powerful than convenience.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

It bends – but only when people bend it.

We are not powerless. Citizens can ask their representatives how they vote on arms licences – and hold them to account when the answer is wrong. Journalists can scrutinise defence lobbying with the same rigour they apply to welfare fraud. Investors can apply ethical screens to portfolios. Academics can refuse funding from weapons manufacturers. All of us can collectively refuse the comfortable fatalism that says this is simply how the world works.

Our goal is simple, to make it politically or otherwise impossible for Presidents, Prime Ministers or law makers to start new wars, or continue old wars. The profitable war economy was built over decades. It can be dismantled over decades – if we choose to begin.

To make it happen, I explored a radical idea in my book, How Not To Go To War – Establishing Departments for Peace and Peace Centres Worldwide. The core argument of the book is, that before a country starts a war, the Minister for Peace and Disarmament at the Cabinet level will discuss with Prime Minister / President that we need to exhaust all other options like dialogue, diplomacy and not rush into a decision to go to war. And that will eliminate the possibility of starting new wars and the savings thus achieved will be utilised for healthcare, creating jobs, conflict prevention and real security like following policies of 4D for World Peace – 4D standing for Disarmament, Demilitarisation, Development and Democracy. Only then we stand a chance for building a peaceful world.

We can demand accountability and an end to influence and power of Military Industrial Complex. We can choose – together, and with urgency – to build economies that profit from human flourishing rather than human suffering.

We can make the world vastly safer by spending less on war and more on actual aid, cooperation, rule of law, disarmament, diplomacy, culture of peace and non-violence.

For the achievement of true peace, instead of being obsessed with different criticism, confrontation, concentrate on similarities, constructive thinking, leading to peace, harmony and prosperity for us all.

Power concedes nothing without dissent. There is no opposition and struggle, there is no progress. The suffragette movement was a late 19th and early 20th-century radical campaign driven by women demanding the right to vote. That is what we are here to work towards. It’s not a luxury, it is an essential condition for our survival.

A better world is possible, let’s build it.

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Vijay Mehta is an author and peace activist. He is chair of Uniting for Peace, founding trustee of Fortune Forum charity, and board member of GAMIP-Global Alliance for Ministries and Infrastructures for Peace. His books include: The Economics of Killing (Pluto Press, 2012); Peace Beyond Borders (New Internationalist, 2016; and the most recent How Not To Go To War (New Internationalist, 2019) where he proposes that in countries and communities, in governments, private institutions and media, Peace Departments and Peace Centres be established to report on and promote peace.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 3 Aug 2026.

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