1. The United States is an aggressive empire and is currently the main threat to world peace.
2. Profit considerations have propelled the growth of finance and the decline of manufacturing in the United States. This has weakened our country and sharply increased economic inequality.
3. The economies of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan continue to be driven by massive debt. This makes a new global financial crisis very likely.
4. Profit considerations accelerate the amount of money spent on military hardware. The size of the military budget is not a reasonable measure of military strength. The true military strength of the United States is much less than the relative magnitude of our military budget (greater than the next eight countries combined) suggests.
5. The relative political, economic, and military power of the United States has been in decline for several decades. History suggests that such decline often renders political elites more aggressive.
6. The United States, despite its mammoth military establishment, has not won a single war against a determined and reasonably competent opponent in the last 70 years.
7. The United States exerts complete control over the NATO alliance. Other members have virtually no influence over NATO policy.
8. Although all nuclear weapons should be abolished, asymmetry in the possession of nuclear weapons does not promote peace. For example, China will not consider reducing its nuclear stockpile while the nuclear stockpiles of Russia and the United States are so much greater. The fact that Israel is the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons, to take another example, actually increases the likelihood of war in that region.
9. Due to the United States propensity for military aggression, peace is more likely if potential victims of U.S. aggression such as Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea have both conventional and nuclear deterrents.
10. Developments in military technology, such as hypersonic (over five times the speed of sound) precision guided long distance missiles, will render enormously expensive U.S. nuclear aircraft carriers vulnerable and largely ineffective in combat with any reasonably modern military establishment (e.g. Iran).
11. In future non-nuclear wars, the North American continent, and the United States mainland in particular, will be subject to conventional military attack. This reality will increase popular opposition to U.S. military aggression.
12. The United States political system is becoming increasing unstable. The basic causes of this instability are the structural contradictions of neo-liberal capitalism. The regime of Donald Trump is an important symptom, but not the real source, of such political instability.
13. Without harmonious relations between China, Russia, and the United States, significant progress on the climate change crisis is impossible.
The Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center’s “Peace Train” runs every Friday in the Colorado Daily.
