What if the worst trouble spots in the world started turning a profit? Would that be a realistic approach to peace after so many other approaches have failed? An old idea along these lines is coming back to life, known as the peace dividend. In its most basic form it refers to the savings a society enjoys when it reduces its military spending. As the Cold War wound down twenty years ago and military budgets around the world began to shrink, the notion arose that money spent on arms could be redirected to social programs. Thus the peace dividend became a popular political slogan. Some economists are skeptical, and there’s no doubt that simply to stop spending won’t bring any dividend unless the money goes toward more productive purposes.

He may not have used the phrase yet, but clearly President Obama believes in the concept of the peace dividend — his projected budgets rely on ending our vast outlay in Iraq in order to divert those funds to health care and infrastructure, as well as to reduce current crushing deficits.
He could take the idea much farther.
As long as Obama enjoys wide support for building a new economy, he should consider totally reversing the trend, now sixty years old, that has made the U.S. a global behemoth in arms dealing, technologies of mechanized death, science fiction defense systems, and the other paraphernalia of the military-industrial complex. In every trouble spot around the world, America plays the Manichean role of fostering peace and war at the same time. In a vicious circle we support militaristic regimes that take our handouts solely to keep themselves in power, thus flaming rebellion among the populace, which in turn calls for stronger armed repression. This strategy was supposed to keep the world safe, but let’s ask a simple question: How safe does anyone feel today?
The peace dividend offers a way out. Nobody can seriously believe that massive arms sales to despots actually brings peace. At the same time, no one can seriously doubt that a rise in the economies of poor, troubled areas is an incentive to peace. It’s ironic that two of the current flash points in South Asia, the Swat Valley in Pakistan and the province of Kashmir in India, are places of breathtaking beauty. If the governments in charge had taken one tenth of the resources they’ve squandered on military ventures and spent it on developing the economic potential of those regions, the native population could be enjoying peace and prosperity.
The belief that militarism brings peace is surreal and at times insane, and to the extent that the U.S. or any country equates security with armaments, the path to insanity is being blindly followed. President Obama, whose great strength is pragmatism, needs to take us on a path that equates prosperity with peace. Every beleaguered Palestinian refugee could be turned into a small businessman overnight with a fraction of the oil profits of Saudi Arabia. Millions of idle young males in the Arab world could be given a meaningful job, decimating the recruitment base for al-Qaeda and the jihadist movement. In this country, bizarre futuristic projects like the planned robot army, not to mention our enormous nuclear stockpile, could be abandoned without the slightest increase in danger to our citizenry.
Retooling the military-industrial complex is hugely more ambitious than retooling the auto industry and yet far more beneficial. In his address to Congress, President Obama got an ovation for saying that the country that invented the automobile wasn’t going to walk away from it. The country that invented the atomic bomb seems to be working on the same rationale, and it’s time to stop. We look elsewhere to place blame, but the naked truth is that this country is the chief instigator and promoter of militarism in the world. We don’t need to be. If any society has the ingenuity to completely retool itself from war to peace, it’s the U.S. The greatest peace dividend we can pay ourselves isn’t economic: It’s a renewed belief in peace. If it’s really true that Obama represents a generational turning point away from the legacy of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, let’s see the proof. No better proof exists than for him to wholeheartedly embrace the peace dividend he’s already made a start on.
Published in the San Francisco Chronicle