Peace was once a goal. Now it’s a corrupted word, rebranded to solicit more bombs, death, and destruction.
The idea of peace used to mean something in the European Union. Even though good research by Peo Hansen shows that the early days of the European project were tainted by colonial aspirations of its first members, at least internally—for the continent—peace was a real aspiration. Not anymore. Today, “peace” is a slogan, a decoration for war conferences, or worse—an excuse for more weapons. In an honest conversation with Dr. Jan Oberg on Neutrality Studies, the lifelong peace researcher points out a painful truth: peace has been quietly erased from politics, media, and even academia—in Europe in particular but in the entire western discourse more broadly. Nobody seems to care anymore what the concept really should mean.
While Western leaders talk about “security” and “freedom,” what they’re really doing is rearming for the next war. They don’t ask how to stop conflicts—they ask how to win them. They don’t imagine dialogue—they prepare invasions. The West didn’t lose peace by accident, they actively threw it away.
How Peace Got Rebranded as War
Look at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The name suggests a peace-oriented group, right? It used to be. Today, it works hand-in-hand with NATO and the arms industry. Its research is no longer about stopping wars. It’s about justifying them.
This isn’t a one-off. It’s happening everywhere. Universities that used to explore nonviolence and diplomacy now chase military funding. Journalists no longer ask whether wars can be avoided. They ask which weapons to send. Even “conflict prevention” has become code for military buildup. The message is clear: if you question the war machine, you’re naïve, disloyal, or dangerous.
We now live in a culture where talking about real peace is taboo. Suggest an end to arms deliveries, and you’re accused of supporting dictators or being ‘Putin’s useful idiot’. Question NATO, and you’re labelled as a traitor. Want to talk to the other side? Good luck. Dialogue has been replaced with drones.
A War-Mongering West in Decline
However, this obsession with militarism isn’t strength. It’s actually a very strange form of fear. The West feels like it’s losing control, so it doubles down on weapons. But the more it arms, the more enemies it imagines. And the cycle feeds itself. Nobody is attacking the West. Russia, China, Iran—they’re not plotting to invade, but Western governments act like the next world war is always around the corner, and the solution is always more missiles.
Meanwhile, real peace-building, the slow, brave work of listening, compromise, and healing, is mocked or ignored (see also The Silent Reordering: How China Builds While America Shouts). Leaders don’t even pretend to care. They pour billions into tanks while their own hospitals crumble and the ones in Palestine are blown up by their very bombs. They train soldiers while silencing dissent and the militarisation of an entire generation is taking place in front of our eyes (see here for a “hip” little YouTube Short by Germany’s state broadcaster ARD on how a female soldier “educates” youth in German high schools about the importance of “national defence”).
And the cost? A generation that’s been taught to fear instead of think. A public that’s been trained to chant slogans instead of ask questions. We are told that war is necessary, that violence is normal, that “the good guys” must always fight, but what if none of that is true—which it clearly isn’t.
This Will End in Even More War
It’s clearly wrong to claim that peace failed in Europe. It was actively pushed out. It was pushed out in the many Munich “Security” Conferences, it was pushed out at the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit, it was pushed out when both NATO and Washington rejected any negotiations with Russia for a comprehensive security arrangement in Europe back in December 2021, it was pushed out when Boris Johnson flew to Ukraine to stop the Istanbul peace negotiations back in April 2022.
And now, a small group of elites, backed by arms companies, media, and think tanks—including SIPRI—have convinced the West that war is the only answer. It doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to keep arming until everything explodes. We can choose another path. But first, we have to face the reality and say it out loud: the West has a problem. It doesn’t know how to talk about peace anymore. And if that doesn’t change, the future isn’t security but death and destruction. Just like the last two times the continent tried to make a “war to end all wars.” Real peace isn’t naive, my fiends. War is.
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Pascal Lottaz is a Swiss academic in Japan, working at Kyoto University as an Associate Professor of the Graduate School of Law and the Hakubi Center on questions of neutrality in international relations.
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