Fernando Alcoforado*
This article aims to present the characteristics of modern warfare based on in-depth research on the march of the new Cold War between the United States and Russia, the trade war between the United States and China and its consequences, financial warfare as a weapon of modern warfare, cybernetic warfare as a modern warfare, the inevitability or not of the 3rd World War, the causes of violence and wars in the world to, in the end, present how to eliminate wars on the planet. The new Cold War results from the fact that the United States and NATO forces are expanding their presence on Russia’s borders. The trade warfare was triggered by the United States against China to prevent this country from assuming the status of hegemonic economic power on the planet. Financial warfare has been unleashed by the United States, against its enemies such as Iran, Russia and China, with the aim of degrading the capabilities of its enemies and subjugating them with the adoption of economic and financial sanctions, while seeking advantage geopolitics in specific areas to bring the enemy country to a state of near collapse and paralysis, to financial catastrophe while advancing on other fronts. Cyber warfare is being unleashed by the United States, Russia, China, among other countries to attack computers and networks of enemy countries that affect resources necessary for war by studying the system deeply to discover its flaws and using these flaws to control this system or destroy it. The decline of the United States and the economic rise of China, which may assume the condition of the greatest world power in the mid-21st century, may trigger the 3rd World War in the face of the tension created between them. Parallel to the effort to educate all human beings with the culture of peace, it is necessary to put into practice a democratic governance of the world to prevent the recurrence of new world wars. This is the only means of survival for the human species and to stop the decay of humanity.
1. A new Cold War is under way
In the contemporary era, one of the US government’s strategies is to prevent Russia from rising to the status of a great world or even regional power and China not to overtake it as the greatest economic power on the planet. From the year 2000, Russia decided to develop a strategic partnership with China. Russia considered that China could help it in its resistance to the geopolitical ambitions of the United States both in Eastern Europe, as well as in the Caucasus and in Central Asia. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was created in 2001 to establish an alliance between Russia and China in military terms and to combat terrorism, religious fundamentalism and separatism in the Asia region. The SCO is a political and military cooperation organization that explicitly proposes to be a counterweight to the United States and NATO military forces. Putin resolved the last territorial disputes with China in 2004 by securing its eastern border. The two countries defend, in general, convergent positions in the UN and in other international forums, such as, for example, the G20 [See the article A Geopolítica das Relações entre a Federação Russa e os EUA: da “Cooperação” ao Conflito (The Geopolitics of Relations between the Russian Federation and the USA: from “Cooperation” to Conflict) by Numa Mazat and Franklin Serrano published on the website <https://revistas.ufrj.br/index.php/oikos/article/view/51868>].
Russia is flexing its military muscles, which is Moscow’s biggest challenge since the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 2010, the Russian Parliament (Duma) approved a program for 2011-2020 that earmarked 20 trillion rubles for rearmament and added 3 trillion rubles to upgrade the military industry. The stated ambition is that by 2020 Russia’s armed forces would be 70 percent “modern”. The Army would receive 2,300 new tanks, the Air Force 1,200 planes including helicopters, and the Navy 50 surface ships and 28 submarines [See the article Em marcha nova Guerra Fria (On the way to the new Cold War) by Fernando Alcoforado, published on the website https://pt.slideshare.net/falcoforado/em-marcha-nova-guerra-fria-43461945]. It is important to note that Russia is now a major arms supplier to countries that want to maintain their independence from the United States, such as India. Likewise, nations that suffer from an arms embargo by the United States such as China, Venezuela or Iran make military purchases with Russia. Furthermore, Russia remains the world’s major nuclear power alongside the United States.
On May 16, 2014, Russia and China announced the signing of a “friendship treaty” contemplating a gas agreement, whereby the two countries would build a pipeline to export Russian gas to China. China would lend Russia the money with which it would build its part of the gas pipeline. Gazprom (Russia’s largest gas and oil producer) made some price concessions to China [See the article O jogo geopolítico da Rússia e da China (The Geopolitical Game of Russia and China) by Immanuel Wallerstein published on the website <https://www.esquerda.net/en/node/33179/>]. The United States government seeks to destabilize the Russian economy in order to bend its government, or even overthrow its main leader, Putin, the reason why it suffers economic sanctions, in addition to seeking to overthrow the Iranian regime, whose economy, already weakened by economic sanctions, depends more on the never before oil prices above $100 per barrel. The United States is Iran’s mortal enemy because it is the last oil producer in the Middle East not aligned with the West and because of its plans to develop nuclear technology. Oil and natural gas contribute more than 68% of Russia’s export revenue and more than 50% of the government budget.
The attempt to destabilize the Russian economy, especially after the war between Russia and Ukraine, is contributing to the escalation of the military confrontation between Russia and the United States and NATO forces. This military escalation and the worsening of Russia’s economic situation resulting from the sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union could radicalize Russia’s conflict with the United States, causing the Russian government to decide to use nuclear weapons that could further strengthen the Vladimir Putin’s power at the helm of Russia mobilizing the nation against the common external enemy. In contrast, the United States and NATO forces are expanding their presence on Russia’s borders, starting a new Cold War.
Igor Gielow published on the website <https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mundo/2023/03/eua-alertam-para-risco-de-guerra-nuclear-com-china-e-russia.shtml?utm_source=sharenativo&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharenativo> the article EUA alertam para risco de guerra nuclear com China e Rússia (US warns of risk of nuclear war with China and Russia). In this article, there is the statement by the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States Armed Forces, General Mark Milley, that the conflict is not inevitable, but asks Congress for money to dissuade rivals. According to Milley, for the first time in history, the United States faces the risk of a war with two nuclear powers at the same time, China and Russia. Fighting them simultaneously would be very difficult, despite American military capabilities. Milley’s alarmism seeks to sensitize congressmen. The general called for approval of the largest defense budget in US history. It outlined all the ongoing risk elements. He claimed, for example, that Putin continued to use irresponsible nuclear rhetoric and posturing as Russia conducted one of the largest intercontinental missile exercises in recent history. General Mark Milley stated that the United States and Russia hold just over 90% of the 13,000 warheads around the world. Milley argues that China has thousands of local-range missiles in its arsenals that would be difficult for the United States to contain with its current inventory, advocating investment in hypersonic and other weapons. He says the potential for armed conflict is growing. China remains the No. 1 long-term geostrategic security challenge citing China’s military expansion in the Indo-Pacific and US countermeasures such as patrols (asked for more ships) and the Aukus military pact that will supply nuclear submarines to Australia.
2. The trade warfare between the United States and China and its consequences
With the argument that he sought to protect US producers and reverse the trade deficit that the United States has with China, President Donald Trump announced since 2018 the adoption of tariffs on products imported from the Asian country. The objective was to make it difficult for Chinese products to arrive in the United States, which would stimulate domestic production. The Chinese government, in turn, reacted to these announcements with retaliation, even imposing tariffs on US products. During his election campaign, Donald Trump’s speeches already pointed to a protectionist tendency, with criticism of the US trade deficit in relation to China. Already as president, Trump made the first announcement of tariffs on Chinese goods in March 2018. Since then, he has announced several measures and threatened to adopt others. China also responded with trade barriers to US products and threats. While China and the United States are waging their trade war, most economists assume that China will soon achieve global economic supremacy. After all, with a population four times that of the United States and an economic plan designed to catch up after centuries of technological stagnation, it is not inevitable that China assumes the status of hegemonic economic power on the planet.
China’s rise and rapid success is not based solely on the size of its population. India, for example, has a similar population (both are around 1.3 billion people) but, for now at least, is much further behind. The Chinese government’s economic leadership must be credited with working miraculously to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into the middle class. China’s rapid growth has been mainly driven by progress and investment in technology. China, unlike the Soviet Union, shows exceptional local technological innovation. Not coincidentally, Chinese companies are already leading the technological path of the next generation of 5G mobile networks and their capacity is high for a cyber-war with the United States. China’s achievements still largely stem from the adoption of Western technology and, in some cases, the appropriation of intellectual property. China is going its own way by demonstrating that centralized and planned political systems can drive development further and faster than free market based systems. China can lead the digital future even if the United States tries to stop it by doing its part. The impending era of intelligent machines could be a turning point in China’s favor in the battle for global hegemony with the United States.
The latest developments do not indicate a quick solution to the trade war between the United States and China. China, which monopolizes 80% of world production of rare earths, is threatening to refuse to export these crucial minerals to its rival. It is important to note that the dispute between the United States and China goes beyond the economic issue because it concerns a geopolitical issue. We are facing the first major geopolitical dispute of the 21st century, between two superpowers with the United States in decline and China on the rise as an economically hegemonic power.
An emerging power like China upsets an established and declining power like the United States. This is a classic problem in international relations. Article by Harold Thibault et Simon Leplâtre, published in Le Monde on 02/01/2019, under the title Chine : avec Huawei, la guerre de la 5G est déclarée (China: with Huawei, the 5G war is declared), available on the website <https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/02/01/chine-avec-huawei-la-guerre-de-la-5g-est-declaree_5417769_3210.html#xtor=AL-32280270> reports that Huawei’s meteoric rise and its ties to Chinese power have placed it at the center of the trade and geopolitical war between China and the United States. The US government has been accusing Huawei of being a threat to the security of the United States and warns its allies.
With its Artificial Intelligence Research laboratory, Huawei, a Chinese company, occupied second place in smartphone sales, which was Apple, but was still behind Samsung, which it hoped to surpass in 2020. Its devices are cheaper than those of Korean or American competitors. Since 2017, it has been the world’s leading manufacturer of mobile network equipment, providing antennas, relays and other infrastructure for mobile operators to connect their customers anywhere. Huawei has become the company with the most patents in Europe. Its research and development spending — $13.8 billion (€12 billion) in 2017 — is on par with the Silicon Valley giants. Huawei is developing prototypes of self-driving cars with artificial intelligence and is working with Audi on autonomous driving for connected vehicles. Its rise, in a strategic field, places this new giant at the center of the war for commercial and technological domination that China and the United States are involved in. In late November 2018, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the US government was carrying out a massive diplomatic offensive to convince governments and telephone operators in allied countries to refrain from installing Huawei equipment. Host countries of US bases are particularly asked to choose between Chinese technology or US protection.
Why are the United States and other countries suspicious of Huawei? US diplomats and intelligence officials urge their European, Australian or Japanese partners to warn of the dangers inherent in 5G being developed by Huawei. 5G is made possible by installing a greater number of antennas, for exchanging larger volumes of data, with mobile terminals that are multiplying: smartphones, vehicles, medical devices, drones. A densification of the network where everything passes through “intelligent” antennas. In this network are “base stations”, condensed technologies that offer opportunities for espionage and sabotage, according to the article by Harold Thibault et Simon Leplâtre, published in Le Monde. According to Harold Thibault et Simon Leplâtre, the transition to 5G involves major technological changes. From now on, sensitive data will also be accessible on relay antennas. Everyone should be aware that the risks of capturing data are real. The US market has been closed to Huawei since 2012 after the Congressional Intelligence Committee concluded that Huawei poses a threat to national security. A growing number of countries are turning their backs on Huawei. Huawei was excluded from bidding for 5G in the United States, Australia, New Zealand and may be excluded in Japan, the United Kingdom and Canada. As for France, it announced, through an official that, from then on, all infrastructure equipment for 5G networks will be subject to prior administrative authorization. This new generation of mobile networks was deployed in 2020 in France. With 5G, speeds increase considerably, allowing a “revolution” of mobile Internet uses instantly transmitting information, for example, about the movement and behavior of an autonomous car, when previously having a time lapse in data transmission was considered a danger.
The aforementioned article by Harold Thibault and Simon Leplâtre published in Le Monde reports that the United States is attacking Huawei because it is the most advanced company and one of the largest in China. The attacks against Huawei are the embodiment of the US government’s strategy in the trade and geopolitical war with China. Security services in other countries fear that Huawei’s telecommunications networks facilitate spying for China. The particular link between the Chinese government and companies – public or private – is what concerns, in particular, the functioning of the Chinese political system and its state capitalism. Companies, even private ones like Huawei, must follow official Chinese government policies by investing abroad. In Brussels, Huawei has a large lobbying office. The European Union is its first market outside of China. The Le Monde article reports that Huawei employs 11,000 people in Europe and has created numerous partnerships with European universities such as a mathematical research center in Boulogne-Billancourt, cooperation with universities such as Humboldt in Berlin and the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, in Stockholm. Western countries’ ability to build their mobile networks independently of China in the future is at stake. In 2008, as operators prepared to roll out 4G, Huawei was only the fourth company in the world. Its climb to the top was achieved in just a decade, ie the average life expectancy of a “generation” mobile network. For the first time, China is taking a strong lead in the most strategic technology area in a context of tensions between Beijing and Washington and its allies. Nevertheless, what will remain of the competition if Huawei maintains the same pace of progression up to the sixth generation? This situation can lead to the parallel development of two distinct and hostile technology ecosystems. Already, because of the censorship that blocks access to US competitors in China, Chinese Internet users mainly use local platforms: the We Chat application instead of Facebook, Weibo instead of Twitter, or Baidu instead of Google.
The article by Harold Thibault et Simon Leplâtre published in Le Monde informs that Huawei has established itself where the main suppliers of network equipment have not ventured: in the interior of China, then in poor countries. Huawei has established itself in less developed countries, which established players have neglected. This hasn’t stopped Huawei from gaining a real technological advantage. When a private company like Huawei acquires an international dimension in a strategic sector, it is forced to take the party-state into account, said Paul Clifford, author of The China Paradox. Although in its day-to-day management, Huawei enjoys a high degree of independence and is in competition with other Chinese companies such as telecoms group ZTE, the ruling party in China can give it orders as needed. And under President Xi Jinping, the party’s influence on large Chinese private companies has increased. When Xi Jinping became head of the party and state in China in November 2012, he said that the key to the survival of the one party is to ensure control over all components of society: universities, the press, lawyers, but also companies. In 2017, passed a law on intelligence, Article 7 states: “Any organization or citizen must, in accordance with the law, support, cooperate with national intelligence and maintain secrecy about any intelligence activity of which he is aware”. China’s restrictions, regulations and governance stifle private companies and are a burden on the country’s efforts to develop global businesses and gain “soft power”, says Duncan Clark, showing the limits to the country’s internationalization.
3. Financial warfare as a weapon of modern warfare
The book The death of money by James Rickards, published by Penguin Random House UK, 2014, makes clear the importance of the financial war that a country can adopt to destabilize the financial institutions of an enemy country and degrade its economic capacity. Rickards argues that destroying an enemy country’s wealth through an attack on its market can be more effective than sinking enemy ships when it comes to weakening an adversary. Financial warfare is the future of warfare, according to Rickards. The objective of financial warfare is to degrade enemy capabilities and subjugate the enemy while seeking geopolitical advantage in specific areas. If the attacker can lead a country into near-collapse and paralysis, into financial catastrophe while advancing on other fronts, then the financial war will be judged successful, even if the attacker incurs great costs. All wars have costs, and many wars are destructive wars that take years or decades to recover from. Financial warfare has both offensive and defensive aspects, according to Rickards. Offensive aspects include malicious attacks on enemy country financial markets designed to disrupt trade and destroy its wealth. The defensive aspects involve rapid detection of an enemy attack followed by rapid response such as closing markets or intercepting enemy message traffic. The offensive action may consist of interrupting the first attempt or retaliating for the second attempt. In theory, offense and defense converge, as second-time retaliation can be destructive enough to thwart first-time attacks, according to Rickards.
Rickards argues that information warfare will control the shape and future of warfare. This tendency will be highly critical to achieving victory in future wars. A highly secretive unit of the National Security Agency (NSA) called the Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO) has successfully penetrated Chinese computer and telecommunications systems for nearly 15 years, generating some of the best and most reliable intelligence about what is going on. within the People’s Republic of China. TAO requires a special security clearance to gain access to unit workspaces within the NSA operations complex. Financial aggressor countries can also use psychological operations, psychopaths, to increase the effectiveness of the attack. This involves issuing false news and starting rumours. Stories, for example, that a Fed chairman was kidnapped or that a prominent financier suffered a heart attack would be effective. Stories that a top bank went out of business or that a hedge fund manager committed suicide would suffice. Panic-inducing scenarios would be widespread. According to Rickards, China and Iran have been targets of action by the United States in the implementation of the ongoing financial war in the world in order to achieve its strategic objectives. Faced with the financial war waged by the United States, China has also been adopting a response in the strategic field. The People’s Liberation Army of China made this strategic response explicit in a 1999 book entitled Unrestricted Warfare. Unrestricted warfare tactics include various ways to attack an enemy without using kinetic weapons like missiles, bombs, or torpedoes. Such tactics include the use of weapons of mass destruction that disperse biological, chemical or radiological elements, cause casualties and terrorize the civilian population. Other examples of unrestricted warfare include cyberattacks that can down planes, open dam gates, cause blackouts, and shut down the Internet. Recently, financial attacks have been added to the list of articulated asymmetric threats.
The Chinese’s unrestricted war was triggered by the analysis of the 1997 Asian financial crisis that sparked the global financial panic of 1998. Much of the pain in Asian countries was caused by Western bankers suddenly pulling money out of banks in emerging markets from Asia, this suffering aggravated by bad economic advice from the IMF dominated by the great capitalist powers of the West. From an Asian perspective, the whole disaster looked like a Western plot to destabilize their economies. The instability was real enough to spark riots and bloodshed from Indonesia to South Korea, according to Rickards. The Chinese were less affected than other Asian nations by the panics of 1997 and 1998, but they studied the situation and began to see how the banks, working together with the IMF, could undermine the countries’ civil society and possibly force a change of social structure. One of their responses to the crisis was to accumulate massive dollars as a financial reserve so that they would not be vulnerable in a sudden “run on the bank” by western creditors. The Chinese response was to develop a financial warfare doctrine. China has more than $3 trillion in reserves and every 10% dollar devaluation engineered by the Fed represents a real wealth transfer of $300 billion from China to the United States. It is not clear, according to Rickards, how long China will tolerate this attack on its wealth. If China cannot defeat the United States in the air or at sea, it could attack through the capital markets. China has also developed actions aimed at increasing its gold stock and its possible use as a weapon to undermine the exchange value of the dollar. With this measure, China could protect its reserves against asset freezes or devaluation in the event of a financial war by converting its paper wealth into gold, an option it is now aggressively pursuing. Every gold ingot purchased by China reduces its financial vulnerability. China’s possible intentions can be inferred from its status as the world’s largest gold buyer.
Rickards claims that China is ahead of the United States with its strategic financial warfare doctrine that emerged in 1999 in response to the 1997 Asian financial shock. By 2012, both China and the United States had engaged in efforts to develop strategic doctrines and financial warfare tactics. In the implementation of financial warfare, China has adopted more subtle forms of financial attack, for example, in January 2011, The New York Times reported that China became a net seller of US Treasuries in 2010 , after being a net buyer. The Times report found this selling odd because China was still accumulating huge dollar reserves from its trade surpluses and was still buying dollars to manipulate the value of its currency, the Yuan. Another technique used by China to disguise its financial market intelligence operations was reported in 2007 by The New York Times, when it reported that the China Investment Corporation (CIC), another sovereign wealth fund, had agreed to buy $3 billion in Blackstone shares. Group, the powerful and secretive US-based private equity firm. The United States is not the only potential target of China’s financial war. In September 2012 a senior Chinese official, writing in the Communist periodical China Daily, suggested mounting an attack on Japanese bond market in retaliation for Japanese provocations involving island territories in the East China Sea. China’s actions in the bond and private equity markets are part of its long-term effort to operate stealthily, infiltrate critical nodes and gain valuable corporate information in the process. These financial efforts are being carried out alongside malicious efforts in cyberspace and attacks on systems that control critical infrastructure launched by China’s military spy unit. These combined efforts will serve China well in future confrontations with the United States.
China is not the only country fighting a financial war promoted by the United States. Such a war is being waged today, too, between the United States and Iran and between the United States and its Western allies against Russia. The United States seeks to destabilize the Iranian regime and cripple its nuclear program by denying it access to critical payment networks. In February 2012, the United States banned Iran from using US dollar payment systems controlled by the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury. Iran has been officially barred by the United States from participating in hard currency payments or receipts with the rest of the world. According to Rickards, the US government has made no secret of its goals in the financial war with Iran. On June 6, 2013, US Treasury official David Cohen said that the purpose of US sanctions was to cause the Iranian currency to depreciate and render it unusable in international trade. The results were catastrophic for the Iranian economy. Iran is a major oil exporter that needs access to payment systems to receive dollars for the oil it exports abroad. It is also a major importer of refined petroleum products, food and consumer electronics such as Apple computers and HP printers. Suddenly, Iran could not pay for its imports and its currency collapsed. Even before the US sanctions against the country, Iran reacted, buying gold to prevent the United States or its allies from freezing its dollar balances. India is a major importer of Iranian oil, and the two trading partners have taken steps to implement an oil-for-gold swap. India would buy gold on global markets and trade with Iran for oil shipments. In turn, Iran could exchange gold with Russia or China for food or manufactured goods. In the face of extreme financial sanctions, Iran was once again proving that gold is good money at all times and in all places.
Turkey quickly became one of the main sources of gold for Iran as well. Turkish gold exports to Iran in March 2013 were US$381 million, more than double the previous month. However, gold is not as easy to move as digital dollars, and trading with gold has its own risks. Another source of gold bound for Iran is Afghanistan. In December 2012, The New York Times reported on a triangular trade between Afghanistan, Dubai and Iran. Iran also uses Chinese and Russian banks to act as front operations for illegal payments. Iran arranged large deposits of hard currency in Chinese and Russian banks before US sanctions took effect. In late 2012, the United States warned Russia and China about assistance to Iran and about sanctions, but no punishment was imposed on the Russians or Chinese. The United States did not act hard against Russia or China because it had higher agendas to proceed with both, including Syria and North Korea. Iran also demonstrated how financial warfare and cyber warfare could be combined in an asymmetric attack hybrid. In May 2013, Iranian hackers reportedly gained access to software systems used by energy companies to control oil and gas pipelines around the world. By manipulating this software, Iran could wreak havoc not only on physical supply chains, but also on energy and derivatives markets. Iran suffered from sanctions, but it did not collapse. At the end of 2013, there was an agreement between President Obama and the Iranian President. In particular, sanctions on Iran’s gold purchases were removed, allowing Iran to stockpile gold using dollar money from oil sales. President Obama has made it clear that while sanctions have been eased, they could be reimposed if Iran does not keep its promises to curb its nuclear programs. As is common knowledge, Donald Trump disregarded the agreement signed with Iran, in addition to imposing new sanctions.
The 2012–13 US-Iran financial war illustrates how nations that have successfully resisted the US can clash on the financial battleground. The United States wanted to take Iran out of the dollar payments system, and it succeeded in doing so. An alternative non-dollar payment system is now taking shape in Asia and gold has proven to be an effective financial weapon. This situation is contributing to Iran’s allies talking openly about building new non-dollar banking and payment systems. The Biden government’s economic sanctions against Russia hit two Russian financial institutions – the VEB and PSB banks, including 42 subsidiaries – and prevent the trading of new Russian public debt securities on the market. This means that the Russian government’s access to Western finance has been cut off. Russia could no longer raise money from the West and could not trade its new debt on American and European markets. These measures are tougher than those taken in 2014, when Russia annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea. The new US sanctions join actions that European governments have also taken. The German Prime Minister, Olaf Scholz, announced the interruption of the certification process for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which is ready but not yet in operation. Russian banks were withdrawn from the Swift international payment system. Western companies have abandoned Russia because of these impacts. The Russian economy has not collapsed despite sanctions ranging from cutting off trade relations between countries to freezing half of Russian reserves abroad and curbs on the financial system. The Russian economy has not collapsed because China and India have been helping the country with “normal trade” cooperation.
The financial war initiated by the United States could make its enemies take actions that contribute to damage the international economic and financial system, which is extremely fragile. The financial meltdown in 2008 was not an act of financial warfare, but it demonstrated to the United States the complexity and vulnerability of the global financial system. Approximately US $60 trillion of wealth was destroyed at the peak of the crisis in October 2007. Cyber attacks on US infrastructure, including banks and other financial institutions, are on the rise and can take many forms. On April 23, 2013, a Twitter account maintained by the Associated Press was hacked and used to distribute a false message that the White House had been the target of a terrorist attack and that President Obama had been injured. Iran claimed credit for the attack. The success of the hackers and the market reaction demonstrated that markets can be manipulated in a variety of ways. These events point to the most dangerous type of financial attack that combines cyber attacks and financial warfare. Capital markets today are anything but failsafe. In fact, they are more and more prone to failure. Everything that is reported in the book The Deats of Money by James Rickards shows that humanity is faced with increasing risks of political, economic and social instability provided by cybernetic and financial wars and by sophisticated weapons that produce destruction.
4. Cyber warfare as a weapon of modern warfare
The article by Fernando Alcoforado A guerra cibernética como arma de guerra moderna (Cybernetic warfare as a weapon of modern warfare), published on the website <https://www.portalsaudenoar.com.br/a-guerra-cibernetica-com-arma-de-guerra-moderna/> informs that the science and technology are used in cyber warfare as one of the weapons of modern warfare. Cyber war is based on information technology and, nowadays, also on advances made possible by artificial intelligence. Cybernetics is an interdisciplinary science based on scientific research. Cybernetics as a scientific field began during World War II with Norbert Wiener as a precursor, who worked on computer programming and control mechanisms for anti-aircraft artillery. Wiener’s goal with cybernetics was to develop research to create an artificial system capable of developing functions that were essentially human until then, such as, for example, executing complex calculation patterns, predicting the future and the trajectory of an aircraft. At that time, Wiener became interested in the principle of feedback and control, which consists of using detectors that work as sensory organs and collect information about the performance of expected functions for a given piece of equipment. Cyber warfare basically consists of the use of digital attacks for purposes of espionage or sabotage against a country’s strategic or tactical structures. Espionage aims to steal tactical and strategic information such as data on troop movements, the strengths and weaknesses of the country’s military system and any other valuable information about resources needed for war. In sabotage, it can range from a simple action like taking down the servers of a government website to something extremely harmful like launching a nuclear warhead. Sabotage boils down to “doing something” as opposed to espionage, which boils down to “finding something out”.
In cyber warfare, state-backed hackers, whether members of a country’s military, or funded by that country, attack computers and networks of opposing countries that affect resources needed for warfare. They do this in the same way as any other computer or system, that is, they study the system deeply, discover its flaws and use these flaws to control that system or destroy it. Hackers can use confidential information intended for others (espionage) to gain the upper hand in the battle against their adversary. It can figure out the speed of a missile and build another missile or a plane that can outrun it. It can find out where the enemy is moving its troops and plan an ambush. You can discover which scientists are important in the creation of these weapons, or which politician was essential in raising funds for that military system and attack them directly using, for example, drones. When the country has control of these systems, it is also possible to sabotage people and structures. By discovering how the troops are communicating, the country gains access to the network so that it can confuse the enemy and invade their base. It could hack into their systems/accounts and defraud them by impersonating one of them. Or it could use that information to control them and blackmail people because of something found on their computer or kidnap their families using private information. Destroying the systems of enemy countries has an obvious result: it destroys what controls that system, and consequently prevents it from functioning. A common example of cyber guerrilla warfare is the use of attacks to disable government websites and social networks. This tactic was used effectively by the Russians during the 2008 South Ossetian War, causing chaos and spreading false information to the population before and during the Russian invasion.
Cyber warfare targets any sector that is important to the enemy’s infrastructure. This means sectors such as the army, national defense and the war industry. However, these targets could also be weapons factories, mines and other manufactures that assist in the operation of these factories and the electrical system, which supplies energy to all these sectors. In its scariest version, cyber warfare can target a country’s most important strategic resource, its people. A hacker could launch a terrorist attack to destabilize or demotivate a population to fight. This implies triggering a financial war with attacks on the financial sectors, which would cause economic damage or attacks on communication systems to disable the telephone network and the internet. Cyber warfare makes no distinction between civilian and military targets. Although a missile does much more damage than a virus, a cyber attack can result in civilian casualties. If there was an attack on any country’s energy system and the system was destroyed by a cyber attack, it wouldn’t just be the weapons factories that would stop working. Such an attack would also result in traffic accidents, interrupted surgeries, failures in life support machines when a high number of people could die. It is very difficult to discover the author of a cyber attack or the governments that finance these attacks. One aspect that makes digital weapons worse than nuclear weapons is figuring out who did the attack. It is very easy to hide the origin of such an attack by masking the identity of the attacker. Even if the government finds out from which computer the attack was carried out, there is still the difficulty of discovering who the person behind the screen was and it is even more difficult to know whether or not he was a government agent.
According to Fernando Alcoforado, there is no doubt about the use of cybernetic capacity in order to achieve political, economic and military advantage. According to reports, on the one hand, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea and, on the other, the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom and France have increasingly sophisticated means of obtaining information from governments and companies to influence the lives of people and destroy their opponents’ infrastructure and strategic objectives. The world has entered a phase of permanent war: without a battlefront and without rules of engagement. Cyber warfare is similar to insurgency warfare, with the difference being that you can plan and execute action at a distance, away from the enemy. The use of artificial intelligence algorithms will multiply the impact of actions and create new vulnerabilities in the adversary. It will be more difficult to identify their authors, by using robots to authorize the dissemination of false information on social networks or to make algorithms available with free access, allowing people to be included in any video and to put in their mouth whatever they want it to be say. It is possible that cybernetic espionage, sabotage or influence operations are already being carried out completely autonomously, requiring only someone’s green light. The understanding that 5G technology can be exploited for espionage and sabotage of infrastructure facilities, communication networks and financial centers has become a new concern and is at the root of the ban on the purchase of Huawei products for public or private 5G networks in the United States. The new cold war between the United States and China started with trade, but is expected to move quickly to technology, where China is showing signs of being ahead of Washington in advancing the application of the latest 5G generation.
Everything that has just been reported makes it quite evident that science and technology are at the service not only of human emancipation, but also at the service of war and the destruction of humanity. In fact, science and technology began to be used for good and for evil. The expectation that science and technology would be used exclusively for the progress of humanity was painfully interrupted by events that marked today’s society, the main ones undoubtedly being the catastrophes of the 1st and 2nd World War. In fact, science contributed to the barbarism of two world wars with the invention of powerful and destructive war weapons and continues to contribute to the sophistication of modern warfare.
5. Is World War 3 inevitable?
Human history has been characterized by periods of global stability and also systemic chaos. The period of global stability results from the hegemony exercised by a certain country that, leading the interstate world system, spreads values and builds institutions that guarantee its unchallenged supremacy. Systemic chaos, on the other hand, occurs when the hegemony based on the economic and military power of a given country tends to be eroded and the hierarchy of power and wealth among the great powers undergoes profound changes. When there is an escalation of competition and conflicts between the great powers that exceeds the regulatory capacity of the existing structures, new structures emerge that further destabilize the dominant configuration of power [See Arrighi; Silver, Caos e governabilidade no moderno sistema mundial (Chaos and governability in the modern world system), Contraponto Editora , Rio, 2001]. Arrighi and Silver argue that the crisis and collapse of a world order result both from the weakening of “existing structures” – based on the hegemonic power of the leading country – and from the rise of “new structures” that seek a systemic rearrangement through economic competition and /or political and military contestation. This situation happened throughout human history when, for example, Holland surpassed Spain economically and militarily and imposed itself as a hegemonic power from the end of the 16th century until most of the 18th century. The same happened with England, which imposed itself as a hegemonic power from the second half of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century, economically and militarily supplanting the Netherlands and after militarily defeating France in Waterloo in 1815, which also aspired to world power.
England, the hegemonic power in the 18th and 19th centuries, was challenged at the end of the 19th century by Germany, which was fighting for the redivision of the world which resulted in the First and Second World War. The military defeat of Germany and the economic decline of England contributed to the rise of the United States to the status of hegemonic power. After the Second World War, when the world was divided into two areas of influence, one led by the United States and the other by the Soviet Union, a bipolar system was structured that lasted almost half a century under the risk of the outbreak of a nuclear war. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 led the United States to exercise its hegemony in the world unchallenged until the beginning of the 21st century. Paul Kennedy argues that the exercise of global consensual leadership, economic prosperity and post-war US military power would be in crisis [See Kennedy, Paul. Ascensão e Queda das Grandes Potências (Rise and Fall of the Great Powers), Editora Europa-America Pt, 1990]. The decline of the United States was accentuated in the first decade of the 21st century at the same time as the economic rise of China, which could assume the condition of the greatest world power in the middle of the 21st century. However, it is not clear whether there will be a happy ending for humanity. Does the rise of China increase the likelihood of war between the great powers? Will there be a new era of tension between the United States and China as dangerous as the Cold War (World War 3) between the United States and the Soviet Union?
If China’s prosperity comes at the expense of making the recovery of the economies of the United States and the European Union, and also of the world economy, impossible, it could lead the United States and other countries to confront it. This process could generate a situation similar to the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Robert D. Kaplan, an American journalist who studies international politics, says that China’s emergence as a superpower is inevitable and that conflicts of interest with the United States will be unavoidable. He admits a military confrontation between the United States and China [See the article A pacífica ascensão da China: perspectivas positivas para o futuro? (The peaceful rise of China: positive perspectives for the future?) by Antônio José Escobar Brussi published in the Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional, vol.51, no.1, Brasília , 2008]. Another possibility is that China is welcomed into the existing order and allowed to prosper within it. This situation would result from the existing economic interdependence between the United States and China because the latter depends on the US market and investments and the United States needs the Chinese Central Bank to buy a large part of US debt securities. This situation reinforces the position defended by Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State, who understands that the US interest will be much more easily achieved through cooperation with China. James Pinkerton, American writer and political analyst, is a harsh critic of Kaplan’s military containment strategy and Kissinger’s accommodation proposal. Pinkerton is opposed to Kaplan because he considers a broad enough coalition to face China along the lines of the one organized to defeat Germany in World War II to be unfeasible. Pinkerton proposes that, instead of direct confrontation, the US government pits the current Asian powers (India, China and Japan) against each other (See the aforementioned article by Antônio José Escobar Brussi). Is World War 3 avoidable or inevitable?
There is a risk that the US government will lead the world into World War 3 in the conflict with Russia in Ukraine. Rather than trying a negotiated solution with Russia to the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration preferred confrontation by establishing economic sanctions against Russia and its citizens, as well as arming the government of Ukraine to resist the Russian invasion. However, China represents the biggest concern of the United States for considering it a power that destabilizes its hegemonic interests. A new stage in US foreign policy was reaffirmed in the new National Security Strategy (NNS) approved in October 2022, where it is openly declared that the danger comes from China, both economically and militarily. While Russia is reduced to a danger limited only to the security of central Europe. Something that can be seen when observing how the United States has moved military capabilities to the Pacific Ocean and Southeast Asia.
Biden himself, in a statement given on October 6, 2022, during a Democratic Party event in New York, said he sees the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” – final war – in the conflict with Russia, which is at the highest level since the Cold War by citing that Putin is “not kidding” when he talks about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons, chemical or biological weapons, because his Army is significantly less capable. According to him, the use of a nuclear weapon could get out of control and lead to global destruction. This statement demonstrates that Biden acts irresponsibly because he knows the risk of a nuclear hecatomb and does nothing to avoid it by seeking a diplomatically negotiated solution with Russia. The world is at risk of the outbreak of the 3rd World War, which could be avoided if there is a peace agreement between presidents Joe Biden and Wladimir Putin to initially end the war in Ukraine and, later, with the reform of the international system to end wars around the world. In the conflict in Ukraine, given the impossibility of the US government to impose its will on Russia, it is urgent to conclude a peace agreement between presidents Biden and Putin to end the war in Ukraine because the war between Russia and Ukraine can evolve for a conflict that would spread across Europe and the world turning into a world war. If this were to happen, it would pave the way for the involvement of major military powers with unpredictable consequences with the use of nuclear weapons. Everyone needs to understand that the war in Ukraine is the scene of the dispute between Russia and the United States. On the one hand, we have the United States, which wants a NATO presence in Ukraine, and on the other, we have Russia, which does not want a NATO presence in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine will only come to an end if Biden and Putin reach an agreement on ending the conflict between Russia and the United States with UN supervision.
The initial deal between Biden and Putin could take place with Russia accepting the ceasefire in Ukraine on the condition that the United States withdraws from Ukraine’s incorporation into NATO. The definitive deal would consist of Russia ending its hostilities in Ukraine by liberating occupied territories in that country, with the exception of Crimea, assuming the burden of rebuilding what was destroyed by the war on condition that the United States and NATO abandon the countries of the Eastern Europe and Finland that adhered to it, returning to the existing limits in 1997 and assuming the commitment to remove the economic and financial sanctions adopted against Russia. The deal between Biden and Putin would be advantageous for Ukraine, Russia, the United States, Europe and the world. Ukraine would gain from this agreement because it would end the suffering of its population, avoid the military occupation of its territory by Russia, recover its sovereignty over the national territory and have the reconstruction of the country carried out by Russia. Russia would gain from this agreement because there would be the removal of economic and financial sanctions against it adopted by the United States and its western allies, there would be the abandonment of NATO’s claim to Ukraine’s membership as one of its member countries and the commitment of the United States and of NATO to leave the 14 countries of Eastern Europe (Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic) and Finland, which recently joined the organization . The United States would gain from the agreement because it would no longer destabilize its economy with a prolonged war. Europe would gain from the agreement because the threat of the cessation of oil and natural gas supplies from Russia and the destabilization of its economies with a protracted war would disappear. The world would gain from the agreement because there would be no destabilization of the world economy with serious repercussions on the economies of all countries and the threat of a new world war that would lead to the end of the human species would disappear. For Biden and Putin to conclude this peace agreement, it is necessary that the UN, through its secretary general, leave its passivity in the search for world peace and that China and all peace-loving countries mobilize in order to achieve it.
In order to permanently remove new risks of a new world war and for perpetual peace to materialize on our planet, it would be necessary to reform the current international system, which is incapable of guaranteeing world peace. The new international system should work based on a Planetary Social Contract that would be the Constitution of planet Earth. For the preparation of the Planetary Social Contract, there should be a convening of a Constituent World Assembly with the participation of representatives of all the countries of the world elected for this purpose. The Planetary Social Contract should establish the existence of a World Government whose president should be elected with more than 50% of votes of the World Parliament to be, also, constituted with elected representatives in the different countries of the world. In addition to the World Government and the World Parliament, the World Supreme Court should also be constituted, which should be composed of high-level jurists from the world chosen by the World Parliament who would act for a determined time. The World Supreme Court should judge cases that involve disputes between countries, crimes against humanity and against nature committed by national States and by rulers in the light of the Planetary Social Contract, judge conflicts that exist between the World Government and the World Parliament and act as guardian of the Planetary Social Contract. The World Government will not have its own Armed Forces, having to rely on the support of the Armed Forces of the countries that would be summoned when necessary.
Therefore, with this system the World Parliament would successfully legislate through a democratic process. There would be no need for an entity that would act as a world policeman because the person who would exercise power would be the President of the World Government who would use the Armed Forces of certain countries that would be summoned when necessary. The new rule of international law would be enforced by the three constituted powers: World Government, World Parliament, and World Supreme Court. World power would rest with the World Government, the World Parliament and the World Supreme Court. World power would neither corrupt nor be corrupted because there would be vigilance from all the powers that be. World Government, World Parliament and World Supreme Court would act as checks and balances aimed at the efficiency and effectiveness of the international system.
These are, therefore, the measures that should be adopted in the short term to end the war in Ukraine and, in the medium and long term, to definitively end wars in the world. Peace-loving citizens from all over the world should mobilize in their countries to demand that their governments and the UN commit to achieving world peace to avoid the outbreak of the 3rd World War.
6. The causes of violence and wars in the world
We live in a world that has as one of its main characteristics the violence practiced by man against his fellow men. The perception of many people is that violence represents the predominance of the animal instinct that we have over the values of civilization. This would explain the escalation of criminality and wars at all times around the world. The debate on violence puts the question of human nature on the agenda, the subject of which was addressed by eminent thinkers such as Raymond Aron (French philosopher and sociologist), Henry Bergson (French philosopher and diplomat), Hannah Arendt (German philosopher), Sigmund Freud (Austrian, neurologist and founder of Psychoanalysis), Carl Rogers (American precursor of humanistic psychology), Thomas Hobbes (English political scientist, philosopher and mathematician), Jean-Jaques Rousseau (Swiss writer and philosopher) and Karl Marx (economist , philosopher, historian and German political scientist), among others. For millennia, scientists and philosophers have raised the following question: is human nature innate or is it a product of the environment or both? Is it determined genetically or by the society where the human being lives or both? Why does the world become more violent every year? Not only is there an increase in the number of armed conflicts across the globe, but people themselves are more violent. What’s the explanation for that? It is not uncommon to assert that since the world began, there has always been violence between human beings. It will be difficult to find anyone today who does not believe this statement. Yet it is false. In the beginnings of humanity there was no violence that manifests itself today in relations between individuals and between human communities.
No human being, no people of that distant time would have had the idea of attacking their fellow man. Nor would they be able, for example, to annex their neighbor’s land against their will, through brute force. It is difficult to try to establish a parallel between the way of life of human beings back then and humanity today. At that time, living in peace and harmony with your fellow human beings was something as natural to human beings as breathing, eating and sleeping. Human beings once lived on Earth, without offending or mistreating each other, much less warring with each other. That, however, was a long, long time ago. No record from that time has come down to the present day, so it is assumed that this situation did not exist. According to Raymond Aron, as man’s life is organized in families and bands, the less likely conducts that are properly bellicose might seem to us [ARON, Raymond. Paz e Guerra entre as Nações (Peace and War between nations). Editora Universidade de Brasília, 1962]. Most animals fight, but rare are the species that practice war, understood as collective and organized action. Aron claims that homo sapiens appeared about 600,000 years ago. The Neolithic revolution, regular agriculture and animal husbandry date back some 10,000 years. Complex civilizations or societies emerged about 6,000 years ago. This means that the so-called historical period represents one hundredth of the total duration of humanity’s existence on planet Earth. According to Aron, no anthropologist has ever found any evidence that men developed an organization or combat tactics before the Bronze Age (3300 BC to 1300-700 BC). It is not surprising, therefore, that the first indisputable signs of armies and war date back to the Bronze Age, which is a period of civilization in which the development of this metal alloy resulting from the mixture of copper and tin took place.
Just as for the first human beings the idea of causing any harm to their fellow man would be inconceivable, today, it sounds like an illusion, a fantasy, the idea of a world without conflicts, as we consider violence to be a characteristic of human beings. One can speculate whether there might not have been an intermediate phase between the many millennia during which man lived under the threat of wild beasts and the much shorter period in which the threat to his safety began to originate in other men. It would be a time when men had sufficient technical means for defense against wild beasts and without engagement in the pursuit of riches and class struggles, conquests and dominions. It has been demonstrated that small societies, without metallic instruments, isolated, still do not show characteristic traits of bellicose societies. Raymond Aron states in his work quoted above that biologists call aggressiveness the propensity of an animal to attack another of the same or different species. In most (but not all) species, individuals fight each other. Some are not aggressive (that is, they do not take the initiative to attack), but will defend themselves when attacked. Among primates, humans are at the bottom of the aggressiveness scale. As an animal, he is relatively combative. In other words, just a little intense stimulus is enough to make him trigger aggression. According to Aron, among higher vertebrates, groups often manifest aggressiveness towards individuals who do not belong to their collective. In the human species, however, manifestations of aggressiveness are inseparable from collective life. Even when it comes to the reaction of one individual against another, aggressiveness is influenced in many ways by the social context. The emergence of a properly social existence was not the only cause of the new dimensions that the phenomenon of aggressiveness assumed: the frustration and inadaptation that lead the individual to an aggressive reaction constitute the most important fact in human relationships.
Aron defends the thesis that frustration is a psychic experience, revealed by consciousness. All individuals feel frustrations from childhood. Frustration is first and foremost the experience of deprivation, that is, a good desired and not achieved, an oppression painfully felt. The chain of causality that leads to emotions or acts of aggression always originates in an external phenomenon. There is no physiological proof that there is a spontaneous incitement to fight, originating in the individual’s own organism. Physical aggression and the desire to destroy is not the only possible reaction to frustration. The difficulty in maintaining peace is more related to man’s humanity than to his animality. Henry Bergson, in turn, states that the origin of violence and war is the existence of property, individual or collective, and since humanity is predestined to property, by its structure, violence and war would be natural (BERGSON, Henry. Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion. French & European Pubns, 1976). People who fear the lack of food and raw materials they need, believe themselves threatened by hunger or unemployment, are capable of anything. To survive, they are ready to attack. This is how authentic wars are born, adjusted to their essence. Hannah Arendt addressed the issue of violence in her work On Violence published by Harvest Book in 1970 in which she discusses, especially with Niezstche and Bergson, about what she calls the biological justification of violence. These thinkers attribute to power a natural expansionist dimension and an internal need to grow. Violent action, in this context, is explained as a strategy to give power new vigor and stability. Arendt contests this position, stating that “nothing could be theoretically more dangerous than the tradition of organicist thought in political matters, whereby power and violence are interpreted in biological terms. Arendt maintains that neither violence nor power are natural phenomena, that is, a manifestation of the vital process, because they belong to the political realm of human affairs, whose essentially human quality is guaranteed by man’s faculty to act, the ability to start something new. Arendt refutes claims such as Wright Mills’ that all politics is a struggle for power and that the basic form of power is violence, refutes Max Weber’s that the domination of man by man is based on the means of legitimate violence or refutes those of Bertrand de Jouvenel that war presents itself as an activity that belongs to the essence of States.
Freud emphasizes in his work the destructive aspects of man. The need, placed by Freud, to control and restrain the individual is evident, due to the danger he could represent to society, which leads him to conclude that the man, advocated by him, is not, socially speaking, very trustworthy. According to Freud, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration because of this primary hostility of men towards each other. Culture has to resort to every possible reinforcement in order to erect barriers against men’s aggressive instinct. Faced with such a hostile and disintegrating being, nothing more natural than society making use of its power of coercion [See the article by Sonia Maria Lima de Gusmão under the title A natureza humana segundo Freud e Rogers (Human nature according to Freud and Rogers) posted on the website <https://encontroacp.com.br/textos/a-natureza-humana-segundo-freud-e-rogers/>]. In this article, it appears that, in Carl Rogers, the opposite of Freud’s view is observed, as he believes that it is precisely in a coercive context, where the individual cannot expand himself, or rather, update his potential, that makes you hostile or antisocial. Otherwise, we have nothing to fear, as his behavior will tend to be constructive. Rogers observes that when man is truly free to become what he is in the depths of his being, when he is free to act according to his nature, as a being capable of perceiving the things that surround him, then he is clearly heading towards globality and integration.
Hobbes’s central thesis on human conduct is that all human beings are selfish and are willing to use others for their own benefit. Hobbes speaks of the “war of all against all”, the permanent struggle that would break out if men did not live in security and had to depend completely on their own resources. Hobbes seeks to show that there can be no society without government and without the sanctions of law. There would only be individuals antagonistic to each other. Hobbes compares human life to a race, in which we have to assume that there is no other goal and no other prize than to come first. Competition – the desire to outdo the other – is part of the fabric of our lives: either we want to achieve something at the expense of others, or we want to defend what we have already achieved (See Roger Trigg’s article under the title A Natureza Humana em Hobbes (Human Nature in Hobbes) posted on the website <http://qualia-esob.blogspot.com.br/2008/03/natureza-humana-em-hobbes.html>). The central idea in Rousseau’s thought is based on the conviction of the natural goodness of man. According to Rousseau, the mishaps of socialization distanced man from himself, throwing him against his fellow man. It is in this process of transformation that man degenerates because he abandons his natural instincts and uses justice instead of pity. Natural feelings lead men to serve the common interest, while reason impels them to selfishness. To be virtuous, it is enough for man to follow natural feelings more than reason. For Rousseau, socialization is the cause of man’s denaturation, and the best path to his degradation. Communion with nature is the only way to preserve the true essence of man [See Dalva’s article by Fatima Fulgeri under the title Conceito de natureza em Rousseau (Concept of nature in Rousseau) posted on the website http://www.paradigmas.com.br/parad12/p12.6.htm]. J.J. Rousseau thought that wars arise, or at least expand, with the expansion of collectivities and that class inequality and individual property are linked to wars of conquest and domination by warriors. It could not be otherwise, since political units were forged for combat and the price of victory was always land, slaves and precious metals.
For Marx, what characterizes man is not just rationality, but the fact that he is the architect of his own development. Humans are capable of changing the world around them, and in doing so, they change themselves [See the article A Natureza do Homem Segundo Karl Marx (The Nature of Man According to Karl Marx) posted on the website <http://nomosofia.blogspot.com.br/2011/10/natureza-do-homem-segundo-karl-marx.html>]. Marx presented a definition of the essence of human nature in the Philosophical Manuscripts, characterizing human beings as free and conscious activity, in contrast to the nature of the animal [See the article by Nildo Viana under the title The A Renovação da Psicanálise por Erich Fromm (Renovation of Psychoanalysis by Erich Fromm) posted on the website <http://br.monografias.com/trabalhos914/renovacao-psicanalise-fromm/renovacao-psicanalise-fromm.shtml>). Marx states that social conflicts result from the division of society into classes with the emergence of private property replacing the collective ownership of the means of production prevailing in primitive societies.
7. How to eliminate wars in the world
From what was exposed in the previous chapter, it appears that Aron defends the thesis that human aggressiveness is influenced, in many ways, by the social context. There is no physiological proof that there is a spontaneous incitement to fight, originating in the individual’s own organism. The difficulty in maintaining peace is more related to man’s humanity than to his animality. Bergson, states that the origin of violence and war is the existence of property, individual or collective. Arendt argues that neither violence nor power are natural phenomena. They are a manifestation of the vital process to which they belong in the political realm of human affairs. Freud and Hobbes converge in their thoughts when considering man’s aggressive instincts and the need for coercion to repress them. The pessimistic view of Freud and Hobbes is opposed to that of Carl Rogers who states that only in a coercive context does man become hostile or antisocial and that if there is no coercion he will tend to be constructive. Rousseau’s central idea is the conviction of man’s natural goodness and that society is what degenerates him by pitting him against his fellow man. Marx states that man is the architect of his own development and that human beings are capable of changing the world around them and, by doing so, change themselves. In summary, it is quite clear that the existence of a society based on social justice can make human beings behave constructively and be able to change the world around them and, in doing so, change themselves. This is the way to combat the violence that increasingly contributes to the social disintegration of the world in which we live.
To make human beings have constructive behavior and be able to change the world around them, it is necessary to educate them. Kant, the philosopher, thus understands education: to develop in the individual all the perfection of which he is susceptible, Such is the end of education. Pestalozzi, the consummate pedagogue, says: to educate is to progressively develop man’s spiritual faculties. John Locke, a great preceptor, expressed himself in this way on the subject: to educate is to make spirits straight, disposed, at all times, not to practice anything that is not in accordance with the dignity and excellence of a sensible creature. Lessing, no less illustrious authority, compares the work of education to the work of revelation, and says: education determines and accelerates the progress and perfection of man. The fight against violence in the world will only be victorious with the education of all human beings in all corners of the Earth so that, through this medium, they acquire awareness of the world in which they live, organize themselves in each country and throughout the world, to carry out the political, economic and social changes necessary to eliminate social inequalities and obstacles to political, economic, social and environmental development in their respective countries. Parallel to the effort to educate all human beings, it is necessary that humanity be equipped, as urgently as possible, with the instruments necessary to take control of its destiny and put into practice a democratic governance of the world. This is the only means of survival for the human species and to stop the decay of humanity.
A democratic governability of the world would not replace the governments of each nation. Its role would be to build the governance of the global economy and environment and the maintenance of world peace. Through it, the defense of the general interests of the planet would be pursued. It would ensure that each State respects the rights of every citizen of the world, seeking to prevent the spread of global systemic risks of an economic and environmental nature. He would avoid the empire of one and the anarchy of all as at present. Governance with these characteristics can only result from consensus among all the peoples and nations of the world. The preservation of peace is the first mission of every new form of world governance. Tomorrow, who will rule the world? Nobody, probably, if nothing is done to build global governance. This is the worst case scenario. However, the global economic, financial, ecological, social and political crises, the development of illegal and criminal activities today and the need to defend humanity against its extinction resulting from natural disasters on planet Earth and threats from outer space show the urgency of global governance. Humanity has to understand that it has everything to gain by uniting around democratic governance in the world representing the interests of nations, including the most powerful, controlling the world in its entirety, in time and space. The new world order to be built should organize not only the relationships between men on the face of the Earth, but also their relationships with nature. It is therefore necessary that a planetary social contract be drawn up that enables economic and social development and the rational use of nature’s resources for the benefit of all humanity. Building a new world order based on these principles is urgent. That government will exist one day even if it happens after a gigantic economic or environmental disaster. It is urgent to think about this to stop the violence and wars that proliferate around the world.
Faced with the impossibility of an imperial State, balanced powers and a hegemonic power to ensure world peace, the time has come for humanity to equip itself, as urgently as possible, with the necessary instruments to build world peace and control its destiny. To achieve these objectives, it is urgent to implement a democratic government in the world, which constitutes the only means of survival for the human species capable of building a world in which every woman, every man of today and tomorrow, has the same rights and the same duties, in which all forms of life and future generations are ultimately taken into account, in which all sources of growth are utilized in an ecologically and socially sustainable manner. The time has come for humanity to equip itself, as urgently as possible, with the instruments necessary for building a world of peace. The UN that was founded after the 2nd World War has been inoperative throughout its history. It has not been successful in building a world of peace. It is urgent to restructure the UN and the international system so that it can exercise world governance that makes it possible to mediate international conflicts and ensure world peace. The global governance to be exercised by the UN would have the objective of defending the general interests of the planet, would ensure that each national State respects the rights of every citizen of the world and would seek to prevent the spread of global systemic risks. It would avoid the empire of one and the anarchy of all. With world governance, it will be possible to end war and end the bloodbath that has characterized human history throughout history. War monuments must be replaced by Peace monuments from the constitution of a world government. To be democratic, the world government must be representative of all the peoples of the world. The survival of humanity will depend on the ability to celebrate a Planetary Social Contract that represents the will of the majority of the planet’s population.
In order to permanently remove new risks of a new world war and for perpetual peace to materialize on our planet, it would be necessary to reform the current international system, which is incapable of guaranteeing world peace. The new international system should work based on a Planetary Social Contract that would be the Constitution of planet Earth. For the preparation of the Planetary Social Contract, there should be a convening of a Constituent World Assembly with the participation of representatives of all the countries of the world elected for this purpose. The Planetary Social Contract should establish the existence of a World Government whose president should be elected with more than 50% of votes of the World Parliament to be, also, constituted with elected representatives in the different countries of the world. In addition to the World Government and the World Parliament, the World Supreme Court should also be constituted, which should be composed of high-level jurists from the world chosen by the World Parliament who would act for a determined time. The World Supreme Court should judge cases that involve disputes between countries, crimes against humanity and against nature committed by national States and by rulers in the light of the Planetary Social Contract, judge conflicts that exist between the World Government and the World Parliament and act as guardian of the Planetary Social Contract. The World Government will not have its own Armed Forces, having to rely on the support of the Armed Forces of the countries that would be summoned when necessary.
Therefore, with this system the World Parliament would successfully legislate through a democratic process. There would be no need for an entity that would act as a world police officer because the person who would exercise power would be the President of the World Government who would use the Armed Forces of certain countries that would be summoned when necessary. The new rule of international law would be enforced by the three constituted powers: World Government, World Parliament, and World Supreme Court. World power would rest with the World Government, the World Parliament and the World Supreme Court. World power would neither corrupt nor be corrupted because there would be vigilance from all the powers that be. World Government, World Parliament and World Supreme Court would act as checks and balances aimed at the efficiency and effectiveness of the international system.
* Fernando Alcoforado, awarded the medal of Engineering Merit of the CONFEA / CREA System, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, of the SBPC- Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science and of IPB- Polytechnic Institute of Bahia, engineer and doctor in Territorial Planning and Regional Development from the University of Barcelona, college professor (Engineering, Economy and Administration) and consultant in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, regional planning, urban planning and energy systems, was Advisor to the Vice President of Engineering and Technology at LIGHT S.A. Electric power distribution company from Rio de Janeiro, Strategic Planning Coordinator of CEPED- Bahia Research and Development Center, Undersecretary of Energy of the State of Bahia, Secretary of Planning of Salvador, is the author of the books Globalização (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1997), De Collor a FHC- O Brasil e a Nova (Des)ordem Mundial (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1998), Um Projeto para o Brasil (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2000), Os condicionantes do desenvolvimento do Estado da Bahia (Tese de doutorado. Universidade de Barcelona,http://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/1944, 2003), Globalização e Desenvolvimento (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2006), Bahia- Desenvolvimento do Século XVI ao Século XX e Objetivos Estratégicos na Era Contemporânea (EGBA, Salvador, 2008), The Necessary Conditions of the Economic and Social Development- The Case of the State of Bahia (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2010), Aquecimento Global e Catástrofe Planetária (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2010), Amazônia Sustentável- Para o progresso do Brasil e combate ao aquecimento global (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2011), Os Fatores Condicionantes do Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2012), Energia no Mundo e no Brasil- Energia e Mudança Climática Catastrófica no Século XXI (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2015), As Grandes Revoluções Científicas, Econômicas e Sociais que Mudaram o Mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2016), A Invenção de um novo Brasil (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2017), Esquerda x Direita e a sua convergência (Associação Baiana de Imprensa, Salvador, 2018), Como inventar o futuro para mudar o mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2019), A humanidade ameaçada e as estratégias para sua sobrevivência (Editora Dialética, São Paulo, 2021), A escalada da ciência e da tecnologia e sua contribuição ao progresso e à sobrevivência da humanidade (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2022), a chapter in the book Flood Handbook (CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida United States, 2022) and How to protect human beings from threats to their existence and avoid the extinction of humanity (Generis Publishing, Europe, Republic of Moldova, Chișinău, 2023).
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