A long-term strategy

Having the capacity to defend oneself in a hostile world and building a future of disarmament and collective security are not two incompatible goals. Rather, they are the necessary combination for a credible and effective strategy. This is how our forebears, the founders of the international system, understood it. Today, we have the opportunity to deploy our ingenuity to bring both horizons together and, perhaps, renew the promise of peace for a new generation.

The return of two records: global military spending and active armed conflicts

The year 2025 marked the consolidation of a regressive and accelerating trend. On one hand, a historic record was reached in global military spending: 2.7 trillion euros, a 3% increase over the previous year, following a decade of sustained growth. By way of comparison, this figure is equivalent to 2.5% of global GDP, around 350 euros per inhabitant, or the total size of an economy like Brazil’s. It is also equivalent to eleven times the estimated investment needed to end hunger and extreme poverty. Or fifteen times the annual funding gap for climate adaptation, whose absence we witness daily. Military spending, despite its tremendous aggregate scale, is explained mainly by five military powers that together account for 60% of the global total: the United States, China, Russia, Germany, and India. Meanwhile, 85% of the total is concentrated among fifteen countries — that is, a select few.

On the other hand, 2025 was the year with the most active armed conflicts in the world since the Second World War: 65 violent conflicts in total, 13 of them of high intensity: Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, followed by Iran, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the central Sahel, Yemen, Somalia, and Haiti. These conflicts directly affected one billion people and displaced around 117.8 million of them (both internally displaced and refugees). This is in addition to the seismic effects that ripple through an interdependent global environment.

These two figures are far from being mere statistics. They reveal an arms buildup that carries global risks difficult to ignore. Risks that affect armed powers, but also (unintentionally) the rest of the non-armed states.

• Nuclear risk: There are currently around 12,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Of these, about 4,000 are deployed and around 2,000 remain on high operational alert status. Since all nuclear powers have continued modernizing their arsenals, even a limited regional nuclear war could alter solar radiation and climate patterns, as well as trigger a global famine.
• Environmental risk: Weapons production generates emissions during manufacturing and transport, base maintenance, exercises, and operations. The use of heavy weaponry, in maneuvers or actual operations, produces chemical contamination of soil and water, fires, and ecosystem destruction. The environmental footprint of the global military sector (including its supply chains) is estimated at around 5% of global emissions.
• Fiscal risk: Sustained military spending financed through structural deficit can raise public debt, increase interest costs, and reduce the budgetary room available for productive investments such as education, health, innovation, infrastructure, or the energy transition. Contrary to what one might assume, defense spending is among the least productive kinds, with an aggregate multiplier below 0.50 in the United States. Meanwhile, other public spending categories such as training or civilian infrastructure produce higher multipliers, in addition to having a greater effect on the overall productivity of the economy in the long run.
• Opportunity cost: Every resource devoted to maintaining arsenals that exceed a reasonable defense need is a resource no longer available for health security, climate adaptation, pandemic prevention, education, poverty reduction, or resilient infrastructure. Article 26 of the United Nations Charter tasked the Security Council with promoting a system for regulating armaments that would ensure peace with “the least diversion for armaments of the world’s human and economic resources.” This is, therefore, one of the Charter’s unfulfilled promises.
• Autonomous weapons. The incorporation of artificial intelligence into systems capable of selecting and attacking targets without sufficient human intervention introduces a new category of risk. It can also reduce the political cost of initiating military operations by lowering the direct exposure of one’s own combatants. Although International Humanitarian Law remains applicable, there is still no universal, binding treaty specifically dedicated to these weapons.

Arming without a constructive strategy also carries violent risks

In today’s toxic atmosphere of insecurity, the prevailing doctrine holds that an immediate increase in military capability will result in effective deterrence and effective defense in the short term. But what about the long term?

Deterrence, in this conception, is understood as the tactic of developing sufficient capacity for harm so that any potential aggressor anticipates a disproportionate cost to their action.

However, recent history, especially since the Second World War, offers examples that both confirm and refute this traditional conception in equal measure. The Kargil War in 1999, a year after the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, or Putin’s recent threat to use nuclear capability in the context of Ukraine, are some examples of this.

A century ago, another concept of security and peacebuilding began to take shape. From the ashes of the Great War arose the lucid expression of the League of Nations, whose Covenant established that the maintenance of peace required reducing national armaments to the lowest point consistent with the security of each state. Not as an abstract Kantian ideal, but as a political reality already understood to be possible and necessary in 1919. The League failed to develop effective mechanisms to implement its purpose — not to define it.

In 1945, in San Francisco, having once again witnessed the devastation of the second world war, the nations of the world tried again. The founding Charter of the United Nations begins:

“We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.”

To this end, the newly created organization launched two parallel and progressive processes meant to form the long-term strategy for humanity’s survival: the disarmament process and collective security.

The disarmament process consisted of states, through broad agreements, taking on commitments to restrict the use of and progressively and proportionally reduce military arsenals.

It soon became clear that such a process could not bear fruit without a foundation of mutual trust. Although the treaties and mechanisms established agencies and processes for verification, monitoring, and compliance control, distrust remained the norm among the armed powers of those decades (the United States and the Soviet Union). Even against the backdrop of the Cold War, the disarmament process achieved some progress. However, the arms race between the two opposing powers revealed two paradoxes to the world:

1. The size of an arsenal is directly proportional to the risk of harm, increasing global insecurity rather than reducing it.
2. An exclusively militaristic understanding of deterrence leads to an arms race with unstoppable momentum on both sides. Precisely the scenario one seeks to avoid. (the prisoner’s dilemma).

In that context, social movements and public opinion reached unprecedented intensity in demanding a broader strategy. One that would take into account peacebuilding, the abolition (or control) of nuclear weapons, and a halt to the arms production race. This is why there were mass movements against the Vietnam War, against nuclear weapons, and against military conscription.

This, combined with the heightened perception of nuclear risk on both sides of the Cold War, began to crystallize into several historic treaties: the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, and the Ottawa Convention on anti-personnel mines of 1997 (led by civil society)[1].

Two time horizons? Defending yourself in ten years means disarming in fifty

Today, the trend toward an unprecedented arms race is compounded by imbalance factors such as shifts in global demographic and economic distribution, amplifying the probability of armed conflicts (which have doubled in ten years). This in turn increases the indirect probability of other catastrophic risks of global scope (nuclear, environmental, technological, fiscal…).

This causal chain of systemic risks leads to projections and scenarios of insecurity for the coming decade and beyond.

It is easy to deduce that, if armed powers and other states adopt a national security strategy consisting solely of increasing military capability, the aggregate outcome is not a safer global or national scenario. Simply because the probability of conflict (and its indirect effects) increases for the whole.

Regions such as the European Union, which have enjoyed the peace dividend, perceive the growing insecurity with greater alarm, not considering themselves prepared. The response of limiting immediate defense to a proportional increase in military capability is rational and responsible in the short term. However, it is not sufficient on its own to deter or to avoid the trap of momentum.

A credible security strategy must combine both time horizons: the capacity to defend oneself with sufficient means in the immediate term and, in parallel, work — both in discourse and in practice — toward a constructive alternative in the long term. In strategic language: diversify and mitigate risks.

Middle powers (as invoked in Mark Carney’s discourse) that do not possess large arsenals are the ones with the legitimacy and strategic interest to promote an alternative, constructive path. Just as the non-aligned countries did during the Cold War, a critical mass of members of the international community with a shared interest can reverse the momentum of the military powers. And the European Union is the middle power among middle powers. The EU has enough military and geopolitical weight to lead a constructive discourse and an international disarmament strategy over the long horizon, without giving up the ability to defend itself today.

But what would a coherent and credible proposal look like to renew the international disarmament process in all its dimensions: integrating existing treaties, unifying monitoring and verification mechanisms, establishing effective compliance measures and incentives, building trust among military powers, or guaranteeing the economic conversion of industries, among others?

The Global Governance Forum, as part of its Second Charter project (2024), published several Complementary Protocols (2025). By the end of 2026, the Protocols on Disarmament and Collective Security are expected to be published, offering a possible proposal.

The visions and proposals presented in this article come from the documents A Second UN Charter (2024) and Protocols Compliementary (2025) published by the Global Governance Forum.