A Strategy for the U.S. Department of Peace to Enhance Our National Security - Transformation to Create a Culture of Peace

By Howard Rosenberg, The Peace Alliance
May 2006

The overarching strategy aims to enhance global and domestic security by building and nurturing strong civil society, thereby establishing an environment of healthy and vibrant communities where human needs can be met as the rule rather than the exception. To accomplish this, we aim to create a "Network of Capability" that links human and community needs to organizations that can contribute to the strengthening of civil society. The focus will be on building the connections among the broad spectrum of organizations that have peacebuilding as a common intention… and as we strengthen civil society, we will simultaneously enhance our national and global security.

Within this strategy, the role of The Peace Alliance/DOP will be the "systems architect" and facilitator to establish a self-organizing network of capabilities (nonviolent conflict resolution, micro-finance, business, environmental stewardship, truth and justice, women and children's rights, healthcare rights, etc.) focused on peacebuilding by strengthening the capacity for civil society throughout the world. The idea is that, while virtually all the "raw" capabilities exist to do this, the management challenge is how do we orchestrate various organizations (NGOs, businesses, educational institutions, government agencies, military, police, healthcare, etc.) to holistically come together, share a common vision, work as a team, and build the capacity for a strong and vibrant civil society, while respecting diverse cultural perspectives.

An intended consequence for this strategy will be that the networks we help create will become part of the very infrastructure for a global culture of peace. The process will be designed to help fulfill Gandhi's profound wish for humanity to "become the change you wish to see in the world".

Instead of our political leadership asking, in our quest for national security, "How can we arm ourselves and defeat our adversaries… like we did during the Cold War?" we now have the opportunity to ask ourselves: "How can we collaborate with the global community to create, by intentional design, a world where humanity thrives" The answers to these two questions may very well be the difference between a fearful society in decline and a hopeful energetic society that can help lead this world out of darkness.

The Peace Alliance can start playing this role now; we are well positioned to do this and we are earning the reputation of being non-partisan, inclusive, and focused on convening all parties who are interested in peacebuilding in its broadest context. We can be a shining beacon of how humanity can work peacefully and constructively together to create a culture of peace; we will strive for what we want, not what we are against. Our means become our desired ends.

A Historical Perspective: The Context

As we look at the events since the end of the Cold War, from the Soviet Union's demise some 16 years ago, we now realize that the very nature of how we establish national security – the very meaning of national security – has changed. But how? The military deterrence and proxy-war approach that contained the Soviet Union since the end of World War II is clearly no longer appropriate. To understand this, let's look at the major post-Cold War crises that have confronted our nation: 9/11 and our military entanglements with failed societies (Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq). We have been surprised and somewhat terrified by each of these events, yet we continue to sacrifice the lives of our soldiers while spending huge sums of money without resolving, or even acknowledging, the root causes and the systemic nature of these events.

Our Challenge and Opportunity

To achieve effective national security, we need to reverse the proliferation of failing and failed societies, the known breeding ground for terrorism, crime, pandemics and human desperation. Vibrant and healthy societies provide opportunities for people to fulfill their human needs, the bedrock of peace. We can't afford a national security approach where we continually react with force to the fallout from failed societies. This is like ignoring an unsanitary kitchen while continuing to pay the exorbitant costs and lost productivity associated with chronic food poisoning and disease. Yet this is what we do when we fail to focus on remediating failing and failed societies.

A powerful example: instead of spending $5 billion - $10 billion to rebuild Afghanistan after their devastating war with the Soviet Union, which would have precluded al Qaeda from establishing a stable operating base, we have now spent in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over $350 billion and suffered over 23,000 killed and wounded as we struggle to deal with the aftermath of 9/11, not to mention the costs in lives and property of 9/11 itself. Add to that the costs associated with Homeland Security and the challenge of the Patriot Act to the integrity of U.S. Constitution, the very bedrock of our country.

Failed societies incubate the pre-conditions that statistically predict war: high child mortality rates, lack of access to markets, and citizens not having a voice in their government. We have learned from North Korea that failed societies do not contribute to or benefit from the global economy. Instead of creating wealth, they destroy wealth, and ultimately become a threat to our security and a drain on the global economy, including ours. Simply put, failed societies can't buy our products or feed their people, but they can destabilize economies and governments, consume our military resources, and overburden relief organizations.

The solution lies in refocusing our will to unite our national and world community on building the capacity in failed and failing societies to nurture and sustain robust civil societies by supporting the institutions of democratic government, economic opportunity, protection of minorities, and the rule of law. The Department of Peace can provide a pivotal role of bringing proven nonviolent conflict resolution approaches to bear on peacefully resolving the inevitable conflicts that arise when creating any change that affects communities of human beings.

It is tragic to witness the human loss in Iraq, as nonviolent conflict resolution techniques have not played a formative role in our "figure it out as we go" strategy for helping the Sunnis and Shiites resolve the highly predictable conflict of how political power is distributed in a new government. The DOP would place capabilities such as this in our Government's toolbox.

The Vision

What is required for effective national security is nothing less than for the U.S. cooperate with others in the international community, over a 25- to 50-year period, to wage peace at an unprecedented scale with the intention to build the capacity and institutions that support healthy civil society. This multi-lateral effort will be designed to include working coalitions of government, NGOs, and businesses to create security across the globe, region by region, in partnership with local communities in the region. When we focus on creating strong civil society, we create a positive feedback loop that leads to stability, providing a firm foundation for economic prosperity, public health, environmental quality, which when all combined, can create real and lasting security.

However, to successfully apply this know-how to create positive change, the political, social, and economic programs and policies must be coordinated. What is needed is to bring the know-how, especially from those who have direct on-the-ground experience, together to address the systemic nature of building civil society. The program could be a series of cross-disciplinary initiatives that address the economic, political, and social challenges.

The logic is clear: a country with a viable, dynamic, creative civil society has the real potential for economic, social, and environmental well being, the very attributes that will enhance our own national security. A country without a viable civil society cannot succeed and will ultimately fail and become a burden to the global community. As we foster civil societies that work, we unleash the power of the human spirit to raise society above a culture of desperation and dependency toward a culture of peace and prosperity.

Gaining an Attractive Return on Global Engagement

Building and nurturing civil society's calls for a basic change in the way we currently engage struggling societies. Currently, we only devote less than one percent of our GNP to foreign aid. The aid we do provide is predominantly allocated directly to American consultants, corporations, and weapons procurement, with very little left over for building capacity for civil society. Studies have shown that there has never been a famine in a functioning democracy.
Furthermore, capacity building for civil society requires a systematic coordination of our foreign aid and trade policies across the board if efforts in one area are not to be compromised by contradictory policies in others. For example, we can now see that our Government's policy of subsidizing our agricultural businesses can be quite harmful to our national security. At risk societies often depend on local agriculture to support their economy while keeping rural farmers from flooding their overpopulated cities. By subsidizing the agricultural products we export, we effectively kill markets for indigenous farmers, thereby destroying their local economy and forcing them and their families off the land into poverty and desperation. Alternatively, other indigenous farmers resort to growing the profitable raw material for illicit drugs, poppies and cocoa for heroin and cocaine. This phenomenon has greatly destabilized Colombia, as we pursue our war on drugs on the backs of Colombian farmers.

Against this backdrop of capacity building, we can readily justify significant investments in building civil societies. These investments can provide the critical mass resources necessary to achieve these promising outcomes. As a benchmark, consider that we have spent over six trillion dollars on military capacity since the end of the Cold War and by key measures (e.g. nuclear weapons proliferation) we now have significantly less security. By asking different questions, we can achieve more security with less money.

We have the Capability to Launch and Facilitate this Global Effort

We can do this. Our country has done something quite similar before, albeit smaller in scale. After World War II, under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur, the United States helped the Japanese build capacity to transition Japan from a ruthless militaristic society to a prosperous and peaceful society that has never initiated war again. General George Marshall did the same for war-torn Germany.

The United States military represents a highly capable asset that has the scale, sophistication, and technology to manage the logistics for such a challenge. We need a change in focus and the political will to get it done. The proposed Department of Peace can deploy a broad-based, systematic approach to apply proven techniques for creating the conditions of lasting peace.

Let's apply the painful lessons of our post-Cold War experience to resolving the root causes and not have to pay the price of being unprepared, a price we can no longer afford; our national debt has sailed well past eight trillion dollars, increasing at a rate of $2.4 billion dollars per day. This indebtedness will most likely accelerate until we start making investments in prevention, investments that can yield a positive rate of return.

[Duchess Note: Howard Rosenberg is a proud member of NYDoP ( www.nyc-dop.com ) and firm supporter of US Dept of Peace, HR808 ( www.ThePeaceAlliance.org ).