by Lawrence Wittner | Apr 27, 2026 | Peace & Disarmament
If the objective of the U.S. war upon Iran is to ensure that that country does not develop nuclear weapons, that goal was attained more than a decade ago through a far different approach than the one now being followed by the Trump administration.
Iran, as a signer of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970, had agreed to forgo the development of nuclear weapons. Even so, fears grew during the early 21st century that Iran’s uranium enrichment program, used for peaceful purposes, might be diverted to the development of the Bomb, thereby throwing the volatile Middle East into yet another crisis, including a frenzied nuclear arms race.
As a result, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France) and Germany began lengthy negotiations with Iran, offering it various incentives to halt uranium enrichment. A key incentive was the lifting of international sanctions, which were having a severe impact on sales of Iran’s oil and, thus, its economy. After the election in 2013 of an Iranian reformer, Hassan Rouhani, as president, the negotiators came to a preliminary accord to guide their talks toward a comprehensive nuclear agreement.
The final agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was negotiated by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Germany, and the European Union. Signed in July 2015, it granted Iran sanctions relief in exchange for significant restrictions on its nuclear program. These included Iran’s agreement to ban production of highly enriched uranium or plutonium, ensure that its key nuclear facilities pursued only civilian work, and limit the numbers and types of centrifuges that it could operate. In addition, Iran agreed to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog, unfettered access to its nuclear facilities and undeclared sites.
In the United States, the Iran nuclear agreement was strongly supported by the Obama administration, which played a key role in securing it, and by Democrats, but denounced by Republicans. Jeb Bush, then a leading presidential contender, called it “dangerous, deeply flawed, and short-sighted,” while U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham claimed that it was a “death sentence for the state of Israel.” Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, lobbied ferociously against U.S. acceptance of the Iran agreement, furiously attacking it as a “historic mistake.”
Despite the opposition, the agreement went into effect in January 2016 and, initially, had smooth sailing. The IAEA certified that Iran was keeping its commitments, nations repealed or suspended their sanctions, Iran’s oil exports surged, and the United States and European nations unfroze about $100 billion of Iran’s frozen assets.
In May 2018, however, Donald Trump, Obama’s successor as President, breaking with America’s European allies, unilaterally withdrew the U.S. government from the Iran agreement and announced the reimposition of oil and banking sanctions. “It is clear to me that we cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of this deal,” Trump announced. Assailing the Iran agreement as “defective to its core,” Trump condemned it for failing to deal with Iran’s ballistic missile program and its proxy warfare in the Middle East, as well as for the agreement’s 10-year sunset provision.
In response, Iranian President Rouhani, stating that the U.S. government had failed to “respect its commitment,” declared that he had “ordered the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran to be ready for action if needed, so that if necessary we can resume our enrichment on an industrial level without any limitations.” Even so, he promised, he would wait to speak about this with allies and the other signatories to the agreement.
Thereafter, things went downhill. Although France, Germany, and Britain sought to keep the agreement alive by evading the U.S. banking sanctions through a barter system, this effort eventually collapsed. Meanwhile, Trump got into a verbal brawl with Rouhani, threatening Iran with what he called “CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.” Ultimately, Iran began exceeding the agreed-upon limits to its stockpile, enriching uranium to higher concentrations, and developing new centrifuges.
Although Joe Biden, as a 2020 presidential candidate, promised to rejoin the Iran nuclear agreement and “to work with our allies to strengthen and extend it,” by the time he was in office the relationship with Iran had deteriorated too far to make this feasible. Coming under a new, more reactionary leadership, the Iranian regime grew more repressive, as well as more distant from the United States and more politically toxic. As a result, a new agreement was increasingly out of reach.
In retrospect, are there any lessons that can be learned from these events?
One is that, to the degree that the development of nuclear weapons by Iran is currently a problem, it is a result of Trump’s decision to pull out of the JCPOA. Or as Biden put it years ago, Trump’s pullout from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement was “a self-inflicted disaster.”
Another is that getting a country to forgo nuclear weapons development is easier to accomplish through international―and especially UN Security Council―action than through unilateral action. A threat from one nation to another can easily be viewed and dismissed as bullying. But pressure from a worldwide organization representing the community of nations has greater impact.
More generally, if nations are going to be asked (or pressured) to forgo development of nuclear weapons, it is useful to have a framework that treats nations equally. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty fosters this equality through a bargain, in which the non-nuclear nations forgo building nuclear weapons in exchange for the nuclear nations eliminating their own nuclear arsenals. The next time the President of the United States or the Prime Minister of Israel threatens to annihilate Iranian civilization, someone might remind him of that.
by Lawrence Wittner | Apr 15, 2026 | Peace & Disarmament
On April 1, 2026, Donald Trump startled the world by publicly declaring that he was “absolutely without question” considering withdrawing the United States from the 77-year-old NATO alliance. Trump’s remarks came only hours after Pete Hegseth, his Defense Secretary, declined to reaffirm the U.S. government’s commitment to NATO’s collective defense.
Actually, the Trump administration’s recent trashing of NATO was less shocking than it appeared. During Trump’s two terms in office, he derided the alliance from the start, developed a warm relationship with its foremost adversary (Vladimir Putin), withdrew U.S. support from embattled Ukraine, called for U.S. annexation of Canada (a NATO member), threatened a military takeover of Greenland (a territory of Denmark, a NATO member), and failed to consult his NATO allies about launching a U.S. war on Iran. Indeed, the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy of December 2025 outlined a sharp shift in U.S. policy from collective action through NATO toward a heavy reliance on U.S. military power.
In line with his “America First” rhetoric, Trump has reverted to an old U.S. tradition―narrow nationalism―and all that entails in terms of militarism, war, and imperialism.
Nationalism has long played an important role in an unruly and ungoverned world. Within nations, law prevailed to at least some extent, limiting crime and violence. But, when it came to international affairs, the situation more closely resembled every nation for itself. In this context, many a nation adopted a go-it-alone strategy, employing military power and, on occasion, war as its rulers sought to maintain or secure whatever they viewed as in its national interest.
Over time, however, national rulers realized that their nations’ military strength could be enhanced by having allies―at least if the members of the alliance could agree upon a satisfactory division of the spoils in the event of a victory over their foes. From the standpoint of national security and, at times, survival, alliances among nations seemed to have advantages over go-it-alone nationalism. Alliances not only provided a remedy for the comparative weakness of small nations in a dangerous world, but added an element of collective decision-making in the realm of international affairs. Furthermore, by fostering cooperation among allied nations, alliances limited the danger of conflict or war among them.
Even so, as people learned only too well, alliances were hardly foolproof. Most notably, they failed to prevent two disastrous world wars.
Consequently, against the backdrop of massive slaughter in the First World War, government officials began exploring a new approach to national security: international organization. In a largely lawless, anarchic world, argued U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, a League of Nations would provide the institutional framework for international cooperation and peace. Amid much fanfare, the League was established in 1920.
The League, however, remained a weak organization, constrained in taking effective action for peace by the requirement of unanimous agreement among its member nations and, more fundamentally, by the unwillingness of “the great powers” to depart from their traditional approaches to world affairs. Despite Wilson’s prominent role in creating the League, the U.S. Senate rejected U.S. membership. Meanwhile, major nations continued to enhance their military might and to squabble over raw materials, territory, and colonies. As a result, within a generation, the world had plunged into the Second World War, the most destructive conflict in human history, culminating in the development and use of nuclear weapons.
Toward the end of the Second World War, the anti-fascist allies were sufficiently sobered by the calamitous nature of the war to make another try at international organization. The new international entity, the United Nations, had some advantages over its predecessor. These included participation by all the great powers, a Charter that clearly banned international aggression, a General Assembly of all member nations with decisions made by majority vote, and considerable respect by member nations and the public.
And, subsequently, the United Nations did manage to resolve numerous international conflicts, to facilitate the end of colonialism, to secure worldwide definitions of human rights, and to institute a broad array of programs that improved the health and living standards of billions of people around the globe.
Nevertheless, although an advance over its ill-fated predecessor, the United Nations has remained a loose confederation of countries without the authority and strength necessary to curb destructive behavior by the world’s most powerful nations. All too often, action to maintain international peace and security has been subverted by the great power veto in the UN Security Council, as has been the case in recent years in connection with international military aggression by Russia, Israel, and the United States. Lacking an independent source of funding, the United Nations faces the prospect of reducing or terminating vital programs whenever major powers decide to punish it by cutting back contributions and required dues payments.
Currently, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and their rightwing counterparts, outraged at attempts by international organizations to enforce international law, are working zealously to undermine the United Nations and other international bodies―for example, the International Criminal Court―as part of their campaigns to silence their critics and restore their own national “greatness.”
To judge from the blood-stained history of narrow nationalism, this reversion to a go-it-alone approach to world affairs represents a recipe for disaster. Nor does an alliance approach offer a satisfactory improvement.
But the record of international organization is more promising. Why not strengthen the United Nations by granting it new, expanded authority to enforce international law, human rights, and world peace? The United Nations could even be reshaped into a democratic federation of nations, which, among other things, would enact world laws and prosecute individuals who violate them. In fact, an international campaign is already underway to authorize a UN review conference to strengthen and transform the world organization.
Rather than throw up our hands at the latest outbreak of horrific violence by marauding nationalist bullies, let’s use the challenge afforded by the current international crisis to create a new and better world.
But the record of international organization is more promising. Why not strengthen the United Nations by granting it new, expanded authority to enforce international law, human rights, and world peace? The United Nations could even be reshaped into a democratic federation of nations, which, among other things, would enact world laws and prosecute individuals who violate them. In fact, an international campaign is already underway to authorize a UN review conference to strengthen and transform the world organization.
Rather than throw up our hands at the latest outbreak of horrific violence by marauding nationalist bullies, let’s use the challenge afforded by the current international crisis to create a new and better world.
by Lawrence Wittner | Mar 13, 2026 | Global Justice
The U.S. military attack upon Iran is but the latest indication that the system of international law―which provides guidelines for the behavior of nations in world affairs―is crumbling.
In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after thousands of years of violent international conflict, efforts to establish global norms for nations in connection with war, diplomacy, economic relations, and human rights accelerated. These efforts resulted in the founding of the United Nations (which develops, codifies, and enforces international law), the International Court of Justice (which settles legal disputes among nations and provides advisory opinions on legal questions), and the International Criminal Court (which investigates and tries individuals charged with the gravest crimes of concern to the international community).
Of course, the current U.S. military attack on Iran flies in the face of the UN Charter, which, in Article 2, states that “all Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means” and that they “shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Furthermore, contemptuous of the United Nations, Trump has withdrawn the U.S. government from dozens of UN agencies and blocked the U.S. government’s payment of billions of dollars in mandatory dues to the world organization.
Other nations are also clearly out of line with international law. The Russian government’s over four years of war and occupation of Ukrainian territory are flagrant violations of the UN Charter, as attested to by a ruling of the International Court of Justice and numerous overwhelming condemnations by the UN General Assembly. The Israeli government is also a prominent transgressor, having joined the U.S. military assault on Iran and conducted an illegal occupation of conquered Palestinian territory for decades while violating international humanitarian law in its treatment of the civilian population.
Disgusted by the ability of these and other nations to act with impunity, Majed al-Ansari, Qatar’s foreign policy advisor, remarked bitterly in 2025: “We are moving into a system where anybody can do whatever they like. . . . As long as you have the ability to wreak havoc, you can do it because no one will hold you accountable.”
This lack of accountability is striking. Within nations, there is usually effective enforcement of law. But, on the global level, law enforcement is weak, indeed. When the International Criminal Court announced warrants for the arrests of Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes, a former Russian president threatened the judges with a hypersonic missile attack and the U.S. government imposed heavy sanctions on the judges. Meanwhile, Putin and Netanyahu remain at large.
Scornful of international law, some national officials openly champion a return to the traditional might-makes-right conduct of international affairs. “You can talk all you want about international niceties,” said Stephen Miller, Trump’s influential White House aide, “but we live in . . . the real world . . . that is governed by strength, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
Naturally, officials of nations that are militarily powerful find a power politics approach appealing, as do people with militarist and nationalist views. Trump recently announced: “I don’t need international law.”
Conversely, officials of less powerful nations are dismayed by the resurrection of a might-makes-right standard, as are people with peace-oriented and internationalist views. They argue that what the world needs is not the abandonment of international law, but its more effective enforcement. Furthermore, they contend that a return to great power imperialism in a world bristling with modern weapons, including nuclear weapons, is a recipe for catastrophe.
But if effective enforcement of international law is preferable to a power politics approach to world affairs, can that effective enforcement be attained?
There are certainly feasible, small-scale actions along these lines that could be taken. One is to increase the number of nations that accept compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice. Currently, only 75 nations of the 193 UN member states do so. Another is to increase the number of nations that are parties to the statute of the International Criminal Court. The current number is 125, and does not include the United States, Russia, China, and Israel.
Even the use of the veto in the UN Security Council―employed most frequently by the U.S. and Russian governments―could be limited to some degree. One way is to simply enforce Article 27 in the UN Charter providing that a party to a dispute shall abstain from voting on that dispute. Another―championed by France and Mexico―is to exclude the veto in situations of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
Also, of course, deadbeat nations could be pressured into paying their UN dues―for example, by denying them their vote in the UN General Assembly.
More thoroughgoing action would be difficult to secure, but not impossible. Perhaps the leading obstacle to a substantial strengthening of the United Nations and the international law it seeks to develop and enforce is the provision in the UN Charter that all five permanent members of the Security Council (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France) must agree to any change in the Charter. Nevertheless, the Charter also provides that a two-thirds vote by the General Assembly and by any nine members of the Security Council can produce a Charter review conference. Consequently, there is now a significant campaign underway to call for one. And, if such a meeting is held, perhaps after the current crop of aging, reactionary officials has passed from the scene, who really knows what will occur?
Admittedly, the prospects aren’t good for halting the return of nations to their traditional practices of war and imperialism.
Even so, if people can create the scientific and technological marvels of the modern world, they might also be capable of developing ways to stop killing one another.
by Lawrence Wittner | Feb 17, 2026 | Peace & Disarmament
On January 27, 2026, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of their famous “Doomsday Clock” to 85 seconds to midnight―the closest setting, since the appearance of the clock in 1946, to nuclear annihilation.
This grim appraisal has impressive evidence to support it.
The New Start Treaty, the last of the major nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties between the United States and Russia, expired on February 5, without any serious attempt to replace it. New Start’s demise enables both nations, which possess about 86 percent of the world’s 12,321 nuclear weapons, to move beyond the strict limits set by the treaty on the number of their strategic nuclear weapons (the most powerful, most devastating kind), thus enhancing the ability of their governments to reduce the world to a charred wasteland.
Actually, a nuclear arms race has been gathering steam for years, as nearly all the governments of the nine nuclear powers (which, in addition to Russia and the United States, include China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea) scramble to upgrade existing weapons systems and add newer versions. China’s nuclear arsenal is the fastest-growing among them. “The era of reductions in the number of nuclear weapons in the world . . . is coming to an end,” observed Hans Kristensen, a highly regarded expert on nuclear armament and disarmament. “Instead, we see a clear trend of growing nuclear arsenals, sharpened nuclear rhetoric, and the abandonment of arms control agreements.”
The U.S. government is currently immersed in a $1.7 trillion nuclear “modernization” program that President Donald Trump has championed and repeatedly lauded. As early as February 2018, he boasted that his administration was “creating a brand-new nuclear force. We’re gonna be so far ahead of everybody else in nuclear like you’ve never seen before.” In late October 2025, to facilitate the U.S. nuclear buildup, Trump ordered the Pentagon to prepare to resume U.S. nuclear weapons testing, which had ceased 33 years before. In line with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996, signed by 187 nations (including the United States), no nuclear power (other than the rogue nation of North Korea) has conducted explosive nuclear testing in over 25 years.
Another sign of the escalating nuclear danger is the revival of implicit and explicit threats to initiate nuclear war. Such threats, which declined with the end of the Cold War, have resurfaced in recent years. When angered by the policies of other nations, Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un, and Vladimir Putin have repeatedly and publicly threatened them with nuclear destruction. According to the U.S. government’s Voice of America, the Russian government, in the context of its invasion of Ukraine, issued 135 nuclear threats between February 2022 and December 17, 2024. Although some national security experts have discounted most Russian threats as manipulative rather than serious, in November 2022, Chinese leader Xi Jinping thought the matter serious enough to publicly chide his professed ally, Putin, for threatening to resort to nuclear arms in Ukraine.
Underlying this drift toward nuclear war are the growing conflicts among nations―conflicts that have significantly weakened international cooperation and the United Nations. As the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists put it, rather than heed past warnings of catastrophe, “Russia, China, the United States, and other major countries have instead become increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic.” Consequently, “hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war.”
But this is not necessarily the end of the story―or of the world.
After all, much the same situation existed in the second half of the twentieth century, when conflicts among the great powers fueled a dangerous nuclear arms race that, at numerous junctures, threatened to spiral into full-scale nuclear war. And, in response, a massive grassroots campaign emerged to save the world from nuclear annihilation. Although that campaign did not succeed in banning the bomb, it did manage to curb the nuclear arms race, reduce the number of nuclear weapons by more than 80 percent, and prevent a much-feared nuclear catastrophe.
Furthermore, in the early twenty-first century, there have been new and important developments. The worldwide remnants of the nuclear disarmament movement regrouped as the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and, joined by farsighted officials in smaller, non-nuclear nations, drew upon the United Nations to sponsor a series of antinuclear conferences. In 2017, by a vote of 122 to 1 (with 1 abstention), delegates at one of these UN conferences adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Although all nine nuclear powers strongly opposed the TPNW―which banned the use, threatened use, development, manufacture, acquisition, possession, stockpiling, stationing, and installation of nuclear weapons―the treaty secured sufficient national backing to enter into force in January 2021. Thus far, it has been signed by 99 countries―a majority of the world’s nations.
In addition to the efficacy of public pressure for nuclear disarmament and the existence of a treaty banning nuclear weapons, at least one other factor points the way toward a non-nuclear future: the self-defeating nature—indeed, the insanity―of nuclear war. With even a single nuclear bomb capable of killing millions of people and leaving the desperate survivors crawling painfully through a burnt-out, radioactive hell, even a nuclear “victory” is a defeat. In the aftermath of a nuclear war, as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev is believed to have said, “the survivors would envy the dead.” It’s a lesson that most people around the world have learned, although not perhaps the lunatics.
Lunatics, of course, exist, and some of them, unfortunately, govern modern nations and ignore international law.
Even so, although we are on the road to nuclear war, there is still time to take a deep breath, think about where we are going, and turn around.
by Lawrence Wittner | Jan 25, 2026 | Global Justice, Peace & Disarmament
There is a widening gap today between global possibilities and global realities.
The global realities are quite grim.
Despite some advances in countering worldwide poverty, it remains at a startlingly high level. According to the World Bank, half of humanity lives on less than $6.85 per day per person, with over 700 million people living on less than $2.15 per day.
Moreover, economic inequality is vast and increasing. A recently-released World Inequality Report, produced in conjunction with the United Nations, found that, in almost every region of the world, the richest 1 percent is wealthier than the bottom 90 percent combined. Indeed, the richest 0.001 percent of the world’s population controls three times the wealth of the poorest half, and its wealth is growing at a faster rate.
As the charitable organization Oxfam has observed, there is no morally defensible justification for this state of affairs. “Extreme wealth is not accumulated simply as a reward for extreme talent,” it has noted. “The majority of billionaire wealth . . . is unearned, derived from inheritance, crony connections, and monopolistic power.” Moreover, billionaires and giant corporations are fostering greater economic inequality and misery by opposing labor laws and policies that benefit workers, undermining progressive taxation, employing modern colonial systems of wealth extraction in the Global South, and using monopoly power to control markets and set the rules and terms of exchange.
Furthermore, when it comes to respecting international law, the rulers of some powerful nations are behaving increasingly like gangsters.
Donald Trump is particularly flagrant in this regard. During his second term as President of the United States, he has already bombed seven nations (Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen), threatened to invade or seize five others (Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, and Mexico ), blown up 33 foreign boats and their sailors, kidnapped the president of a sovereign nation (Venezuela), and announced plans to “run” Venezuela and take control of its vast oil resources. “I don’t need international law,” he explained.
Trump’s “America First” policy―redolent of traditional great power imperialism―is complemented by other measures showing contempt for key international institutions. Trump quickly withdrew the U.S. government from leading UN agencies like the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, refused to participate in the UN Relief and Works Agency, and announced plans to withdraw from UNESCO. On January 7, 2026, the White House followed up by announcing U.S. withdrawal from 66 international and UN entities. It has also withheld at least two years of mandated dues to the UN’s regular budget and has placed sanctions on the judges and chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
Clearly, Trump has other priorities. He dramatically increased U.S. military spending soon after he returned to power and, in January 2026, proposed raising military spending by another $600 billion to a record $1.5 trillion, thereby creating his “Dream Military.” Apparently, this dream does not include ending the menace of nuclear annihilation, for―asked about renewing the last nuclear arms control agreement remaining with Russia, scheduled to expire next month―Trump responded: “If it expires, it expires.”
Unfortunately, leaders of other nations are also working full-time to destroy what remains of international law and humanity’s hopes for the future.
Vladimir Putin has stopped at nothing to revive what he considers Russia’s imperial glory by waging nearly four years of war to conquer and annex his far smaller, weaker neighbor, Ukraine. Ignoring strong condemnations by the UN General Assembly, the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court, Putin has pressed on with an imperialist war that has reduced cities to rubble, damaged or destroyed thousands of schools and health care facilities, and sent 6 million Ukrainians fleeing abroad. The wounded or dead number hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and as many as 1.2 million Russian soldiers.
Nor is this the extent of Putin’s military interventionism. Until quite recently, he conducted a brutal bombing campaign for nearly a decade in Syria to prop up the Assad dictatorship against its domestic foes. He also employed the Wagner Group, a shadowy private mercenary army headquartered in Russia, to conduct military operations elsewhere in the Middle East and in numerous African nations.
Like Trump, Putin has scrapped nuclear arms control agreements and occasionally threatened nuclear war.
Other national rulers, enamored with military power and widening their realms, have also turned their countries into rogue nations. Kim Jong Un, despite offers from the South Korean and U.S. governments to improve diplomatic relations, has chosen instead to dramatically expand North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, threaten nuclear war, and dispatch more than 14,000 combat troops to help Russia subdue Ukraine. Benjamin Netanyahu, while constantly claiming Israel’s victimization, has in fact superintended a genocidal slaughter of Palestinian civilians, staged military attacks on numerous nations, and―in defiance of a ruling by the International Court of Justice―refused to end Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territory.
And yet, the possibilities for reversing this sad state of affairs are enormous, for―thanks to a variety of factors, ranging from increases in knowledge to advances in economic productivity―it’s finally feasible for all of humanity to lead decent and fulfilling lives.
No longer is poverty necessary, for the enormous global economy can produce adequate food, goods, and services for all the world’s people.
Human health and longevity can be improved substantially, thanks to breakthroughs in science and medicine.
Education, communications, transportation, and culture have made huge strides toward enriching human existence and could finally be made available to all.
Meanwhile, the rise of the United Nations and of international law holds the promise of moving beyond the violent, bloodstained past and securing peace, human rights, and justice on the international level.
Although it’s tragic that powerful forces seem intent on building an unjust, lawless, and violent planet, let’s not forget that another world remains possible. Indeed, with an organized international effort, it could be a wonderful world.
