When George W. Bush took office in 2001, there was a lot of discussion about the Project for a New American Century. PNAC was a think tank founded a couple of years before (and dissolved in 2006) that agitated for regime change in Iraq, but more generally discussed and promoted ways for the US to maintain its hegemony in the years following what had been dubbed The American Century. Of the 25 signatories to the original PNAC manifesto, 10 (including Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney) went on to high-profile positions in the second Bush administration in part to forward plans to foment war in Iraq and to regain influence lost after the 1991 invasion.

In September, 2000, PNAC released a white paper entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century. Its key passage was one that suggested quickly regaining the influence America needed in the Middle East would require some catastrophic event on the scale of Pearl Harbor. Some have pointed to this as circumstantial evidence that 9/11 was indeed an inside job. While it might have been (and it’s often one impossible thing I believe before breakfast), as a catalyst for the Second Gulf War, it certainly did the trick.

But we didn’t manage to win that war (and in fact didn’t exactly win the war before it either) and the Second Gulf War has become the Perpetual War – Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. Mission Accomplished notwithstanding, and despite the fact that large numbers of Papa Bush’s closest advisors were also advising Junior, it was also impossible for the Obama administration to negotiate a withdrawal from the Middle East (or even from Guantanamo Bay) given the various obstructionist forces in both houses of congress for much of his presidency. (Note: I’m not entirely certain Obama wanted to get us out of Iraq very badly, but the man had a lot on his plate if he did.)

Enter Commander ‘Bone-Spurs’ Trump who has no impulse control, is cornered by his own illegal maneuvers, and has Vladimir Putin as a key advisor. Of course what he does won’t be in anybody’s interest but his own (much, as the NYT would remind us, like Clinton’s air strike behavior when impeached in 1998). And now we’re headed for war in Iran, something PNAC and its ideological predecessors and successors have wanted for 40 years.

Reuters posted a very strange article this morning entitled Marking the end of a 30-year peace dividend which opens with the notation that next week we’ll be marking the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

This piqued my interest because I have very clear memories of the time before that wall came down and after. I came of age during the coordinated arms build-up of the Reagan years (which coincided with the only recently trashed anti-ballistic missile treaties that were signed at the time), the closing period of the various red scares and the successors to Duck-and-Cover. I was 22 when the Hungarians decided not to repair a fence on their border with Austria and a lot of central and east Europeans suddenly (or not so suddenly – these changes had been building up for at least a year) crossed over into western Europe and the West simply let them.

But I also remember that possibilities for negotiating peace around the world were effectively thwarted as often as possible. As the band Megadeth titled their 1986 LP, Peace Sells, But Who’s Buying? From a United States perspective, we started the 90s with the invasion of Panama, and 1991 with the invasion of Iraq. The defense budget did not drop and events like those and the implosion of Yugoslavia gave congress good reason to keep the money flowing to the arms manufacturers. Trade deals with China meant that we haven’t looked too deeply into their internal violence as long as the cheap electronics keep getting shipped over. (Yes, I’m writing this sat at my second iPad while reading the article in question on a Samsung phone. I’m aware of my hypocrisy.)

So what the hell is Reuters on about? The second paragraph talks about unfettered cross-border investment that ‘pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty’. This assertion is unsupported, and given that the world population has increased by about 45% from 5.2 billion to 7.6 billion in the intervening period, it wouldn’t take long to find out how many of those additional 2.4 billion live in poverty. (Reference: Wikipedia’s Global Population Estimates page.)

So we’re not actually talking about a peace dividend, but a period of increased prosperity, by certain measures. Do I need to count the ways in which these two things are different?

The article goes on to discuss how current waves of populism are wiping out the market gains made in the last 30 years, with reference to several market statistics, followed by South Africa’s credit rating, what’s going on with the Bank of England because of Brexit, and cancelled trade summits between China and the US.

None of these things addresses the possibilities of peace that were on the horizon as we entered the last decade of the 20th century and listened to the band Jesus Jones sing about watching ‘the world wake up from history‘. A peace dividend might have included many things including figuring out how to feed and house all of our hungry. If we’d had thirty years of that peace dividend, we wouldn’t be talking about children today going hungry because their parents can’t afford to pay for their school lunches. The term ‘school lunch debt’ wouldn’t be part of our vocabulary.

A peace dividend might have included something to rein in our internal arms merchants so that children wouldn’t be ducking and covering from their neighbors 68 years after their grandparents and great-grandparents gave us Bert the Turtle.

A peace dividend might have helped us work out the issues that dog countries at war around the globe. Of course, there’s another side to that equation. The wars that the powers that saw out the Cold War support (and that increasingly lead to waves of refugee migration – fodder for another blog entry and a history dissertation) are good for maintaining the poverty that give us cheap tropical fruit far north of the tropics. Oh yeah, that cheap tropical labor gave us the wars in Central America. The ones that are still driving refugees up to our new (very effective) border wall.

Three years ago, Next Big Future announced that the peace dividend was over a little more honestly, but discussing increased military budgets in Europe. The one thing, however, that a peace dividend is not is unfettered market growth.