Rethinking the Militarized Future We’re Building

After gutting USAID, the Department of State, and the U.S. Institute of Peace in early 2025, the Trump Administration requested a $1.5 trillion-dollar defense budget (Kosiak 2026) for fiscal year 2027. The reduction in support for diplomacy and peacebuilding amid a sharp increase in spending for war is not a coincidence, nor is it limited to the United States: other countries in Europe and beyond are following suit and increasing military spending. Leaders are citing paradigms of “peace through strength” to justify these shifts. Yet, history has shown that more militarism does not lead to more peace. Increased military spending offsets funds that could go to diplomatic efforts to manage conflicts as well as to other critical efforts to mitigate climate change and natural disasters, strengthen public health, and support broader social and economic well-being.

The challenges associated with militarism are not new and did not begin with the second Trump administration. The primacy accorded to military “solutions” to conflict has meant that diplomacy, global cooperation, and peacebuilding have been overshadowed. Militarism—a system where military priorities fuel violence and insecurity, benefiting elites while oppressing and endangering the vulnerable and the planet—has long undercut our ability to build peace and prevent wars. In considering the future of peace, the peacebuilding field must contend with militarism as a primary driver of political violence and ecological harm, not simply as background to them, and offer alternative models for achieving collective safety and security. Militarism makes peace more difficult to achieve.

Militarism Explained

Besides actual warfighting, one of the most direct experiences of militarism is the collection of trade-offs between military spending and social spending (healthcare, food assistance, housing, education, etc.)—illustrated with the so-called “guns vs. butter” model. It’s a simplistic model to demonstrate how governments are forced to make budget choices with finite resources. It is more complicated and contested in academic literature, but the trade-offs are real. The additional $200 billion requested for the war in Iran could cover all Medicaid and SNAP benefits for at-risk individuals ($118 billion) and expand Medicaid to 10.3 million people ($82 billion), according to the Institute for Policy Studies (National Priorities Project 2026).

President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex (Eisenhower n.d.) in his farewell address in 1961. He raised concerns over how a close relationship between arms producers, the government, and the military would create incentives to deepen militarization and produce corporate profit at the expense of democratic processes. This complex creates perverse incentives to pursue wars more recklessly and militarize domestic security operations—as we are seeing today with the scourge of war (Erlanger 2026) in the Middle East, domestic surveillance infrastructure (Toomey and Robinson 2024), the militarization of immigration enforcement (Johnson 2026), and the use of military equipment and weaponry by domestic police throughout the United States (Abou-Elias, et al. 2024). These examples show a gradual move away from civilian oversight, transparency, and accountability inherent in democratic processes.

The logic underpinning militarism is that security is attained using violence, control, and domination. Decades of research on peace and war (Davenport, Melander and Regan 2018) have shown that this logic is simply not true. Indeed, the most durable and sustainable security is achieved through peacebuilding, which includes practices like building mutual trust (Kelman 2005) and understanding across differences, ensuring that basic human needs are met (Bashur 2023), and turning to nonviolent mechanisms (Kivimaki 2024) to settle emergent conflict or disputes when they arise. That work takes time and fails to attract headlines.

Disrupting a Militarized Future

The peacebuilding field can be a powerful influence for challenging militarism by explaining the harms and limits of military approaches while showing the possibilities for diplomacy and global cooperation. John Paul Lederach calls on peacebuilders to develop a moral imagination (Lederach 2005) to identify pathways through which the impossible becomes possible. Elevating peace research and innovative practices can help show that alternative approaches are available to obtain collective safety and security without the use of violence.

This special issue offers a snapshot of what the peacebuilding field offers in this moment of extraordinary militarism: how we might sustain long-established, tested practices amid escalating tensions and diminished support; how involving new technologies, approaches, or sectors can help revive peacebuilding practice for the future; or how this moment calls on us to more fundamentally question, re-think, and approach peacebuilding from a radically different point of view.

Building a future of peace requires noticing and then diverting ourselves from the current path that the United States and other countries are on toward more militarism, including by offering viable alternatives for fostering collective security. The 10% for All campaign (10% for All n.d.) calls on governments to reduce global military spending by 10% and reallocate those funds to social, environmental, and peacebuilding initiatives. A global campaign to reduce military spending can help build confidence and unlock needed diplomatic power to achieve global cooperation on proliferating challenges, including those related to nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence.

For the future of peace, government budgets need to meaningfully support peacebuilding and diplomacy efforts and prioritize socio-economic needs over larger military systems and capabilities. Re-balancing the budget in this way is critical for creating the space for alternative, demilitarized approaches to security to gain traction—ultimately moving us away from the militarized future that currently looms ahead. On a deeper level, the future of peace requires questioning what fundamentally makes us secure and reconfiguring how decisions about peace and security are made. Peacebuilding offers paths that—guided by moral imagination—can make new futures of peace possible and attainable.

Works Cited

10% for All. n.d. “10% for All: A Global Campaign to Cut Military Spending, Reframe Security, and Invest in Humanity.” Accessed August 4, 2026. https://10percentforall.org/10-for-all-a-global-campaign-to-cut-military-spending-reframe-security-and-invest-in-humanity/.

Abou-Elias, Janet, Lillian Mauldin, Liv Owens, Mekedas Belayneh, and Rosie Khan. 2024. “Unaccountable Military Surplus Fuels Police Violence at Home and Abroad.“ Center for International Policy. August 8. https://internationalpolicy.org/publications/unaccountable-military-surplus-fuels-police-violence-at-home-and-abroad/.

Bashur, Diana. 2023. “Basic Income for Development and Peacebuilding in Post-Conflict Settings.” In The Palgrave International Handbook of Basic Income, 199-222. Palgrave Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-41001-7_10.

Davenport, Christian, Erik Melander, and Patrick Regan. 2018. The Peace Continuum: What It Is and How to Study It. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190680121.001.0001.

Eisenhower, Dwight D. 1961. “Military-Industrial Complex Speech.” The Avalon Project, Yale Law School. Accessed July 15, 2026. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp.

Erlanger, Steven. 2026. “In Iran, Trump Risks Another American ‘Forever War’.” The New York Times, July 16. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/world/middleeast/forever-war-trump-iran.html.

Johnson, Kit. 2026. “From Militarization to Military Enforcement: The U.S. Armed Forces and Immigration Control in the Second Trump Administration.” Kentucky Law Journal 114: 772-802. https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7212738.

Kelman, Herbert C. 2005. “Building Trust among Enemies: The Central Challenge for International Conflict Resolution.” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 29 (6): 639-650. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014717670500129X.

Kivimäki, Timo. 2024. “Dispute Resolution by Means of Peace Negotiation.” In Research Handbook on Conflict Prevention, 122-138. Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781803920849.00014.

Kosiak, Steven. 2026. “Trump’s $1.5 Trillion Defense Budget Request: Unhinged, Unaffordable, and Unnecessary.” Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, April 16. https://quincyinst.org/research/trumps-1-5-trillion-defense-budget-request-unhinged-unaffordable-and-unnecessary/.

Lederach, John Paul. 2005. The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace. Oxford University Press.

National Priorities Project. 2026. “How Many People in Every State and Congressional District Could Have Medicaid or SNAP Instead of $200 Billion for War on Iran?” March 30. https://www.nationalpriorities.org/analysis/2026/how-many-people-every-state-and-congressional-district-could-have-medicaid-or-sn/.

Toomey, Patrick C, and Sara Robinson. 2024. “Mass Surveillance Is Dangerous for American Communities: Reforming the Section 702 Spying Regime.” Human Rights Magazine, American Bar Association, June 3. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/resources/human-rights/2024-june/mass-surveillance-dangerous-american-communities-reforming-section-702/.