AN ALTERNATIVE TO WAR

Unlike earthquakes, floods and volcanic eruptions, war is a disaster created entirely by people against people. It is never an accident: making a war is always somebody's decision. Nations spend vast amounts of money and training, arming soldiers to fight and kill. They spend even more on devising and manufacturing weapons and machinery for fighting and killing. Huge sums are also needed for dealing with the damage of war.

For all these reasons and more, the invention of war is one of humankind's greatest blunders. The bottom line of pacifism is simply this: human beings invented war, and human beings should make it obsolete. War is only an invention. War, like a disease, can in time be eradicated and that's what we should be working to achieve. Now we should realize that war in itself is a crime against humanity and grow wise enough to solve our problems another way. Some people have been working for a long time on so-called conversion: practical ways of transforming the world's massive military complexes into organizations benefiting the civilian world. Pacifism means unequivocally rejecting the great wrong that we have done ourselves: organized killing, or war. It does mean that at last we will stop deliberately imposing suffering on other people and ourselves.
Economic sanctions are the contemporary ALTERNATIVE to war. There are 'no questions' that Trump sanctions brought North Korea to the negotiating table. A peace treaty is potentially in the works for North Korea, and leaders say they plan to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula within a year.
Economic sanctions have not historically been used for the purpose of preventing the deadly conflict. However, they should be. Conditions for using economic sanctions for this purpose are more auspicious today than in the past and should remain so for the foreseeable future. Economic sanctions are an important policy and deserve more attention of policy makers. The sanctions must formulate a strategy for addressing the economic suffering of domestic interests and interests of neighboring states that are injured by sanctions. These innovations will make economic sanctions an even more effective instrument.
Another example where economic sanctions can be of help is Iran. If the United States managed, by means of sanctions, to force Iran to stop the creation of nuclear bombs and render assistance to terrorists of the Middle East, then we can declare with confidence that sanctions can be a perfect substitute for wars.l
It is apparent that time has come, when the World Community should come forward with a demand to legalize universal sanctions as an alternative to war. Meanwhile finish with wars forever.