War as a Business Model
1. The Triumph of Militarism
1.1 The Question of Responsibility
At the end of the Second World War, some 60 million people had lost their lives. The logical consequence was the founding of the United Nations (UN) and the grand promise of its Charter to "free humanity from the scourge of war." Yet to this day, 81 years later, the world has not come a step closer to this goal.
The blame for this total failure lies with interest groups that wield significant influence over the policies of the Allied founding members of the UN. In January 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower clearly warned about the growing influence of the MIC—the military-industrial complex composed of high-ranking military officers, defense industry representatives, and politicians.
At the time, the world failed to recognize both the immense opportunity and the urgent necessity to permanently curb the warmongering influence of this vested clique. The ongoing stagnation in the global implementation of nonviolent conflict resolution can be attributed primarily to this failure. Lasting peace would directly clash with the business model of the MIC—or rather, the MIFC (adding the "F" for the financial sector).
While the UN provides a platform for diplomacy and international law, its resolutions and interventions lack enforcement power. The world organization's practice has demonstrated that various Charter articles lack sufficient clarity to serve as effective tools for peaceful resolution. In particular, there is an urgent need to clarify the hierarchy among three core legal principles that currently suffer from an application rivalry: the claim to sovereignty under Article 2 conflicts directly with the right to self-determination under Article 1, as well as the right to self-defense under Article 51. https://www.frieden-freiheit-fairness.com/en/blog/uns-guilt-terrorism
Although these gaps and structural weaknesses in the Charter have already claimed millions of lives in armed conflicts, reasonable reform has been lacking—just as it has in response to the unchecked expansion of the MIFC. A thorough analysis, systematic improvements, and an accompanying reform package are long overdue.
1.2 A Market for Violent Solutions
The inadequate enforcement power of the UN's peacekeeping apparatus has opened up a expanding market for the violent resolution of conflicts. The business of death became one of the most lucrative industries of the 20th century and is on the verge of driving its profits to new heights in the 21st. Its inherent logic is not programmed for conflict resolution, but rather for perpetual polarization and the escalation of war.
The system relies on a symbiosis of three forces:
- The dominance of the financial system,
- The geopolitical interests of the Military-Industrial-Financial Complex (MIFC), and
- The ability of mainstream media to shape public opinion.
The media have long failed in their role as guardians of freedom and democracy by prioritizing the interests of war profiteers over those of everyday citizens. This is achieved through information filtering (see Section 3), taboos, and psychological tactics, including fear-mongering and the inducement of collective guilt.
1.3 History of Monetary Power and the MIFC
The modern engine of war is the product of historical automatisms. Even Thomas Jefferson, author of the US Declaration of Independence, warned of the existential threat posed by the unchecked influence of financial institutions and rampant militarism. Both dangers are inextricably linked to the uncontrolled expansion of power.
- 1600 — The Birth of Corporate Militarism: Queen Elizabeth I grants the East India Company exclusive sovereign rights. As the largest corporation in history, it maintained a private army that was at times twice the size of the British state army—the prototype of commercialized warfare.
- 1913 — Institutionalization: The Federal Reserve Act introduces the US dollar and places the right to create money out of thin air into the hands of major private banks.
- 1917 — Profit-Driven Entry into War: During World War I, the J.P. Morgan banking firm brokered and financed massive US arms deals with France and Great Britain. To secure the entry of the previously pacifist United States into the war—and thereby guarantee the repayment of these loans—Morgan and fellow bankers bought influence over leading newspapers, transforming them into tools of war propaganda. https://cdn.mises.org/The%20Merchants%20of%20Death_2.pdf
The punitive Treaty of Versailles and the subsequent rise of Adolf Hitler—which was also co-financed by Western banking interests—are causally linked to this fateful dynamic.
- Lend-Lease and the Acceptance of a Rival Superpower: The Lend-Lease Act of 1941 raised US arms production to a historic peak. However, the supply of war materiel to the Soviet Union by the US and Great Britain to defeat Nazi Germany went far beyond tactical necessity, driven by commercial profit motives. In addition to weapons, industrial machinery for arms production and logistics (including 400,000 trucks) fell into the hands of the Stalinist regime. https://docslib.org/doc/2902487/national-suicide-military-aid-to-the-soviet-union
After the war and well into 1947, shipments of modern production equipment for civilian goods—much of which was dual-use and suitable for military manufacturing—continued. This directly fueled the rise of the USSR as a competing superpower. Subsequently, the media seamlessly flipped the narrative from friend to foe, treating the Cold War as an unexpected twist of fate. Effective public criticism of the arms lobby for arming what became an obvious geopolitical adversary failed to materialize. As is so often the case, this was due to a lack of public transparency: during the war, media outlets had consistently portrayed the brutal dictator Joseph Stalin as the benevolent "Uncle Joe," leaving the American public psychologically unprepared to differentiate between genuine friendship and a purely tactical alliance.
NATO, founded in 1949, guaranteed the continuation of these lucrative arms deals. Its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, candidly acknowledged the alliance's true purpose: "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." Containing communism served as a convenient political narrative for the MIFC and NATO militarists, while arms deals and permanent polarization within Europe formed the actual foundation for their lucrative positions and revenue streams.
Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the historic opportunity for genuine European integration was squandered more willfully than negligently. The inclusion of Russia was—and remains—a vital prerequisite for long-term European security, precisely as Victor Hugo had proposed at the Paris Peace Congress in 1849. In that same integrative spirit, Vladimir Putin outlined his vision of a free community stretching "from Lisbon to Vladivostok" during his 2001 address to the German Bundestag.
However, NATO's eastward expansion beginning in 1999—in breach of clear verbal assurances—and the systematic, profitable military build-up of Ukraine from 2014 onward into Europe's strongest armed force cynically vindicated Lord Ismay's words. Keeping "the Americans in" ultimately meant safeguarding the interests of the MIFC.
2. How the System Instrumentalizes Conflict
2.1 Protracted Wars
The strategy of artificially prolonging conflicts rather than resolving them is a recurring pattern of modern history. For finance capital and the defense industry, war is most profitable when it offers long-term planning certainty.
From a commercial standpoint, a swift diplomatic resolution represents a financial "risk." This dynamic was vividly demonstrated in December 2001—just two months after the invasion of Afghanistan—when George W. Bush rejected a definitive surrender offer from the Taliban. The Bush family was hardly the only beneficiary of the subsequent 20-year conflict, which dragged on until August 2021. The operational logic of protracted warfare is evident across multiple historical examples:
The Korean War (1950–1953)
This conflict marked the first catastrophic failure of the UN Charter's peace mandate. The US government turned a blind eye to massive border provocations staged by Syngman Rhee's American-armed South Korean regime, which had already claimed 100,000 lives prior to the official outbreak of war. https://archive.org/details/KoreanWarTheBruceCumings/mode/1up
When North Korea launched its counteroffensive in June 1950, its logistics relied heavily on American Studebaker trucks provided to the Soviet Union via World War II Lend-Lease surpluses. Simultaneously, Chinese forces fought with US weapons (such as Thompson submachine guns and Springfield rifles) captured from Chiang Kai-shek's defeated Nationalist forces. In Korea, the West was effectively fighting against its own previously exported, highly profitable hardware.
The War in Ukraine (2022–Present)
The conflict in Ukraine follows the same profit-maximizing blueprint. Western military aid effectively functions as massive state subsidies returned directly to domestic defense contractors, who replace older donated inventory with modern, significantly more expensive systems. Transnational asset managers such as BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—historically the primary shareholders in major defense firms like Lockheed Martin, RTX, and Rheinmetall—have experienced record stock rallies. These same financial institutions are already positioning themselves for post-war reconstruction through exclusive investment funds: capital profits first from destruction, and subsequently from rebuilding and privatizing the infrastructure of a heavily indebted nation. As former Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes candidly told investors in January 2022, rising tensions in Eastern Europe represented an exceptional "opportunity for international sales." The MIFC has successfully secured contracts and revenue certainty well into the 2030s.
Psychological Delay Strategies: From Vietnam to Gaza
Conflicts such as Vietnam (20 years) and Iraq (9 years) persisted for as long as they did due to systematic psychological failures in military strategy. The underlying pattern remains constant: the West arms and trains local regimes or insurgent groups. The harsh treatment of civilians by these forces routinely drives the populace straight into the arms of opposition fighters. In Western nations, this creates a paralyzing political divide: left-leaning citizens sympathize with civilian suffering, while conservatives demand a heavier military hand. The resulting political "compromise" is a drip-feed deployment of weapons—militarily indecisive, but a perpetual goldmine for the MIFC.
3. The Failure of the Media
3.1 Censorship and Narrative Management
This pattern of perpetual warfare would face immediate public pushback if the mainstream media fulfilled its constitutional responsibility as a watchdog of free societies. However, since the Spanish-American War (1898–1899) and the Philippine-American War that followed, journalism has operated under severe systemic constraints. https://apjjf.org/2013/11/40/Susan-A-Brewer/4002/article
Instead, major media outlets function as an integral component of the war system. Through a two-stage filtering process—first by military and intelligence apparatuses, and then by the oligopoly of wire agencies—news reporting is subjected to continuous narrative management and self-censorship.
Whenever system-threatening scandals emerge, a reliable media containment mechanism kicks in, as demonstrated by two landmark events in US history:
3.2 The Church Committee (1975–1976)
When investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed in late 1974 that the CIA was conducting illegal domestic surveillance on American citizens and anti-war activists (Operation CHAOS), the Senate formed the Church Committee. However, as the committee exposed illegal assassination plots and the FBI's COINTELPRO program, major media outlets shifted toward insulating state institutions from public backlash. Framing the issue around "national security," news outlets accused Senator Frank Church of "castrating" the CIA and leaving the nation vulnerable during the Cold War.
When CIA station chief Richard Welch was assassinated by terrorists in Athens in December 1975, government officials and news outlets leveraged the tragedy for a coordinated campaign, blaming the press's "exposure hysteria" for Welch's death. This media pivot eroded public support for the committee; its final recommendations were heavily diluted, leaving newly established congressional oversight committees largely toothless.
3.3 The Iran-Contra Affair (1986–1987)
When it was exposed in November 1986 that the US government had covertly sold arms to both sides of the Iran-Iraq War to illegally fund the right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua, the media protected the administration through hyper-personalization. News outlets focused almost exclusively on CIA officer Oliver North, portraying him in soap-opera fashion as a rogue patriot.
This framing successfully diverted public attention from the core issue: systemic constitutional violations by the executive branch and intelligence agencies. To insulate CIA leadership, President Ronald Reagan, and Vice President George H.W. Bush, media coverage adopted the narrative that the affair was merely the work of "a few rogue operatives."
When journalists like Robert Parry and later Gary Webb (Dark Alliance, 1996) presented documentation showing that CIA-backed Contras were trafficking tons of cocaine into US cities to fund their operations, major outlets like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post chose not to investigate the allegations, but instead launched a concerted campaign targeting Webb's professional credibility. The systemic corruption was effectively buried, and legal proceedings dragged on until President George H.W. Bush issued Christmas Eve pardons to the principal defendants in 1992, shortly before their trials.
4. Disregard for Fundamental Psychological Principles
4.1 Israel's Counterproductive Military Strategy
While Israel achieved swift military victories against coalitions of Arab states in 1967 and 1973 (lasting 6 and 19 days, respectively), it has struggled to achieve a decisive outcome against non-state actors like Hamas and Hezbollah. As with US military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, this stems from a fundamental failure to account for psychological dynamics.
In Israel's case, this mistake was formalized into the "Dahiya Doctrine"—a doctrine that calls for the deliberate, large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure and residential areas in regions from which attacks originate, explicitly intended as a deterrent.
Mainstream media outlets have largely shielded this strategy from conceptual critique. In the two years between the October 7, 2023 attacks and the October 10, 2025 ceasefire, major Western news agencies rarely referenced the Dahiya Doctrine by name, even as its destructive consequences dominated international headlines. https://www.frieden-freiheit-fairness.com/en/blog/a-military-doctrine-endangers-the-liberation-of-the-iranian-nation
Despite advance warnings, tens of thousands of civilians lost their lives. The resulting reputational damage to Israel and the West has been immense, fueling a global rise in anti-Semitic incidents. Islamist groups easily filled the resulting information vacuum with their own strategic narratives.
4.2 The Strategy of Islamist Extremism
The media's silence is doubly consequential because it fails to explain how extremist leaders actively exploit the Dahiya Doctrine. In the summer of 2024, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar (architect of the October 7 massacre) wrote to associates in Qatar: "We have Israel right where we want them." Sinwar acknowledged that widespread destruction plays directly into the strategic calculations of extremist groups: as civilian suffering increases, militant leaders harvest waves of international sympathy and political leverage generated by media coverage.
Extremist leaderships, such as the regime in Tehran, pursue their goals with absolute fanaticism, treating their own populations as expendable tools of martyrdom. When political leaders threaten the destruction of power grids and civil infrastructure, it demonstrates a failure to internalize the lessons of past interventions from Somalia to Afghanistan. There is no greater strategic gift to extremist movements than a protracted, high-attrition conflict that inflicts heavy civilian casualties.
4.3 Clash of Civilizations vs. Cultural Rapprochement
This tactical dynamic has persisted since the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), when European nations began accepting large numbers of refugees. This accelerated the spread of radical, reform-resistant Islamist ideologies linked to the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in 1928), which fuses armed jihad with political propaganda, with Tehran operating as a major coordinating hub.
Decades of inconclusive, protracted wars across the Middle East—sustained in part by the economic incentives of the MIFC—have driven continuous displacement and refugee flows. The resulting media coverage generates broad Western empathy for victims, which extremist networks frequently exploit for political cover.
Concurrently, genuine Middle Eastern reform movements capable of bridging cultural divides have been repeatedly abandoned or undermined by Western policy. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's foundational 1920s secular reforms in Turkey, for instance, face steady erosion under the Erdoğan administration due to a lack of international backing. Western media outlets share responsibility for this widening cultural rift by stifling candid discussions on religious extremism with accusations of "Islamophobia."
This silence shields protracted wars, domestic political polarization, and chaotic migration policies from meaningful accountability. By failing to offer a coherent defense of democratic values, Western institutions encourage expansionist counter-narratives. As Turkish President Erdoğan asserted at an Islamic conference in November 2024:
"The progress of the West—built on blood, tears, massacres, genocide, and exploitation—has temporarily gained the upper hand [...]. A day will come, sooner or later, when the era of progress that excludes the sacred and the human will come to an end, and while Western civilization collapses with a great crash, our civilization [...] will rise even stronger."
The risks posed by compromised media structures were recognized early on by figures like Thomas Jefferson, yet a structural solution has been continually deferred.
5. Pathways to Reform
5.1 A Strict Separation of Powers
Addressing this crisis does not require inventing new democratic principles; it simply requires enforcing a foundational one: the separation of powers.
Over the past two centuries, the press has evolved into a de facto "Fourth Estate." However, it has increasingly fallen under the influence of news agency oligopolies that filter information and shape public sentiment to serve specific interests.
To prevent democratic societies from giving way to authoritarian governance, an open marketplace of ideas built on unfiltered information flows must be restored. This requires democratic oversight and structural transparency within major news ecosystems. Only a media system genuinely committed to truth and public accountability can strip militarist interests of their psychological cover, removing the primary barrier to ending perpetual conflict.
5.2 AI as a Structural Check
This reform is urgently needed. While an unmanipulated AI framework within the information sector could assist in monitoring, verifying, and preserving objective journalism, a compromised AI system can easily be weaponized for mass manipulation, deepfakes, and automated narrative control. Destructive applications—such as coordinated bot networks designed to distort political discourse—are already widespread.
Systemic reforms must keep pace with the massive capital being poured into artificial intelligence to ensure democratic oversight over these powerful tools. It is precisely at this technological intersection that the future balance between transparency and manipulation, and between societal stability and conflict, will be decided.
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). It may be shared, translated, and redistributed free of charge, provided that my name and my website are linked as the source. Christian Hamann https://www.frieden-freiheit-fairness.com/en