Land of Missed Opportunities!

Land of Missed Opportunities!

RUBA AYYASH

In recent years, global military spending has exceeded unprecedented levels, accompanied by wars and conflicts that have left enormous human and material losses. Cities have been destroyed, communities have fragmented, millions of people have become displaced and refugees, unemployment is increasing, poverty is increasing, ignorance is expanding, and creative chaos in many countries is erupting as volcanoes that the parties are unable to contain and manage, until the economic effects have spread to areas far from the battlefields themselves. The cost was not limited to what was directly spent on military operations, but also included lost opportunities for development, stability and growth that could have benefited entire States and peoples.

If some of these resources were directed towards education, the levels of knowledge, skills, and productivity would rise in entire societies. If you invest in health, you could save millions of lives, improve their quality of life, and discover drugs to treat worsening chronic diseases, rather than killing them in vain. If you go to infrastructure, innovation, and technology, you will create economic and investment opportunities that are more sustainable and profitable than any war or conflict.

Investing in people is the highest long-term investment, while wars consume resources, accumulate crises, delay development for decades, and affect future generations that will pay the price for every crazy decision made today. We were supposed to live in a world where everyone enjoys their basic rights, gets their needs and opportunities, and has the time, capacity, and resources to build a better reality and future.

Instead of accepting a world in which economic gaps widen enormously, where a great deal of wealth and influence is concentrated in the hands of a small few, while vast numbers of people struggle to secure the basics of life. These gaps are not a natural phenomenon or an inevitable fate, but rather the product of political, economic, and historical decisions that have accumulated influence and wealth for some at the expense of others, and enabled a few to enjoy exceptional privileges, while millions of people are paying the price for wars, conflicts, and decisions that they did not participate in making from the beginning.

This is true, countries arm themselves because they fear threats, aggressions, or loss of their ability to protect their interests and peoples, or because of a struggle for resources and power, or because of an old cumulative historical conflict between ideologies, ideas, beliefs, and sectarian, religious and intellectual differences.

Unfortunately, human beings live in societies based on a cycle of mutual fear, where each side is armed in fear of the other, and the other responds with more armaments, and the cycle continues without a clear end. But even with the recognition of these complexities and more, they cannot be considered as a justification for the enormous scale of destruction and fragmentation that people are paying for every day, especially today in light of 2026, when all materials, technologies, technology and ideas are available to build a better world.

All of this was the result of an accumulation of political failure, mismanagement, corruption, and a struggle for resources, in addition to investing in extremist ideologies and discourses based on intimidation, hatred, the abolition of the other, the exclusion of opinion, thought and humanity, and the making of words such as justice, equality, law, transparency and responsibility as if they belonged to a fairy world.

There are still entire media machines used to fuel division, spread fear and turn opponents into absolute enemies. Many voices are still pushing for escalation instead of looking for common spaces that will allow us to stop promoting this hell and start ensuring calm and stability.

RUBA AYYASH: Multimedia Journalist @ Sky News Arabia ; Master’s in Journalism, Abu Dhabi Emirate, United Arab Emirates

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