24 June 2026 – At the time of writing, three nuclear-armed states are at war. The United States and Israel have been fighting Iran for three months; Russia has been fighting Ukraine for three years. Nuclear weapons were supposed to be the holy grail of global security, but the current situation requires us to ask: are nuclear weapons really a source of global geopolitical power today? Do they enable the holders of such power to impose their will over others? I argue that we are seeing a new form of power emerging – an economic-ecologic power – and that this is the arena where new thinking about peace must emerge.
Nuclear weapons are indeed capable of great violence and devastating destruction. The logic of “mutually assured destruction” – that any state using a weapon invites its own annihilation – is that they form an existential threat to humanity and cannot be used.
But the conflict conditions of the world since the nuclear race began have also changed dramatically. There are now 193 sovereign states where there were 70 in 1945, and a global economy ten times larger. More borders and more economic activity mean more points of friction. More economic activity, more use of planetary resources, more jurisdictional disputes and more conflicts.
And these modern conflicts reflect the extent to which nations are entangled and interdependent, as are the ecosystems in which their economies are rooted. To be effective in such conflicts one needs a different kind of power than that conveyed by sheer destructive force and violence of nuclear weapons.
The emerging economic-ecologic power
This new kind of power is economic-ecologic power. Ecological features – land, forests, waterways, mountains, shipping lanes – are not simply assets to be monetised. They are potent sources of power in their own right, capable of shaping the prices, availability, production and distribution of countless downstream goods and services. Their strategic value is not fixed: it is magnified or diminished depending on what flows through or depends upon them. A shipping lane carrying fertiliser or oil commands far greater leverage than one carrying stone. The same ecological feature can therefore hold very different geopolitical weight depending on the commercial ecosystem in which it is embedded.
This power operates through economic interconnections: the supply chains, trading relationships, and commercial dependencies that tie nations together. It is built by cultivating willing allies, trading partners and transportation networks that undergird the global economy, and operationalised through commercial contracts, trade deals, foreign investments, the protection of ecological services and diplomacy. Nations still need conventional military forces to deploy this power – but force alone cannot generate it.
The power of Hormuz
The current conflict in Iran is a clear example of this. In the Gulf we see a face-off between a nuclear armed US and Israel and an economic-ecologically armed Iran. Iran’s control over the Straits of Hormuz is accomplished by a complex mix of military, commercial and ecological mechanisms. Hormuz is a critical waterway not only because 20% of oil and gas travels through it to reach markets, but also many other trade commodities and oil derivative products, including fertilisers. The economic impacts of shutting down Hormuz are playing havoc in global oil markets, with oil prices doubling from where they were before the war. The FAO has warned that fertiliser prices and consequently food prices are rising because 20–45% of key agrifood inputs depend on passage through Hormuz. Food shortages are already affecting vulnerable populations in South Asia. The World Food Program estimates that 45 million additional people could be pushed into acute hunger by mid-2026. A single chokepoint has done more to alter the balance of power than any warhead in any silo.
The root of planetary peace and security
Now that this source of power is becoming apparent, new questions arise: who has access to this sort of power, and how is this power operationalised and cultivated? The Club of Rome Planetary Peace Initiative is premised on the idea that ecology as the basis of economy is the root source of national and human security. Beyond Hormuz, there are many ecosystems around the world that could put an economic chokehold on the global economy such as the Gulf of Aden, the Straits of Malacca and the Panama and Suez canals, to name a few.
More sobering still are the climate tipping points – Arctic sea ice, the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, permafrost, coral reefs, boreal forests, the Amazon and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation – each capable of planetary-scale devastation that would match or exceed the devastation imaginable by nuclear weapons. Whoever shapes the fate of these systems holds power that no missile can confer.
Meanwhile, we are wasting billions of dollars in building unusable nuclear weapons in the name of national security. The collective inventory of nuclear weapons is close to 9,600. The total collective global investment in nuclear weapons exceeded several trillion dollars by 2025. In 2024 alone, the global spending on nuclear weapons was about USD 100 billion. The cost of operating, maintaining and upgrading the US’s nuclear arsenal over the next decade to 2034 is expected to cost USD 946 billion. All of this is a colossal waste from a true human security perspective. Instead, we could put 10% of this investment into protecting global ecosystems and guarantee security of all.
That is the premise of the Planetary Peace Initiative: ecology is the foundation of economy and security, and therefore the root source of national and human security. Real power in this century will not lie in the capacity to end the world with bombs, but the ability to keep it functioning by safe use of ecosystems.
