How can we build trust between nations?
Trust is the antidote to paranoia, and is the essential ingredient to create a more peaceful world.
Creating trust between adversaries is not a straightforward matter of “Just trusting them”. It is a matter for delicate movement involving both sides.
Trust building should begin with a small step such as offering a minor concession to the other, to test whether it may be reciprocated. If and when a positive reaction is noted, a slightly larger gift may be offered, and their actions should be reviewed to find anything that might be seen as an similar offering. It involves a slow, deliberate, incremental process.
Trust building requires each party to try to view the relationship from the point of view of the other side, and to see how one’s own actions may be misinterpreted. We have to be clear in communications, and must not assume that the other side automatically understands what we are implying.
Trust building may be a long, slow process, with lulls and reversals in progress, but we have no alternative. The alternative to mutual trust is mutual paranoia, and that ends in mutual assured destruction – the end.
Common Security
in 1982, the Swedish statesman Olof Palme’s Independent Commission on
Disarmament and Security Issues presented a report that developed the concept of Common Security – the idea that nations and populations can only feel safe when their counterparts feel safe. The 2022 report on Common Security published by the Olof Palme International Centre, the International Peace Bureau and the International Trade Union Confederation is an extremely valuable document.
A More Peaceful World 