On the International Day of Peace, what a former arms dealer discovered when he stopped building war and started documenting the communities the war economy was supposed to suppress.
Jim Merkel was twenty-nine years old, sitting in a Paris apartment, eating couscous that had been cooked by Moroccan servants who were not allowed to leave the flat, when something shifted.
He was there to sell weapons, the lead designer of top-secret cryptographic communications equipment for the US military, in a meeting with an arms dealer who also served as a consulate for Iraq. The arms dealer explained, between courses, that the developing world was simply not capable of managing its own resources. That the right people, meaning American corporations, needed to go in, extract the oil, the minerals, the land.
Jim looked at the servants. He thought about where the weapons he was selling were going and what they were doing there. He took the paycheck for another year, and then he stopped.
“I know exactly what the war economy costs,” he says now, from a $7,000 sailboat in Penobscot Bay, Maine. “Not in dollars. In the communities that never get the schools, the clinics, the food systems they need because the money went somewhere else.”
The Arithmetic of the War Economy
The connection Jim is describing is not a rhetorical flourish. It is arithmetic.
Global military spending reached $2.443 trillion in 2024, the highest level ever recorded, and the tenth consecutive year of increase. The United States alone spent $997 billion, more than the next ten countries combined. In the same year, the global humanitarian system received $20.5 billion, roughly two percent of what the world spent on weapons.
The communities that most need the schools, the clinics, and the food systems are the same communities most likely to be on the receiving end of the weapons. And the communities that have achieved the best combination of human development and ecological sustainability, Kerala, Cuba, Slovenia, are consistently the ones that invested in people rather than in military infrastructure.
Kerala spent on education. Cuba spent on healthcare and food sovereignty. Slovenia built cooperative economic institutions. None of them are military powers. All of them have produced quality-of-life outcomes that the world’s largest military spenders have not replicated for their own populations.
Peace Is Not the Absence of Conflict
The International Day of Peace was established in 1981 to strengthen the ideals of peace among nations. The definition has expanded since, peace not just as the absence of war between states, but as the presence of the conditions that make conflict unnecessary: food security, healthcare access, economic equity, functioning governance, ecological stability.
By this definition, peace is what Kerala has been building since the 1950s through land reform and literacy campaigns. It is what Cuba built through community health infrastructure that has survived sixty years of economic siege. It is what the cooperative economies of Slovenia sustain through shared ownership structures that give communities a genuine stake in their collective future.
Jim’s film is not a peace documentary in the conventional sense, there are no peace talks, no diplomatic negotiations, no international summits. It is something more practical: a documentation of what communities built when they chose the conditions of peace over the machinery of conflict.
“How do we ensure this world works for everyone?” he asks. “That includes our earth, the poor, women, those who’ve been historically underrepresented and underserved. Instead of spending trillions on war we can divert all that brilliance and kindness into making the world work for others.”
The International Day of Peace is the right moment to make that calculation visible. Not as idealism. As arithmetic.
