When security turns into a business, humanity becomes expendable. Fear is no longer an unfortunate consequence of international politics; it is a commodity—produced, marketed, and sustained. In today’s global order, wars are not always fought to end threats but to manage them, prolong them, and, in many cases, profit from them. In this marketplace of insecurity, human lives are quietly reduced to numbers, while suffering is absorbed into strategic calculations.
Modern international relations increasingly reflect this disturbing reality. The global arms industry thrives on instability, not peace. Defense budgets expand even as diplomacy shrinks, and conflicts linger long after their original causes have faded. Security, once a public good, has been privatized and commercialized, turning fear into a renewable resource. Peace, by contrast, has become economically inconvenient.
This is not a new warning. Ancient philosophers anticipated the consequences of such moral decay. Plato cautioned that when the guardians of the state become merchants, justice collapses and war becomes inevitable. His fear was not merely about corruption, but about a transformation of purpose—when protection becomes profit-driven, violence ceases to be a last resort and becomes a business model. The modern global security architecture bears uncomfortable resemblance to this ancient insight.
Islamic Sufi saints offered a radically different understanding of security—one rooted in inner discipline, justice, and moral restraint. Jalaluddin Rumi repeatedly warned that the most destructive enemy is not an external rival, but unchecked greed within the human soul. A global order that seeks safety solely through military dominance, while ignoring ethical responsibility, is bound to reproduce the very insecurities it claims to prevent.
The great Andalusian thinker Ibn Arabi cautioned rulers against the illusion of absolute power. Authority, he argued, is a trust, not a possession. When leaders imagine themselves as masters rather than trustees, tyranny becomes inevitable. In contemporary geopolitics, this illusion manifests in hegemonic behavior, where dominance is equated with stability and coercion is justified as order.
South Asia’s Sufi tradition echoes these warnings with striking clarity. Bulleh Shah rejected hierarchies built on wealth, power, and false piety. His poetry exposed the hypocrisy of those who use moral language to legitimize oppression. Today, similar hypocrisy appears when the language of “national security” is used to excuse civilian casualties, surveillance states, and perpetual warfare.
Imam Al-Ghazali, one of Islam’s most influential scholars, warned that when truth is abandoned, deception becomes governance. He foresaw rulers who would manipulate knowledge, distort facts, and replace wisdom with spectacle. In the contemporary world, misinformation, fake news, and strategic narratives are not accidental distortions; they are tools of power, deployed to manufacture consent, justify violence, and silence moral resistance.
The erosion of truth has profound consequences for international relations. Diplomacy depends on trust, treaties rely on credibility, and peace requires honest engagement. When lies become normalized and facts are politicized, global cooperation collapses. Public opinion, instead of acting as a restraint on power, is engineered through fear and confusion.
International relations were meant to balance power with responsibility. Institutions, alliances, and norms were designed to prevent the horrors of endless war. Yet increasingly, global politics resembles a marketplace of fear rather than a forum for cooperation. Human beings are reduced to collateral damage, refugees become statistics, and ethical responsibility dissolves into strategic necessity.
The saints and scholars of the past remind us that no civilization collapses solely because of external enemies. It collapses when it loses its moral compass. No arsenal is large enough, no surveillance system advanced enough, and no alliance strong enough to compensate for the absence of justice and compassion.
When security becomes commerce and truth becomes a weapon, life itself turns into a quiet battlefield. The world may appear orderly on maps and balance sheets, but for millions living under endless conflict, displacement, and manufactured consent, existence feels like a carefully engineered hell. The enduring wisdom of saints and scholars urges us to remember a simple truth: without ethics, there can be no real security—only the illusion of it.