ABSTRACT
Although the contents of the previous chapter certainly make clear the cardinality of war itself as a barrier to closing the global equity gap in access to healthcare, what the author wishes to argue in this chapter is that hardly any war is a one-off independent barrier to universal health. The fact of the matter is that human psychology not only exhibits a propensity to engage in war, but – as a species – we have evolved an increasingly tight matrix of war, politics and trade so that any one major war is linked through international relations with the others. As time passes, neoliberalism becomes more efficient at using warfare as a mechanism for self-actualisation. In a sense, we can feel so inexorably caught up in it that, like the dinosaurs of old – powerful though they were – we can only wait to be snuffed out by forces we cannot control.
