by Richard Gowan | Feb 20, 2008 | North America, Off topic
Readers of this blog will, almost by definition, be well aware of the thoughts of Mr. Alex Evans on global risks, resilience, the new dynamics of international cooperation and so on and so forth. So they’ll be pretty used to this sort of stuff:
I think we face three challenges currently: The disappearance of the nation-state; the rise of India and China; and, thirdly, the emergence of problems and challenges that cannot be solved by a single power, such as energy and the environment. We do not have the luxury to focus on one problem; we have to deal with all three of them or we won’t succeed with any of them.
Yeah, yeah, give us a break. Except those sentiments don’t come from Alex but from, er, Henry Kissinger in a remarkable new interview with Der Spiegel Online (the best English-language news source on the web that nobody knows about).
Old Mr. Realpolitik hasn’t exactly turned that cuddly. He has wise things to say about how the Bush administration gives European governments an easy excuse for avoiding hard questions on foreign policy – and weird ones on Bush himself:
SPIEGEL: Isn’t German and European opposition to a greater military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq also a result of deep distrust of American power?
Kissinger: By this time next year, we will see the beginning of a new administration. We will then discover to what extent the Bush administration was the cause or the alibi for European-American disagreements. Right now, many Europeans hide behind the unpopularity of President Bush. And this administration made several mistakes in the beginning.
SPIEGEL: What do you see as the biggest mistakes?
Kissinger: To go into Iraq with insufficient troops, to disband the Iraqi army, the handling of the relations with allies at the beginning even though not every ally distinguished himself by loyalty. But I do believe that George W. Bush has correctly understood the global challenge we are facing, the threat of radical Islam, and that he has fought that battle with great fortitude. He will be appreciated for that later.
SPIEGEL: In 50 years, historians will treat his legacy more kindly?
Kissinger: That will happen much earlier.
But back to the whole “problems and challenges that cannot be solved by a single power” malarkey. I’ve just returned from a week in the UK talking about Managing Global Insecurity, and although there were a lot of interesting conversations involved, I was struck by the deeply-embdedded European assumption that U.S. policy-makers just don’t get the twenty-first century risk agenda or concepts like human security. Well, piffle. As I noted late last year in a short piece for the Stanley Foundation, the whole presidential campaign has been shot through with this sort of thing:
One of the most prominent foreign policy themes of pre-presidential debates has been the need to get UN troops to Darfur. Hillary Clinton has “an aggressive plan to support public schools in developing countries” while Mitt Romney’s anti-jihad strategy centers on a “Special Partnership Force” that will win over foreign communities and leaders through “humanitarian and development assistance and rule of law capacity building.”
Such proposals leave outside observers scratching their heads. Ask the average anti-American to name the pillars of US international policy, and they’ll pick two: military power and unbridled capitalism. But the country’s leaders-in-waiting are promoting social democratic goods like public schooling and development aid. Is the US turning into a gigantic Sweden?
As I said at the time, no, not really. But think back to Super Tuesday. Here’s the key foreign policy paragraph from Obama’s speech that night:
And when I am President, we will put an end to a politics that uses 9/11 as a way to scare up votes, and start seeing it as a challenge that should unite America and the world against the common threats of the twenty-first century: terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease.
And here’s the equivalent from Clinton’s speech the same night:
I see an America respected around the world again, that reaches out to our allies and confronts our shared challenges – from global terrorism to global warming to global epidemics.
And now the McCain-supporting Kissinger is in on the act. I’m off to go and watch the primary results roll in from Wisconsin – but if these guys are even semi-serious, the Europeans may find they’re behind the ideological curve in 2009.
by Charlie Edwards | Feb 19, 2008 | UK
I was planning to write a more comprehensive analysis of RUSI’s journal article yesterday. I didn’t, which was fortunate, because Michael White has an interesting piece in today’s Guardian on why the military feels misunderstood while The Times leads with why Britain’s security must be a narrowly defined priority (which I will post separately about). All three pieces echo a set of assumptions that are out of date and unless interrogated risk sending UK HMG back to the early 1990s.
In order to understand the view of the traditionalists in the ‘defence community’ you have to go back to the beginning of the week and listen to the Radio 4 interview with Gwyn Prins. At one point Prins suggests the UK is at war with a peace time mentality.
I first heard this phrase at Wilton Park a year or so ago, more recently at Defence Academy and last week at the Rag. It is, I think, becoming the mantra of the traditional school within the defence community and is borne out of their view of current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and how the community sees the world through the lens of global terrorism, instability in the Middle East and other latent threats (Russia being the prime example).
In this context the reason for why the military feels misunderstood is not as simple as Brown spending more on security than defence as White suggests but a reflection of how isolated the defence community have become in the current debate about national security and resilience.
It is Browne who lacks the necessary overarching narrative that would act as a strategic anchor for MoD during this period of uncertainty. Devoid of such a narrative (let alone a strategy) the three services have resorted to damaging campaigns (invariably about procurement) with each other, played out in the harsh light of the media, as illustrated by Michael White:
Hence this Thursday’s ministerial search to cut the Astute nuclear subs and Type 45 destroyer programmes, to sell some Eurofighters (ordered but irrelevant) to the Saudis. The army’s new multi-purpose vehicle is probably safe from a Navy-RAF pincer movement. So are those two carriers: Rosyth dockyard is in the PM’s constituency. But defence contractors may be told to “sort it out yourselves”.
There are a number of different strands to the current debate on national security and defence but 3 are important in the context of the RUSI/ White/Times articles.
The first strand has to do with the role of UK defence in the current security environment. Here the debate rarely moves beyond the dual dichotomies of latent threats and poles of power (i.e. uncertainty of Russia) and the perennial debate over defence spending. The point here is that these debates are usually separate discussions and lack a necessary strategic anchor to bring them together. The result is that debates over defence end up being dominated by equipment rather than UK priorities.
The second emerging strand is about the focus and level of risk. Past debate has focused solely on the threat from terrorism. Since last December however there has been a concerted effort by departments and think tanks in the UK and across the Atlantic to place terrorism in context within a spectrum of risks (see Alex’s post on McConnell for instance). In doing so what is clear is that while most agree terrorism remains a threat to the UK it has become increasingly apparent that it is not the only risk.
This is disconcerting for the defence community which traditionally thinks in terms of one big threat. It is why, for the last couple of years, the question whispered along the corridors of Main Building been what is our role today?
This latter point is why many commentators felt what RUSI served up at the beginning of the week was well past its sell by date. By arguing that the UK is now in a time of remission between the frontal attack of 9/11, and its eventual successor the RUSI article was creating the image of a threat that they claimed would deliver an even greater psychological blow . It didn’t help that they were unable to support this with substantial evidence and to make matters even more confusing the authors conceded later on that we know much less about what threatens us.
The final strand concerns the present debate over counter-terrorism legislation which, at its most simplistic, pitches the security camp against the liberty camp. The new Counter-Terrorism Bill is the current focus of dispute with the former camp claiming (wrongly as it turns out) that only they understand there is a threat from terrorism and if everyone else knew what they did the legislation would be accepted without complaint. The liberty group meanwhile has chosen to use the ‘42 days’ as a stick to prod the apathetic public and NGO community into standing up against such draconian laws citing the last three pieces of CT legislation as examples of how disproportionate the government has been in the face of the terrorist threat.
Given that both Tony Blair and Tony McNulty have admitted that the ‘rules haven’t changed’ when it comes to fighting terrorism and that they got some things wrong it was therefore a mite confusing to read that RUSI thought the UK was a ‘soft touch’.
It is these three strands of debate that explain why the RUSI piece makes sense to the traditionalists in the defence community but to everyone else looks like a reckless piece of polemic based on spurious and an unconvincing analysis.
by David Steven | Feb 10, 2008 | Conflict and security
In his recent speech to the Fabian Society (covered by my co-editor Alex Evans here), British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband spoke of the need for a new fusion between the social democratic and radical liberal traditions. Power is shifting away from governments and towards people, he argued: a dynamic that is disrupting the traditional certainties of international relations.
True enough – and a process that seems to be just beginning. But will the decline in state power lead to greater stability or instability? How should governments adjust to a changing role? And what kind of foreign policy would they be best advised to pursue?
Miliband roots his argument back to the enlightenment – another period when a radical new balance was forged between the individual and the collective:
At the beginning of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine called on his fellow colonists to forge a new society where power was dispersed among the citizens. “Let the crown … be demolished,” he urged, “and scattered among the people whose right it is.”
Today Paine’s world is coming into view. Around the world there is what I call a ‘civilian surge’. Born of the death of deference in the North and West, the collapse of communism in the East, the spread of democracy in the South. Everywhere it is the rise of the better educated – and if not better educated, better informed citizen – who knows, in real time, about how other people, often far away, live their lives; who is more distrustful of traditional sources of authority; who is yearning for greater freedom and power; who is more able through technology to produce and distribute information, more able to hold power to account.
Now David Miliband, in this speech at least, focuses mostly on the beneficial consequences of growing numbers of people becoming “actors rather than spectators in life’s dramas.” But, as he no doubt knows, an equally compelling story can be told about the flipside of this phenomenon, where the collapse of authority leads to chaos (Paine, after all, was as enthusiastic about the French Revolution as he was about the American one). “Globalization is quickly layering new skill sets on ancient mind-sets,” writes counterterrorism expert, John Robb. The result is a massive shift in the types of risk we face.
Warriors, in our current context of global guerrillas, are not merely lazy and monosyllabic primitives…They are wired, educated, and globally mobile. They build complex supply chains, benefit from global money flows, travel globally, innovate with technology, and attack shrewdly. In a nutshell, they are modern. Despite this apparent modernity and an eager willingness to adopt technology, however, their value sets are completely different from those we find acceptable in the West…
Guerrilla entrepreneurs…are the central actors in this move towards sustainable non-state entities. They provide innovation in warfare, leverage sources of moral cohesion to grow the group through fictive kinship, find new sources of income through integration with trans-national criminality, and much more.
Robb is not primarily concerned with the ‘spectacular’ one-off attack (though he does worry about a future where one man can ‘declare war on the world and win’). Instead, he focuses on the ability of guerrilla groups to degrade the complex and fragile systems on which the modern world relies.
Today’s threat is based on sustainable disruption – ongoing, easy, low-tech attacks that are nearly impossible to defend against. These attacks have the potential to ‘hollow out’ the state by preventing the delivery of critical services or a denial of income and/or investment.
So then, there are two types of ‘civilian surge’. Miliband’s: a liberation of the energies and enthusiasm of billions of global citizens. And Robb’s: what happens when a malignant network sets out to probe and exploit points of weakness in the body in which it lives. But both these visions agree on one point – that the role of the state is inevitably going to change. The important question is whether it redefines itself through choice, or because forces beyond its control batter it into retreat.
Clearly, for those of us who favour order over disorder, the former option is preferable. But that means asking hard questions about what government is for. What functions should it try to perform internationally? And how and where is it most likely to succeed? This is especially important at a time when governments are being asked to take on new responsibilities (acting as midwife for a low carbon economy, for example). It is imperative that we focus on distinguishing state actions that are important and productive, from those that are subsidiary, ineffective, counter-productive, or a combination of all three.
Alex and I believe that the concept of resilience provides an important, and perhaps unparalleled, lens through which we can explore this challenge. Those who seek to create disorder are searching with great determination for those points where a small exertion of force is rewarded by a disproportionate disruption. Their main objective is to cause complex systems to break down. Moreover, sometimes a similar effect is being achieved by the internal contradictions of the system itself. Inequality and poverty lead to great stress, and favour social breakdown. Climate change is a particularly pernicious form of negative feedback, where prosperity creates and fosters the conditions for future social and economic failure. The quest for resilience is a search for an antidote to these destabilising forces. It forces us to consider what will lead to greater health for the system as a whole.
In spite of the vast resources devoted to defence, development and diplomacy, we have, as yet, done little to counter this type of threat. Indeed, our systems appear to be becoming more fragile, not less.
Here in Pakistan, people are scared witless that they may now be living in a failing state. By way of response, their government manages the trick of simultaneously exerting too much and too little control (the paradox of weakness through strength). American foreign policy – the dominant international influence – has amplified Pakistan’s oscillations, rather than dampening them. The result could bring chaos to large parts of the world.
Under the seas, meanwhile, and as we have reported extensively on this blog, we have been given a graphic demonstration of how easy it is to bring the internet to its knees (think of this as the equivalent of the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993). Our energy systems are in a similarly poor state, remaining at least as brittle as they were twenty five years ago when Amory Lovins pointed out that they were ‘easily shattered by accident or malice’.
The world’s growing urban centres are particularly vulnerable to disruption. New Orleans has shown how easily a modern city can disintegrate, while the 2003 European heat wave demonstrated how quickly people die when social system fail to respond to an ‘invisible’ threat. The developing world’s megacities struggle to deliver basic services in good times and verge on the ungovernable. In a crisis, they could rapidly degenerate into a Hobbesian horror.
The global war on terror, meanwhile, is a case study in a how a response to a threat can lead to a cascade of further calamities. “We wantonly inflicted [systems] disruption on ourselves,” John Robb writes.
A focus on resilience also provides a yardstick for addressing David Miliband’s question about the proper balance between the responsibilities of individual and state. Resilience comes from a distributed response, where each level of the system contributes to its survival. Long experience has shown us the perils of over-centralization, where the centre itself becomes a likely trigger of failure. This is why Hobbes’s Leviathan is no answer to the war of all against all. As Alex points out, the centre can never have sufficient information to ensure an adequate response. At a time of crisis, “a resilient citizenry will be the difference between breakdown-and-recovery versus outright collapse”.
But a full application of the concept of resilience should force us to focus more widely than simply on a direct response to threats. We need instead to think about the problem in three levels. First, we need to consider shared values, which are the most fundamental level at which people can make an investment in our global system. Next, the institutions or social structures in which those values are expressed and which should be designed to flex, rather than break, when under stress. Only then, should we look specifically at defending points of weakness, identifying the spots where a system is most vulnerable to a disruptive attack.
Delivering on this agenda would challenge every aspect of a government’s international and domestic capability, and demand that large parts of it should be re-wired. It’s a problem Alex and I have started to work on – I’ll try and explain some more of our thinking in a future post…
by Alex Evans | Feb 5, 2008 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks
Further to David’s previous posts on this, John Robb is working the problem too. Three observations from him:
Vulnerability. All of the same network vulnerabilities we see other infrastructures are in force with the Internet’s long haul systems (the network analysis of systempunkts applies). If this was a real attack rather than a series of accidents (the geographical concentration is interesting in this regard), then this was likely a capabilities test that yielded data on response times, impact, and duration.
Means. Attacks on undersea cables are within the capacity of small groups to accomplish. With precise mapping (these cables take very circuitous routes), a cable could be cut with as little as an anchor. However, nation-states are the most capable in this sphere (including, a growing number of micropowers). Why would a nation-state do this? Deterrence. Disconnection from the global communications grid is very likely become a form of economic/social coercion in the future (for standard national security reasons all the way down to an inability/unwillingness to crack down on rampant Internet crime, which is growing into a HUGE global problem).
Precision. It’s very hard to precisely target an attack’s damage. Regional impacts are unavoidable (collective punishment for everyone that connects to the target country?). Here’s a final point to consider: closed systems like China’s that route traffic through firewall choke-points, or other closely held infrastructure, are likely very vulnerable to an attack of this type.
Also: Valdis Krebs offers a pre-9/11 take on how social network analysis can be applied to computer networks to make them more resilient…
