President Obama speaks at a press conference during the second day of the NATO 2014 Summit at the Celtic Manor Resort in Newport, South Wales, on Sept. 5
***
"Obama's Benghazi, Reagan's Beirut And America's Loss Of Perspective-Proportion-Balance"
***
At a recent fundraising event, President Obama suggested we should all calm down about global security threats: “The world has always been messy. In part, we’re just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through.” Despite the crises in the Middle East and Ukraine, he said, “I promise you things are much less dangerous now than they were 20 years ago, 25 years ago, or 30 years ago. This is not something that is comparable to the challenges we faced during the Cold War.”
You might be a little confused by this message from the commander-in-chief. After all, some of his deputies have framed the state of the planet a little differently. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently suggested America was in “a very complex, dangerous world,” and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey intoned that “the number and kinds of threats we face have increased significantly.” Just a few weeks ago, Nancy Lindborg, an assistant administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, argued that “we are probably at a near-historic level of humanitarian need right now.”
As it turns out, both the president and Lindborg are broadly right: Despite the implosion of the Middle East over the past two years, the U.S. is still in a far better national security situation than it was 25 years ago. At the same time, the demand for American humanitarian assistance may never have been higher—in part because the end of the Cold War means aid can be mobilized to help in more places. And that suggests a logical response: Shift our global efforts, and related budgets, away from using military tools and toward humanitarian ones.
Compare the challenges of today with those of 1989, a quarter-century ago. For all of the jubilation of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union was still a unified country. Iran and Iraq were less than a year out from one of the bloodiest conflicts of the past 60 years. Saddam Hussein was a year away from invading Kuwait, the trigger for the Persian Gulf War. The unwinding of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan signaled the start of that country’s civil war. U.S. troops invaded Panama, and ongoing civil wars occupied countries including Angola, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, and Sudan. The Shining Path was fomenting terror in Peru, while the Medellín cartel was on a rampage. And the Chinese army fired upon its own citizens, massacring thousands in and around Tiananmen Square. Nobody at the time thought the world was in a period free of international strife, and many would probably have swapped 2014’s challenges for their own.
Russian President Vladimir Putin may boast that his tanks could occupy Ukraine’s capital of Kiev in two weeks if he wanted—but he’s not following through on that threat. In 1956 the Soviet army invaded Hungary and occupied the capital Budapest, with no pretense and little restraint. Sixty years later, the Russian army is tiptoeing across a border 1,000 kilometers (622 miles) to the east, declaring all the while it isn’t even doing that.
Putin leads a country that has a gross domestic product of just more than $2 trillion—that’s about the same as Italy’s. Russia’s military expenditure in 2012, at $91 billion, compares with a combined expenditure of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. of more than $200 billion—or with the U.S. at $682 billion.
And there’s no successor to the Soviet Union in terms of an armed threat to the West. Back in the heyday of the Cold War, the Pentagon used to publish Soviet Military Power, a glossy pamphlet designed to demonstrate the country’s overwhelming conventional superiority against NATO and scare up some more dollars for new cruise missiles along the way. The tradition has yet to be revived with a Chinese Military Power, perhaps because it would be risible to suggest that the country possesses anything more than the ability to project power in its home region. China’s military spending is less than a quarter of the U.S.’s.
Regarding weapons of mass destruction, the risk of accidental nuclear war during the Cold War was constant—and we frequently came very close. In 1989 there were58,336 (PDF) nuclear warheads stockpiled worldwide, compared with only 10,215 warheads today. Not that the remaining weapons would be insufficient to pulverize the planet, but the declining numbers are a symbol of a broader de-escalation of the threat. With U.S. assistance, Russia has concentrated its stockpile of weapons in fewer locations that are better protected, for example. And only four countries (the U.S., the U.K., Russia, and France) actually keep warheads on missiles or at bases with operational launchers.
It’s true that India and Pakistan have joined the nuclear weapons club since the Cold War (bringing total membership to eight), North Korea has tested devices, and Iran will perhaps restart its weapons program if international talks fail. This may have marginally increased the overall threat of a nuclear device being detonated in anger even while the risk of total global thermonuclear annihilation has declined.
On the other hand, a series of three Nuclear Security Summits over the last four years have brokered agreements on reducing stocks of fissile material, improving the security of nuclear installations, and strengthening the International Atomic Energy Agency and international oversight capacity. And there’s simply no evidence that any terrorist group has come close to stealing or constructing an atomic bomb.
No comments:
Post a Comment