December 8, 2024

HubMP2012

Redefining global security – less war, more cooperation

DECEMBER 8, 2024

Mike Phipps reviews The Insecurity Trap: A Short Guide to Transformation, by Paul Rogers with Judith Large, published by Hawthorn.

The 2024 Munich Security Conference asserted that the world has entered a new era of decline in global cooperation, in favour of protectionism and self-interest. This, alongside rising nationalism and right wing populism, a growing mistrust of science and expertise and the huge growth in the influence of social media, is worrying enough. The increased tendency to respond to international threats with exclusively military ‘solutions’ is creating new dangers.

The breakdown in international cooperation is illustrated by the West’s reckless approach to the climate emergency – despite the emergence of new technologies that make rapid decarbonization possible within a very short period. It was underlined by the lack of intergovernmental responsibility during the Covid pandemic, expressed in ‘vaccine nationalism’ – all while the world’s ten richest people increased their wealth by US $540 billion in the pandemic’s first year.

Paul Rogers notes: “ The world’s dominant economic model is terribly ill suited to responding to global challenges that need close intergovernmental cooperation.”

As climate breakdown and increasing global inequality fuel greater migration, the West’s response is to impose new barriers to movement and resort to divisive and nationalist rhetoric to support its policies – which further strengthen militarism and undermine international cooperation in tackling global problems.

The preference for military responses has had a profound impact. It’s estimated that 940,000 people died in post-9/11 wars directly as a result of war violence, and four times that number indirectly. Some 38 million people were displaced in wars that cost $8 trillion. And it should be remembered that these wars – particularly in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, where new instabilities and terrorist threats were generated – were failures – just as Russia’s war on Ukraine and Israel’s war on Palestine will be failures, lucrative though they may for arms manufacturers and other corporate interests.

As the Rethinking Security Group has observed, current UK national security thinking privileges supposed ‘national security’ over a common value to which all people have an equal claim. Its version of the ‘national interest’ is driven by establishment and corporate interests and it prioritises short-term violent threats over long-term drivers of insecurity, usually responding with military methods and the curtailment of civil liberties.

These priorities will need to be drastically recast if we are to deal with the fundamental threats we face. “To prevent systemic climate breakdown and unbearable catastrophes, we need to achieve radical change almost beyond comprehension within a couple of decades,” argues Rogers.

In the UK alone, given its huge renewable energy resources, every home could be insulated within a decade, as could workplaces, and a national network of improved public transport and a wide range of carbon reduction programmes could be rolled out. But this requires a break with the dominant neoliberal economic model.

A rethinking of the meaning of national security will also be necessary. Security needs to be redefined as freedom from fear and want, to live in dignity; it should be a common right, not gained at others’ expense; and therefore a shared responsibility, not one that privileges a self-selecting group of powerful states.

In practice , this means a new emphasis on international development to help poorer countries develop their renewable energy resources, and a commitment to strengthening the United Nations and reorienting the UK military to focus on disaster relief.

This is a short book, but a useful introduction to a subject often sidelined by the left and avoided by those who are put off by the jargon that often accompanies the topic. Rogers’ redefinition of security away from military capabilities makes the discussion here vital and accessible.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.