Global Security Manifesto Critique, with additional comments

The Global Security Matrix presents a clear, comprehensive, and an all-encompassing understanding of the variable definitions, concepts, and projections for threats facing the international system

The main strength of the Manifesto lies in the specification and detailed explanation of the different types of threats, especially information war and the close inter-connection between organized transnational crime and asymmetric warfare.

Despite several basic strengths, the Matrix suffers from a partial lack of objectivity in its use of historical examples to buttress present security challenges, and fails to adequately connect shifts of security policy to changes in understanding of current security threats.

1.4- In this portion of the Matrix, which deals with the seemingly contradictory nature of the actor's pursuit of increased security, the leap made in the historical evidence is startling. The argument at its end point seems to imply that true security can never be achieved. Yet this seems rather like saying that a perfect life can never be lived. Both are quite evident. No state, individual actor, networks, or system expects to achieve perfect or complete security. A much stronger point would have been to demonstrate how actors used the understanding of the impossible aim of perfect security to reach crucial compromises and advance their aims (be they humanitarian, national, or otherwise).

The leap made from historical security dilemma to post-911 is also troubling, as I see this leap and the focus on "eroding the foundations of a democratic civil society" underpinned by a veneer of political partisanship rather than objective analysis. Why did the argument not mention Dr. Aaron Friedburg's famous paper detailing the unique approach the United States took, as opposed to the USSR, to organize its political and economic resources during the Cold War? Whereas the Soviets were spending close to 25% of GDP on national defense, and shifted most industrial production by the GOSPLAN to heavy industry (thus becoming tantamount to a Garrison State), the United States maintained what Friedburg called a "Contract State". Instead of completely altering the basic political and economic foundations of the state, the US government was able to spend significantly less on defense, while producing higher quality product due to its close engagement with a limited number of arms producers. The absence of this clear distinction in the Matrix detracts from its breadth of historical scholarship.

3.4-I think a caveat would enhance the potency of this point. The paragraph shifts between the threat newly emerging forces pose to the universalization of western norms and the priority of system over state security. It is important to address here the arguments of such theorists as Fukuyama, Ikenberry, Krauthammer, and Huntington about this changing nature of the international system. Fukuyama's argument in the End of History and Huntington's attacks on Endism as being overly idealistic and practically flawed would create the kind of balance necessary for a reader to grasp just what this conflict between "western norms" and "new threats" means. Is the future one of the slow acceptance of western, liberal, democratic superiority by the rest of the globe? Or is it just a renewed effort to preserve an international system that actually has not changed at all (according to Ikenberry)?

As for the subpoint regarding system over state security, it is important to distinguish here between aggressor states, which seek to either destabilize or remove the system for a specific set of interests, and coalitions formed to counter such threats. When Nicholas I moved to annex Moldavia and Walachia, throwing the possibility of an Anglo-French-Turkish alliance to contain Russian expansion to the wind, he was clearly not acting out an interest to maintain system security. Similarly, Bismarck brooded over a possible alliance between Russia and France, and shunned the colonialists in Berlin, only after having turned the European status quo upside down in 1866 and 1871. Transnational networks, individual leaders, and asymmetrical movements cannot be properly analyzed without clear distinctions and analysis of possible motives.

3.6-I cannot understand why an analysis that seeks to describe such a fundamental and oft spoken goal as security, and those which seek to advance and undermine it in international relations, would end the definitional portion of the study with quotations from two American presidents, both Republicans, and both serving in the last twenty years. Such a closing is reminiscent of the same sort of possible partisanship described in my earlier critique of point 1.4.

All of this having been said, the description and level of work placed into defining and expanding upon classical interpretations of security challenges to the international system, with its vast array of multi-faceted actors, makes this manifesto and matrix timely in our present international relations discourse.

In addition to the previous critique:

I think it is becoming more and more imperative to note demographic shifts and cultural clashes in order to fully understand the array of threats facing global actors, particularly states. Direct acts of terrorism do not pose, short of a nuclear or massive bio-chemical incident, an existential threat to the physical and political development of the state. Nevertheless, cultural alterations brought about by vast migrations from across regions pose just such a problem, especially in its political sphere. A number of leading theorists and commentators, from administrators in London, Paris, and Berlin to Oriana Fallaci and fellow journalists, have pointed to very troubling changes afoot in Europe due to the inability of the continent to properly assimilate an increasingly volatile Muslim minority. In Sweden, this has led the state’s largest Muslim Association to pressure for passage of separate Shari’a law on three separate occasions, and led France to adopt restrictions on public religious expression. A surge of anti-Semitism on the continent has also been linked to this troubling development. The clash of values and ideologies is at the center of the puzzle of threats facing the international system. Such a clash, I believe, should take its place next to the threats already established in the Matrix.

Posted by Boris Ryvkin on September 30, 2006 04:30 PM | Permalink

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