Keeping the World Unsafe

From the Cold War to Ukraine: The Grim History of National Security

Security is a concept that tends to be overused and very often misused by governments, especially when preceded by the word ‘national’. In the name of national security even democratic governments will give themselves the right to do whatever they think fit and protect whatever they define as the national interest,.

The physical annihilation of political opposition, administrative detention, dictatorship, war, invasion, nuclear weapons, border walls - nothing is off the table once a government cites national security as a justification for doing it. At first sight national security seems to touch on what is generally accepted as the essential duty of any government – to protect the national interest and keep its population safe. 

In practice the pursuit of national security tends to go beyond these objectives. In Latin America the dictatorships and military regimes that subscribed to the ‘national security states’ of the sixties and seventies defined the primary threat to state security as an international Cuban/Russian-backed conspiracy that had no national borders.

Faced with this largely imaginary enemy, security forces across the continent abandoned the traditional role of the military as the defenders of their country’s frontiers, and concentrated on the violent repression of internal ‘subversives’ - a conveniently-elastic concept that could be applied to anyone. 

This ‘doctrine’ was not unique to dictatorships.  During the Cold War, the United States promoted and supported the Latin American national security states and similar regimes elsewhere. In his 1972 book Roots of War, the great activist-scholar Richard Barnett excoriated the ‘national security managers’, who had given themselves the right to commit ‘bureaucratic homicide’ in Vietnam and other countries, without any moral reservations or repercussions. 

Barnett accused these ‘managers’ of reducing the American national interest to a constant preparation for war and a constant invocation of the threat of war.  He believed that the transformation of the post-war national security apparatus was necessary for America to ‘renounce militarism and war as primary instruments of policy and accommodate its fears and appetites to the post-imperial world.’

The War on Terror

By the time Barnett died in 2004, this ‘post-imperial world’ was very far from realisation. Following the 9/11 attacks, a new national security bureaucracy (which contained a number of veterans from the Reagan era), embarked on a global ‘war on terror’ against an amorphous array of organisations and governments perceived to pose a threat to American security and to the American national interest.

The constant invocation of ‘another 9/11’ provided a persistent justification for regime change, covert operations, ‘enhanced interrogations’, extraordinary renditions, outsourced torture and detention without charge, and a panoply of extra-legal measures, in which the United States effectively defined the entire world as its theatre of military operations.

The UK was not far behind.  Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown consistently justified British military interventions abroad on the grounds that that they were fighting to ‘keep us safe’, and that we were fighting ‘over there’ in order to prevent our enemies fighting us over here.

This formulation ignored the proliferation of ‘homegrown’ terrorists who justified their actions precisely on the basis that we were ‘over there.’ It ignored the trail of chaos and devastation, the hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the destabilisation of whole regions that accompanied this swathe of militarism.

Not only did they fail to produce security in these theatres of military operation, but the war on terror erased whatever claims America had to ‘moral’ leadership, and the vast expenditure of more than six trillion dollars contributed to the subsequent implosion of American domestic politics.

In short, this reckless and often quasi-imperial pursuit of national security made the world less secure, and it also made America less secure.

And now a new exponent of the national security doctrine has emerged in the shape of Vladimir Putin, who has repeatedly referred to Russian security ‘concerns’ in regard to Ukraine in particular and to NATO’s ‘eastward expansion’ in general.  These claims are partly spurious. It’s clear from many of Putin’s statements that he has reasons for attacking Ukraine that go beyond any legitimate conception of national security. 

It’s easy to point this out, but it’s also worth remembering that the same can be said about the United States and its allies during the war on terror, though it very rarely is.  

Those who accuse Russia of ‘paranoia’ regarding NATO tend to forget Dick Cheney’s ‘one percent doctrine’, in which the United States conferred on itself the right to attack any country that might have even a one percent chance of posing a security threat to it. Or Tony Blair’s suggestion that Iraq could attack the UK ‘in forty-five minutes’ to bolster his case for war.

Such claims were no less bogus than Putin’s fears of NATO missiles ending up in Ukraine.  Had Iraq attacked the UK with one of these weapons then it would have been annihilated, and the same could be said about Ukraine with regards to Russia.

The general rule of the war on terror was that countries that actually had nuclear weapons did not get attacked, and there is - or at least there was - little to no chance that Ukraine would acquire enough weaponry to pose a serious threat to Russia.

The reason I mention these precedents is not because I want to recycle Russian talking points or engage in ‘whataboutery.’ There is no excuse for the Russian invasion and the horrors that are now unfolding daily in front of our eyes, and Russia’s rulers are the ones who are responsible for it.

Nevertheless, however disgusted and outraged we may be at this catastrophe, we need to find a way out of it, and the prospect of a wider war potentially involving a nuclear exchange or the destruction of a nuclear reactor is something that we need to bear in mind at every moment. Because if any of these things happen, that is game over for Ukraine, Russia, and much of Europe.

As things currently stand, we are witnessing the largest movement of refugees in Europe since World War II; rocketing prices and shortages, not only of fuel, but of bread - an outcome that is likely to have dire consequences in the MENA countries and elsewhere if the Ukraine wheat harvest is not planted and sown.

All this is taking place when the world still has yet to emerge from the public health and economic consequences of the pandemic. So in these circumstances, let us by all means expose the fakery of Putin’s justifications for precipitating this war.

But we also need to rescue the concept of security from the multiple fictions of national security - and the dark histories that these fictions have so often produced.

In his 2007 Munich speech, Putin attacked the ‘unipolar world’ of the US, and the disintegration of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation ( OSCE) into what he called ‘a vulgar instrument designed to promote the foreign policy interests of one or a group of countries.’

He closed his speech by reminding his audience that ‘Russia is a country with a history that spans more than a thousand years and has practically always used the privilege to carry out an independent foreign policy.’ In these circumstances:

We are not going to change this tradition today.  At the same time, we are well aware of how the world has changed and we have a realistic sense of our own opportunities and potential.  And of course we could work together in constructing a fair and democratic world order that would ensure security and prosperity not only for a select few, but for all.

These words could not sound more hollow today.  We now see what Putin’s ‘independent foreign policy’ has meant in practice, and also how far he has departed from any ‘realistic’ assessment of Russia’s opportunities and potential. But even if we reject the messenger, we need to take the message seriously. Because the multiple crises the world now faces cannot be solved by any one state acting by itself, let alone by a ‘great power’ seeking to impose quasi-imperial dominance over the world or merely over its ‘sphere of influence.’

Security must be mutual, and based on cooperation and consensus not military confrontation.  It cannot be limited to the interests of great powers, and must be extended to the smaller states that surround them. 

If we can’t achieve this, and we return to the old image of the benign West versus Russia the eternal aggressor, permanently blinkered by paranoia and irrationality, then we shall have to reconcile ourselves to a new Cold War and a new era of militarism and soaring military budgets, none of which will guarantee anybody’s security.

As horrific as the Ukraine war is, and as criminal as Putin is, we should resist this temptation. We should remember that Germany was once seen in similar terms. At the end of World War 2 America considered ‘pastoralisation’ - restoring Germany to a preindustrial state - to prevent if from ever disturbing the international peace again.

This did not happen. Instead Germany was integrated into the European project and locked into economic relationships with its arch-rival France that obliged both countries to depend on each other rather than fight each other.

Sooner or later, the guns must fall silent in Ukraine. Diplomacy must start again. Compromises and solutions must be found, however bitter and stained with blood they may be in the short term.

In these negotiations, it is incumbent on the West to develop a relationship with Russia that goes beyond permanent war and the preparation for war.

There must be a recognition of what Andrei Gromyko called ‘the concept of indivisible security, particularly the elements of equal security and the obligation that no country should strengthen its own security at the expense of the other.’

This possibility may seem a long way off, right now, at a time when Ukraine is fighting for its survival. It may not be achievable with Putin himself, and may require a different regime and a different political system in Russia. But that will happen. And when it does, and Europe starts to imagine how it might live with Russia, we will have to accept that the relationship between the West and Russia is not the story of Beauty and the Beast.

We will have to consider this essential truth: that either we build an international system in which everyone is secure, or we will end up with a world in which no one is.