Redefining Security

I S i n c e the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s, every administration in Washington has defined American national security in excessively narrow and excessively military terms. Politicians have found it easier to focus the attention of an inattentive public on military dangers, real or imagined, than on nonmilitary ones; political leaders have found it easier to build a consensus on military solutions to foreign policy problems than to get agreement on the use (and, therefore, the adequate funding) of the other means of influence that the United States can bring to bear beyond its frontiers. Even the Carter Administration, which set out self-consciously to depart from this pattern, found in its later years that the easiest way to deflect its most potent domestic critics was to emphasize those aspects of the dilemmas it faced that seemed susceptible to military solutions and to downplay those that did not. Jimmy Carter's failure to win reelection may suggest not that his political instincts in these respects were faulty but merely that his conversion was neither early nor ardent enough. Just as politicians have not found it electorally rewarding to put forward conceptions of security that take account of nonmilitary dangers, analysts have not found it intellectually easy. They have found it especially difficult to compare one type of threat with others, and to measure the relative contributions toward national security of the various ways in which governments might use the resources at their disposal. The purpose of this paper is to begin to chip away at some of these analytical problems. It proceeds from the assumption that defining national security merely (or even primarily) in military terms conveys a profoundly false image of reality. That false image is doubly misleading and therefore doubly dangerous. First, it causes states to concentrate on military threats and to ignore other and perhaps even more harmful dangers. Thus it reduces their total security. And second, it contributes to a pervasive militarization of international relations that in the long run can only increase global insecurity . Richard H. Ullman, Professor of International Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs,spent the 1982-83 academic year as a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study. International Security, Summer 1983 (Vol: 8, No. 1) 0162-2889/83/010129-15$02.50/0 0 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 129 lnternational Security I 130 Security versus What? One way of moving toward a more comprehensive definitionof security may be to ask: what should we be willing to give up in order to obtain more security?how do we assess the tradeoffs between security and other values? The question is apposite because, of all the "goods" a state can provide, none is more fundamental than security. Without it, as the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes observed in a passage often cited but endlessly worth recalling: there is no place for Industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth, no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual1 feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, bruitish, and short.' For Hobbes it did not much matter whether threats to security came from within or outside one's own nation. A victim is just as dead if the bullet that kills him is fired by a neighbor attempting to seize his property as if it comes from an invading army. A citizen looks to the state, therefore, for protection against both types of threat. Security, for Hobbes, was an absolute value. In exchange for providing it the state can rightfully ask anything from a citizen save that he sacrifice his own life, for preservation of life is the essence of security. In this respect, Hobbes was extreme. For most of us, security is...