After Authority: War, Peace, and Global Politics in the 21st Century

3. THE INSECURITY DILEMMA

33 3❖ THE INSECURITY DILEMMA What is “security?” What does it mean to be “secure?” Who or what secures us? And why do we feel so insecure? Security demands certainty ; to be uncertain about the present and future is to be insecure about them, as well. We try to reduce or eliminate uncertainties in order to become more secure. But risk analysts often tell us that the cost of eliminating a risk is infinite, which suggests that we can never be fully secure. Security is, therefore, something of a chimera, inasmuch as only the dead can be absolutely sure that nothing about their condition will change (and even then, the promises of Christian millennialism auger some uncertainty about that future). For many, particularly in the United States, the absence of a coherent, concentrated threat or enemy seems to have become especially troubling (Huntington, 1997). The president and Pentagon warn darkly of surrounding dangers (Clinton, 1997). Some describe coming conflicts with non-Western civilizations (Huntington, 1996); others fear the collapse of pivotal states (Chase, Hill, and Kennedy, 1996); a growing number see in China a challenger to U.S. dominance (Bernstein and Munro, 1997). Environmental degradation and economic change are deemed to be security “threats,” while hackers and pornographers lurk in cyberspace, ready to steal information and poison young minds. 34 Chapter 3 The boy or girl next door could cut our throats, as we are told in films and articles “based on true stories.” Diseases are poised to escape from disappearing tropical forests, flying out on the next 757, to be deposited in the midst of urban insurrections. Drugs, illegal immigrants, and terrorists are everywhere. And a few far-sighted individuals (and film producers) even tell us that, somewhere out in distance space, there is a comet or asteroid with Earth’s name on it. The universe of threats seems infinite; the only limit is our imagination (Foster 1994; Kugler, 1995). Why so many threats? Although a decade has passed since the “end” of the Cold War, the basic premises of U.S. national security policy remain uncertain, ill-defined, and contested. Despite the precise language of President Clinton’s National Security Strategy (1997; see chapter 4), no consensual agreement on the nature or source of present or future threats has developed; no comprehensive strategy akin to containment has emerged; no stable policies regarding force structures and deployments have been formulated (Levin, 1994). The U.S. defense budget continues to grow, albeit more slowly than in the 1980s, but who is the target? NATO expands, but who is the enemy? The world of 170 states on the march against each other is a nostalgic memory; who or what now threatens to stalk us? And why, even though we are, in many ways, more secure than we have been for fifty years— especially with a decline in the probability of large-scale nuclear war— does the search for security continue, more frantically and, some might argue, more fruitlessly, than ever? Is it a failure of policy, or a flaw in reasoning? We face, in short, an insecurity dilemma. Forty years ago, John Herz (1959) formulated the idea of the “security dilemma,” a concept later picked up and further developed by Robert Jervis (1978). Both argued that many of the ostensibly defensive actions taken by states to make themselves more secure—development of new military technologies , accumulation of weapons, mobilization of troops—had the effect of making neighboring states less secure. There was no way of knowing whether the intentions behind military deployments were defensive or offensive; hence, it was better to be safe and assume the worst. The result was, in many instances, an arms spiral, as each side tried to match the acquisitions of its neighbor.1 While there were continual arguments over whether security policy should be based on The Insecurity Dilemma 35 observable capabilities—what the other side could do—or on intent— what the other side meant to do—there was, minimally, a material basis for arriving at assessments, whether correct or not. Today, the basis for assessing threats and potential consequences is of a quite different character, for three fundamental reasons. First, those structural features of international politics that constrained and directed security policies and practices between 1947 and 1991 have vanished, even as most of the institutions and many of the capabilities associated with the Cold War remain in...