The bursting global security bubble

By Hugh Gusterson

Human history is the story of complacence. While disaster is fresh in our memory, we take precautions. As the memory of disaster recedes, kept alive only in history books and the fading memories of the aged, we assume that the fruits of precaution are the natural order of things. So we start to take risks. And if the risks pay dividends in the short term, we take more risks, finding reasons not to see that we’re building an edifice of risk that can only eventually collapse under its own weight.

So it was that financiers, economists, congressmen, and regulators talked themselves into believing over the last decade that the economic laws of gravity had somehow been repealed. Otherwise intelligent people professed to believe that house prices could climb far in excess of any other indices of wealth and that a substantially unregulated new banking system, based largely on mortgages and their derivatives, could arise without calamity. If in the short term this produced great prosperity — especially for Wall Street and the politicians and regulators who enabled such a pyramid scheme — the longer-term consequence was a calamity whose full extent we don’t yet know.

And what of the other shoe? Are we at least doing a better job of keeping World War III or a nuclear calamity at bay? I think not.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan show that we have already unlearned the main lesson of Vietnam — that occupying faraway countries usually ends badly. (This lesson was articulated in the so-called Powell Doctrine back when former Secretary of State Colin Powell was a reasonable person.) U.S. troops are now involved in direct military attacks against the territory of a nuclear power, Pakistan. Thus, Washington is violating a principal rule of the road the two superpowers worked out during the Cold War: Never let the troops of two nuclear powers engage one another directly.

In addition, Washington is going to extraordinary lengths to weaken the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty so that U.S. companies can reap the short-term financial benefits of selling nuclear fuel and technology to India. And, ignoring the advice of many arms control experts, the five U.S. presidential administrations in power since the end of the Cold War have been slow to secure loose nuclear material, reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world, and have failed to de-alert nuclear weapons still on hair-trigger alert or negotiate a fissile material cut-off treaty. Not to mention, the Air Force has become so careless about nuclear safety that it recently flew nuclear-armed cruise missiles across the country without realizing it.

Then there’s the matter of Russia. George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev had a handshake agreement that NATO wouldn’t expand to Russia’s borders if the Soviets allowed Eastern Europe to go free. But in one of the most short-sighted and dishonorable decisions in recent U.S. history, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush found it convenient to violate this agreement. Currently, Washington is busy absorbing Russia’s former allies into NATO and building military bases and missile interceptor sites close to Russian territory. This is the military equivalent of building a financial empire based on credit default swaps. It’s also Versailles all over again, and we should hardly be surprised that the Weimar figure of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin has been replaced by the efficiently brutal neo-fascism of current Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin or that the Russians are planning to increase their military spending by 25 percent this year.

When financial systems and security orders collapse, we learn that everything is connected. This is a hard lesson for Americans to learn since we’re ideologically predisposed to believe that every man is an island who can be prosperous and secure while others are not. But now we’ve learned that when poor people in modest neighborhoods lose their homes, the money drains out of our retirement funds and investment banks collapse; and when U.S. banks collapse, they can take European banks and the Russian stock market with them. We’re (hopefully) about to see CEOs lose their mansions because they didn’t care that plumbers and mechanics were losing their three-bedroom starter homes.

Economists like to talk about soft and hard landings when economic bubbles burst. At the moment we’re in the midst of a very hard landing. And what about the security bubble we’ve created? Will that be a soft or hard landing when it bursts?

Hugh Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University, with expertise in nuclear culture and international security. His latest book is People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex (University of Minnesota Press, 2004). His article is excerpted from Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Web edition, 24 Sept. 2008, and was reprinted in PeaceMeal, Nov/December 2008.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

The real threat to U.S. security

By Rick Steves

The greatest risk to our society today is not Islamo-fascist terrorism, but the people who use that term to scare us. As the human, fiscal and ecological damage caused by our nation’s economic priorities grows, it’s becoming clear that we’re addicted to more than oil — we’re addicted to military spending, too.

The United States spends as much on its military as the rest of humanity combined: more than $400 billion annually — not including the hundreds of billions of dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These military expenses are “off limits” as we sharpen our collective pencils to find $39 billion to cut from domestic programs. And yet, despite our already huge military expenditures, these days it’s hard to get elected without promising even more military spending.

Recently, San Francisco Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval appeared on the Fox News program “Hannity & Colmes.” Frustrated by our government’s budget priorities, Sandoval suggested America would be better off without a military. Instead, he said, “we should invest our money in our kids.” Right-wing pundits pounced on these statements, and even many prominent Democrats distanced themselves from Sandoval.

Should we abolish the American military altogether? Of course not. But daydream with me for just a moment: What if we gradually scaled down military spending, chose not to rush off to foreign wars based on questionable motives, and began to take the name of our “Department of Defense” literally?

Let’s be honest: Is there anyone out there who would actually want to — or, more importantly, be able to — invade the United States? Consider today’s biggest perceived threat, al-Qaeda. Do Osama bin Laden and his gang want to ride into Washington DC, take over our government, and turn us into an Islamo-fascist nation? Or — as his recent offer of a “truce” suggests — do they instead want dignity for the Palestinians, Christian armies out of sacred Muslim territory, and freedom for the Arab world to control its own natural resources?

“We do not negotiate with terrorists,” our administration gravely informs us. But forcing our interests on the ever-more-volatile Middle East doesn’t seem to be helping much, either. Isn’t it ironic that this planet’s most overtly “Christian” nation is feverishly pounding plowshares into swords?

So let’s try something different. Imagine if we required our military to manage with a budget no bigger than all the militaries of our hemisphere combined: That’s Canada – $15 billion; Mexico – $6 billion; everyone from there to Tierra del Fuego – about $16 billion. Round the total up to $40 billion. Add to that a healthy sum to support the United Nations and our allies in their peacekeeping work (say $60 billion a year). Grand total: $100 billion.

That saves more than $300 billion a year, which we could use to tackle not “Islamo-fascism,” but more-fundamental concerns: dependence on oil, both foreign and domestic; a skyrocketing debt that allows other nations (such as China and Saudi Arabia) to gain economic and political leverage over our homeland; progressively violent weather and a rising sea caused by global warming; and a lower class that’s chronically in need of affordable housing, good education and reliable health care. We could even let the wealthy keep their tax cuts.

And what if we decided that, rather than being outvoted routinely in the U.N. 140-4 on Cuba, Israel, torture, the international court, and issues of desperate importance to the developing world (such as global warming, land mines, debt relief and AIDS), we believed it was good for our “homeland security” interests to be supported by the U.N. 140-4? Instead of being at odds with the rest of the world, we could join the family of nations in dealing with the pressing problems that confront us all.

I have many friends in Europe named “Frankie” or “Johnny” who were born in the late 1940s. Every time I see them, I’m reminded that there was a time when our allies in Europe gave their children Yankee names in gratitude for what America meant to them. This can happen once again across the world: America can become a superpower in a positive sense — so appreciated that other nations would fund their militaries to protect us.

The prospect of al-Qaeda attacks is frightening. But America is being held hostage not by a man in a cave, but by clever people with a different agenda. They use Osama bin Laden to scare us — even terrorize us — into funding an agenda that’s weakening our country.

It’s time for patriots to stand up to fear-mongering and broaden our definition of “sanctity of life” and “homeland security.” It’s time for some courage and eloquence on the left. And it’s time for our electorate to wake up and see the real threats to our for-the-time-being-still-great nation. If we rose to this challenge, I think we could report that “the state of our union is strong” — and it would be true.

Travel writer Rick Steves (www.ricksteves.com), based in Edmonds, Wash., produces and hosts the public-television series "Rick Steves' Europe" and the public-radio show "Travel with Rick Steves." His op-ed was published in The Seattle Times, 2 March 2006, and reprinted in PeaceMeal, Nov/December 2006.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)