Analysing security - the US position on its security after the Cold War - some major threats to its security.

The United States and its security after the Cold War.

        In 1998, the United States was the globe’s biggest spender, accounting for over one-third of the world’s total military expenditures of $745 billion. At the same time, the US, just like China, Russia, India and North Korea, had an army with over one million soldiers. For the year 2002, the US military budget has been around $340 billion. That of 1999 was $232 billion and in 1993, $291billion. If taking an average of the US military budget from 1948 till 1989 that is during the Cold War period, we see that it was around $250 billion, not including the Korea and Vietnam eras. US military expenditures in 1999 were more than the next fifteen biggest spenders combined; Russia and China, second behind the United States in defence spending, together in 1998 allocated $180 billion less than the United States annually for their militaries. Where does all this money go? Why does it spend so much on its security?

        The world has witnessed many important changes as regard the distribution of power over the past decade. The Soviet Union has collapsed and Russian power remains arguably in decline. China’s influence on the other hand, has risen rapidly and is likely to continue grow. This change in scenario prompted the US government to make some adjustments. These are in fact reflected in the closing down of hundreds of military bases at home and abroad with the result that tens of thousands of people whose livelihood depended on military services have lost their jobs. The size of the uniformed military services has shrunk measurably and the deadly nuclear arsenals built by the Cold War adversaries have been drastically reduced. The American military budget has been in fact cut by 40 percent and the armed forces personnel by a third since the Cold War peak. In a few words, US national security policy is in decline, relatively compared to an ascending China, Japan, Germany and an integrating European Union pursuing a common security policy. The reality for the US is that it now faces stiff trade competition and its rival economies are growing at a pace that is threatening to cut into the US share of the global financial pie. In the long run, these trends might reduce US influence and its ability to lead in world affairs.

        Yet, as the aforementioned figures suggest, it is well far from the end of an era for the US and the dominance of security in its foreign policy is still on. Quite the contrary of what many argue, I still think that the main reality of the global balance of power is the same as it was in 1990: the US remains as the only superpower with global assets in all dimensions of power – military, economic and political, and those who had forecasted an inevitable American decline only a decade ago have been proven wrong. Yes, I agree that it would be wrong to state that a unipolar world has now taken place instead of the bipolar world of the Cold War. But the US is still playing a major world role and despite that the Cold War is over, as former US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger proclaimed in 1993 “The dangers of the period into which we are going can be unpleasant, if not as bloody, as most of the first fifty years of this century.” What this statement implies for sure is that for a major power like the US, be there a New World Order (as George Bush eagerly proclaimed in the aftermath of the Cold War) or not, it will not relax on its security measures since there exist a big range of issues and problems which serve as a threat to its national security.

The major difference from the time of the Cold War is that now, while the US needs to continue strengthening its security, it has no identified enemy. Before 1989, that enemy was the Soviet Union. Now, that enemy comes under the form of many threats. The problems of nuclear weapons, terrorism, regional conflicts with the usual UN incapability to handle them, and the overthrowing of democracies, are still existent threats to the security of the United States. For sure, there are many important security, economic, and political goals that the United States cannot achieve on its own.  This explains why the US requires a long list of regional alliances so that with their help, either direct help or indirect one, it achieves its targets. The fact that today, the US still stations more than 100,000 troops in Europe, another 100,000 in Asia and 20,000 in and around the Persian Gulf out of many others, proofs all of this.  A case in point is the military aid that the US annually gives to Israel, which reached the $1.98 billion figure in 2001, and which is scheduled to increase by $60 million each year until 2008. The NATO partners play a key role in the US shaping of the political world and the US is forging also new alliances especially in the Asian continent to safeguard its influence. Institutions and bureaucracies that today influence US choices and which have sometimes competing and sometimes complementary interests to those of hers must take also great account. Such organizations or bureaucracies include not least the UN, the NATO, the EU, the CSCE, the Organization of American States, the World Bank and the IMF.

About regional conflicts, nuclear weapons, and terrorism.

For the US therefore, the maintaining of world stability is an imperial necessity to enhance its security. This is reflected in the ever-increasing policy of ‘soft power’. This implies the ability to achieve desired outcomes in international affairs through attraction rather than coercion. Opposite to military force or economic sanctions, soft power aims to get others to do what you want. Such soft power can rest on the appeal of one’s ideas or the ability to set the agenda in ways that shape the preferences of others. For the US for example, it is a must to impose this so-called ‘soft power’ onto regimes in strategic important states such as in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel, out of many others, so that it can have a better grasp of the regional happenings. The United States remains a global leader in soft power resources, as is evident in the movement toward democracy and free markets in many states over the past decade, and as history suggests, liberal democracies are less likely to fight one another. In fact, the avoidance of regional and local conflicts is given a prominent importance in the security agenda of the United States. For it appears to be that even a distant war in a tiny nation can affect American interests, both at home and around the world. The effects of an internal conflict can spill over into neighbouring countries, including regions of strategic importance or even the United States. The military coup in Haiti for example prompted thousands of Haitians to risk their lives on the high seas to seek refugee on American soil. A conflict in Africa can affect the supply of oil to America and the breakdown of law and order in Columbia has benefited narco-traffickers, who export drug and violence to American streets and schools. The war in Bosnia could have sparked a wider conflagration in Europe, affecting some of America’s NATO allies and many of the continents’ democracies. Adding to this, a nation that is paralysed by a conflict will not make a reliable partner for the US and while an isolated conflict might not impinge on US interests, the accumulative effect of dozens of conflicts will hinder US capability to shape a more secure and stable world. All this therefore clearly explains why the US (besides many other hidden interests) is always on the forefront as soon as a regional or local conflict breaks up.

Neither has the Cold War signalled any end to the nuclear nightmare, as a huge spread of weapons of mass destruction are still in existence. The stopping of all these weapons – nuclear, chemical, and biological and the ballistic missile technology that might carry them, figured prominently on the Clinton’s security agenda. The US has long been a chief advocate of the nuclear non-proliferation regime centred on the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). There are five nuclear weapons states enumerated in the Treaty – the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China. India and Pakistan have also recently carried out some nuclear tests, and by reputation, one includes also Israel. The recently called by President Bush axis-of-evil countries of Iran, Iraq and North Korea, have recently had their nuclear programs halted but the suspects remain there and all three were put on Bush’ black list. The permanent extension of the NPT in 1995 was an encouraging sign that the non-proliferation regime was holding. But there are still big problems to solve. The demise of the Soviet Union had left nuclear weapons in the possession of four republics: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Now, the greatest threat for the US today as regard the nuclear arena is about the danger that nuclear materials might escape from control in states of the former Soviet Union and become available in the black market, with the great possibility of being used in regional conflicts where in almost Cold War style, several nations are seeking to build a deterrent force to serve as a counter-balance to ‘Western aggression’. For such reasons, America is giving assistance to Russia through the Defence Department’ Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (CTR) which began in 1991, to control these problems. The CTR had the basic aim to assist Russia to reach its strategic arms reduction to the Strategic Nuclear Arms Reduction Treaty (START) levels and to assist Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan in becoming non-nuclear weapon states, which they achieved in 1995 and 1996, signing non-nuclear signatories to the NPT. The CTR is working also with Russia to eliminate many types of ballistic missiles, to have more security while storing and transporting nuclear weapons, and to eliminate plutonium. Presently, the CTR is launching similar campaigns in Moldova, Georgia and Uzbekistan. Programs have already started to bring Russia’s nuclear arsenal below START II levels and there are already negotiations to have a START III.

The CTR Program is one of the most effective and efficient tools wielded by the US government to ensure a more stable international environment, reduce weapons of mass destruction and prevent their proliferation, while forging strong and enduring ties with the former Soviet republics. However, the future of US national security policy in the area of arms control, strategic missile defence, disarmament and non-proliferation is much harder to anticipate. Such statement comes as a result of the fact that in October 1999, the US rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and pledged to fund creation of a limited anti-ballistic missile defence to intercept and destroy from outer space missiles launched accidentally by a nuclear power or by a rouge state such as North Korea and Japan. Critics complain that the costly missile defence system is misguided. And the nuclear problem seems also to be steadily extending to Third World countries where ballistic missiles are multiplying, including the possibility of delivering with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. This makes for a North-South nuclear divide of what had previously been an East-West confrontation.

For sure, the world’s nuclear nightmare is not yet over and for the coming years, it will highly feature on the US security agenda.

Finally there is the threat of terrorism. In recent years, terrorism has been primarily viewed as an international and foreign policy issue. Numerous acts of state-sponsored terrorists and of foreign-based groups have given support to this notion. While US policies, citizens and interests are prime targets for international terrorism, the vast majority of those acts took place on foreign soil. International terrorism is recognised as a threat to US foreign and domestic security and also undermines a broad range of US foreign policy goals as it erodes international stability, which is a major foreign and economic policy objective for the United States. The 11th September events have brought with them a national conscience that terrorism is becoming a major threat to the national security of the US and that it is also a kind of threat that cannot be solved by classical military means. And as we have witnessed, the terrorist threat has a very wide range of means to achieve its targets – from the use of nuclear weapons, to the use of biological and chemical weapons such as anthrax, ricin, or sarin. From the simple placing of bombs, to plane hi-jacking. Recent years have seen the rise of a new type of terrorist less interested in promoting a political cause and more focused on the eradication of what they define as evil. Their motives are often a distorted form of religion, and they consider weapons of mass destruction to be a suitable means to their ends. However, the silent cry through terrorist means generally against the foreign policies of the western major powers on issues such as the Middle East is still a reality, as we have witnessed on 11th September. The event, prompted US President George W. Bush to declare a war on terrorism, both against the terrorist groups and all those that finance them or help them in any way. However, Bush’s strategy is obviously somewhat tricky and quite difficult to fulfil since terrorism, happens to be a very ambiguous subject.

First and foremost is the difficulty in defining terrorism and pinpointing terrorist groups. There exists no universally accepted definition of international terrorism. Current definitions of terrorism all share one common element: politically motivated behaviour. Such definitions do not include therefore violence for financial profit or religious motivation and thus, this number may grow in light of expanding international criminal activity and an increasing number of extremists acts carried out in the name of religious and cultural causes. All this thus complicates Bush’s foreign policy as one questions: where and when will the US put the final line in its list of terrorist-linked countries and second, how will the other countries which are supposed to form an axis with the US in its war against terrorism, agree on the countries or organisations which are to be attacked since there exist such varied definitions on terrorism? In fact, China raised more than its eyebrows at the US mentioning of North-Korea in Bush’s “axis of evil” and whilst Iraq relationship with the West needs no emphasis, whether Iran is a friend or a foe does need further explanation and clarification. Other countries such as Libya, Syria, Sudan and Cuba are also terrorist-linked. What is for sure is that to achieve these goals, the US needs an axis of its own in combating this “axis of evil”, and this support seems more fragile than it should be.

Conclusion

        Concluding this write-up, I think that it is crystal clear how much security is a dominant force in determining today’s US foreign policy as many American effort in venturing its foreign policy is thrown in the preventing and safeguarding of its security, under the many possible forms. For a major power like the US, which is playing such a major world role, is continually vulnerable to attacks and criticism, all of which finally result in the threatening of its security. The whole range of goals, which it needs to secure or to fight against in order to safeguard its security, is enormous, and surely well explains the aforementioned figures which the US reserves annually to its security.

        Whether US policy in doing so is right or wrong is another debate that needs another write-up of its own to be answered. What is for sure is that with so many new threats, the US needs to depart from its Cold War security policy and frame its mind on these non-classical problems for which it seems that the US is still ill-suited to combat them. Keeping its own axis together might be another future problem for the US as conflict of interests between its own partners are highly developing, which problem will surely weaken US dominance. The answer for these problems might lay in the shifting of priorities of its foreign policy where reducing annually its military budget, will give her ample time and resources to concentrate more on these hidden threats.

        

                

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