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Redefining National Security
Michael T. Klare, The Nation
… The risk that this economic downturn, like other severe ones in the past, will lead to an upsurge in global violence was highlighted on February 12 by Admiral Dennis C. Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, in testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications,” he declared. “[A]ll of us recall the dramatic political consequences wrought by the economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, the instability, and high levels of violent extremism.”
In these few words, Blair announced a revolution in American strategic thinking: For the first time since the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, the distressed state of the world economy rather than a particular adversary or ideology was cited as the greatest threat to US national security.
Unfortunately, Blair did not go on (at least in public testimony) to identify the sort of situations in which he anticipated a similar upsurge of extremist violence this time around. He did, however, suggest that “the longer it takes for the recovery to begin, the greater the likelihood of serious damage to US strategic interests….Statistical modeling shows that economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year period.” Clearly, this crisis will last for two years, at the very least, and so we can expect a growing frequency of what he called “regime-threatening instability.”
Michael T. Klare, Nation defense correspondent, is professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College. His latest book is Rising Power, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy.
(12 March 2009)
When the repairman turns radical
Rod Dreher, Dallas Morning News
The repairman finished working on our dishwasher and stepped outside to present his bill. My wife and I were working in the garden, and the repairman – I’ll call him Dave – said it was good to see younger folks planting vegetables in their back yards. He was surprised, though, to see hens puttering about.
… Dave, I should mention, is a middle-aged white guy who lives in southwest Dallas, well informed and by no means a talk-radio crank. If you were to say he had no respect for the leadership class in Dallas, you would be correct. But it doesn’t stop there.
“I’m a conservative Republican, but I voted Libertarian last time,” he told me. “I knew we weren’t going to win, but I was sick and tired” – here his voice rose – “of those no-count Republicans, and I sure wasn’t going to vote for a liberal Democrat.”
Well, of course not, I said, and besides, the Clinton Democrats were just as chummy with Wall Street as the Bush Republicans. Dave agreed, but he wasn’t about to turn the GOP loose.
“Oh, now they’re saying they not going to go along with all that big spending,” he said. “Well, excuse me, mister, where were you these past eight years? George W. Bush, I voted for him twice, but he wasn’t too smart, was he? ‘The economy is looking up,’ he said. Bull. It was all on paper.
… What happens when people like him become convinced that the system is set up to reward lobbyists, lawyers, rent-seekers, developers, corporate interests, special-pleaders and sundry freeloaders lining up to nuzzle the ever-expanding government teat – all at their expense? What happens when the repairman loses faith in the institutions of government, of commerce, of civil society? When the kind of man who makes up America’s backbone concludes that nobody else seems to believe in the common good anymore, so why should he?
I fear we’re going to find out before too much longer. And we’re not going to like it.
Rod Dreher is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist.
(13 March 2009)
Dreher is peak-oil aware and is one of the editors at Front Page Republic, which articulates a new (old) kind of concsevativism. -BA
The heat is on Bill Gates
Joseph Romm, Salon
He now works to solve humanity’s greatest problems with his foundation — yet has no program to curb global warming. That does not compute.
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the richest foundation in the world, has taken on the noble challenge of helping billions of people, those who “never even have the chance to live a healthy, productive life,” reach that opportunity themselves.
In the face of that daunting task, which has proven such an intractable challenge for national governments and international aid agencies, Bill Gates retains the techno-optimism that drove his unbridled success at Microsoft.
… Now, you might think a foundation focusing on third-world “sustainable” development would devote some significant portion of its resources toward preventing catastrophic global warming. After all, on our current emissions path, we will have destroyed a livable climate by 2100. Most every independent scientific and economic analysis says the developing world will suffer horribly. This goes double for the region Gates is focusing much of the foundation’s resources on — Africa, a continent facing climate-driven desertification in the north and the south, a continent with huge coastal populations.
But, in fact, the Gates Foundation has no program to help prevent global warming. Back in 2006, when Gates first announced that he planned to spend most of his time running the foundation, Newsweek raised the climate change issue in an interview:
(9 March 2009)
