Wednesday, January 19, 2005
(9:25 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Global Security Threat
In a recent Foreign Affairs article (found via Political Theory), Francis Fukayama mentions that some people believe that the United States presents a greater threat to global security than does Islamist terrorism. Of course we know that for Fukayama, such a conclusion is impossible and absurd, as is any statement in the form "The United States presents a greater threat to global security than x." I'm sure that this would be the case for most US commentators, except for the fringe lefty types (none of whom, it should be noted, have syndicated columns in major newspapers or positions of power in the Democratic party).It seems to me that this is the case because "global security" is taken to mean the continued hegemony (here taken as a descriptive, rather than pejorative term) of nations that embrace the two-pronged strategy for achieving a rational freedom: some form of parliamentary democracy, coupled with a free market economy. The United States, as the most successful implementation of this two-pronged strategy, is the model and guarantor of any possible "global security" worthy of the name.
What if, however, we took a different view of "global security"? What if, for instance, we defined it not in terms of the continued stability of particular structures of political economy, but rather in terms of the likelihood of survival? After all, most people would view their own personal "security" first and foremost in terms of their own life and only secondarily in terms of various structures (one's home, job, etc.). Thus, in this definition, the greater threat to global security would be the force that is more likely to get one killed. Now here I'm going to throw out a hypothesis, which admittedly is not yet backed up by actual numbers. (If someone can give me stats on this, that would be great, but my Google research skills have apparently gotten rusty.) I would venture to guess that within, say, the last four years, deaths resulting directly from US military operations have far exceeded deaths resulting directly from terrorism. I would venture to guess that this is the case even if one uniformly defines all Iraqi insurgent attacks as terrorist attacks.
Thus, if we think of global security in terms of not inflicting death on civilians, then it would seem that the US is in fact a greater threat to global security than is Islamist terrorism, since one is statistically more likely, on a global level, to be killed by agents of the US government than by terrorists. (Of course, this equation changes if we look at it just in terms of the US or even of Western powers in general -- the citizens of those nations are much more likely to be killed by terrorists than by agents of the US government. But we were supposedly talking about "global security," not "Western security.") Thus, those who view the United States as a greater threat to global security than Islamist terrorism are not taking as absurd a position as it is usually assumed to be. In fact, their position may well conform rather closely to the dictates of common sense.
UPDATE: I added parentheses to a sentence in the final paragraph that seems to have created confusion; I then added an additional clarifying sentence within the parentheses.
