The world is becoming ever more dangerous. Threats to the United States are multiple and complex. Just think of terrorists, rogue states, dangers arising from Middle East revolutions, cyber attacks, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the rising power of China. The list goes on.
It makes for a world “more unpredictable, more volatile and more dangerous,” as Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has put it. According to polls, most of America’s foreign policy elite thinks the world is as dangerous, or more dangerous than it was during the Cold War.
This belief, write the foreign policy analysts Micah Zenko and Michael Cohen, shapes debates on U.S. foreign policy and frames the public’s understanding of international affairs.
“There is just one problem,” they write in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, “it is simply wrong. The world that the United States inhabits today is a remarkably safe and secure place. It is a world with fewer violent conflicts than at virtually any other point in history.”
They add: “The United States faces no plausible existential threats, no great power rival, and no near-term competition for the role of global hegemon. The U.S. military is the world’s most powerful.” And though there are a variety of international challenges, they pose little risk to the overwhelming majority of American citizens, say the two scholars.
Take terrorism: Of the 13,816 people killed by terrorist attacks in 2010, only 15 (or 0.1 percent were U.S. citizens, according to the two scholars. Between 2006 and 2010, terrorist attacks world-wide declined by almost 20 percent and the number of deaths by 35 percent.
Zenko and Cohen argue that there is a disparity between foreign threats and domestic threat-mongering that America’s political and policy elites are unwilling to recognize and even more unwilling to integrate into national security decision-making.
Why? Hyping threats serves the interests of both political parties, and more so in an election year. Republicans turn up the volume of warnings to better attack Democrats’ alleged weakness in dealing with threats. Democrats exaggerate threats as a protection against Republican attacks.
The chronic exaggeration of threats, argue Zenko and Cohen, also serves as a justification for huge budgets for the military and America’s intelligence agencies.
Result: the militarization of foreign policy, a skewed allocation of funds and not enough emphasis on non-military national security tools.
Challenging what has become conventional wisdom, the two write that “American foreign policy needs fewer people who can jump out of airplanes and more who can convene round-table discussions and lead negotiations.”
Yet, the budgets of the two principal agencies of “soft,” rather than military power, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Department of State, pale in comparison with the Pentagon. Its enormous budget “not only wastes previous resources; it also warps national security thinking and policy-making.”
THE ONE-PERCENT DOCTRINE
Will the two scholars’ thought-provoking arguments prompt policy-makers to rethink? Probably not, but the fact that their piece appears in the house organ of America’s foreign policy establishment will spark debate – and no doubt criticism from defenders of the so-called 1.0-percent doctrine, the notion that no effort must be spared to counter a threat even if there is only a 1.0-percent chance that it will materialise.
Counter-intuitive though it may seem, given a daily diet of news on bloodshed from places around the world, Zenko and Cohen are not alone in insisting that the world has become a safer place.
Last year, Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard, published an influential book, “The Better Angels of our Nature,” that traces the decline of violence over the centuries.
“Believe it or not – and I know that most people do not – violence has declined over long stretches of time,” Pinker writes. “And today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.” That decline is an unmistakable development, visible on scales from millennia to years, he says.
Pinker admits that his assertion may strike some as “between hallucinatory and obscene”, given that the new century began with more than 3,000 people killed in the attacks on New York and Washington and that wars inIraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur killed thousands more.
But relatively speaking, the beginning of the 21st century and all of the 20th (despite two world wars and the holocaust) featured less bloodletting than earlier eras. In the 17th century, for example, the Thirty Years’ War reduced the population of Germany by a third.
Do such numeral comparisons change perceptions? Not according to Pinker. “Our cognitive faculties predispose us to believe that we live in violent times,” he writes in the preface to his book, “especially when they are stoked by media that follow the watchword ‘if it bleeds, it leads.’”
