The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon

Certainly this is the view of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General David Petraeus. General Petraeus told Kaldor that “we still need to be able to do the full spectrum of operations.” The operative word for Robert Gates seems to be balance. He talks about the need to “rebalance” the Department of Defense’s programs “in order to institutionalize and enhance our capabilities to fight the wars we are in today and the scenarios we are most likely to face in the years ahead, while at the same time providing a hedge against other risks and contingencies.”¹ And in an article in Foreign Affairs, he wrote:

The strategy strives for balance in three areas: between trying to prevail in current conflicts and preparing for other contingencies, between institutionalizing capabilities such as counterinsurgency and foreign military assistance and maintaining the United States’ existing conventional and strategic technological edge against other military forces, and between retaining those cultural traits that have made the U.S. armed forces so successful in the past and shedding those that hamper their ability to do what needs to be done.²

Our argument, however, is that human security is more than just an add-on, more than just the “soft” end of national security. It is a way of reframing the so-called “hard” issues—a full paradigm shift. Indeed, the epithets hard and soft are rather misleading. The paradox is that a human-security approach is often a hard security strategy insofar as it involves the use of force. In contrast, the main purpose of the conventional and nuclear arsenal is soft: it is for deterrence and prestige. These forces are not intended to be used. They are psychological signals—forms of communication—aimed at demonstrating military strength to prevent the use of force by other powers and to underpin political power. But they are very expensive, and even dangerous, signals, and it is not evident that they work.

In the book The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Robert Kagan says that “the world has become normal again.”³ By “normal,” he means that competition among sovereign states backed by military power has returned. He argues that there are three major conflicts in the world—one between the great powers (the United States, the European Union, Russia, China, Japan, and India), one between liberalism and autocracies (e.g., Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Burma, and Zimbabwe), and one between radical Islam and modern secular ideologies. Of course, it is true that there is competition among the major powers in the world, that many people still live under repressive regimes, and that an extremist global Islamist movement is involved in many conflicts and terrorist incidents. But does this constitute a return to the Cold War or to nineteenth-century imperial rivalry? And is hard power the only way to deal with these challenges?

Russia calls itself a “sovereign democracy.” Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has maintained a façade of democracy—holding regular elections, for example—while making sure that there is no meaningful alteration in leadership. As one commentator put it, it maintains not “just the monopoly of power but the monopoly of the competition for it.”⁴ In the 1990s, under Boris Yeltsin, there was much more freedom than there is today, but there was also chaos. When Vladimir Putin came to power, he took control of the energy sector and the media, persecuted opponents, and suppressed Western-type NGOs. For Russia, sovereign democracy implies political independence, military strength, and cultural identity—it refers to “different national paths to democracy” and emphasizes stability and antipopulism.

Russia has become a petro-state. Although this has produced wealth, it also means dependence on global markets. Because it is a petro-state, the regime is more or less independent of society—its revenue comes from energy exports rather than taxes. There is a liberal intelligentsia and, as one liberal told Kaldor, the “government is irrelevant. We just notice them when they stop the traffic in the street.” Or, as Stephen Holmes put it: “Those at the top neither exploit nor oppress those at the bottom. They do not even govern them; they simply ignore them.”⁵

China, of course, still has a nominally Communist regime, but it has presided over the dramatic growth of a capitalist economy. China is thus deeply interconnected with the rest of the world. This is reflected in a much more cooperative foreign policy and in the growth of spaces within China for debate and discussion both on the Internet and in newly formed associations. Chinese leaders also emphasize the importance of a traditional understanding of sovereignty. Like Russia’s, this concept of sovereignty is related to capacity. According to the scholar, Bates Gill, “Those rulers who, through the exercise of wangdao (benevolent governance), maintain domestic stability and prosperity while also achieving peace and respect abroad, earn the mantle of sovereign legitimacy.”⁶

The transformations of Russia and China are reflected in the evolution of their security policies. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia presided over a dramatic decrease in military spending along with a much greater interest in, and indeed enthusiasm for, a cooperative approach to international problems. The Gorbachev concept of a “common European home” continued to be supported during this period. There were, of course, conflicts, especially in post-Soviet space, and in particular in the Caucasus—Chechnya, Ossetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno Karabakh—where Russia, or parts of the Russian state apparatus, played a role in both fomenting war and negotiating peace.

The rise of Putin led to a return to more traditional security thinking. Military spending has increased. The conflict in Chechnya has been stabilized at considerable human cost. Putin’s designated successor, Dmitry Medvedev, has announced a new national-security strategy that will boost the conventional armed and nuclear forces to counter what is viewed as a growing threat from NATO. The new security strategy envisages possible future military conflicts over energy resources and calls for Russia to rely on its own “strength.”⁷ It portrays the United States as Russia’s main rival and throughout the document refers to a “resurgent Russia.”⁸ According to the document, Russia has overcome the “consequences of the systemic political and socioeconomic crisis of the late 20th century” and has restored its capacity to promote its national interest through “multipolar international relations.”⁹ This view appeared to be confirmed in the short-lived invasion of Georgia in August 2008, which seemed to intimate a return of traditional threats.

Nevertheless, the security strategy also emphasizes the importance of Russian participation in multilateral organizations. It contains references to so-called nontraditional threats like terrorism, criminality, and religious extremism. And overall, Russia recognizes a version of human security, which is included in the current security concept: “The interests of the individual boil down to the implementation of constitutional rights and freedoms, the insurance of personal security, the raising of the quality and standards of life, as well as the physical, spiritual and intellectual development of the man and citizen.”¹⁰ Interestingly, Medvedev used the term human security to justify the incursion into South Ossetia. He claimed he was protecting Russian citizens from being attacked by Georgia. Medvedev has also proposed a new European security architecture.

Chinese security policy has also undergone considerable changes since the mid-1990s. Bates Gill has described how China showed much greater interest in security cooperation since the early 1990s, especially in the region. It has been active in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It has initiated a range of bilateral partnerships. It has resolved a number of territorial disputes. It has stopped providing assistance to Pakistani and Iranian nuclear programs and has, instead, become interested in nonproliferation. And whereas it supported insurgencies around the world in the name of self-determination, it is now strongly opposed to separatism and what it calls “splittism,” bearing in mind its own domestic unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang. The joint declaration of the leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2006 talked about the “Spirit of Shanghai”: “The Spirit of Shanghai is, therefore, of critical importance to the international community’s pursuit of a new and non-confrontational model of international relations, a model that calls for discarding the Cold War mentality and transcending ideological differences.”¹¹

Chinese leaders talk about being a “responsible great power” or about the “peaceful rise” of China, even though the term peaceful rise has been subject to some debate within China; it is argued that the term peaceful might restrict China’s options regarding Taiwan, while the term rise could be alarming to China’s neighbors. President Hu Jintao prefers to speak of peaceful development.

A particularly important political actor is the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which is generally considered conservative and hard-line. But even the PLA is said to be changing as a result of exchanges with other militaries through joint exercises and peacekeeping. Some commentators have noted the presence of a “quasi-liberal” discourse within the PLA, one that emphasizes multilateralism, international institutions, and confidence building, but it’s a minority view.¹²

By and large, both Russia and China see themselves primarily as traditional powers, despite some less traditional tendencies. This is reflected both in their emphasis on military strength and in their insistence on territorial integrity and respect of sovereignty. Chinese military spending has risen steadily, especially in the mid-2000s, even though it has declined as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), accounting for only 2 percent.¹³

Both Russia and China are rearming; both appear to have engaged in cyber warfare in recent years. China continues to adhere to the “five principles of peaceful coexistence” laid out at Bandung in 1955: mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity; mutual non-aggression; non-interference; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful coexistence. Russia insists on Principle 1 of the Helsinki Final Act: “the participating states will respect each other’s sovereignty. Equality and individuality as well as all the rights inherent in and encompassed by its sovereignty, including, in particular, the right of every state to judicial equality, to territorial integrity, and to freedom and to political independence.”

Both countries’ insistence on territorial integrity is linked to their failure to respect human rights—that’s why they fear interference. They both support regimes, like Sudan, that violate human rights. (There is much Western criticism of Chinese investment in Sudan and other African countires who do not respect human rights). Both Russia and China suppress domestic opposition, often brutally.

The evolution of security policy is, of course, the product of internal factors. But authoritarian leaders are typically obsessive about external threats. Immediately after the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact was dismantled, but NATO did not follow suit. On the contrary, former members of the Warsaw Pact have joined NATO, but Russia has been excluded. The West insists that NATO is not directed against Russia. But NATO is a traditional defensive alliance aimed at defending the borders of its members against traditional foreign enemies, and it is difficult to see who might be the enemy if not Russia. Moreover, the newer members of NATO tend to be rather explicit about their insecurities vis-à-vis Russia. Most recently the color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, said by Russia to have been orchestrated by the West, followed by the proposed membership of these two countries in NATO, have been cited as examples of Western hostile intentions. Just as important, at least according to the Russian rhetoric, was perhaps the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia during the dissolution of Yugoslavia, which represented the first revision of borders in Europe after the signing of the Helsinki Final Agreement that was not based on mutual agreement. And the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo crisis in 1999 without a UN Security Council resolution was claimed to be seen as a demonstration of the West’s readiness for the unilateral use of force.

It is impossible, of course, to prove a counterfactual. But in the case of Russia, had the West been ready to put more emphasis on a European security architecture that included Russia, it might have been possible to sustain a much more cooperative, less militaristic policy toward Russia. Indeed, the August 2008 war in Georgia may turn out to be the exception that proves the rule. Ever since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the United States has embarked on a geopolitical competition in the region, which, of course, borders Russia and is deeply interconnected with the instability in the North Caucasus. The area is rich in oil and has been cited in official U.S. documents as a crucial alternative to dependence on the Middle East. American military installations have been placed in Azerbaijan and Georgia, and the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline was deliberately designed to avoid Russia (and Iran). Moreover, the United States provided considerable military assistance to Georgia, which rapidly increased its military spending, and did nothing to restrain President Saakashvili’s increasingly militant behavior in the period preceding the war. At the time of the war, there were some 100 U.S. military specialists assisting the Georgian armed forces. The war began because of a Georgian attack on Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia; the Russians overresponded, not only repulsing the Georgians but moving into parts of Georgia and allowing irregular forces and “volunteers” to destroy villages and expel the Georgian population. U.S. actions in support of Georgia were cited as a sort of justification by the Russians, and the language they used to describe the invasion was a distorted imitation of Western language. Russia argued that the independence of Abkhazia and Ossetia was no different from the independence of Kosovo.

Indeed, the Western narrative is perhaps the most important influence on Russia and China. It is not just that Western rivalry offers an excuse for militaristic thinking, it is also, paradoxically, that Western behavior offers a model. The language of the War on Terror has been hugely important in justifying Russia’s behavior in Chechnya and China’s behavior in Tibet and Xingjian—not to mention the way in which the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, mainly Central Asian autocracies in addition to Russia and China, have banded together under the label of the War on Terror to suppress domestic unrest.

Would less emphasis on “hard” power by the United States tempt China to retake Taiwan? China’s official policy calls for the peaceful unification with Taiwan under the “one country, two systems” status. However, in 2005, an “Anti-Secession law” was passed, which states that the “state shall employ non-peaceful means and other necessary measures to protect China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity [Art. 8]” (italics added) should Taiwan Independence forces cause secession from China. Currently, both sides are seeking closer ties, although the “PRC (People’s Republic of China) continues to increase, upgrade, and modernize its military forces deployed opposite Taiwan [… ]”¹⁴ and Taiwan continues to acquire sophisticated military systems.

Despite the nationalist and militaristic rhetoric from the main-land, most commentators think that incorporation of Taiwan into China by military means seems unlikely. It is not clear whether the threat of military intervention by the United States is what deters such an adventure or whether, on the contrary, it is the threat that spurs militant language. But it is clear that such a move would disrupt Beijing’s growing emphasis on a peaceful international environment needed for economic development.

To say that Russia and China tend toward rather traditional geopolitical thinking does not mean that the West has to mimic their behavior. Indeed, one could go further and argue that military competition actually strengthens the hard-liners and prevents any dialogue about some of the most serious issues. What is striking is how little the West is concerned about the massive human-rights violations in Chechnya, Tibet, and Xingjian compared with, say, the Balkans and Africa. The West is much more concerned about the potential threat posed by Russia and China to the West than it is about the threats posed by those regimes to their citizens. Yet it is precisely because of their domestic fears that Chinese and Russian leaders are so fearful about outside interference. The problem with trying to match or overmatch military forces and emphasizing deterrence is that it offers a form of legitimation to Chinese and Russian military leaders.

A more cooperative, less militarized approach would, at best, remove insecurities, build on the nontraditional elements of security that are contained in both countries’ official security policies, strengthen those within both regimes who favor more cooperative approaches, and help to create space for internal change. At least it would remove some of the legitimation for the use of military force.

But civil society in Iran does not only include reformist tendencies; it is also composed of conservative, pro-government, and radical Islamist groups. Pro-government groups include Ansar-e Hezbollah, Muslim Students Following the Imam, and the Tehran Militant Clergy Association. Some groups are more extreme than the government. For example, in January 2007, the government closed down a fundamentalist Web site, which had accused Ahmadinejad of betraying the revolution because he watched a female dance show at the Asian Games in Qatar.

In contrast to Iran, North Korea, known as the “hermit kingdom,” is probably the last bastion of totalitarian communism. It is one of the most heavily militarized societies in the world; the army, according to the U.S. State Department, numbers some 1.2 million and is the fifth largest in the world. It is also one of the poorest countries in the world—millions died in the famine of the mid-1990s, known as the “arduous march,” and malnutrition persists. Arbitrary arrest, detention, and torture are widespread. The government runs huge prison camps where hundreds of thousands of citizens, including children, are enslaved. It also holds public executions where individuals are executed for stealing state property, hoarding food, and other “anti-socialist” crimes.

But even North Korea has changed since the 1950s and 1960s, when the Great Leader Kim Il-sung propagated a reign of terror and a cult of personality. Kim’s son, Kim Jong-Il, who succeeded his father in 1994, still rules in a personalistic, secretive, centralized way, but some commentators argue that the system of governance in North Korea today involves a degree of institutional competition between the ruling Workers’ Party, the military, the cabinet, and the security apparatus.¹⁶ More importantly, perhaps, in the aftermath of the famine, the government could no longer maintain control. It could not stop people from fleeing from the cities to the countryside to look for food or fleeing across the border to China, because the police and other officials had also fled. It could not stop illegal businesses from which officials take a cut. Nor could it control the spread of illegal CDs and DVDs, and even mobile phones, from South Korea.¹⁷ North Korea remains dependent on food aid from South Korea, Japan, China, and even the United States. This dysfunctional regime cannot survive, but whether it will collapse dangerously, with military elements using force to retain their power, or peacefully unify with South Korea remains a crucial unanswered question.

It can be argued that the main effect of military threats and sanctions in both Iran and North Korea is to strengthen hard-liners. In Iran, this began with the West’s support for Iraq in the long and bloody Iran-Iraq War, which greatly strengthened the position of the Islamists. During the 1990s, President Clinton pursued an aggressive containment policy in order to isolate Iran. He issued across-the-board sanctions on Iran in 1995 (due to pressure from a Republican-dominated Congress). There was some moderation of this policy after 2000. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in March of that year announced the easing of certain sanctions and called for people-to-people exchanges. She also offered open dialogue without conditions. However, Iran did not respond to the American offer and insisted on the complete lifting of sanctions prior to dialogue.

After 9/11, there was a real opportunity for rapprochement with Iran, which could have helped the reformist movement. Candlelit vigils were held in Tehran for the victims of 9/11, and in Iran’s football stadium, some 60,000 spectators respected a minute’s silence for the victims of 9/11. The Iranian government supported the United States initially in its war against the Taliban and helped to establish the new Afghan government. There was some shock, therefore, when Iran was included as part of the “axis of evil.”

In May 2003, the Iranian government sent a letter to the American government, based, according to Iranian diplomats, on a set of talking points proposed by American intermediaries. In the letter, Iran offered complete openness about its nuclear program, help toward stabilizing Iraq, an end to support for Palestinians, and help in disarming Hezbollah, in exchange for a halt in hostile American behavior and a statement that Iran does not belong to the “axis of evil.” The letter was ignored; hard-liners within the U.S. administration said, “We don’t talk to evil.”¹⁸

In a 2007 statement before the U.S. House of Representatives’ subcommittee on government oversight and reform, Hillary Mann Leverett, who served on the National Security Council in the Bush administration, said:

From an Iranian perspective, this record shows that Washington will take what it can get from talking to Iran on specific issues but it is not prepared for real rapprochement. From an American perspective, I believe that this record indicates that the Bush administration cavalierly rejected multiple and significant opportunities to put U.S.-Iranian relations on a fundamentally more positive and constructive trajectory.¹⁹

Yet aggressive policies do not seem to work. Zakaria Fareed argues that military strikes against Iran, by the United States or by Israel, would be “utterly counter-productive. Such a move would do limited damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities, rally the country round the regime, isolate the United States further in the world and probably prompt the Iranians to retaliate by sponsoring terror attacks.”²⁰ In the case of a military invasion, as in Iraq, the result would be even worse, mobilizing the country in a resistance movement united under an Islamist banner and resulting in an even longer war along the lines of Afghanistan. And if the actual use of military force would be counterproductive, then military threats either lack credibility or could drag those who issue them into an impossible situation.

The United States has never really tried to engage with Iran and has continuously pursued a strategy of sanctions and isolation. According to the Iran Nuclear Policy Group of the American Foreign Policy Project, “through endless repetition the myth has taken hold in some quarters that nuclear diplomacy with Iran has been tried and failed, leaving no recourse but threats and sanctions.”²¹

Sanctions also appear to be counterproductive, since the regime can use the sanctions to explain the current deep recession, as Iraq did before the fall of Saddam Hussein. Iran’s rationing system would ensure that the military and the elites would receive gasoline while the poor and middle classes would suffer; it would be easy enough for the Iranian government to put the blame on the United States just as Saddam Hussein did in Iraq.

According to Djavad Salehi-Isfahani at the Brookings Institution:

The sizeable majority of Iran’s economically disadvantaged population that supports the Ahmadinejad government is not poor in the sense of lacking food and shelter. Its support for the current government signifies a clear choice between a populist leader with oil money to distribute and his liberal opponents, who criticize his redistributive policies for being inflationary and dismiss them as mere charity. In this political atmosphere sanctions are likely to cement the authoritarian pact between the conservatives and the economic underclass and at the same time weaken the voices calling for greater social, political and economic freedom. … The sanctions on gasoline imports under review may be a god-send for President Ahmadinejad, who would use the sanctions as an excuse to raise gasoline prices to the middle class and use the proceeds to expand his popular base.²²

The best hope for solving the nuclear problem would be regime change in Iran. It would be paradoxical if the West gave the impression that the nuclear issue (the potential threat to the West or to Israel) was more important than the ongoing threats to ordinary Iranians every day. And, if by so doing, it helped the very people who are using repressive measures to prevent change.

The same sort of argument can be applied to North Korea, only to a more extreme degree. The threat of military conflict has been ever present since the end of the Korean War (1950 to 1953). Indeed, the Korean peninsula can be regarded as the last remnant of the Cold War, as massive military forces confront each other on either side of the demilitarized zone. The United States Pacific Command maintains tight surveillance over North Korean military activities and has developed numerous plans and contingencies for possible attacks. It could be viewed as part of a mutual imaginary confrontation in which both sides, North Korea and the United States, are locked.

In 1994, North Korea gave notice that it was about to withdraw from the nuclear nonproliferation treaty but was persuaded to freeze its nuclear program and “suspend” its withdrawal. In 2002, evidence surfaced that North Korea was violating this agreement; the following year, North Korea formally withdrew from the treaty after expelling inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Despite six-party talks convened by China, which included the United States, North Korea’s nuclear program seems to have been continued. The talks seemed close to getting somewhere in 2005, but in 2006, North Korea refused to return to the talks after the United States imposed financial sanctions.

In October 2006, North Korea undertook its first nuclear test. In a statement, the North Korean government said, “The Iraqi war teaches a lesson that in order to prevent a war and defend the security of a country and the sovereignty of a nation, it is necessary to have a powerful physical deterrent.”²⁵ In April 2009, North Korea successfully tested a medium-range ballistic missile, and in May 2009, it announced that it had successfully conducted a second nuclear test. The United Nations Security Council unanimously passed a resolution on June 12 to tighten sanctions targeting North Korea’s nuclear and missile-development programs; it encouraged United Nations members to inspect cargo vessels and airplanes suspected of carrying weapons and other military materiel. The United States and allies like Japan and South Korea have brought back measures, such as freezing North Korea’s overseas bank accounts, to which the regime strongly objected in the past.

In response, North Korea threatened a “powerful military strike.” According to the official statement: “We consider this a declaration of war against us. Any hostile act against our peaceful vessels, including search and seizure, will be considered an unpardonable infringement on our sovereignty, and we will immediately respond with a powerful military strike.” The statement also said that North Koreans “no longer feel bound by the armistice” that ended the fighting in the Korean War.²⁶

In addition to military pressure, the United States has also imposed sanctions on North Korea. The problem with sanctions is that the countries that have the most leverage over North Korea, China and South Korea, are skeptical about their utility. According to Sheila Smith at the Council on Foreign Relations

The Chinese position has been that to really push the North Koreans up against the wall, to harm them or to cut them out completely—of any kind of fuel oil or food aid—would have devastating consequences and would in fact push the North Koreans in the opposite direction. . . . The South Koreans themselves have felt that engagement has had a better chance of influencing North Korea than a more punitive sanctions kind of approach. ²⁷

It can be argued that the situation in North Korea is desperate—an ailing president presides over a cruel and increasingly chaotic impoverished society. We do not actually know what is happening inside North Korea, despite former president Clinton’s August 2009 visit to rescue two American journalists. It may be that the mad acts and statements of recent months are the last-ditch efforts of a regime on the verge of collapse—a moment when military provocation, far from acting as a deterrent, could be very dangerous.

In general, our argument is that hard power does not work when dealing with unpredictable dictators. It strengthens hard-liners, unites the population around anti-Western sentiments, and provides an incentive to acquire nuclear weapons—to deter attack. Sanctions and isolation may work sometimes, but they do not seem to have worked in these two cases. That’s why we need an alternative.

The Russians justified their intervention in Ossetia in terms of the “allegedly ongoing genocide” of Ossetians. They also claimed they were protecting Russian citizens. Those Russian citizens were actually Ossetians who had been given Russian passports. According to the official EU fact-finding mission, this “passportisation” of what were still Georgian citizens “runs against the principles of good neighbourliness and constitutes an open challenge to Georgian sovereignty and an interference in the internal affairs of Georgia.”²⁸ In any case, the disproportionate Russian response to the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali went well beyond the protection of civilians and involved setting up military positions deep inside Georgian territory. Moreover, the EU fact-finding mission records many violations of international humanitarian law and human rights, especially by irregular South Ossetian forces, which the Russians did nothing to restrain. These forces engaged in ethnic cleansing against ethnic Georgians and “systematic looting and destruction of ethnic Georgian villages.” Altogether some 850 people, most of them civilians, lost their lives, and some 135,000 people were displaced—of these, about 35,000 cannot return to their homes.

A humanitarian intervention is not the same as war. A humanitarian intervention has to be focused on the protection of civilians and cannot kill the very people it is supposed to protect. In the case of the Kosovo war, the aim was humanitarian but the means of war were highly problematic. In the case of Ossetia, it is less clear whether the aim was humanitarian or had to do with a growing geopolitical conflict with Georgia, but even if Russian statements are taken at face value, it cannot be described as a humanitarian intervention since it was not focused on the protection of civilians.

Kaldor first visited South Ossetia in the summer of 1995. She was ushered in to meet the so-called foreign minister of the enclave. To her surprise, a large portrait of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb war criminal brought to trial in The Hague in 2009, was prominently displayed on the wall. When she asked him about it, he said that the portrait had been presented to him by the Bosnian Serb delegation at a meeting of Eastern Christians and that he greatly admired the Bosnian Serbs’ stance on independence.

The story is revealing because it suggests that the Balkan parallel with Ossetia (and Abkhazia) is not Kosovo, as the Russians claim, but Republika Srpska. Republika Srpska is a Serb-dominated separate “entity” within Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was established during the war through expelling Muslims and Croats. Ossetia and Abkhazia, two breakaway statelets, originally provinces within the Soviet republic of Georgia, were created with Russian support during the breakup of the Soviet Union—probably as a way of maintaining control over the South Caucasus, which Russian traditionalists regard as their sphere of influence. At that time, of course, the Russian state was not unified, and so whether this was deliberate policy or part of the jockeying for power among sections of the military, remnants of the KGB, and Russian mafia who want to control Black Sea tourism will never be known.

The debate about the future of South Ossetia (and Abkhazia) is rarely framed in human terms, but instead in terms of status issues and geopolitics, the principle of territorial integrity versus the principle of self-determination. But this serves only to harden the conflict. When the debate is framed in human-security terms, different outcomes are possible. Does it matter whether Northern Ireland is part of Ireland, part of Britain, or part of Timbuctoo as long as Catholics and Protestants can live alongside each other in their own homes? Did it matter whether Yugoslavia remained one state or became six states (the six republics) or eight states (the six republics plus two autonomous provinces) or more, as long as individuals could live in their communities without fear of violence? In other words, the solution to the question of status should be secondary to the principle of human rights.

There is a strong case for the independence of Kosovo because there are good reasons to fear for the human rights of Kosovar Albanians, based on past experience, should the province be returned to Serbia. At the same time, there should be an international presence to guarantee the human rights of the Kosovar Serb minority. On the other hand, the independence of Republika Srpska or its annexation by Serbia could make the return of Muslim and Croat refugees and displaced persons (who represented the majority of the population before the war) even more difficult.

Independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia might be acceptable provided all the displaced persons could return and receive compensation, and provided an international presence (not Russia) could guarantee their human rights. And of course there are other possible permutations that could be acceptable, provided they were reached through agreement among all the relevant parties.

A frequent argument on behalf of hard power is energy security. The United States is no longer self-sufficient in oil. The Ukrainian “gas wars” of 2005/2006 and 2009 exposed the dependence of Europe on Russian oil and gas. For emerging economies such as China and India, energy and raw materials are crucial to sustain economic growth. The United States, Russia, and China all tend to adopt a strategic rather than a market approach to energy security. Military power is needed, so goes the argument, to secure access to energy, especially oil and gas. This argument is part of a broader idea that the United States has to retain “command of the commons”—air, sea, and space.²⁹

This kind of thinking is deeply embedded in a twentieth-century conception of hard security. In the two world wars, petroleum was defined as a “vital interest” because the military effort relied on motor vehicles, tanks, aircraft, and naval ships, all powered by oil. Both Germany and Japan depended on imported oil, and it is often argued that access to petroleum guided their strategic actions. This kind of thinking persisted during the Cold War years, when strategic reserves were built up on both sides, and remains important in scenario building and strategic planning in both the United States and Russia. Michael Klare, a specialist on resource conflicts, maintains that increasing competition between Russia, China, and the United States for energy supplies in the Persian Gulf, the Caspian, and Central Asia has led to a militarization of these areas.³⁰ According to Klare, the protection of U.S. oil and gas extraction is one of the reasons the United States created a military command structure for Africa (AFRICOM).³¹

What might be called the geopolitical approach to energy, however, no longer works in the context of twenty-first-century risks. In Iraq, despite the efforts to protect oil installations in the initial invasion, oil became a hugely important factor in the subsequent violence—oil was a factor in the sectarian conflict that raged through 2008, and oil rents, extracted through smuggling, looting, blowing up pipelines, or hostage taking, financed the violence. In the Caucasus, where Russia and the United States compete for influence, supposedly to gain access to oil, the competition for oil rents exacerbates instability and finances festering conflicts. The conflict in Chechnya, for example, was sustained for a long time through a mutual business between Chechen warlords and Russian generals; the former sold oil extracted from backyard oil wells to the latter, who, in turn, sold the oil received from the ministry of defense on the Moscow market.

Oil producers do, of course, use their dominance in energy supply as a political instrument. In 1973, Arab oil producers imposed an oil embargo on the West after the Yom Kippur War. Russia continues to subsidize oil and gas prices to former Soviet republics but in the event of political disagreements sometimes raises the price to commercial levels. Thus, it has cut off supplies or raised prices not only in the most publicized case of Ukraine but also in relation to Georgia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Belarus. Russia is not the only “offender” in this regard. Hugo Chávez often tries to use Venezuela’s oil resources to reward or punish allies in Latin America. But does military power prevent this type of behavior? Or does it, like Ukraine’s potential membership in NATO, provide a justification?

Geopolitics is based on the assumption that what matters is great power influence over states who deliver oil. This, however, is rarely the case. On the contrary, the competition for oil rents filters down through society. The biggest problem of contemporary oil producers has to do with governance. The days are over when oil installations could be insulated from popular pressure. At best, oil states like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and Azerbaijan survive on a mixture of patronage and repression, and are vulnerable to oil-price volatility. At worst, as in Iraq, they degenerate into weak states prone to violent upheavals. As two scholars at the Wilson Center put it: “[T]he United States, Europe, and Asia have not confronted the connection between foreign policies that tolerate or enable repression and corruption in many oil-producing countries, and the threats of terrorism, instability, and volatility they face today.”³²

The best way to achieve energy security is, first, through energy diversification, second through transparency of oil revenues, and third through human security. Energy diversification means investment in energy savings and alternative sources of energy. Transparency of oil revenues and pipeline payments helps to reduce endemic corruption. A human-security approach, as elaborated in this book, is the way to deal with the new risks that are exacerbated by competition for oil rents. And this applies to the broader argument about the global commons. After all, the main threat to trade routes today is piracy, not competing great powers.

Finally, energy security itself should be considered within a global rather than a national or a Western context. It should also include access to energy for every human being, including the poorest people. The focus on the security of energy supplies of industrialized countries and the competition among large energy importers risks ignoring the problem of energy poverty—the lack of access to heat or electricity or fuel in developing countries. In developing countries, high energy prices, or the disruption of fuel supply (oil-rich Nigeria regularly suffers from shortages of fuel), have much more grave consequences than those faced by developed consumer countries.

An enduring example of geo-state politics, resistant to the notion of shared sovereignty, and wholly inimical to the concept of human rights, is the persistence of nuclear weaponry. Even the language of nuclear disarmament, as expressed by presidents Obama and Medvedev, and many other politicians around the world, confirms a twentieth-century view of sovereignty utterly at variance with the changing perspectives in a global era. It a bizarre anachronism that we have negotiated bans on land mines and cluster munitions on the grounds that these types of weapons inherently violate human rights and international humanitarian law on account of their indiscriminate nature, yet we treat nuclear weapons as though they might not.

The main argument for continuing to possess nuclear weapons is deterrence. That, after all, was the basis of the case for accumulating large numbers of nuclear weapons during the Cold War; they were supposed to deter an attack, whether conventional or unconventional, by the Soviet Union against the democracies of the West. But did they? It is often argued that deterrence kept the peace during the Cold War. Quite apart from the fact that there were many wars during this period outside of Western Europe and North America, the problem with this argument is that it can only be disproved, not proved. Had the Soviet Union attacked the West, then we would know that deterrence does not work. But we do not know whether the Soviet Union would have attacked the West had the West not possessed nuclear weapons. What we do know is that the arms race kept alive the idea of war—it was not peace but “imaginary war” that was experienced in Europe during the Cold War. Indeed, the arcane arguments about strategic, sub-strategic, and tactical weapons were all about how nuclear weapons might be used in the scenarios dreamed up by military planners. The term arms control has to be understood in the context of deterrence. It was about keeping alive the idea of war while minimizing the risks of such a war becoming real. Hence, arms control was directed against so-called defensive weapons and against sub-strategic or tactical weapons that were thought to be “usable,” while preserving the capacity for “mutually assured destruction.”

Since the end of the Cold War, we have plenty of proof that deterrence does not work. The American possession of nuclear weapons did not deter the 9/11 bombers—they inflicted mass destruction even if they did not use what are formally defined as weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)—nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological weapons. Likewise, British nuclear weapons did not deter the use of polonium, which could be described as a radiological weapon (i.e., a WMD) according to the formal definition, to poison the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinov repeatedly in a Sushi Bar. A cartoon in the British magazine Private Eye showed Prime Minister Blair saying to Putin, “We need new nuclear weapons,” and Putin replying, “Try Sushi.”

Actually, President George W. Bush used a similar argument. In the National Security Strategy of 2002, it was argued that deterrence does not work against rogue states and terrorists. Suicide bombers and mad leaders do not fear retaliation; indeed, they might welcome retaliation since they do not care about human life and it would prove that they are involved in a war against the West. This explains Bush’s emphasis on counter-force to deal with proliferation—hence the threats against Iran. But if leaders like Ahmadinejad are not rational, even a threat could be dangerous. And if deterrence only works against states that are rational, why do we need nuclear weapons at all? Surely no rational state would threaten to use them. We need another approach.

Nuclear weapons need to be reframed as a humanitarian issue, and deterrence needs to be reframed as prevention. In particular, nuclear weapons should be criminalized. The threat or use of nuclear weapons should be treated as a war crime or a crime against humanity and should be included in the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Since a nuclear war could destroy the world, everything must be done to prevent a nuclear war from happening—not through threats, which risk provoking mad reactions, but through the type of strategies discussed in this book

It is often said that nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented. That is true, but the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons does not reside in a single individual but in social infrastructure that involves a complex combination of specific skills, knowledge, and equipment. States alone have the capacity to build such infrastructures. The current fear is that terrorists will get hold of nuclear materials. But terrorists could not construct their own infrastructure. They would need access to states. Thus, the best way to prevent this from happening is to dismantle the global nuclear infrastructure, and this would require extensive international monitoring and verification that would further strengthen the interconnection of states. Perhaps the most important task is to break the link between nuclear weapons and great-power status, something that would involve a profound change in global public discourse—a shift from geopolitics to human security.

Absolute state sovereignty, war mentality, territorial inviolability, and aspects of superpower rivalry are remnants of the industrial and imperial age. But hard power is hard to shift. The twentieth-century wars established huge embedded institutions in our societies, both in the West and among the newly emerging great powers like Russia, China, and India. Dictators oppose interference. The left fears imperialism. Organizations don’t like change. Statesmen, soldiers, and civil servants naturally think the way they have always done things is the right way to do things. Moreover, the identity of the state is often bound up with a militarized notion of security. Thus, the War on Terror was a popular policy because it reflected popular assumptions about the nature of American power, however out of date. In the same way, it is helpful for Iran, China, and Russia to have a Western enemy. But these are old battles and old wars, and there’s no virtue in fighting them again. Traditional military power no longer works as a way of dealing with potential spoilers like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea; indeed, perceiving them as military threats may have the opposite effect of what is intended—legitimizing the buildup of armaments as well as domestic repression. Instead, such states need to be embedded in an interconnected global framework aimed at protecting the human security of all citizens. Traditional ways of thinking about security need to be reformulated. Sovereignty is no longer absolute; today, states are members of an international system that operates on behalf of the human community and in which all human lives are considered equal. Energy security is a global, not a national, problem. Deterrence, which is an unprovable strategy until it fails, needs to be recast as prevention since a nuclear war is the worst imaginable cataclysm.

Russia and China

Iran and North Korea

Reframing the “Hard” Issues