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Some Way Out of Here: Common Security in a World On Fire
The political will must be found to extinguish the violent conflicts that put us ever closer to nuclear annihilation.
Sep 28, 2024
This is a most unusual election season. While the media focuses on Georgia and Nevada polling, the world is aflame. Those who have the greatest power to stop the killing are either missing in action or profoundly complicit as they refuse to exercise their diplomatic leverage.
President Biden refuses to join rising European voices urging a ceasefire and negotiations for the Ukraine War and continues to deliver weapons to Israel that make the ongoing genocide in Gaza and murderous devastation of southern Lebanon possible. Donald Trump has welcomed Russia to invade NATO nations that don’t spend at least 2% of their GDP on their militaries, while he urges Netanyahu to “finish the job” in Gaza. Meanwhile Kamala Harris poses as a military hawk, promising the world’s “most lethal military” while talking her way pas serious questions.
Wars and Mounting Dangers
U.N. General Secretary Guterres warns that “The world is becoming unhinged as geopolitical tensions rise and it seems incapable of coming together to respond to mounting challenges.” There are disturbing parallels to the forces that triggered the First World War. As in 1914, there are tensions between rising and declining powers, arms races with new technologies, complex alliance structures, intensifying nationalism, territorial competition, economic integration and intense competition, and wild card actors. Yet—unlike Sarajevo in 1914—an incident, accident, or miscalculation, today could trigger escalation to thermonuclear war.
With the Ukraine War, we face the dangers of political and military miscalculations leading to vertical (weapons) or horizontal (geographic) escalation. After its many nuclear threats, what might the Kremlin’s response be if Biden gives the okay and Kyiv launches a long-range missile at a Russian city, if Ukraine actually threatens Russia control of Crimea, or if a senior Russian political leader is killed by Ukrainian drones hitting in Moscow? What would happen if Russian missiles malfunction or purposely hit Polish cities?
Putin could respond by launching low-yield nuclear warheads. In addition to the resulting unimaginable devastation of Ukraine, our lives would also hang in the balance. There is no certainty that fighting a limited nuclear war is possible. A first limited strike could easily escalate to Armageddon.
In the Middle East, unable to eliminate Hamas or the idea of Palestinian nationalism, Prime Minister Netanyahu is pressing a second and greater Palestinian Nakba, and with his campaign of assassinations, the state terrorism of exploding pagers, and with his bombing campaign he seeks ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon. Iran’s nuclear infrastructure could become an Israeli target, should the U.S. be drawn into the wider war with Netanyahu’s assassinations and bombings in Damascus and Iran.
On numerous occasions—most recently during the Iraq Wars—the U.S. has prepared and threatened to initiate nuclear attacks. What President Putin will tolerate on Russia’s southwestern flank before again rattling his nuclear sword is an unknown. But recall that in the first days of the 1973 October War Gold Meir threatened to unleash Israel’s “Temple Weapons.” We cannot expect the Arab Street to remain silent in the face of a second Nakba or that Hezbollah and Tehran will continue to calibrate their responses to Israel’s brutality.
Further east, the planet U.S.-Chinese competition for regional hegemony in the Taiwan Strait, the South and East China Seas, an accident or miscalculation could all too easily spark a great power, and potentially nuclear. The same applies to U.S.-Russian provocative shows of force in the Baltic and Black Seas. And then there are Korea and Sudan....
These wars and confrontations serve as major obstacles to the cooperation needed to address not only essential human needs like health, housing, education, jobs and more, but the other existential threat to humanity: the climate emergency. It is not for nothing that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns that it is 90 seconds to midnight.
Common Security: A Way Out of Here
Decades ago, Bob Dylan sang “there must be some kind of way out of here.” There is. It is the alternative that, buoyed by the protests of millions of people, served as the diplomatic paradigm that ended the Cold War: the ancient truth that no nation can achieve security at the expense of its rivals. With very few exceptions, and despite nations’ differences, peaceful coexistence and security can be achieved only through mutual recognition, and respectful, if difficult, win-win negotiations between rivals. It is called common security diplomacy.
Common Security is a realist, not an idealistic, approach to stop the killing, to relieve suffering, and to ensure human survival. Those who advocate common security have no illusions about how difficult such diplomacy can be or that it can address every problem we face.
In the early 1980s, as the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race and threats brought us to the brink of nuclear apocalypse. Sweden’s Prime Minister Olof Palme had the wisdom to convene The Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues. It was comprised of the most senior national security advisors to Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev, including U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Georgi Arbatov Gorbachev’s senior security advisor, Egon Bahr Germany’s Secretary of State, and others. Their mandate was to develop a strategy to halt the spiraling arms race and prevent a nuclear war. After difficult but rich discussions, they recognized that fears, as well as bureaucratic and vested interests, drove the arms race. They agreed that when for defensive purposes one side augments its nuclear forces, its rival experiences that as a threatening escalation, and responds in kind, inciting new fears and fueling a spiraling arms race.
The Commission’s answer was to insist on difficult diplomacy in which each side names its fears, does the difficult work of discerning win-win solutions that addressed legitimate fears and enhances each side’s sense of security. Their 1982 Common Security Report provided the paradigm for disarmament diplomacy that followed and resulted in the Intermediate Forces Treaty. The Soviets agreed to forego deployment of nuclear armed SS 20 missiles which would have held all of Europe hostage. And the U.S. committed not to deploy Pershing II missiles that could devastate Moscow and decapitate Soviet leadership in the Kremlin in eight minutes, as well as disavowing deployment of first strike nuclear armed cruise missiles in Europe. With that agreement, and the Gorbachev-Reagan 1985 statement that nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought, the Cold War functionally came to an end in 1987 two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
We should also appreciate that it was popular movements, with millions of people demonstrating in cities and towns across the West and beyond for a halt to the arms race, as well as the wisdom of statesmen, that fueled the creation of the Palme Commission and its recommendations.
The INF Treaty was followed by the Paris Charter, the NATO Russia Founding Act, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation’s 1999 Charter for European Security. Each included the commitment that no nation would seek to enhance its national security at the expense of another. These commitments were enhanced by the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.
I am sorry to say that it was U.S. arrogance, beginning with President Bill Clinton, combined with the residual fears of many Eastern European nations, that led to NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders and thus to the decline and then collapse of the European Common Security order.
To prevent a catastrophic war, the Palme Commission had recognized the need to engage in diplomacy. It stressed that “A doctrine of common security must replace the present expedient of deterrence through armaments. International peace must rest on a commitment to joint survival rather than the threat of mutual destruction.” It announced its support for the United Nations’ and Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty’s “goal of general and complete disarmament.”
In 2021 and 2022, as great power confrontations again posed existential threats to survival and the Doomsday Clock approached midnight, non-governmental organizations updated the call for common security diplomacy to prevent catastrophe and to provide a foundation for a sustainable, if not perfect, peaceful international system. Led by the Palme Center, the International Peace Bureau, and the International Confederation of Trade Unions, and backed by a commission of present and former government and U.N. officials and scholars, they produced a successor report, Common Security 2022: For Our Shared Future. Drawing on the Palme Report, it reiterated that ”global peace and security are created jointly—that when your counterpart is not secure, you will not be secure either,” and they pointed to Common Security’s potential to “bring us back from the brink.”
Common Security 2022 was based on six principles that are universally applicable:
1. All people have the right to human security.
2. Building trust between nations and peoples is fundamental to peaceful and sustainable human existence.
3. There can be no common security without nuclear disarmament, strong limitations on conventional weapons, and reduced military expenditure.
4. Global and regional cooperation, multilateralism, and the rule of law are crucial to tackling many of the world’s challenges.
5. Dialogue, conflict prevention, and confidence-building measures must replace aggression and military force as a means of resolving disputes.
6. Better regulation, international law, and responsible governance need to be extended to address new military technologies.
Common Security for Middle East, Ukraine, and the Indo-Pacific Region
How might these apply to the horrors of the current Middle East and Ukraine Wars and to the new cold war across the Indo-Pacific region?.
Hamas’s October 7 massacres were indeed abominations, but by blocking nonviolent opposition and meaningful diplomacy to brutal decades-long occupations, something had to explode. Neither Hamas nor Palestinian nationalism will be eliminated, even as there is no safe place to hide for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank or for increasing numbers of Lebanese. Predictably and tragically Israelis have earned and suffer pariah state isolation. Israel’s economy is flagging, and the country’s northern and southernmost communities have become uninhabitable.
Since the UN’s 1947 partition of Palestine, the world has understood the importance of a common security solution to this legacy of colonialism. The dignity and rights to national self-determination and security must be respected for each of the two peoples as well as between Israel and its neighbors. U.N. resolutions, the Arab Peace plan of 2022, and the sometimes secret 1970s and 80s negotiations between some of Israel’s founders and senior PLO figures have all sought a path for a two-state solution.
Since Israel’s conquest of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli settlements and highways have been designed to eliminate the possibility of the creation of a credible Palestinian state. But, as the former Israeli general and courageous peace campaigner Mattityahu Peled argued, what humans have created can be changed by humans. The establishment of a single secular democratic state may be an ideal worth aspiring to, but with decades of Palestinian and Israeli traumas that will reverberate for generations, such a possibility cannot be realized in the foreseeable future. It can only emerge after trust is restored following years of peaceful coexistence and mutual recognition. As the Palestinian journalist Ramy Khoury explains, with a two state agreement, the spectacular potential of each of these peoples and of the Arab world can be released and realized.
Khoury also reports that the destruction of Israel has never been Hezbollah’s ambition. Rather it has been to defend Lebanon’s long marginalized Shiite population, especially from Israeli attacks. That it would act in solidarity with Gazans under Israel’s indiscriminate massacres should come as no surprise,
Then Ukraine. Over the centuries it has been a divided nation. Its borders have constantly changed. It has been part of the Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian empires. It has been divided by language, religion, and economic ties. It is the borderland over which armies flowed in both directions. In addition to the devastation of Ukraine and its people, the post-Cold War security architecture was shattered on February 24, 2022. With it went all but a few remnants of trust and strategic stability established over sixty years
We now have numerous proposals for Ukrainian peace or an end to the war: Russian and Ukrainian, Chinese, Brazilian, and more. Most urgently we need a ceasefire and interrelated common security negotiations in three dimensions: Ukrainian-Russian leading to a Ukraine which is a neutral sovereign nation with credible security guarantees and as the Czech president recently acknowledged, territorial compromise; U.S/NATO- Russian negotiations for a new European security architecture; and U.S.-Russian negotiations to restore a modicum of trust and strategic stability, including renewal of arms control and even nuclear disarmament negotiations.
In conclusion and turning to the competition for regional and potentially global hegemony, there are the growing dangers of war across the Indo-Pacific region. A working group comprised of engaged scholars and national peace movement leaders from South Korea, Japan, India, Mongolia, the Philippines, the United States and the International Peace Bureau in Germany will soon release a Common Security report for the Indo-Pacific Region.* It identifies off ramps from the sleepwalking marches to what Australia’s former Prime Minister and current ambassador to the U.S. Kevin Rudd terms an “avoidable war.” The report’s key recommendations include:
1. Commitments to common security diplomacy and war under any circumstances must be prevented. Build common security via negotiations, diplomacy, trust, tolerance, and understanding of other cultures.
2. The U.S., China, and Taiwan take actions simultaneously to lower tensions in the Taiwan Strait to avert war. The Strait should be demilitarized, with a shared understanding that the solution to the Taiwan issue should not be by military means. There are specific recommendations for Beijing, Taipei, and the U.S.
3. Declare the end of the Korean War and conclude a Peace treaty. Reduce conventional armaments in Northeast Asia, denuclearize the Korean Peninsula and establish a Northeast Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone. War prevention and peacebuilding forums are needed that involve all parties to the Six Party Talks.
4. Demilitarization and denuclearization of the South China Sea. Respect the security interests of all nations involved in the Law of the Sea Treaty and the U.N. International Court of Arbitration decision. Multilateral and bilateral ASEAN-Chinese negotiations for a South China Sea code of conduct.
5. The legitimate security interests of small states must be respected by the major powers. The role of small states in facilitating regional security cooperation must be recognized.
6. Universalization of No First Use nuclear policies, Resumption of U.S.-Russian arms control negotiations. Strategic stability diplomacy between the U.S., China, Russia, and Japan. Establishment of nuclear weapons-free zones. Freeze in military spending as well as a halt to high-tech weaponization research, development, and deployment.
7. Avoid crystallization of strategic bloc building and related military alliances.
8. Active engagement of the peace movement - nationally and internationally.
How to achieve a second common security order? Several years ago, Noam Chomsky put it well, reminding us that we know the solutions to the existential threats facing humanity. The question, he said, is whether we have the political will to bring them into being.
This article is based on a talk given at a side event organized by the International Peace Bureau and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung during the United Nations Summit for the Future.
*Common Security In the Indo-Pacific Region is scheduled for release on October 8, 2024 and will be found here as well as on other websites.Keep ReadingShow Less
As Drones Enter Battlefields Worldwide, Call Grows for Global Ban on Killer Robots
"Without explicit legal rules, the world faces a grim future of automated killing that will place civilians everywhere in grave danger," one human rights expert said.
Aug 26, 2024
As drone warfare continues to proliferate worldwide and concerns grow over the use of artificial intelligence by militaries, Human Rights Watch on Monday backed United Nations' Secretary-General António Guterres' call for an international treaty to ban "killer robots" that select and attack targets without human oversight.
In an August 6 report, Guterres urged the international community to negotiate a treaty prohibiting lethal autonomous weapons systems by 2026. This is a widely supported idea, as 47 of the 58 submissions to the report from more than 73 countries endorsed either a ban or increased regulations.
"The U.N, secretary-general emphasizes the enormous detrimental effects removing human control over weapons systems would have on humanity," Mary Wareham, deputy crisis, conflict, and arms director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. "The already broad international support for tackling this concern should spur governments to start negotiations without delay."
The momentum behind a ban is building as armies around the world are increasingly deploying and testing militarized robots and drones. The U.S. military became the first nation to widely deploy drone warfare during its War on Terror campaigns in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Iraq following the attacks of 9/11. But today, from Israel's use of drones in Gaza and the West Bank to China and Russia's growing arsenals, the use of remotely operated weapons is rapidly expanding.
Ukraine War
HRW's call came the same day that Russia launched an attack on Ukrainian energy infrastructure using around 200 missiles and drones. The attack killed at least five people and knocked out power and water in several parts of the country, Reuters reported.
"It was one of the biggest combined strikes. More than a hundred missiles of various types and about a hundred Shahed drones. And like most previous Russian strikes, this one is just as sneaky, targeting critical civilian infrastructure," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Telegram.
Ukraine has also used long-range attack drones against Russia, targeting sites such as oil refineries and military airfields.
North Korea
Also on Monday, North Korean state media reported that the country's leader Kim Jong Un had supervised a test of a North Korean attack drone.
Pictures showed a drone colliding with a target that looked like a South Korean K-2 main battle tank and obliterating it an a fiery explosion.
The North Korean test coincides with increased tensions with South Korea and the U.S. as well as a joint exercise by the two countries to prepare their militaries for a potential conflict with North Korea.
Noting their importance in modern warfare, Kim said he wanted North Korea to be equipped with drones "as soon as possible" and urged the manufacturing of several types including exploding drones, attack drones, and underwater suicide drones, according to North Korean state media.
China/Taiwan
Drones featured in another global hot spot as China sent two drones over the sea between Taiwan and Japan's westernmost island of Yonaguni on Friday, as the Joint Staff Office under Japan's Defense Ministry observed.
China's move followed two actions by the U.S. military: the first ever U.S. Marine Corps deployment of a radar capable of sensing aerial threats including drones from Yonaguni on July 29 during exercises and the sending of the destroyer USS Ralph Johnson to the Taiwan Strait on Thursday.
Gaza
Israel has also used drones "systematically" in its ongoing war on Gaza.
In a February report, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said it had confirmed that dozens of civilians had been killed by "small killer drones," including the Matrice 600 and LANIUS models. The drones were equipped with explosives, machine guns, and artificial intelligence.
"Israel is intentionally using them to target Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip," Euro-Med said, adding that "the majority of Israel's targeting takes place in public spaces where it is easy to distinguish fighters from civilians."
Summit of the Future
World leaders will have a chance to curb the proliferation of drones in warfare in New York in September, when they will convene at U.N. headquarters for the Summit of the Future, an initiative of Guterres.
The summit is expected to produce a "Pact for the Future," the current draft of which recommends acting "with urgency" toward international control of killer robots.
"The Summit of the Future provides an important opportunity for states to express high-level support for opening negotiations to ban and restrict autonomous weapons systems," Wareham said. "Without explicit legal rules, the world faces a grim future of automated killing that will place civilians everywhere in grave danger."
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Presidents Who Gamble With Nuclear Armageddon
Each of the last five presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, have brought us closer to the brink. We desperately need leaders with a knack for peace who can steer the nation, and the world, toward a more secure and less dangerous future.
May 29, 2024
The overriding job of any U.S. president is to keep the nation safe. In the nuclear age, that mainly means avoiding nuclear Armageddon. Joe Biden’s reckless and incompetent foreign policy is pushing us closer to annihilation. He joins a long and undistinguished list of presidents who have gambled with Armageddon, including his immediate predecessor and rival, Donald Trump.
Talk of nuclear war is currently everywhere. Leaders of NATO countries call for Russia’s defeat and even dismemberment, while telling us not to worry about Russia’s 6,000 nuclear warheads. Ukraine uses NATO-supplied missiles to knock out parts of Russia’s nuclear-attack early-warning system inside Russia. Russia, in the meantime, engages in nuclear drills near its border with Ukraine. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg give the green light to Ukraine to use NATO weapons to hit Russian territory as an increasingly desperate and extremist Ukrainian regime sees fit.
These leaders neglect at our greatest peril the most basic lesson of the nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis, as told by President John F. Kennedy, one of the few American presidents in the nuclear age to take our survival seriously. In the aftermath of the crisis, Kennedy told us, and his successors:
Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of a collective death-wish for the world.
Yet this is exactly what Biden is doing today, carrying out a bankrupt and reckless policy.
Nuclear war can easily arise from an escalation of non-nuclear war, or by a hothead leader with access to nuclear arms deciding on a surprise first strike, or by a gross miscalculation. The last of these nearly occurred even after Kennedy and his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev had negotiated an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when a disabled Soviet submarine came within a hair’s breadth of launching a nuclear-tipped torpedo.
The Doomsday Clock was at 17 minutes to midnight when Clinton came to office, but just 9 minutes when he left it. Bush pushed the clock to just 5 minutes, Obama to 3 minutes, and Trump to a mere 100 seconds. Now Biden has taken the clock to 90 seconds.
Most presidents, and most Americans, have little idea how close to the abyss we are. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which was founded in 1947 in part to help the world avoid nuclear annihilation, established the Doomsday Clock to help the public understand the gravity of the risks we face. National security experts adjust the clock depending how far or how close we are to “midnight,” meaning extinction. They put the clock today at just 90 seconds to midnight, the closest that it’s ever been in the nuclear age.
The clock is a useful measure of which presidents have “gotten it” and which have not. The sad fact is that most presidents have recklessly gambled with our survival in the name of national honor, or to prove their personal toughness, or to avoid political attacks from the warmongers, or as the result of sheer incompetence. By a simple and straightforward count, five presidents have gotten it right, moving the clock away from midnight, while nine have moved us closer to Armageddon, including the most recent five.
Truman was president when the Doomsday Clock was unveiled in 1947, at 7 minutes to midnight. Truman stoked the nuclear arms race and left office with the clock at just 3 minutes to midnight. Eisenhower continued the nuclear arms race but also entered into the first-ever negotiations with the Soviet Union regarding nuclear disarmament. By the time he left office, the clock was put back to 7 minutes to midnight.
Kennedy saved the world by coolly reasoning his way through the Cuban Missile Crisis, rather than following the advice of hothead advisors who called for war (for a detailed account, see Martin Sherwin’s magisterial Gambling with Armageddon, 2020). He then negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with Khrushchev in 1963. By the time of his death, which may well have been a government coup resulting from Kennedy’s peace initiative, JFK had pushed the clock back to 12 minutes to midnight, a magnificent and historic achievement.
It was not to last. Lyndon Johnson soon escalated in Vietnam and pushed the clock back again to just 7 minutes to midnight. Richard Nixon eased tensions with both the Soviet Union and China, and concluded the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), pushing the clock again to 12 minutes from midnight. Yet Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter failed to secure SALT II, and Carter fatefully and unwisely gave a green light to the CIA in 1979 to destabilize Afghanistan. By the time Ronald Reagan took office, the clock was at just 4 minutes to midnight.
The next 12 years marked the end of the Cold War. Much of the credit is due to Mikhail Gorbachev, who aimed to reform the Soviet Union politically and economically, and to end the confrontation with the West. Yet credit is also due to Reagan and his successor George Bush, Sr., who successfully worked with Gorbachev to end the Cold War, which in turn was followed by the end of the Soviet Union itself in December 1991. By the time Bush left office, the Doomsday clock was at 17 minutes to midnight, the safest since the start of the nuclear age.
Sadly, the U.S. security establishment could not take “Yes” for an answer when Russia said an emphatic yes to peaceful and cooperative relations. The U.S. needed to “win” the Cold War, not just end it. It needed to declare itself and prove itself to be the sole superpower of the world, the one that would unilaterally write the rules of a new U.S.-led “rules-based order.” The post-1992 U.S. therefore launched wars and expanded its vast network of military bases as it saw fit, steadfastly and ostentatiously ignoring the red lines of other nations, indeed aiming to drive nuclear adversaries into humiliating retreats.
Since 1992, every president has left the U.S. and the world closer to nuclear annihilation than his predecessor. The Doomsday Clock was at 17 minutes to midnight when Clinton came to office, but just 9 minutes when he left it. Bush pushed the clock to just 5 minutes, Obama to 3 minutes, and Trump to a mere 100 seconds. Now Biden has taken the clock to 90 seconds.
Biden has led the U.S. into three fulminant crises, any one of which could end up in Armageddon. By insisting on NATO enlargement to Ukraine, against Russia’s bright red line, Biden has repeatedly pushed for Russia’s humiliating retreat. By siding with a genocidal Israel, he has stoked a new Middle East arms race and a dangerously expanding Middle East conflict. By taunting China over Taiwan, which the U.S. ostensibly recognizes as part of one China, he is inviting a war with China. Trump similarly stirred the nuclear pot on several fronts, most flagrantly with China and Iran.
Washington seems of a single mind these days: more funding for wars in Ukraine and Gaza, more armaments for Taiwan. We slouch ever closer to Armageddon. Polls show the American people overwhelmingly disapprove of U.S. foreign policy, but their opinion counts for very little. We need to shout for peace from every hilltop. The survival of our children and grandchildren depends on it.Keep ReadingShow Less
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