The mission of the London-based independent Commission on National Security in the 21st Century set up in May this year is to review the current security landscape and suggest an independent security strategy for the United Kingdom. Co-Chair Lord Robertson of Port Ellen and Deputy Chair Ian Kearns set out their view of the threats and changes in the security landscape and suggest ways in which security should be re-thought. In particular they stress the urgent requirement to project governance more effectively into failed states and to create more effective international control and storage regimes for fissile nuclear material.
United Kingdom: Independant Commission on National Security
In May this year, under the auspices of the leading London-based think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, we launched an independent Commission on National Security in the 21st Century. This is a major two-year initiative designed to carry out a serious review of the United Kingdom’s readiness to deal with the current security landscape. The Commission, which includes participation from senior military, diplomatic, police, scientific, academic and legal figures and representation from all three main political parties, will seek some consensus on the issues and will produce and publish an independent national security strategy for the United Kingdom.(1) Its formation is a response to some profound changes in the national and international security landscape. In this short article, we set out some of what we believe those changes to be, our view on what the changes imply for how we define and delimit the terrain of security policy in future, and offer three guiding principles which we believe should, where possible, shape much of our response. We conclude with a statement of optimism that there is much the international community can do to address the challenges, and suggest two areas for priority action.
A Changed Security Landscape
We believe we live today in a new strategic landscape that includes but goes well beyond the challenge of terrorism. To understand it, we believe it is necessary to grapple with the four underlying themes of change we outline below.
Power Shift
The first theme of change is perhaps best described as historically significant ‘power shift’ and it is visible in three important respects. First, it is most obviously evident in a geographic shift of power from the Atlantic seaboard to Asia and the Pacific. Here, the rise of China and India represents a significant alteration to the geopolitical landscape and is possibly a harbinger of the elevation of great power rivalry from the European stage in the last century, to the global stage in this. Second, power shift is evident in an unplanned increase in vulnerability interdependence in which the security of people in one country is ever more dependent on what happens in others. This is an important by-product not only of the financial systems, investment patterns and trade flows associated with globalisation, but also of its dark underside, which includes an increase in transnational organised crime, an illicit cross-border trade in drugs and materials related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD), people trafficking and the increased risks of a global disease pandemic in an era of travel on an unprecedented scale. Third and last, a shift of power from states to non-state actors such as terrorist groups is evident. This is based on a number of developments including such groups’ skilful use of the Internet to amplify their voice and extend their organisational reach, upon an evident historical trend to mass casualty terrorism, and upon the all too plausible likelihood that terrorists may soon acquire access to WMD, if they have not done so already. Militant Islamist groups concern us most today in this context, not only because of 9/11, but because they offer just the kind of transnational ideological appeal that thrives in the era of globalisation.
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