The Future of National Security and the Role of States

Western writers and commentators on national security are curiously homogeneous. They are mostly male, middle-aged academics with political science or economics backgrounds, writing and talking to each other within a closed system, using the same language and vocabulary unaffected by philosophical, cultural, or linguistic variability. They generally support the Realist Theory of international politics so brilliantly developed by Hans Morgenthau over sixty years ago. The conceptual paradigm and its supporting language and terminology is univocal, which means that terms like power, sovereignty, security, state, morality, and law – to identify just a few – have a constant meaning in the Western strategic discourse.

The Realist Theory is based on a set of intersecting propositions: the belief that politics is governed by objective laws; that interest is defined in terms of power (which, of course, is there to be manipulated, thereby generating transformation); that political action has moral significance; that there is no necessary correlation between the moral aspirations of a particular nation with universal moral laws; and that the world of international politics is autonomous and distinct. These propositions, however, are founded on even more fundamental assumptions: that there are objective laws, that there are universal moral laws, and that international politics is an autonomous and distinct domain (Morgenthau 1966). Increasingly, these assumptions, and the propositions that they support, are contested, not least of all by those who aspire to establish a new way of doing strategic business – the governments of China and India.

They are also contested by the more heterodox strategic analyst, Robert D. Kaplan. Writing in Stratfor, Kaplan described realism as a ‘way of thinking, not a set of instructions as to what to think’ (Kaplan 2014). Yet even Kaplan, who entertains a more acerbic and less optimistic view of the world’s strategic future than most other commentators, does not avoid the ‘either-or’ polarities that have come to define the analytical paradigm on which so much of the work of Western strategic commentators is based. Kaplan does, however, offer the more interesting insight that realism ‘is imbued with a hard morality of best possible outcomes under the circumstances rather than a soft morality of good intentions’ (Kaplan 2014). By redefining morality in international relations in terms of ‘ends’ rather than the more traditional ‘means’, Kaplan is actually redefining realism as pragmatism. This rather turns Morgenthau on his head by portraying strategic success in terms of a satisfactory outcome rather than the application of objective laws. With characteristic insight, Philip Bobbitt proposes an elegant means of resolving the tension between ends and means as static and linear polarities by repositioning them as dynamic coefficients having a much more fluid relationship where ends may become means and vice versa (Bobbitt 2008).

The instinctive reaction of Western strategists, and the governments they advise, is to reassert the dominance of Western conceptual models and the strategic architectures they are designed to support. Defence Colleges and Strategic Studies Institutes across the Western group of like-minded countries invite promising young officers and students from China and India to attend their courses, thereby educating them in the principles of strategic analysis and at the same time attempting to shore up Western strategic supremacy by defining both the strategic game and its rules. This is what some Western governments like to call ‘soft power’ – achieving dominance through persuasion rather than imposition. What this approach actually achieves is to afford young strategists from the rising centres of strategic power exactly the opportunity that is denied to young Western strategists – the ability to understand how the ‘other side’ thinks.

In some respects, this analytical straightjacket was the result of the expansion of Western strategic power, especially that of Great Britain, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Along with the great trading companies, Britain through its technology, civil administration, and, of course, the Royal Navy, adopted a dominant position in Asia, governing India as a Dominion and isolating China under its own sclerotic imperial government.

As Niall Ferguson has pointed out, the decline of the British Empire more or less coincided with the rise of American hegemony (Ferguson 2004). From the point of view of the Western community of nations, this was no bad thing. As British treaties and alliances slowly morphed into, or were overtaken by, US treaties and alliances, Western strategic dominance was maintained. Whether through the North Atlantic Treaty (1949), the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan (1949), the ANZUS Treaty (1951), the Mutual Defense Treaty between the Republic of the Philippines and the United States (1951), the Mutual Defence Treaty between the United States and the Republic of Korea (1953), and the Manila Pact (1954), or through second-tier British agreements such as the Five Power Defence Arrangements (1971), the Anglophone West has been able to control the dynamics of global strategic power, more or less unhindered, for the best part of seventy years. But, more than that, it has been able to control the language and the logic of the global strategic discourse.

It has become something of an axiom in contemporary political discourse that whoever controls the language controls the issue. This has nowhere been more practised than in the controversies surrounding global warming (‘climate change’ sounds much more neutral), global refugee flows (‘queue jumpers’ sounds much more threatening), and terrorism (‘criminal violence’ is far too commonplace). Language generates its own policy logic. The world of political discourse is simply catching up with a phenomenon that has distinguished the global strategic discourse since World War 2.

But there are subtle early signs emerging that this situation is changing. Language and meaning are now contestable. Two examples, each with profound significance, suffice to illustrate this development: ‘security’ and ‘rule of law/rule by law’.

Whether it is in Canberra, London, Ottawa, or Washington, the symbols of government preoccupation with security in the sense that has dominated the second half of the twentieth century are only too visible: bollards, CCTV, metal detectors, vehicle barriers, high fences, razor wire, armed police officers, security patrols – all of them designed to instil public confidence that government is addressing the threat of global terrorism. The fact that most of these physical security measures focus on the Australian and Canadian parliaments, the UK Houses of Parliament, the Capitol in Washington, and government institutions displays a measure of introspection by governments and their advisors that betrays a preoccupation with the threat of political violence directed towards governments, government institutions, and the people who are employed there. This narrow focus fails to come to terms with the fact that government and institutional security is not synonymous with public safety. It also fails to come to terms with the fact that terrorist events are more likely to involve transport systems (London and Madrid), commercial centres (the World Trade Centre), and spaces where the public may be at risk (Martin Place in Sydney).

The difference between security and safety is most starkly demonstrated in the United States, where, over the past decade, gun violence has killed 428 times more Americans than has terrorism. And even if that comparison is extended to include the attack on the world Trade Centre (9/11), the difference remains pronounced: for every American killed by terrorists between 2001 and 2014, guns killed more than 127 (Ting 2015). The United States, of course, represents a unique set of circumstances. But the comparison in Australia is revealing nonetheless. Since 2002, 91 Australians have died in terrorist incidents – 88 in Bali and three in Sydney (though whether the Martin Place siege was an act of terrorism is yet to be determined by the Coroner). In the same period, gunmen have killed over 3000 Australians (Alpers et al. 2015). This figure does not include suicides.

When looked at through the lens of the myriad factors that might threaten the physical well-being of a citizen – suicide, motor vehicle accidents, homicide, diabetes, HIV, cancer, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes – the risk of terrorism in Australia is insignificant (Michaelson 2010). Yet the focus on ‘security’ affords it a prominence out of all proportion to the threat. Indeed, in many policy pronouncements by Western governments, the term ‘security’ has itself become trivialised as it morphs into a symptom of fear rather than a tool of strategic logic.

It is perhaps for this reason that the denotation and the connotation of the term ‘security’ are broadening, taking on a multidimensional character that has profound implications for the policy architectures that support conventional approaches to ‘national security’, ‘state security’, and ‘national defence’ – preoccupied as they all are with the acquisition, deployment, and use of armed force and military conflict. Whereas, in the Realist dispensation, the focus of ‘security’ has been on the institutions of government and the symbols of state power (as noted earlier, the major physical and operational security enhancements around national parliaments and military and paramilitary executive organisations), demographic and societal changes are bringing new security issues to the table.

Increasingly, ‘security’ comprehends something more fundamental and compelling than the ability of the state to protect its sovereignty against threats from other states – important though that is to the safety of the citizens. Security has as much to do with clean water, reliable food supplies, opportunities for children, freedom from ethnic or racial violence, the ability to live a fulfilling life – in other words, individual and community well-being. In some senses, this evolved concept of security reflects a broad community wish to be free from threat – to be free from military service than to be free because of it. More importantly, however, it reflects the arrival of opportunity, prosperity, resilience, and well-being as key policy imperatives (Behm 2009).

In the most fundamental sense, national security is an artefact of national economic and political strength. Curiously, most formal expressions of Western security policy, such as the US Quadrennial Defense Review and the procession of Australian Defence White Papers, focus on existing or emergent threats. But as these threats are identified and listed, even the strategic experts are unable to establish a priority list. They rarely, if ever, look to emerging strategic opportunities. The strategic canard represented by the ‘Washington-Beijing’ dilemma – the inevitability of a choice between the United States and China for long-term strategic security – is derived from an exaggerated sense of threat.

While there has been an incipient ‘paradigm shift’ in the global approach to security, this movement is yet to be detected in Australian security policy. Internationally, consideration of national security issues has begun to include more basic concepts of values and rights – concepts that have not replaced the need for states to be able to protect themselves against aggression, but have rather expanded the basic connotation of security to accommodate human security concerns. Security as a function of the power of the state to protect itself has progressively expanded to incorporate the basic need for personal and community well-being in a world where threats from states are diminishing relatively while threats from other sources are increasing. The growing literature dealing with global warming and security offers a case in point (Behm 2009).

The national defence and security enterprise in all democratic societies is grounded on the principle that the core duty of the state is to protect the liberty of its citizens – the freedom that flows from the recognition that each citizen has dignity and value. The state is the ultimate guardian of the individual rights of its citizens, any attack on these rights being tantamount to an attack on the state. And in the parlance of the West, these rights are generally summed up in the phrase ‘rule of law’ – the equality of every citizen before the law, the presumption of innocence until guilt is proved, the separation of powers, the protection of the law against the arbitrary exercise of power by the state, and the subordination of both the government and the people to the law. In democratic societies, the entire legitimacy of the national security effort depends on the individual dignity and value of the citizens.

The same principle does not hold true, however, in non-democratic societies. In authoritarian and totalitarian societies – whether communist, despotic, or religious fundamentalist – the national security enterprise draws its legitimacy from the protection of the state itself, which is identified with the government rather than the people.

The governments of such societies claim to operate under the ‘rule of law’. But the fact is, they do not. They may indeed ‘rule by law’ or ‘rule according to law’, though more usually they rule by decree or by fiat.

China currently offers an interesting case in point. Since the ascension of Xi Jinping as China’s President in 2013, China has seen an increasingly virulent campaign against corruption extending not only to economic malfeasance and graft, but also to activities deemed to be antisocial or against the interests of the state. There have been extensive crackdowns on human rights lawyers, for instance, as well as artists and writers. At the same time, China has been representing its activities to the international community as a significant reinforcement of the ‘rule of law’. This is a significant misnomer, and one that the less critical analyst accepts at face value to support the more comfortable view that the fundamental drivers of national defence and security policy, and the doctrinal foundations of war fighting are the same for all nations. It is the same uncritical view which asserts that international treaties have the same meaning and force for all parties.

John Delury is quoted as saying that, because the Chinese language does not employ prepositions, what is translated as ‘rule of law’ actually means ‘law and order’ (Chin 2014). In Delury’s opinion, the mistranslation is intentional, designed to lull Westerners into thinking that the recent imposition of new legal practices in China is simply the application of the rule of law to a market economy. In fact, it is not. Rather, law reform in China, as The Wall Street Journal’s Josh Chin has pointed out, is simply a cover for giving China’s courts independence from local government while keeping them firmly in the cage of Communist party control (Chin 2014).

As a one-party state, China does not practise any separation of powers between the political and judicial arms of government. The courts are subject to the direction of the governing party.

The difference between ‘rule of law’ and ‘rule by law’ generates an interesting paradox: The philosophical and ethical foundations of the world’s two most important twenty-first century states, China and the United States, reflect entirely different conceptions of what the state is, what affords government its legitimacy, and what constitutes the relationship between the citizen and the state. The issue here is not that one is right and the other wrong. The issue is that the United States and China have entirely different philosophical and theoretical approaches to the development of strategic policy, neither accommodating the other. And as shall be seen later in this chapter, the difference between ‘rule of law’ and ‘rule by law’ has important implications for the way in which the nation state evolves over time.

Historically, China has based its strategic calculus on the ‘zero sum game’, where advance for one side demands retreat by the other, where victory for one side means defeat for the other, and where a win for one side involves a loss for the other. On the other hand, for the past half century, US defence planners, consistent with US corporate practice, have applied a ‘net value adding’ paradigm. Fundamental to US strategy is the idea that victory is less about the destruction of the opponent than it is about the resolution of the uncertainties that might generate armed conflict in the first place. Both sides thereby ‘win’, though in somewhat different ways (Behm 2003).

This strategic paradigm clash is perhaps best illustrated in contemporary circumstances by the emergent issues in the South China Sea, where China is intent upon asserting its ‘sovereignty’ – despite the fact that its seabed claims are contested by six of its neighbours – while the United States is intent upon asserting universal freedom of navigation (especially that of its own warships). This is no simple standoff (Stratfor 2015). What this issue represents is a basic and potentially irreconcilable difference in approach, reflecting policy antinomies with significant strategic consequences.

The United States and China will dominate the global strategic landscape for the rest of this century, and beyond. The lack of strategic congruence between them has profound implications for the rest of the global community, at once constraining the strategic options of the states that constitute that community, while at the same time generating strategic opportunity as the power balance between the behemoths continually adjusts. How states manage these constraints and opportunities will depend on their ability to construct a contemporary security policy framework and to reconcile the inconsistencies caused by the tension between bilateral and multilateral approaches to protecting the national interest. In other words, in an altogether new strategic environment, states will need to reinvent themselves and devise new ways to meet new problems. States will need to recalibrate their national security settings while redefining their role in delivering national security and global strategic stability.

Many governments remain preoccupied with traditional national security paradigms and the demands of national defence, often at the expense of national security in the broader sense. The analytical and conceptual paradigms that underpin much of what currently passes for national security policy are dysfunctional and sclerotic where they are not completely outmoded. The current and prospective national canvas extends far beyond traditional concerns about personal security from criminals and terrorists and the security of the state against armed conflict. While the potential for armed conflict between states remains a key consideration for modern governments, the fact is that intrastate conflicts – civil wars – have continued to engage the military systems of both the affected states and their neighbours. The massive refugee flows that affected Europe in the (northern) summer and autumn of 2015 were testimony to the broader impact that civil war in one region – in this case the Middle East – can have on the political and social security of communities elsewhere.

As a result of demographic and social changes, Western democratic societies are increasingly preoccupied with the demands of employment and financial security, retirement security, the availability of high-quality health services and broader issues of social security. While national defence remains an important consideration, electorates are beginning to consider non-traditional issues that may impact on their quality of life. Central among these is the failure of neo-liberalism and the economics of globalisation to safeguard the prosperity and aspirations of manual labourers and manufacturing workers in the advanced industrial economies as global enterprises and investment institutions search for cheap labour and economies of scale.

If national security is essentially dependent on national economic strength, any recalibration of national security settings needs to identify the constraints on economic strength. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to deal comprehensively with each of these constraints, it is at least worth noting the range of issues that will increasingly engage national governments in the course of this century. They include international criminal conspiracy, ranging from drugs to human trafficking to financial manipulation; cyberattacks; terrorism, especially the possible use of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction; intrastate conflicts that generate massive refugee flows; the continued erosion of the authority of the UN; and, of course, global warming which already poses an existential threat to island states.

Global warming, of course, impacts on both the ability of states to address the anthropogenic causation factors (the growing dependence on the carbon cycle leading to significant warming of the oceans and melting of the ice shelves) and the consequences (drought, high impact weather events, and economic and social dislocation). It is, perhaps, the greatest threat to stability and security in the twenty-first century.

The World Bank (World Bank 2013) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2014) have both drawn attention to the impacts on human security – health and relocation – that may result from global warming. In the absence of any reliable method of estimating possible population movements, they do not posit any particular quantum of people that may move within or across borders as a consequence of climate change. Historical experience suggests, however, that climate change and the attendant significant weather events have the potential to generate millions of refugees as riverine deltas flood (as they have in Bangladesh), salinity levels rise in low-lying agricultural areas (as they have in the Mekong Delta), long droughts destroy crops (as they have in large areas of Africa and the Middle East), and floods and cyclones destroy densely populated urban areas. It also has the potential to obliterate small states in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Global warming and the resultant natural disasters, together with the local conflicts that are also often caused by prolonged drought, will generate significant population movements. The numbers of refugees fleeing famine, war, and persecution will be multiplied by those who are seeking long-term personal and family security – employment, education, and opportunity. These are the so-called ‘economic refugees’ whose plight may be less pressing but nonetheless as real as those fleeing armed conflict. What this suggests is that the international legal instruments (conventions, treaties, and agreements) currently available to governments to assist them in determining the status of displaced individuals and family groups are no longer fit for purpose. Emerging as many of these legal instruments did from the calamity of World War 2, they are either too narrow in focus or completely tangential, leaving displaced people in the no-man’s land of refugee camps and detention centres. The international community needs to negotiate totally different approaches to human displacement and its inevitable consequence of political, economic, and social marginalisation.

The combination of fundamental structural changes in the global balance of power with the emergence of China and India as major strategic entities, the mass movement of peoples as a result of global warming, and the unpredictable consequences of inequality will generate pressures that the global community has not experienced hitherto. But, as Piketty notes, ‘socioeconomic inequalities…are always both causes and effects of other developments in other spheres’ (Piketty 2014 p 274).

While the tools for limiting global warming are economic, those for managing the consequences of global warming will inevitably involve national military forces in both disaster relief and community safety (Behm 2008). The employment of military forces in operations other than war (OOTW) – peace enforcement, peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief – have become a more or less permanent feature of post-World War 2 military action. The extension of military operations into law enforcement areas such as border operations, illegal fishing, and drug importation prevention raises important questions about both the nature of contemporary military power and the role of twenty-first century military forces. And it certainly raises questions about the appropriate force structure of military forces and the training of military personnel. In a throwback to the days of gunboat diplomacy, China is already using its military forces to inhabit the new islands it is creating in the South China Sea and to substantiate its claims to the expansion of its potential natural resource base. The economic role of military forces may be yet another dimension that transcends the traditional place of military forces in the nation state.

Philip Bobbitt has postulated that the nation state is undergoing a progressive transformation into what he has described as ‘the market state’ – a state characterised by its dependence on the international capital markets and on the modern multinational business network to create stability in the world economy, in preference to management by national or transnational political bodies (Bobbitt 2002).

In a world where the immediacy of communications facilitates immense and largely unregulated capital flows, for instance, national budgets are subject to external factors over which they have little control. But if managing the national economy is one of the core responsibilities of government (managing national defence being another), then constraints on revenue necessarily impact on the ability of the state to deliver credible defence systems. More importantly, constraints on national governments impact on the ability of the state to deliver the security to the citizens – security in terms of freedom from worry – that is measured by national prosperity, community well-being, social inclusiveness, and amenity.

For this reason, global economic relationships are an increasingly important dimension of national security. They are also a transformative factor influencing both the nature and the power of the state in the twenty-first century. The mobility of capital and skills, for instance, imposes altogether new demands on national governments. In the developing world, the shift from an agricultural economic base to an industrial economic base is as dependent on investment and skills as is the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial base for the developed economies. As less-advantaged and less-developed nations compete with each other and with the more developed nations for capital and skills, they will face a global investment market that places no premium on national development, but rather follows profitability and investment security. At the same time, they will see their most talented citizens similarly follow high earnings and security by moving to more economically developed countries.

The consequence will be that those developing nations where corruption is rife, where transparency and accountability are largely absent, and where national institutions are incapable of providing the security that investors demand, will become failed states, generating both internal and external security threats.

Nor will the international banking institutions of the twentieth century be able to meet the demands of either failing developing economies or failed developed economies. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, and even the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank backed by China, will find themselves increasingly subject to the competition for funds that distinguishes the entire twenty-first century investment market.

The competitive scenario is not significantly different for the developed economies. Notwithstanding the comparatively greater robustness of their national institutions, their economic pluralism, the greater transparency and accountability of their governments, and the strength of their regulators, the developed nations will also find themselves locked in a competition for both investment and skills. The mobility of both cash and skills will penalise states that lack vision and agility, at the same time rewarding those states that can adapt to an increasingly deregulated international financial system, increase productivity, foster innovation, and reorient national policy settings towards the opportunities generated by global capital rather than defending a status quo that has passed its use-by date.

This transformation of the nation state into the market state is already underway. The traditional right of the national government to manage the national economy through a mix of tariff barriers, non-tariff barriers, foreign exchange controls, labour market controls, foreign ownership rules, and taxation policies is slowly eroding. The old interstate contest between protectionism and free trade has largely given way to a new contest between capital flows, investment efficiencies, and market domination over which the nation state has diminishing influence. The underlying issue here is the inexorable rise of ‘the market’ as an alternative to ‘the polity’, with the market assuming rights that have traditionally been the province of the polity, but none of the responsibilities. The market thrives on a form of economic Darwinism, where only the fittest survive. The market – amorphous and freewheeling – generates the very forces that lead to the inequality of which Piketty writes. Corporate leaders who earn incomes many manifolds greater than the workers they employ and the shareholders who fund their corporations, who are able to avoid taxation through complex artificial structures and whose corporate power can hold governments in their thrall (News Corp, Apple, Google, Amazon and the energy majors come readily to mind) are increasingly able to behave with impunity. And international corporations are increasingly beyond the reach of national governments, using their financial and market power to frustrate legislative efforts to bring them to heel. Where the payment of taxes, for instances, becomes increasingly optional, whether through ‘thin capitalisation’, transfer pricing, or artificial lending regimes, individual states seem increasingly powerless.

The past four decades have seen national governments increasingly held hostage by ‘the market’, the demands of global capitalism trumping the demands of ordinary citizens progressively to improve their lot. ‘Small government’ has become a mantra, with bank profits and reduced company taxes enjoying higher government priority than the availability of affordable housing, the broader provision of advanced medical services, and improvement in the overall standard of living. The political contumely that characterised the ‘Brexit’ debate in the United Kingdom, the populism and policy chaos that distinguished the US presidential campaign, the emergence internationally of independents and splinter parties to challenge the traditional political domination of the major political parties – all of these are symptoms of a fundamental malaise where the electorate has lost confidence in government. And while the home of free enterprise capitalism, the USA, displays some of the greatest economic and social distortions that have accompanied the ascension of small government (Gordon 2015), disparity and disadvantage are increasingly shared characteristics of the Western democracies.

The solution lies in the hands of political leaders who are able to maintain a dialogue with the electorate. Governments need to redefine themselves as the protectors and managers of the contract between the government and the governed that defines modern democracies. In a globalised world, the nation state has to accord priority to the well-being of its citizens, even if that constrains the freedoms of the international corporations that dictate their terms to the market. The solution has to be nation states acting in concert to sanction those states that create artificial tax havens, and to impose international standards of economic behaviour on a phenomenon – the market – that is currently out of control.

The recently negotiated Trans Pacific Partnership provides an interesting example. The inclusion of an Investor-State Dispute Settlement provision would permit foreign investors to sue governments for losses due to changes in regulatory frameworks, even where such changes are introduced to protect public health, at-risk communities, or the environment. In other words, investors would be able to sue governments for doing what they are elected to do – work for the betterment of the community – if investors were to suffer a consequential financial detriment.

As states evolve politically over the course of the twenty-first century, they will need to find new ways of doing business, of organising themselves, of cooperating to achieve mutually beneficial objectives, and of enhancing international organisations and institutions. Agility and adroitness, and the ability to generate pragmatic interdependency, will become the hallmarks of the successful twenty-first century state. Just as the European nation states have had to find new ways of dealing with state indebtedness and refugee flows, so the nations of the Asia-Pacific region will need to find new ways of dealing with territorial disputes and the even more dramatic potential consequences of global warming. The management of tens of millions of refugees, for instance, will quickly exhaust the resources of any single state acting alone and in its own interests, no matter how impermeable their border controls might be. Concerted multilateral action will be the only way in which the nations of the Asia-Pacific region will be able to meet the multidimensional challenges that China’s regional strategic pre-eminence, inequalities of wealth between neighbouring states, potential refugee flows, and the impact of natural disasters will conspire to create. And at the heart of concerted international action must be the fundamental recognition that every human being enjoys the same basic rights by virtue of their very humanity.

This insight is central to the restoration of “the rule of law” as the cornerstone of the rules-based system without which the international community will fail in its fundamental duty: the protection and advancement of each individual person who constitutes the national communities to which each of us belong. As was noted earlier in this chapter, how individual states resolve the tension inherent in the ‘rule of law/rule by law’ paradox will impact significantly on personal, communal, and national security. For those societies where the value of the individual grounds the political compact between the citizen and the government – generally the democracies – the personal fulfilment of the people becomes the main goal of government. For those where the survival of the state apparatus is the central purpose of government – generally the autocracies – the individual is but a pawn in the expression of state power.

The great powers will continue to try to stare each other down as they jostle for dominance. For second and third tier states, long-term strategic security will depend as much on their ability to create a robust rules-based international system as on the strength of their alliances with the major military powers. Bilateral alliances and multilateral arrangements are not alternatives, of course. They are both operating environments where national interests are promoted, protected, pursued, and defended. Bilateral partnerships are under constant review, and the partners work hard to ensure that they are contemporary and enduring. That is less true of the multilateral institutions, where organisational change has been sclerotic, due as much to the organisational inertia as to the inability of the parties to provide contemporary relevance. The UN and its agencies, for instance, are in serious need of institutional modernisation to reflect the dynamics of the twenty-first century as distinct from the dispensation of the immediate post-World War 2 years. A UN Security Council without Germany and India, for example, is considerably less relevant and agile than contemporary and prospective circumstances demand. Similarly, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR – the UN refugee agency) is simply unable to cope with the demands resulting from the present crisis in the Middle East. It is on the verge of bankruptcy, and lacks the personnel and materiel resources to meet the demand. Without a radical transformation, both organisationally and financially, it will be unable to meet the prospective refugee demands that will inevitably result from global warming.

To paraphrase Thomas Piketty, the past has a habit of devouring the future (Piketty 2014 p 571). Unless the nation states that constitute the present global community are able to overcome the inertia that attends weak leadership and the complacency that attends a lack of imagination and vision, they will be unable to meet the strategic challenges that will inevitably confront them. The security of their populations will be diminished accordingly. The security challenges of this century, whether they are the consequences of global warming, mass displacement of peoples, economic inequalities generated by a rampant and unaccountable form of capitalism, or armed conflicts resulting from new forms of militarism, nationalism, and ideological confrontation, can only be addressed by nation states acting together to protect a common humanity. This is what drives a rules-based international order.