“'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the
rub,”
We are living in a moment in history where world power is changing in ways we have never imagined.
We
have seen shifts of power -- from nation to nation, the power of Greece passing
on to Rome and the power shifts that occurred during the European
civilizations.
Civilizations
started gathering around seas -- with the first
ones around the Mediterranean, the more recent ones around the Atlantic. It
seems that we're now seeing a fundamental shift of power, broadly speaking, away from nations gathered around the Atlantic
seaboard to the nations in Asia gathered around
the Pacific rim. It has begun with economic power - the way it has always
begun. We are already beginning to see the development of foreign policies, the
augmentation of military budgets occurring in the other growing powers in the
world. This is not just a shift from the West to the East; this is something
different.
Up
until now, the United States has been the dominant feature of our world, acting
as the world’s police force at very great expense. They will remain to be the
world’s most powerful but in an increasingly multi-polar world. We already
begin to see the alternative centers of power growing. But China's ascent to
greatness is not going to be smooth. It's going
to be quite rough as China begins to democratize
her diverse unwieldy society after liberalizing
her economy.
Many
people say that the Chinese will never get themselves involved in multilateral
peace-making around the world. But they have to get involved. How many Chinese troops are
already serving under the blue beret, serving under the U.N. command in the
world today? 3,700. How
many Americans? 11. The fact remains that there
are more global Filipinos at any one time under U.N. command. What is the
largest naval contingent tackling the problem of Somali pirates? The Chinese naval contingent of
course! Because they are a mercantilist nation, they
have to keep all sea lanes open, including the West Philippine Sea leading to
the Malacca Straits. Increasingly, all of us
will have to do business with people with whom
we do not share values, but with whom, for the
moment, we share common interests. It's a whole
new different way of looking at the world that
is now emerging.
There's
another factor that is totally different. Today
in our modern world, because of the Internet, because of Facebook, Twitter and other social media, everything is connected to everything. We are now interdependent. We
are now interlocked, as nations, as individuals, in a way which has never been the case before. The interrelationship of nations has always existed. Diplomacy is about managing the interrelationship of
nations. But now we are intimately locked
together. You get swine flu in Mexico, which is
going to be a problem for Charles de Gaulle Airport 24
hours later. Lehman Brothers goes down the drain
and the whole lot collapses. When there are fires in the steppes of Russia, it
causes food riots in Africa.
We
are all now deeply, deeply, deeply interconnected. And
what that means is the idea of a nation acting
alone, not connected with others, not working with others is
no longer a viable proposition. Because the
actions of a nation state are neither confined
to it, nor is it sufficient for the nation state
itself to control its own territory, because the effects outside the nation state are now beginning to affect what happens inside them.
In
olden times wars were small. At that time, the
defense of a country was about one thing and one
thing only: how strong was our army, how strong
was our air force, and how strong was our navy
and how strong were our allies. That was when
the enemy was outside the walls. Now the enemy
is inside the walls. It's no longer the case
that the security of a country is simply a
matter for its soldiers and policemen. It's its
capacity to lock its institutions together.
In
this modern age, where everything is connected
to everything, the most important thing about
what you can do is what you can do with others. The most important bit about your structure -- whether you're a government, an army regiment, or
you're a business -- is your docking points, your interconnectors, your
capacity to network with others.
Our global commons is under attack in a variety of ways, and that the sources of these
threats are within us and will not be
kept away by walls.
Now we see ocean liners with concertina wire along the
sides. That's to prevent pirates from attacking ships. Piracy is a very active
threat today around the world. It is very active in the Indian
Ocean, the Strait of Malacca, even in the Gulf of Guinea. We see it in the Caribbean. It's a
$10-billion-a-year problem in
the global transport system. Last
year, at this time, there were 20 vessels with 500 mariners with a big number of
Filipinos held hostage. This is an
attack on the global commons. It has to be addressed.
Let's shift to a different kind of sea, the cyber sea, which
may become the next battleground. Authorities have apprehended two young
men who conducted a credit card fraud that netted them over 10 billion dollars. This is part of cybercrime wave, which is a
$2-trillion-a-year glitch in the global economy. Two trillion dollars
a year is just under the GDP of Great Britain. So this cyber sea, which we
know is the fundamental instrument for transparency and openness that has been
shown to give us this open-source security, needs to be well guarded as it can
likewise be misused or abused.
Another thing to worry about is the threat posed by
trafficking, the movement of narcotics, opium, coming out of
Afghanistan through Europe over to the United States - about
cocaine coming from the Andean Ridge. We worry about the movement of
illegal weapons and about human trafficking and its awful
consequences.
There is a very high-tech piece of sea craft that we should
be using to stop trafficking, but instead it is a semi-submersible
developed and run by drug cartels, built in the jungles of South
America. The US Navy caught it with a low-tech raft — and it was carrying
six tons of cocaine. With a crew of four and sophisticated communications, this
kind of trafficking, in narcotics, in humans, and in weapons is part of
the threat to the global commons.
Eighty to 90 percent of the world's poppy, opium and heroin, comes out of Afghanistan. Of course,
terrorism and al Qaeda are also staged from there, including a very strong
insurgency embedded there. So this terrorism concern is also part of the global commons that we must address.
So, knowing that our
20th-century tools are no longer going to work,
what should be done?
Security will not be delivered
solely from the barrel of a gun. We will need the application of military
force, but done in a more competent manner.
Open-source security is about international, interagency,
private-public connection pulled together by this idea of strategic
communication on the Internet.
Eighty-five percent of Afghans cannot read when they enter the security forces of Afghanistan. They
are illiterate because the Taliban withheld education during the period of
time in which these men and women would
have learned to read.
NATO in partnership with private sector entities, in
partnership with development agencies is teaching Afghan security forces to
read in literacy courses.
When you can read and write in Afghanistan, you will
typically put a pen in your pocket. At the ceremonies, when these young
men and women graduate, they take that pen with great pride, and display it in their pocket. There are 50 nations involved
in these development agencies performing this mission. It is bringing together
international, interagency and private-public effort, to take on this kind
of security.
We are, of course, also teaching them combat skills, but
open-source security means connecting in ways that create longer
lasting security effect.
Here's another example. The US Navy has 2 hospital warships, the
Comfort and its sister ship called the Mercy. The Comfort operates
throughout the Caribbean and the coast of South America conducting
patient treatments. On a
typical cruise, they'll do 400,000 patient treatments. It is manned not strictly by military but by a
combination of humanitarian organizations: Operation Hope, Project
Smile. Other organizations send volunteers. Interagency physicians
come out. They're all part of this effort.
To illustrate the impact this can have: there is this little boy, eight years old, who walked
with his mother for two days to come to the eye clinic put on by the
Comfort. When he was fitted with glasses over his extremely myopic
eyes, he suddenly looked up and said, "Mom, I see the world." Multiply this by 400,000 patient treatments done
by this private-public collaboration with security forces, and you
begin to see the power of creating security in a very different way.
We can do open-source security through sports. We can have a
series of baseball clinics, where we explore collaboration between
Major League Baseball and the Department of State. Military
baseball players, who are real soldiers with real skills, participate in
this mission, and they put on clinics throughout Latin America and
the Caribbean, in Honduras, in Nicaragua, in all of the Central
American and Caribbean nations where baseball is very popular. It
introduces role models to young men and women about fitness and about life
that help create security for all of us.
Another aspect of this security partnership is in disaster relief. US
Air Force helicopters participated in disaster relief after the tsunami in 2004 which killed 250,000 people. Also
in each of the following major disasters: the Kashmiri earthquake in Pakistan
in 2005 with 85,000 dead, the Haitian earthquake causing about 300,000
dead and more recently the awful earthquake-tsunami combination which struck Japan and its nuclear industry — in all of these instances, we see partnerships between
international actors, interagency, private-public working with security
forces to respond to this kind of natural disaster. So these are
examples of this idea of open-source security.
So
suddenly, what has been the proposition of visionaries and poets down the ages becomes something all of us including the superpowers
have to seriously face as a matter of public policy.
Based
on presentations for TED Talks by Paddy
Ashdown, British politician and diplomat & Admiral
James Stavridis, US Navy
