scholarly journals Economic Factors Undermining National Security: Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap, Australia

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-140
Author(s):  
Marko Beck
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Best Interests ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Human Intelligence ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
Intelligence Gathering ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Controversy

The article analyses Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap in Australia that is used by the United States to controls satellites pinpoint airstrikes around the world. The Joint Facility rises political controversy in Australia (especially after Edward Snowden’s revelations) as many doubt if it is in Australia’s best interests to contribute data for drone assassinations and targeting US nuclear weapons. Considering Australia’s policy towards Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap the author raises the question whether national security can be “outsourced” to save budget funds. The article concludes that in Australia it is noticeable that human intelligence potential in financial terms is less valued than some construction, manual jobs. Considering that Russia and China, which are in the focus of Pine Gap intelligence gathering do not outsource its national security and were more successful in preventing major information leaks, moreover in preventing major terrorist attacks on their soil, is indicating that national security should not be privatized.

Refuge in the National Security State

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Cristina García
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Security ◽  
Homeland Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Policies ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Department Of Homeland Security ◽  
The World ◽  
National Security State

In response to the terrorist attacks of 1993 and 2001, the Clinton and Bush administrations restructured the immigration bureaucracy, placed it within the new Department of Homeland Security, and tried to convey to Americans a greater sense of safety. Refugees, especially those from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, suffered the consequences of the new national security state policies, and found it increasingly difficult to find refuge in the United States. In the post-9/11 era, refugee advocates became even more important to the admission of refugees, reminding Americans of their humanitarian obligations, especially to those refugees who came from areas of the world where US foreign policy had played a role in displacing populations.

Narrative Misdirection? UK Strategic Communication for Afghanistan and Beyond

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-392
Author(s):  
Thomas W. Cawkwell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Security ◽  
Strategic Communication ◽  
The United States ◽  
Security Issue ◽  
Counter Terrorism ◽  
Defence Policy ◽  
The World ◽  
Communication Approach ◽  
The Uk

Britain’s war in Afghanistan – specifically its latter stages, where the UK’s role and casualties sustained in the conflict rose dramatically – coincided with the institutional emergence of Ministry of Defence-led ‘Strategic Communication’. This article examines the circumstances through which domestic strategic communication developed within the UK state and the manner in which the ‘narratives’ supporting Britain’s role in Afghanistan were altered, streamlined and ‘securitised’. I argue that securitising the Afghanistan narrative was undertaken with the intention of misdirecting an increasingly sceptical UK public from the failure of certain aspects of UK counter-insurgency strategy – specifically its counter-narcotics and stabilisation efforts – by focusing on counter-terrorism, and of avoiding difficult questions about the UK’s transnational foreign and defence policy outlook vis-à-vis the United States by asserting that Afghanistan was primarily a ‘national security’ issue. I conclude this article by arguing that the UK’s domestic strategic communication approach of emphasising ‘national security interests’ may have created the conditions for institutionalised confusion by reinforcing a narrow, self-interested narrative of Britain’s role in the world that runs counter to its ongoing, ‘transnationalised’ commitments to collective security through the United States and NATO.

Alliances, Military Basing, and Logistics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc C. Vielledent
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
Security Strategy ◽  
Potential Conflict ◽  
Security Forces ◽  
Fiscal Constraints ◽  
Security Environment ◽  
National Security Strategy ◽  
The World

The United States has long enjoyed an essentially unopposed ability to project power and sustain its security forces dispersed throughout the world. However, the uncertainty facing the global security environment, including tenuous alliances, fiscal constraints, and a decline in overseas basing, has increased tensions in emerging areas of potential conflict. These factors are driving change regarding the United States’ defense posture and access agreements abroad. While the preponderance of overseas capability outweighs the preponderance of U.S. forces, deterrence continues to underpin the overarching national security strategy. However, deterrence options impacted by the lack of resilience and investment in distributed logistics and sustainment are generating an additional range of variables and conditions for operators on the ground to consider in shared and contested domains.

scholarly journals Obama's National Security Exceptionalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sudha N. Setty
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Security ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Norms ◽  
Global Community ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
The World ◽  
International Obligations

Published: Sudha Setty, Obama's National Security Exceptionalism, 91 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 91 (2016).This Article discusses how continued national security exceptionalism engenders a view of the United States as considering itself to be above international obligations to investigate and prosecute torturers and war criminals, and the view by the global community that the United States is willing to apply one standard for itself, and another for the rest of the world. Exceptionalism not only poses real challenges in terms of law, morality, and building useful relationships with allied nations, but acts as a step backward for the creation of enforceable international norms and standards, and in efforts to restore a balance in the rule of law when it comes to national security matters.

scholarly journals Public Pressure, Temptation of Power and Unconstitutional Actions in the War Against Terrorism in Kenya: Suggesting a Link

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-75
Author(s):  
Cecil Yongo
Keyword(s):  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Information Communication ◽  
Intelligence Gathering ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
The World ◽  
Public Pressure ◽  
The Government

The reaction of the government in Kenya, like many other governments around the world, to terrorist attacks has generally been to strengthen existing laws and enact novel laws, especially those that aid the state’s intelligence-gathering capabilities, along with those that are punitive. In some cases, even in Kenya, States have taken, or have attempted to take, extra-Constitutional and unconstitutional actions. This is the approach that this paper characterises as arising from ‘temptation of power’, and in that regard, this interdisciplinary paper is—through an analysis of scholarship in law, sociology and information/ communication—an attempt to investigate the origin, results and wisdom of such an approach in the war against terror, its effect on the rule of law and minority rights in society; and propose why and how it can be avoided.

The continuing threat of nuclear war

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Cirincione
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Winter

The American poet Robert Frost famously mused on whether the world will end in fire or in ice. Nuclear weapons can deliver both. The fire is obvious: modern hydrogen bombs duplicate on the surface of the earth the enormous thermonuclear energies of the Sun, with catastrophic consequences. But it might be a nuclear cold that kills the planet. A nuclear war with as few as 100 hundred weapons exploded in urban cores could blanket the Earth in smoke, ushering in a years-long nuclear winter, with global droughts and massive crop failures. The nuclear age is now entering its seventh decade. For most of these years, citizens and officials lived with the constant fear that long-range bombers and ballistic missiles would bring instant, total destruction to the United States, the Soviet Union, many other nations, and, perhaps, the entire planet. Fifty years ago, Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel, On the Beach, portrayed the terror of survivors as they awaited the radioactive clouds drifting to Australia from a northern hemisphere nuclear war. There were then some 7000 nuclear weapons in the world, with the United States outnumbering the Soviet Union 10 to 1. By the 1980s, the nuclear danger had grown to grotesque proportions. When Jonathan Schell’s chilling book, The Fate of the Earth, was published in 1982, there were then almost 60,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled with a destructive force equal to roughly 20,000 megatons (20 billion tons) of TNT, or over 1 million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ anti-missile system was supposed to defeat a first-wave attack of some 5000 Soviet SS-18 and SS-19 missile warheads streaking over the North Pole. ‘These bombs’, Schell wrote, ‘were built as “weapons” for “war”, but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to annihilate man’.

The Reticence of India

2021 ◽  
pp. 119-141
Author(s):  
Manjari Chatterjee Miller
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The United States ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Material Growth ◽  
The World ◽  
Military Development ◽  
Rising Power

Like China, the world began to see India as a rising power in the post–Cold War world. While today many would argue China has pulled away from India, in the 1990s, the two countries were comparable in terms of their economic and military development. In the post-Cold War world, thanks to domestic reforms, India’s economic growth took off at unprecedented rates. It continued to invest in its military, and also became a nuclear weapons state. But, as this chapter shows through two of its relationships, with the United States and with ASEAN, India remained peculiarly reticent on the world stage. And the narratives that accompanied its material growth remained entrenched in older ideas and inward facing ideas about nation-building.

Cold War diplomacy

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beverley Hooper
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Communist China ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Foreign Ministries

From the early 1970s, the US-China relationship was central to diplomatic reporting, with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s visit to Peking in October 1971, President Nixon’s historic visit in February 1972, and the establishment the following year of small liaison offices in Peking and Washington. Following each of Kissinger’s further visits in 1973 and 1974, senior diplomats virtually queued up at the liaison office to find out what progress, if any, had been made towards the normalization of US-China relations. Peking’s diplomats, like some of their colleagues elsewhere in the world, did not always see eye-to-eye with their foreign ministries. There was little chance of their becoming overly attached to Communist China, as the Japanologists and Arabists were sometimes accused of doing for Japan and Arab countries. At the same time, living and breathing the PRC led some diplomats to regard Chinese Communism as being rather more nuanced—and the government somewhat less belligerent—than the Cold War images portrayed in the West, particularly the United States.

The United States and Asia in 2017

Asian Survey ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-20
Author(s):  
Robert Sutter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
Security Strategy ◽  
Regional Stability ◽  
National Security Strategy ◽  
The World ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
Trump Administration

Early Trump administration initiatives upset regional stability, complicating the foreign policies of Asian partners and opponents alike. Subsequent pragmatic summitry eased regional anxiety and clarified the new government’s security and political objectives. The administration’s national security strategy, released in December, provided a well-integrated security, economic, and diplomatic strategy for Asia and the rest of the world.

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