Cooperation

Five global hinge points

/ Dan Smith / Leave a comment

Among those sayings that encapsulate political wisdom but are either inaccurate or apocryphal (such as the ancient Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’ that is neither Chinese nor ancient, or the misinterpretation of the Chinese character for crisis as fusion of danger and opportunity), I have a soft spot for the one by Harold Macmillan. When asked either what he most feared or what was most troubling when he was UK Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963, he may have replied, ‘Events, my dear boy, events.’

If he didn’t say it, he should have. The press of events is the bane of those trying to steer a strategic path in government. Today, it is particularly difficult because there are so many events consuming so much government oxygen while we face five major hinge points in global affairs that complicate everything.

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The nuclear challenge today and tomorrow

/ Dan Smith / 1 Comment

On 6 and 9 August this year, we will mark the 80th anniversaries of the two occasions on which nuclear weapons have ever been used in war – the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.* Humanity has perpetrated and experienced a great deal of harm in the past eight decades but nuclear weapons have not been used again. Despite today’s widespread and intensifying perception of nuclear risk, the nuclear taboo survives.

That does not mean the nuclear problem has been solved, of course. It is “an encouraging fact”, as the Nobel Peace Prize Committee put it when giving the 2024 award to the movement of Japanese nuclear survivors (the hibakusha), Nihon Hidankyo. But not more than that. And honouring the hibakusha in this way was also intended as a wake-up call to those many people who until recently regarded nucleapons as yesterday’s problem.

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World order §7: Shared vulnerabilities demand cooperation

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My previous post makes an argument that regular readers of this blog will find familiar: the challenge of ecological disruption including climate change crosses national boundaries and can only be tackled by international cooperation. It is not a problem that any single country, however rich, can solve alone. It is the superordinate challenge of our time and one part of the difficulty of rising to it is that, at the very time when we need a world order with strong institutions encouraging, facilitating and streamlining international cooperation, they are weakening. Deteriorating relations and increasing hostility between the great powers and their respective allies are undermining the ability of world order institutions to protect peace and security and get in the way of working productively on climate change and other issues. In the face of that, how can we do cooperation?

To the pessimism that might produce, I have a simple response. If international cooperation is necessary it has to be possible because the alternative is unacceptable. And if it is possible on the ecological crisis, I’m now going to argue, it’s possible in other areas as well.

This post is the next to last in a series on the shaky state of the world order. It is based on the introductory chapter to the recently released SIPRI Yearbook 2024.

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World order §6: Ecological disruption and cooperation

/ Dan Smith / 2 Comments

Researchers, commentators and policy-makers are increasingly aware of the negative effects of climate change for peace and security. Climate change undermines conditions for peace and security for all, while increased conflict, disputation, instability and disorder add to the difficulties of arriving at agreements to slow down global warming. When we think about peace and security and about world order, climate change – and, by extension, the full spectrum of ecological disruption – should be in the centre of our attention.

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Insecurity, the Anthropocene & nature’s tipping points

/ Dan Smith / 1 Comment

Each February, leaders, policy-makers, thinkers and practitioners in the field of security, broadly defined, get together at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich for a three day international conference. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2019, Germany’s then Chancellor, Angela Merkel, opened her speech by reflecting on the world’s entry into a new geochronological age – the Anthropocene Epoch. 

She explained, “This means that we are living in an age in which humankind’s traces penetrate so deeply into the Earth that future generations will regard it as an entire age created by humans.” She briefly touched on different human impacts on the environment and then said, “All of this has implications for global security and for the issues that are being discussed right here, right now.”

Right here, right now, too right.

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Arms control in 2021

/ Dan Smith / 2 Comments

There are so many crucial items on the global agenda that one struggles to keep up (though I do wonder whether there really are more now than there used to be or does it just feel that way?). Covid-19 and its economic consequences, the likely increase in extreme poverty and hunger, climate change and the rest of the compound environmental crisis, the attack on democracy in the world’s richest and most powerfully armed state, rising inequality, toxic geopolitics, intractable armed conflicts. And more. This does not seem to be a happy age that we are living through.

In this (rather lengthy) post, I focus on prospects for arms control in 2021. The big challenge is how to make progress against such an unpromising backdrop.

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Law matters

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A UK government minister has acknowledged that the next step in the country’s departure from the EU includes a plan to break international law. That decision that has led the government’s senior legal adviser to resign. As reported in the normally government-supporting Daily Telegraph, it appears he had already contemplated resigning over the government’s fast and loose way with the law.

Not surprisingly, the incident has caused outcry, both about the substance of the case and about the resulting damage to Britain’s international reputation. Bad and sad as that is, there is a bigger issue. This is only the latest example of a seriously worrying trend of disrespect for international law.

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Nine items of evidence for optimism

/ Dan Smith / 3 Comments

It’s that time of year, right? In fact, that time of the decade – the cusp between one and the next. From the teens to the twenties. So it’s time for my review of the last (what went wrong) and a forward perspective over what’s coming (trends to watch). Except, no.

Recently I asked a group of eminent and wise people for reasons for optimism. There is these days a bias towards pessimism that is simultaneously understandable, debilitating and tedious. I wanted to push back and get eminent wise help in doing so.

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Realism means cooperation

/ Dan Smith / 2 Comments

Consider some problems: climate change, the challenges of new technologies, the crisis in nuclear arms control, inequalities, freedom of navigation in the Gulf, increasing hunger and food insecurity, demographic pressures, the greater number of armed conflicts in this decade than the previous one, discrimination and repression on the basis of gender or faith or sexual preference, plastic pollution, pandemics, the sixth mass extinction and more. What conclusions can we draw? Continue reading →