convergence

Miklaucic and Naím
An Existential Threat
What are existential threats? Are they limited to those that result in mushroom clouds?
Throughout the Cold War years, the Soviet Union, with its terrifying military machine, was
clearly perceived as a clear and present threat to U.S. national and international security. But
also perceived as posing an existential threat was the international spread of the Marxist/
Communist ideology. The Soviet threat led to substantial institutional innovation within the
United States and the West, such as the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
It also resulted in various tools the U.S. Government created largely to fight the ideological
battle against the existential threat posed by international communism, such as the U.S. Agency
for International Development, U.S. Information Agency, Radio Free Europe, and Radio
Liberty. Though these latter efforts were not notably effective, they indicated the magnitude
of the threat perceived.
Spanish prosecutor Jose Grinda Gonzalez was responsible for investigating organized
crime particularly coming from Russia, Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Belarus, Chechnya, and
elsewhere. In Grinda’s view, in the nations he calls mafia states the interlocking networks of
criminals and political leaders is vast, deep, and permanent. One cannot differentiate between
the activities of the government and organized criminal groups; they are one in the same. He
reports examples of going after some criminals and criminal groups and discovering that he
was not only dealing with them; they were able to mobilize their nations’ diplomats, military,
governments, judiciary, and so on. “Here I am, a prosecutor, a magistrate in Spain, but on the
other side of me I face the best lawyers that can be hired in Spain and I face nation-states that
are deploying diplomats, the military, intelligence and spies.” This invokes the point made
above concerning asymmetry and underscores the challenges we face in containing, let alone
reversing, the decay within the global rule-based system of states.
Does the emergence of criminal states pose an existential threat to U.S. national interests
or to international security or is this just a marginal issue? We believe unequivocally that this
threat is at the least very substantial, and has the potential to become existential if the trends
it generates remained effectively unchallenged. Although our analytic, policy, development,
and military communities are still at a very primitive stage of understanding and intellectual
development, the evidence of risk is pervasive and frightening. While not measurable in megatons
or body counts, the rapid erosion of a fundamental principle of modern governance—the
dedication of the state to the public interest—is an insidious threat to the state system as we
know it. The proliferation of criminal states would represent a profound disruption in the
contemporary system for the preservation of global order.
We need to be selective and prioritize the greatest threats, perhaps even letting go for the
time being those that might be characterized as nuisance risks. If we have scarce resources, what
should we prioritize? Should we spend time, money, and other resources pursuing those who
produce and sell counterfeit children’s books or dedicate those resources to pursuing people
who are trafficking in children? Should we put the same effort into going after people who are
stealing Microsoft software and plagiarizing and copying programs and apps as we put into
the effort to stop people from selling centrifuges for nuclear enrichment on the black market?
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