convergence

Lawlessness and Disorder
termed “the revenge of the periphery,” a trend that is evident in illegal migration, transnational
crime, terrorism, piracy, and even insurgency. 8
The authors of the third argument regarding a clear and present safety do not actually
deny the existence of complex security threats and challenges; rather, they argue that current
threats are inflated and the responses are overly militarized while emerging threats are largely
ignored, especially in terms of resource allocation. 9 Their argument is far more compelling than
the title of their article suggests, not least because the authors see clear and present safety as
transitory. In their view, “the main global challenges facing the United States today are poorly
resourced and given far less attention than ‘sexier’ problems, such as war and terrorism. These
include climate change, pandemic diseases, global economic instability, and transnational
criminal networks—all of which could serve as catalysts to severe and direct challenges to
U.S. security interests.” 10 This assessment is, in many respects, very compelling. The difficulty
is that the more traditional security threats have not simply gone away to be replaced by a new
set: new and old challenges coexist as part of a more crowded agenda in which traditional,
resurgent, nascent, and truly novel and unfamiliar security threats demand attention in a climate
dominated by economic austerity. Great power conflict, for example, has not disappeared
and, as discussed below, against a backdrop of climate change and intensifying competition
for diminishing natural resources could well come to the forefront again. Adversaries with the
desire or capacity to do harm to the United States cannot be ignored now or in the future. The
danger is that they will present new challenges more difficult to delineate, define, deter, and
defend against. The inherent opportunity cost of managing one set of challenges inevitably
results in attention and resource deficits in relation to other problems. In this connection, one
of the most serious problems is the bias toward the familiar, which accentuates the inherent
difficulties of “managing the unexpected.” 11 Most of the emerging and nontraditional security
challenges are novel or unfamiliar, extending well beyond the comfort zones of policymakers
and officials. As such, they will likely prove impervious to the usual range of policy options
embedded in standard operational procedures. Bureaucracy and budget managers are good at
responding to routine and familiar challenges, but when the challenges are new and different,
the level of competency tends to decline and resources are constrained at the very time they
are most needed.
Adversaries cannot be ignored. Nevertheless, one of the key assumptions of this chapter
is that security challenges emanate not only from hostile actors and pernicious interactions
such as security dilemmas and arms races, but also from certain conditions that promote
violence and instability—and in turn are worsened by them. The United States, in particular,
tends to be overtly focused on adversaries or enemies who are then typically characterized as
embodiments of evil. A paradigm shift is needed to create at least an accompanying focus on
the kinds of conditions and the confluence of trends that create instability, disorder, and chaos.
Some of these conditions and trends might not be susceptible to preventive measures; even so,
acknowledgment of their debilitating consequences might make it possible, under some circumstances,
to develop mitigation strategies. Yet successful mitigation might be the exception
rather than the rule, especially as more security challenges will likely fall into the category of
wicked problems that are not amenable to easy or readily available solutions.
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