Understanding New Global Realities

Abstract

To build successful national security policy, US policymakers need to take new security realities more fully into account. Four of these—declining utility of military power, rising threats from non-state actors, increasing non-military threats to security, and growing dangers from virulent militarized nationalisms—worsen all of the United States’ traditional security problems and increase the dysfunctionality of the existing international system. Three more promising changes—expanding applications of the rule of law internationally, rising potential in nonviolent direct action for advancing social justice and human rights, and increasing promise in global governance—provide new possibilities for increasing US security. These changing realities call for significant revisions in security theory, policy, and international institutions to address the most dangerous trends and take advantage of the most promising governance opportunities in order to make national government, once again, and global governance, for the first time, truly effective in serving the common good.