Some Way Out of Here: Common Security in a World On Fire

This is a most unusual election season. While the media focuses on Georgia and Nevada polling, the world is aflame. Those who have the greatest power to stop the killing are either missing in action or profoundly complicit as they refuse to exercise their diplomatic leverage.

President Biden refuses to join rising European voices urging a ceasefire and negotiations for the Ukraine War and continues to deliver weapons to Israel that make the ongoing genocide in Gaza and murderous devastation of southern Lebanon possible. Donald Trump has welcomed Russia to invade NATO nations that don’t spend at least 2% of their GDP on their militaries, while he urges Netanyahu to “finish the job” in Gaza. Meanwhile Kamala Harris poses as a military hawk, promising the world’s “most lethal military” while talking her way pas serious questions.

Wars and Mounting Dangers

U.N. General Secretary Guterres warns that “The world is becoming unhinged as geopolitical tensions rise and it seems incapable of coming together to respond to mounting challenges.” There are disturbing parallels to the forces that triggered the First World War. As in 1914, there are tensions between rising and declining powers, arms races with new technologies, complex alliance structures, intensifying nationalism, territorial competition, economic integration and intense competition, and wild card actors. Yet—unlike Sarajevo in 1914—an incident, accident, or miscalculation, today could trigger escalation to thermonuclear war.

With the Ukraine War, we face the dangers of political and military miscalculations leading to vertical (weapons) or horizontal (geographic) escalation. After its many nuclear threats, what might the Kremlin’s response be if Biden gives the okay and Kyiv launches a long-range missile at a Russian city, if Ukraine actually threatens Russia control of Crimea, or if a senior Russian political leader is killed by Ukrainian drones hitting in Moscow? What would happen if Russian missiles malfunction or purposely hit Polish cities?

Putin could respond by launching low-yield nuclear warheads. In addition to the resulting unimaginable devastation of Ukraine, our lives would also hang in the balance. There is no certainty that fighting a limited nuclear war is possible. A first limited strike could easily escalate to Armageddon.

In the Middle East, unable to eliminate Hamas or the idea of Palestinian nationalism, Prime Minister Netanyahu is pressing a second and greater Palestinian Nakba, and with his campaign of assassinations, the state terrorism of exploding pagers, and with his bombing campaign he seeks ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon. Iran’s nuclear infrastructure could become an Israeli target, should the U.S. be drawn into the wider war with Netanyahu’s assassinations and bombings in Damascus and Iran.

On numerous occasions—most recently during the Iraq Wars—the U.S. has prepared and threatened to initiate nuclear attacks. What President Putin will tolerate on Russia’s southwestern flank before again rattling his nuclear sword is an unknown. But recall that in the first days of the 1973 October War Gold Meir threatened to unleash Israel’s “Temple Weapons.” We cannot expect the Arab Street to remain silent in the face of a second Nakba or that Hezbollah and Tehran will continue to calibrate their responses to Israel’s brutality.

Further east, the planet U.S.-Chinese competition for regional hegemony in the Taiwan Strait, the South and East China Seas, an accident or miscalculation could all too easily spark a great power, and potentially nuclear. The same applies to U.S.-Russian provocative shows of force in the Baltic and Black Seas. And then there are Korea and Sudan....

These wars and confrontations serve as major obstacles to the cooperation needed to address not only essential human needs like health, housing, education, jobs and more, but the other existential threat to humanity: the climate emergency. It is not for nothing that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns that it is 90 seconds to midnight.

Common Security: A Way Out of Here

Decades ago, Bob Dylan sang “there must be some kind of way out of here.” There is. It is the alternative that, buoyed by the protests of millions of people, served as the diplomatic paradigm that ended the Cold War: the ancient truth that no nation can achieve security at the expense of its rivals. With very few exceptions, and despite nations’ differences, peaceful coexistence and security can be achieved only through mutual recognition, and respectful, if difficult, win-win negotiations between rivals. It is called common security diplomacy.

Common Security is a realist, not an idealistic, approach to stop the killing, to relieve suffering, and to ensure human survival. Those who advocate common security have no illusions about how difficult such diplomacy can be or that it can address every problem we face.

In the early 1980s, as the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race and threats brought us to the brink of nuclear apocalypse. Sweden’s Prime Minister Olof Palme had the wisdom to convene The Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues. It was comprised of the most senior national security advisors to Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev, including U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Georgi Arbatov Gorbachev’s senior security advisor, Egon Bahr Germany’s Secretary of State, and others. Their mandate was to develop a strategy to halt the spiraling arms race and prevent a nuclear war. After difficult but rich discussions, they recognized that fears, as well as bureaucratic and vested interests, drove the arms race. They agreed that when for defensive purposes one side augments its nuclear forces, its rival experiences that as a threatening escalation, and responds in kind, inciting new fears and fueling a spiraling arms race.

The Commission’s answer was to insist on difficult diplomacy in which each side names its fears, does the difficult work of discerning win-win solutions that addressed legitimate fears and enhances each side’s sense of security. Their 1982 Common Security Report provided the paradigm for disarmament diplomacy that followed and resulted in the Intermediate Forces Treaty. The Soviets agreed to forego deployment of nuclear armed SS 20 missiles which would have held all of Europe hostage. And the U.S. committed not to deploy Pershing II missiles that could devastate Moscow and decapitate Soviet leadership in the Kremlin in eight minutes, as well as disavowing deployment of first strike nuclear armed cruise missiles in Europe. With that agreement, and the Gorbachev-Reagan 1985 statement that nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought, the Cold War functionally came to an end in 1987 two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

We should also appreciate that it was popular movements, with millions of people demonstrating in cities and towns across the West and beyond for a halt to the arms race, as well as the wisdom of statesmen, that fueled the creation of the Palme Commission and its recommendations.

The INF Treaty was followed by the Paris Charter, the NATO Russia Founding Act, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation’s 1999 Charter for European Security. Each included the commitment that no nation would seek to enhance its national security at the expense of another. These commitments were enhanced by the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

I am sorry to say that it was U.S. arrogance, beginning with President Bill Clinton, combined with the residual fears of many Eastern European nations, that led to NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders and thus to the decline and then collapse of the European Common Security order.

To prevent a catastrophic war, the Palme Commission had recognized the need to engage in diplomacy. It stressed that “A doctrine of common security must replace the present expedient of deterrence through armaments. International peace must rest on a commitment to joint survival rather than the threat of mutual destruction.” It announced its support for the United Nations’ and Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty’s “goal of general and complete disarmament.”

In 2021 and 2022, as great power confrontations again posed existential threats to survival and the Doomsday Clock approached midnight, non-governmental organizations updated the call for common security diplomacy to prevent catastrophe and to provide a foundation for a sustainable, if not perfect, peaceful international system. Led by the Palme Center, the International Peace Bureau, and the International Confederation of Trade Unions, and backed by a commission of present and former government and U.N. officials and scholars, they produced a successor report, Common Security 2022: For Our Shared Future. Drawing on the Palme Report, it reiterated that ”global peace and security are created jointly—that when your counterpart is not secure, you will not be secure either,” and they pointed to Common Security’s potential to “bring us back from the brink.”

Common Security 2022 was based on six principles that are universally applicable:

1. All people have the right to human security.

2. Building trust between nations and peoples is fundamental to peaceful and sustainable human existence.

3. There can be no common security without nuclear disarmament, strong limitations on conventional weapons, and reduced military expenditure.

4. Global and regional cooperation, multilateralism, and the rule of law are crucial to tackling many of the world’s challenges.

5. Dialogue, conflict prevention, and confidence-building measures must replace aggression and military force as a means of resolving disputes.

6. Better regulation, international law, and responsible governance need to be extended to address new military technologies.

Common Security for Middle East, Ukraine, and the Indo-Pacific Region

How might these apply to the horrors of the current Middle East and Ukraine Wars and to the new cold war across the Indo-Pacific region?.

Hamas’s October 7 massacres were indeed abominations, but by blocking nonviolent opposition and meaningful diplomacy to brutal decades-long occupations, something had to explode. Neither Hamas nor Palestinian nationalism will be eliminated, even as there is no safe place to hide for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank or for increasing numbers of Lebanese. Predictably and tragically Israelis have earned and suffer pariah state isolation. Israel’s economy is flagging, and the country’s northern and southernmost communities have become uninhabitable.

Since the UN’s 1947 partition of Palestine, the world has understood the importance of a common security solution to this legacy of colonialism. The dignity and rights to national self-determination and security must be respected for each of the two peoples as well as between Israel and its neighbors. U.N. resolutions, the Arab Peace plan of 2022, and the sometimes secret 1970s and 80s negotiations between some of Israel’s founders and senior PLO figures have all sought a path for a two-state solution.

Since Israel’s conquest of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli settlements and highways have been designed to eliminate the possibility of the creation of a credible Palestinian state. But, as the former Israeli general and courageous peace campaigner Mattityahu Peled argued, what humans have created can be changed by humans. The establishment of a single secular democratic state may be an ideal worth aspiring to, but with decades of Palestinian and Israeli traumas that will reverberate for generations, such a possibility cannot be realized in the foreseeable future. It can only emerge after trust is restored following years of peaceful coexistence and mutual recognition. As the Palestinian journalist Ramy Khoury explains, with a two state agreement, the spectacular potential of each of these peoples and of the Arab world can be released and realized.

Khoury also reports that the destruction of Israel has never been Hezbollah’s ambition. Rather it has been to defend Lebanon’s long marginalized Shiite population, especially from Israeli attacks. That it would act in solidarity with Gazans under Israel’s indiscriminate massacres should come as no surprise,

Then Ukraine. Over the centuries it has been a divided nation. Its borders have constantly changed. It has been part of the Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian empires. It has been divided by language, religion, and economic ties. It is the borderland over which armies flowed in both directions. In addition to the devastation of Ukraine and its people, the post-Cold War security architecture was shattered on February 24, 2022. With it went all but a few remnants of trust and strategic stability established over sixty years

We now have numerous proposals for Ukrainian peace or an end to the war: Russian and Ukrainian, Chinese, Brazilian, and more. Most urgently we need a ceasefire and interrelated common security negotiations in three dimensions: Ukrainian-Russian leading to a Ukraine which is a neutral sovereign nation with credible security guarantees and as the Czech president recently acknowledged, territorial compromise; U.S/NATO- Russian negotiations for a new European security architecture; and U.S.-Russian negotiations to restore a modicum of trust and strategic stability, including renewal of arms control and even nuclear disarmament negotiations.

In conclusion and turning to the competition for regional and potentially global hegemony, there are the growing dangers of war across the Indo-Pacific region. A working group comprised of engaged scholars and national peace movement leaders from South Korea, Japan, India, Mongolia, the Philippines, the United States and the International Peace Bureau in Germany will soon release a Common Security report for the Indo-Pacific Region.* It identifies off ramps from the sleepwalking marches to what Australia’s former Prime Minister and current ambassador to the U.S. Kevin Rudd terms an “avoidable war.” The report’s key recommendations include:

1. Commitments to common security diplomacy and war under any circumstances must be prevented. Build common security via negotiations, diplomacy, trust, tolerance, and understanding of other cultures.

2. The U.S., China, and Taiwan take actions simultaneously to lower tensions in the Taiwan Strait to avert war. The Strait should be demilitarized, with a shared understanding that the solution to the Taiwan issue should not be by military means. There are specific recommendations for Beijing, Taipei, and the U.S.

3. Declare the end of the Korean War and conclude a Peace treaty. Reduce conventional armaments in Northeast Asia, denuclearize the Korean Peninsula and establish a Northeast Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone. War prevention and peacebuilding forums are needed that involve all parties to the Six Party Talks.

4. Demilitarization and denuclearization of the South China Sea. Respect the security interests of all nations involved in the Law of the Sea Treaty and the U.N. International Court of Arbitration decision. Multilateral and bilateral ASEAN-Chinese negotiations for a South China Sea code of conduct.

5. The legitimate security interests of small states must be respected by the major powers. The role of small states in facilitating regional security cooperation must be recognized.

6. Universalization of No First Use nuclear policies, Resumption of U.S.-Russian arms control negotiations. Strategic stability diplomacy between the U.S., China, Russia, and Japan. Establishment of nuclear weapons-free zones. Freeze in military spending as well as a halt to high-tech weaponization research, development, and deployment.

7. Avoid crystallization of strategic bloc building and related military alliances.

8. Active engagement of the peace movement - nationally and internationally.

How to achieve a second common security order? Several years ago, Noam Chomsky put it well, reminding us that we know the solutions to the existential threats facing humanity. The question, he said, is whether we have the political will to bring them into being.

This article is based on a talk given at a side event organized by the International Peace Bureau and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung during the United Nations Summit for the Future.