The Insecurity Trap

This is a highly topical short study of security in an insecure world. Paul Rogers has been writing about these themes for over 30 years, and coined the term ‘liddism’ to characterise a military approach to security, ‘rather than by understanding the nature and the underlying factors and thus countering them at source.’ Fundamentally, security has ultimately to be common and multilateral rather than one-sided or even lopsided, creating insecurity in its wake. We see this in the current European situation, where the author does not in fact follow his own advice by failing to give the historical background to the Ukraine war, as explained by Jeffrey Sachs and Glenn Diesen in multiple YouTube videos. NATO expansion was based on unilateral US hegemony, and repudiated earlier plans for a general European security, effectively re-creating the Cold War. The current Secretary of State is the first in his position to talk about multilateralism - see my review of Diesen above. Military solutions in the Middle East, especially currently in Gaza, are ultimately self-defeating, while creating unliveable conditions for the inhabitants who are no more than expendable pawns on the global chessboard. Violence is always reproduced in violence, and we are not yet mature enough as a species to realise this. Besides, war is good business, with huge lobbying power and influence. The overall model is correctly characterised as hegemonic masculinity. (see essential argument on p. 47).

The two other key themes are the climate crisis and our unjust neoliberal economic system based on competition rather than cooperation, and leading inexorably to inequality and concentrations of wealth and power. If, as the author argues, there is increasing mistrust of institutions and science, this is in my view due to the politicisation and monetisation of science as consensus and the suppression of dissent during Covid, on which the author takes the mainstream view – including referring to ‘conspiracy theories on the origin of the virus’ which have now proved to be correct and is even being covered in mainstream outlets (and see recent disclosures by Tulsi Gabbard confirming this). His fundamental remedy for the climate crisis is centred on the consensus for decarbonisation, without mentioning any critiques of such a reductionist approach and the neglect of the role of water and clouds. And no leading commentator discusses the potential destabilising role of geoengineering, aka weather manipulation. What we need in my view is a different form of thinking based on systems regeneration, also involving forests, the soil, and regenerative agriculture – as argued by Vandana Shiva. These reservations aside, the book is highly informative and contains an action-oriented final resource chapter, and I can certainly agree with what is formulated as the right question: ‘How quickly can we move to a more sustainable, equitable and peaceful world?