Monday, April 09, 2012

"Clear and Present Safety"

Micah Zenko and Michael Cohen have a longish piece up on Foreign Affairs on the problem of threat inflation. Here's the article summary:

A political cartoon about threat inflation

U.S. officials and national security experts chronically exaggerate foreign threats, suggesting that the world is scarier and more dangerous than ever. But that is just not true. From the U.S. perspective, at least, the world today is remarkably secure, and Washington needs a foreign policy that reflects that reality.

If you're not already a subscriber, you'll have to register to read the article. But that's free, and painless.

Of course, given the reality of our political system's utter ownership by the military-industrial complex, it's hard to imagine that this article will do much more than get people like me to nod with approval. But you never know, and you gotta start somewhere, and maybe at least, it'll make it easier to keep at least some pressure on the brakes.

(h/t: Foreign Entanglements)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

To read the full article, you have to subscribe and pay.

bjkeefe said...

Yes, sorry about that, Anon. Foreign Affairs does that with their articles: they're freely accessible for only a short while after they get posted, and then they disappear behind a paywall.

However, this being the Internet, you can find copies of it elsewhere, say, by Googling a directly quoted phrase from the opening section. Here is what looks like a complete copy on Scribd. for example.

bjkeefe said...

Oh, wait, I spoke too soon. You can, of course, go read the article at the Scribd link I just gave, but it turns out that this article is, in fact, still freely accessible on Foreign Affairs's site. You only have to register, which, as I said in the main post, is free.

But, if you don't want to give them your email address, the Scribd link or similar might be of more interest to you.

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