What do the CIA, the Pentagon and the UN have in common? They share a prescient view of the world’s greatest dangers and their unheralded agreement on key issues facing the planet has received far too little attention in the media.
Since 2000, all three institutions have produced a number of valuable reports arguing that so-called soft issues like poverty, disease and climate change are endangering global stability and the future of the United States.
This rising consensus should compel US policy-makers to concede a most basic point–we need a global development agenda. It isn’t a soft-headed, idealistic thing either. Unless we confront issues like poverty and gender inequality, the world will become more destabilized, increasingly violent and less secure.
In December 2000, the CIA’s Global Trends 2015 report warned of instability brought on by a shortage of drinking water–“the single most contested resource on the planet,” as Time.com described the CIA’s findings. The report also warned that nation-states would soon disintegrate, “non-state actors” like Osama bin Laden would emerge as greater threats, that populations would increase by one billion people by 2015, and that HIV/AIDS would represent a major security issue in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and the former Soviet Republics. (Another CIA report issued that same year, “Global Infectious Disease Threat,” estimated that by 2020 over half of all deaths from infectious disease in the developing world will be caused by AIDS, imperiling government stability, food production, health services, and even nuclear/weapons security in places.)
Some cities in the Arab world would become “impossibly overpopulated hubs of discontent, dramatically under-serviced by such basic infrastructure as drinking water and sewage,” as Time.com described the CIA’s Global Trends 2015 report’s conclusions. “Their population is likely to be young, hungry, sick, disillusioned and very, very angry.”
The CIA’s report argued that we should increase foreign aid and investment, along the lines of the Marshall Plan, to close a growing divide between rich and poor, which would, in turn, reduce threats to the United States.
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The CIA’s findings, which remarkably dovetail with the United Nation’s Millenium Development Goals, ought to be heard as a rousing call to fund the UN’s development agenda–the only truly global Marshall Plan of our time. The UN’s Millenium agenda–adopted in 2000–includes reducing by half those suffering from hunger; reducing child mortality for children under five by two-thirds; cutting in half the number of those without access to safe drinking water and establishing universal primary education and halting the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases by 2015.
The statistics don’t lie: UNICEF reports that one billion children are living in poverty (or every second child); more than 121 million primary school age children are out of school–the majority of them are girls; and that 10.6 million children died in 2003 before they were five of largely preventable deaths.
The global community knows how to deal with these catastrophes. By spending $150 billion dollars worldwide each year, the UN could actually meet its Millennium Goals over the next decade. (UNICEF puts the figure somewhere between $40 and $70 billion–either way, it’s a paltry sum in contrast to the $956 billion spent annually worldwide on military items.)
Indeed, while the CIA and the UN may diverge on rationale and policy implications, the underlying issues in the decade ahead give credibility to the much-derided “soft” side of the global agenda. Supported by Gordon Brown, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, the UN Global Millennium Agenda offers an agenda that do-gooders as well as economists, national security strategists and CIA agents can (and should) love.
Meanwhile, earlier this year, the Pentagon tasked two futurologists with assessing long-term threats to the United States–their report, “Imagining the Unthinkable,” focused on “worst-case” scenarios and actually cited climate change as a major long-term threat to US national security.
The report’s co-author, Peter Schwartz, told NPR’s Living on Earth that the “most extreme case would be a scenario of fairly rapid warming in the near future–the next, say, decade or so–that would in turn trigger rapid cooling. “Ultimately, we’d see ‘warming’ [in] Europe, parts of the northeastern United States and Canada.You’d see severe storms–more torrential rainfall–very short winters, a shift in the location of tornadoes–and ‘mega-droughts.'” Conflicts over water and fishing rights would emerge, and refugees would flock to the US in greater numbers.
An even more recent report issued last fall–and authored by the Defense Science Board Task Force, an organization that advises the Secretary of Defense–raised crucial issues. The report, virtually ignored by the mainstream media, found that: “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather they hate our policies” and “American direct intervention in the Muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists…” The study also concluded that US public diplomacy faces “a fundamental problem of credibility” and that US support for authoritarian regimes in the region has undermined the so-called war on terror by turning ordinary Muslims against the West.
Back in Dec. 2000, John Gannon–Chairman of the National Intelligence Council and one of the authors of the CIA Global Trends 2015 report–urged America to deal with countries that “feel they’re being left behind”–thereby confronting the downside of globalization. Yet, four years have passed, and America’s political leadership is doing quite the opposite: neglecting the global South and attacking the UN as outdated and useless.
While our mangled Iraq war policy is sowing hatred for America in the Middle East, American policy-makers have failed to heed the rising global consensus that poverty, climate change and the global HIV/AIDS pandemic demand intelligent and collective response and funding.
How many more reports (and threats) must appear before attacking the world’s most glaring problems becomes priority number one?
