The United Kingdom has enjoyed a deep and a strong relationship with the whole of the Gulf Region. Centuries old ties, built upon economic and security needs, they promise to be just as important to my country in the future as they have been in the past. Today, this gathering is an important event. Listening to each other leads to better understanding, and understanding someone else’s perspectives should always be a precursor to action. The top priority of every nation will always be the security of its own people. Today, however, traditional territorial security threats sit alongside new threats to peace, prosperity and security. These include nuclear weapons proliferation, failed states that allow terrorism to go unchallenged, economic disorder, health pandemics, energy security and climate change. These challenges are common to everyone here today, and a threat to every region on our planet. Each of these threats in their own way, equal to the potency and the disruption of the traditional military threats we have all spent so much time and energy analysing and preparing for.
These new security threats can be addressed sensibly and safely, provided each region is prepared to accept and share responsibility for overcoming them. There must be a renewed commitment to strengthen multi-lateral institutions across each region to assist in creating a permanent dynamic through which the individual security of each nation can be enhanced and guaranteed.
It is clear to all of us that the world has never been more interdependent. The twin late-20th Century forces of accelerated economic globalisation and the mobile, transnational modern security threats have made this so. Both are expanding and redefining our concepts of national security. The process of economic interdependence can and should drive us to a closer sense of security interdependence, a process that can help tackle causes of conflict by placing an increasing emphasis wherever possible on development and good governance over kinetic operations and the use of military force alone. But of course there is nothing inevitable about this outcome. We will have to work together to make it achievable.
Today it is true that technology drives the forces of globalisation further and faster, increasing its power and magnifying its effects. But globalisation itself is not a new phenomenon. Previous phases of economic globalisation have resulted not in peaceful coexistence but in conflict and war, quickly followed by protectionism and depression. So history contains a clear warning to all of us: Let us not repeat the mistakes of the past again.
Terrorism is the most potent security threat of our time, increasing in intensity and projecting its reach to every region of the globe. As we have seen with the barbaric and criminal events in Mumbai last month, but Islamabad, London, New York, Madrid, Nairobi and Bali and elsewhere in recent years, terrorism does not discriminate between people, races or religion. That is why security in Afghanistan, where terrorist attacks that killed citizens from 53 nations were planned, is a challenge for the region and the world.
Let me take a brief moment this morning to pay tribute to the four British soldiers who lost their lives in Afghanistan in the last 48 hours. Three of those soldiers, victims of a despicable Taliban attack involving an innocent 13 year old child. Further evidence, if any were needed, of the hideous depths to which these terrorists will sink. Terrorists must be tackled at source. Its hard core ideologues, not reasoned with or disarmed by words of peace or comfort, must be defeated. The whole international community must play its part.
Terrorism, like so many of the new security threats we now face, is not constrained by territorial boundaries. Today the distinction between economic and territorial insecurity is becoming harder and harder to draw. Energy security is a potent example of the new risks that we now face. I am concerned by states that might want to exploit their energy resources as a tool of foreign and security policy. As my country, and many others, transition from being net exporters to becoming net importers of energy, access to reliable and affordable energy becomes more and more of a national security challenge. Energy insecurity is driving an expansion of civil nuclear power right across the world, and I understand why.
Nuclear power has a critical role in combating energy insecurity and dealing with the challenge of climate change. In the United Kingdom we are committed to a new generation of nuclear power stations for precisely these reasons. But the expansion of civil nuclear power also increases the risk of sensitive technologies falling into the wrong hands or being applied for military purposes. So effective international inspection and regulation will be critical if we are to robustly govern the development and application of civil nuclear power. Effective multilateral institutions that can help us build trust and sustain trust and confidence.
Nuclear weapons proliferation is a first order security threat that must be dealt with now and not brushed under the carpet. South Africa and Libya have shown alternative paths can be trod, and we must all continue to play our part in supporting these efforts. Sadly, only Iran appears impervious to every offer from the international community to develop the safe application of nuclear power for civil purposes. The combination of Iran’s ambition to create indigenous enriched uranium capability and its constant refusal to abide by five separate UN Security Council resolutions on nuclear technology proliferation gives the international community every justification in saying that Iran’s stated aim to contain its nuclear programme for civil use cannot be taken seriously. So the burden of proof must now shift. The onus is on Iran to demonstrate, to the satisfaction of both the regional and the international community, that its nuclear motivations are peaceful.
Nuclear weapon proliferation in the Middle East would be a disaster for regional and global security. The coming year provides a real opportunity to work with leaders in this region, and in the international community, to resolve this dispute over nuclear weapons proliferation with Iran. We need to move beyond a shared rhetorical understanding of the threat we face towards a practical engagement for dealing with it.
The interdependent nature of modern security threats challenges every region of the globe to examine and potentially construct new institutions and processes that can recognise and manage these new as well as traditional security risks. This generation of political and military leaders should work to create a climate in which there is both public support for, and the institutional capacity to deliver, a rebalancing of regional security questions. The twenty-first century must be one that recognises the responsibility and leadership role of the regions themselves for managing security threats in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Central Asia or Africa.
During the twentieth century, Western European states learned the hard way, through two World Wars costing millions of lives that we had to search for a new path of peaceful coexistence. Multilateral economic and security institutions were created – NATO, The European Coal and Steel Community, the European Union, European Defence and Security Policy. They have all been at the heart of that search for a new, peaceful path. These institutions have succeeded. They have bound our economic and security destinies together to the extent that military confrontation now between major European states is unthinkable. To anyone who says tensions in the Middle East, in Africa or Central Asia can never be resolved, my response is to say that Europe’s progress since World War II is living proof that such fatalism is misplaced.
Each region must find its own way of making and working through these challenges, creating institutions that can respond effectively to regional and local security challenges. The Gulf Cooperation Council is gaining momentum as an economic market, and I am sure there is much that could be gained from building similar trading frameworks across Central Asia to integrate the economic and security futures of Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and neighbouring states. There is not an institutional template that can or should be imposed.
The shape, structure and depth of each are questions for each region to address. But they must pass the test of effectiveness. They must bring together all the major players of the region. They must be able to respond in a timely fashion. They must be able to deal effectively with the modern security questions we are faced with today: ethnic conflict in the Congo, Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, piracy off the coast of Somalia, terrorism across Afghanistan and Pakistan. Effective institutions can build trust and confidence.
Britain can help, if invited, to build capacity in these nascent institutions. There are lessons to be learned from Europe’s development, that it is possible to transform from being enemies into partners. Europe and America must play its part too in ensuring that our global and regional economic and security institutions are fit for purpose and can cope with modern security threats. Indeed, the reform of international institutions – the UN, IMF, World Bank – will in terms of voting rights and influence require recognition of the new global economic landscape. And just as we are rethinking the nature of our international economic, financial and regulatory regimes in the face of today’s economic challenges, we must reappraise, too, the structures that deal with security. NATO, for example, must continue to reform in order to become a security alliance that is equal to the challenge of these new security threats and not just those of the second half of the 20th century.
Britain will play its part because we believe we can help to make a difference. The UK’s historic legacy of relationships and responsibilities across every region of the world will continue to inform our engagement. But ultimately, my country stands ready to engage because our national security, like yours, depends upon it. The modern security threats we face are faced in one way or another by every nation on the planet. Globalisation has brought the world closer together. It has allowed us to fight poverty, disease and injustice more rapidly and more effectively than at any other time in the history of human civilisation. But we must make globalisation the driving force behind a new commitment to multilateralism beyond just the economic sphere, extending the frontiers of cooperation now on security policy so that the gains we have made are not squandered by the prevalence of the old ways of thinking about national security, which only sees borders and barricades. That is the old way. Those are the old ways of thinking. And we all know from history and from precedent where that thinking eventually leads.
