Increasingly the Middle East and its growing population face a highly complex and fragile security system. The book analyzes these emerging security challenges in a comprehensive and systematic manner. It draws national and regional security issues into both the global security and human security perspectives.
How can the United States craft a sustainable national security strategy in a world of shifting threats, sharp resource constraints, and a changing balance of power? This volume brings together research on this question from political science, history, and political economy, aiming to inform both future scholarship and strategic decision-making.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is the world’s largest, most powerful military alliance. The Alliance has navigated and survived the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the post-9/11 era. Since the release of the 2010 Strategic Concept, NATO’s strategic environment has again undergone significant change. The need to adapt is clear. An opportunity to assess the Alliance’s achievements and future goals has now emerged with the Secretary General’s drive to create a new Strategic Concept for the next decade—an initiative dubbed NATO 2030. A necessary step for formulating a new strategic outlook will thus be understanding the future that faces NATO. To remain relevant and adjust to new circumstances, the Alliance must identify its main challenges and opportunities in the next ten years and beyond. This book contributes to critical conversations on NATO’s future vitality by examining the Alliance’s most salient issues and by offering recommendations to ensure its effectiveness moving forward. Written by a diverse, multigenerational group of policymakers and academics from across Europe and the United States, this book provides new insights about NATO’s changing threat landscape, its shifting internal dynamics, and the evolution of warfare. The volume’s authors tackle a wide range of issues, including the challenges of Russia and China, democratic backsliding, burden sharing, the extension of warfare to space and cyberspace, partnerships, and public opinion. With rigorous assessments of NATO’s challenges and opportunities, each chapter provides concrete recommendations for the Alliance to chart a path for the future. As such, this book is an indispensable resource for NATO’s strategic planners and security and defense experts more broadly.
Water has always been a source of risks and opportunities in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet rapidly changing socioeconomic, political, and environmental conditions make water security a different, and more urgent, challenge than ever before. This report shows that achieving water security means much more than coping with water scarcity. It means managing water resources in a sustainable, efficient, and equitable way. It also involves delivering water services reliably and affordably, to reinforce relationships between service providers and water users and contribute to a renewed social contract. Water security also entails mitigating water-related risks such as floods and droughts. Water security is an urgent target, but it is also a target within reach. A host of potential solutions to the region’s water management challenges exist. To make these solutions work, clear incentives are needed to change the way water is managed, conserved, and allocated. To make these solutions work, countries in the region will also need to better engage water users, civil society, and youth. The failure of policies to address water challenges can have severe impacts on people’s well-being and political stability. The strategic question for the region is whether countries will act with foresight and resolve to strengthen water security, or whether they will wait to react to the inevitable disruptions of water crises.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has elaborated its own philosophy of security. Driven by emergencies and increasing risks, both in the region and globally, Emirati authorities have developed a sense of anticipation as well as an agility to react promptly to new threats through the ability to assess the risks in any given situation. War and the avatars of conflict are a constant reality in the Middle East. Transnational threats, including the regional context, the war in Yemen, insecurity in the Levant and tensions with Iran affect the overall stability of the Peninsula and consequently that of the UAE. Owing to the inclusion of the UAE in the networks of globalization, non-traditional security issues are not relegated to the background. Issues such as COVID-19, immigration, cybersecurity and human trafficking need to be addressed domestically as well as globally. This volume offers a comprehensive and multifaceted examination of the traditional and non-traditional security measures present in the UAE that allow the country to remain politically stable in an otherwise volatile region, and aims to offer a comprehensive overview of all forms of security in the UAE.
On August 24-25, 2010, the National Defense University held a conference titled “Economic Security: Neglected Dimension of National Security?” to explore the economic element of national power. This special collection of selected papers from the conference represents the view of several keynote speakers and participants in six panel discussions. It explores the complexity surrounding this subject and examines the major elements that, interacting as a system, define the economic component of national security.
National secuirty strategy is a vast subject involving a daunting array of interrelated subelements woven in intricate, sometimes vague, and ever-changing patterns. Its processes are often irregular and confusing and are always based on difficult decisions laden with serious risks. In short, it is a subject understood by few and confusing to most. It is, at the same time, a subject of overwhelming importance to the fate of the United States and civilization itself. Col. Dennis M. Drew and Dr. Donald M. Snow have done a considerable service by drawing together many of the diverse threads of national security strategy into a coherent whole. They consider political and military strategy elements as part of a larger decisionmaking process influenced by economic, technological, cultural, and historical factors. I know of no other recent volume that addresses the entire national security milieu in such a logical manner and yet also manages to address current concerns so thoroughly. It is equally remarkable that they have addressed so many contentious problems in such an evenhanded manner. Although the title suggests that this is an introductory volume - and it is - I am convinced that experienced practitioners in the field of national security strategy would benefit greatly from a close examination of this excellent book. Sidney J. Wise Colonel, United States Air Force Commander, Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education
This book discusses the threats and challenges facing the Persian Gulf and the future security in the region, providing an overview of the major regional and extra-regional actors in Gulf security. It argues that except for Iran, no regional or extra-regional actors, including the United States, China, India and Russia, have developed a strategy for Persian Gulf security, and only Turkey has expressed a willingness to provide security for the region. Importantly, the major threats to Persian Gulf security are nonconventional, rather than external, threats to Iranian hegemony or the balance of power. In conclusion, it predicts that the power struggle in the Persian Gulf in the coming decades will be between Iran and Turkey, and not between Iran and Saudi Arabia. This book is of interest to diplomats, journalists, international affairs specialists, strategists and scholars of Gulf politics and security and defence studies.