E3G

Security trends and threat misperceptions

By Nick Mabey

But while traditional military strategists – particularly in Washington – focus on the threat from China’s future economic and military strength, the reality is that it is China’s weakness that is the biggest challenge to UK and global security over the few decades.

China is still a relatively poor and developing country, undergoing profound and destabilising changes. Chinese leaders estimate that they must grow at around 7% per annum to prevent internal social unrest, and they need to secure the energy supplies to achieve this. China’s inability to compete against the US in political, financial or military influence is a key reason for it striking energy deals with “pariah” states such as Sudan, Iran, Myanmar and Angola; with India (the world’s largest democracy) following close behind. China’s fears about destabilising shortages of food and water are also driving its relationships in Latin America and Africa, to secure access to fertile land. China’s economic need to use its major domestic energy reserves of coal is behind the rapid rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

China is trying to manage the domestic tensions caused by its growth, but is hampered by the immaturity of its political, governance and social systems. Ambitious targets to increase energy efficiency and lower oil imports have been missed; policies to save water and reduce pollution are not implemented; outbreaks of infectious diseases such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) are covered up; people traffickers continue to send economic migrants to Europe; and regulation to prevent land expropriation for commercial development is ignored leading to 70,000 public protests every year.

In the past we would perhaps have seen these as internal matters for the Chinese to deal with, and that an internal crisis in China could have been welcomed as reducing their global influence. But interdependence now means that we cannot afford for China to fail. The majority of the economic growth driving these tensions is devoted to producing exports for the developed world, often from factories owned and built by foreign companies. A failed China would bring global economic depression and probably a more dangerous and hostile regime into power. A hostile China would be less interested and less able to control its greenhouse gas emissions, which constitute a direct threat to the UK.

China is just the most visible example of how our security and prosperity is becoming ever more intertwined with what was previously called the developing world. UK security and stability will be increasingly determined by the ability of India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa and many others to manage the tensions of industrialisation and globalisation.

In this context, traditional security policies of deterrence and containment will increasingly fail to deliver. For these threats there is often no malign intent to identify and then deter, and we have in any case often chosen increasingly to intertwine ourselves with the sources of these challenges.