My Take | Why US national security means insecurity for most other countries
- New book details how America has weaponised the global economy to attack foes and bully friends, with Hong Kong among those targeted
With his typical intellectual condescension, the late Henry Kissinger once told Golda Meir that her demand for “absolute security” for Israel meant absolute insecurity for everyone else.
But elsewhere he said something not so dissimilar to Meir with respect to America: “Other countries have national interests. The United States alone has global interests.”
I am reminded of what FBI trainee Clarice Starling, played by the young Jodie Foster, said to the genius serial killer Dr Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs: “If only you could turn your amazing power of perception on yourself, Dr Kissinger”, sorry, I meant to write Dr Lecter.
In the intervening decades, US national/global interests have become increasingly indistinguishable from its broad definition of national security.
That means what one country does in its own backyard halfway around the world may be seen as a threat to US national security and is to be dealt with accordingly. But this is not just confined to physical space, such as sea, land and air, including outer space and deep into the oceans. It also covers cyberspace and its online activities.
The awesome powers that the US wields in the latter technological and financial spaces are the subject of a new book, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman.