LAKE: The fact that it looks like our next president will have come to power as much through the skill of his lawyers as through the number of votes he gathered will simply reinforce all of the bitterness and partisanship that has been so destructive over the past decade. I’ve just returned from repeated trips abroad, and I find that most foreign friends are worried that this will further vitiate our ability to govern and to lead.
The most dramatic would be an incident of bioterrorism–an anthrax attack, for instance. That could be more devastating than a chemical attack. We’re also underestimating the dangers of cybercrime and cyberterrorism. There’s a kind of bemused acceptance of hackers. But if cyberterrorists go after emergency police or medical systems or many other targets that I don’t want to mention, the results could be terrible. This is especially dangerous because of the much larger pool of potential terrorists. You can develop anthrax in dry form that could be used by a terrorist, but it’s extremely difficult. Almost anyone under 30, though, has been trained in the skills that would allow him or her to be a cyberterrorist. Which is why, reversing the 1960s phrase, I say I don’t trust anyone under 30.
Yes. Probably our most effective foreign-aid spending is the Nunn-Lugar Act, which helps the Russians safeguard their nuclear materials. There is enough nuclear material in Russia now to build some 70,000 warheads. If only a minuscule percentage of that were to leak out to terrorists in usable form, it could have devastating consequences. This doesn’t have to be a nuclear bomb. If you put radioactive materials around a conventional explosive, you can still have a devastating result.
Governments must stop acting bureaucratically, having one box for domestic terrorism and crime, and another box for foreign terrorism and crime. In an era of globalization, it’s harder to separate the domestic from the foreign. That’s why I make a radical proposal. I recommend that there be a new assistant to the president who would be in charge of what is called public security. This new office should integrate all of our efforts in this area, forcing the FBI and the CIA to get over some of their frictions.
We can be effective in combating terrorism while still protecting our civil liberties. If you have a clearer bureaucratic structure, there’s less chance of individual branches of the government taking actions that would violate civil liberties. And covert actions can be properly controlled by both the White House and the Congress. As much as possible, this should be coordinated with other governments, not directed against other governments.
Every nation cedes some of its sovereignty when it joins others in combating common threats. If we in the U.S. are so preoccupied with preserving our sovereignty that we fail to cooperate with others, we will lose more of our sovereignty to the dark forces of globalization. Globalization is in general a good thing, but it’s also eroding the safety of our citizens because borders are becoming more porous and terrorists can access cyberspace.
It is extremely difficult to deal with the weaknesses of others–economic dislocations, the growing gap between rich and poor, fractured states. It is harder to try to build a political base in the United States for dealing with others’ weaknesses than for confronting missile development in North Korea, for example. But we need to do both. The growing gap between rich and poor nations can provide fertile ground for the kind of terrorism and anti-American reactions that we are now seeing.
We are a statistical superpower. But one of the consequences of the gridlock in Washington is that we are not applying the constructive power that we could to try to solve these problems. Either through our aid programs, where on a per capita basis we lag behind just about every other industrial nation, or in paying our bills at the United Nations, or in risking our forces on the ground in peacekeeping operations. We are becoming the Atlas that shrugged.
