One topic that has always interested me is the supposed tradeoff between “national security” and “personal freedom.” After September 11th, I took for granted that maintaining security from external threats, i.e. terrorism and nuclear proliferation, would require Americans to give up some of their civil liberties in order to give the Justice Department, the CIA and the myriad of other agencies charged with maintaining national security, the capacity to find and punish anyone who threatened America. I now see this view as shortsighted and misguided. These violations of civil liberties and human rights actually compromise the very American ideals that so many have fought and suffered to uphold. They also fuel resentment towards America, bolstering support for organizations like al Qaeda and making us less safe. I now adhere to a much broader definition of national security, which includes upholding human rights and civil liberties.

A few things endure over time: lives, property, our economic health, and our institutions of government (including the Constitution). These are, in fact, our way of life.

If you begin with that framework, it’s easier to understand the broadening set of threats that we face. Climate change, for example, won’t defeat the 3rd Infantry Division, but its impacts will pose profound threats and challenges to our security–challenges that our Department of Defense is ill-suited to address.

Unfortunately, “security” is so intertwined with “defense” in our daily parlance that we tend to focus on the kinetic power of the American military (and the threats it was built to address) at the expense of America’s other powers–diplomatic, economic, and moral–and the challenges they face.

The sad result is that we are less secure, despite the billions we spend to protect America, from a multitude of likely threats.

These beliefs are no longer well-adapted to understanding a fast-changing world. One example: Non-state, nonviolent indigenous actors, such as civilian-based movements using mass resistance, are sapping the power of governments that have lost or never had their people’s consent. So, for example, civil resistance in Iran, Burma, Egypt, West Sahara, West Papua and about 20 other countries today have decimated the legitimacy of the governments or occupiers in these lands. Such movements have become the chief agency by which the political structure will eventually change, dramatically or gradually. In 50 of 67 transitions from authoritarianism to democracy between 1970 and 2005, civil resistance was the decisive factor. Yet talk to virtually any senior people in any foreign affairs ministry or intergovernmental NGO and they will see nonviolent non-state actors as aspirational amateurs at best but typically as a sideshow. The green movement in Iran was a complete surprise to them.

To the extent that the very concept of “national security” helps to preserve the dogmatic thinking that inhibits seeing critical new changes, perhaps we need to find an entirely new paradigm for determining what should guide our public policy-making when it comes to international affairs.

I think we’d do ourselves a favor if, when we talk about security, we looked inward as much as at external threats.

When you look at all the damage that has been done to this county over the last 30 years, whether it be tax policies that resulted in a massive redistribution of wealth from the working and middle classes to the very top; or the deindustrialization of the country, taking with it with the corresponding number of good-paying jobs and resulting in huge current accounts imbalances; or the deregulation of the banking and financial sectors that became an unquestioned fetish and resulted in the destruction of trillions of dollars of our national wealth; or the consolidation of the media, which resulted in the dumbing down of the news to the point where corporate “journalists” never ask tough, probing questions of our leaders, or even call them out on statements they make that are outlandishly and demonstrably false, all these wounds are self inflected. No foreign power did these things to us. All these things we did to ourselves.

And the resulting carnage of it all: a middle class under unprecedented stress; an immoral profit-driven healthcare system that reaps well-documented suffering and hardship; hard- earned retirement savings forced into the casino of a deregulated Wall St, and wiped away overnight; a crumpling and insufficient national infrastructure that we can never seem to pay to maintain; a military-industrial complex which has spun completely out of control beyond all reason – all these things resulted from a fanatical adherence to one political ideology: the conservative ideology. Yes, Democrats were culpable too. Far too few had the courage to stand up to the prevailing winds blowing from the Right, not even when they were leading us into an unnecessary war.

You can’t talk about national security without mentioning all this because it seems we are our own worst enemy.

You want the equivalent of a foreign nuke attack on the US? It’s called President Sara Palin. And the MAD scenario won’t put the breaks on this one.