Jeffrey LewisElBaradei Accepts Nobel Prize

Yeah, what he said:

I believe it is because our security strategies have not yet caught up with the risks we are facing. The globalization that has swept away the barriers to the movement of goods, ideas and people has also swept with it barriers that confined and localized security threats.

A recent United Nations High-Level Panel identified five categories of threats that we face:

1. Poverty, Infectious Disease, and Environmental Degradation;
2. Armed Conflict – both within and among States;
3. Organized Crime;
4. Terrorism; and
5. Weapons of Mass Destruction.

These are all “threats without borders” – where traditional notions of national security have become obsolete. We cannot respond to these threats by building more walls, developing bigger weapons, or dispatching more troops. Quite to the contrary. By their very nature, these security threats require primarily multinational cooperation.

But what is more important is that these are not separate or distinct threats. When we scratch the surface, we find them closely connected and interrelated.

That’s the core idea of the Advanced Methods of Cooperative Security project and John Steinbruner’s book, Problems of Global Security.

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On a related note, Drudge and the Jerusalem Post grossly misrepresented something DG ElBaradei said in an interview with The Independent earlier this month.

ElBaradei told The Independent that once the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz is up and running, then Iran would be a few months away from enriching enough uranium for a nuclear weapon. That statement is a technical fact based on the capacity of Natanz. A second technical fact, omitted in the Jerusalem Post story (and previously alluded to by the IAEA), is that Iran is some years away from getting Natanz (and the Uranium Conversion Facility at Esfahan) up and running—the best guess is that Iran will not be able to produce enriched uranium before early to mid-next decade.

Anyway, Media Matters does a reasonably wonky job dissecting the claim after the Washington Times editorial page and Rush Limbaugh repeated the line out of the Jerusalem Post.