About Sustainable Security

Positioning America to lead in a 21st century world will take more than extending a hand to our allies, fixing a long list of misdirected policies, and crafting a new national security strategy that is tough as well as smart. Globalization provides an immutable backdrop to our foreign policy. America is today competing on a global playing field that is more complex, dynamic, and interdependent and thus far less certain than in the past.

Leading in this new world will require a fundamental shift away from our outdated notion of national security to a more modern concept of sustainable security—that is, our security as defined by the contours of a world gone global and shaped by our common humanity. Sustainable security combines three approaches:

• National security: the safety of the United States
• Human security: the well-being and safety of people
• Collective security: the shared interests of the entire world

Sustainable security, in short, can shape our continued ability to simultaneously prevent or defend the United States from real-time threats, reduce sweeping human insecurity around the world, and manage long-term threats to our collective global security. This new approach takes into account the many (and ongoing) changes that have swept our planet since the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union.