A new way to talk about national security

A chara, – David O’Sullivan, the director general of the Institute of International and European Affairs, asks “How can we best protect Ireland’s security and prosperity into the future?” (“Ireland will need to develop a new vocabulary to talk about national security”, Opinion & Analysis, June 30th).

By way of an answer, he advocates “a holistic concept of security that embraces the full range of our political and economic interests, as well as our values”.

It seems apparent that, during his stint as EU ambassador to the US, Mr O’Sullivan fully imbibed what the political analyst Perry Anderson terms the American “catechism of security”: alarmist scenarios of vulnerability to external attack, the magnification of foreign dangers and the absurd notion that “our values” are intrinsic to security.

Mr O’Sullivan suggests that, “We will even need to develop a new vocabulary to talk about security”. However, his own lexicon is already well known to anyone familiar with what Anderson calls the “distortions of ideology and exaggerations of insecurity” that have underpinned US foreign policy for more than a century.