Leaders of today could learn much from Gorbachev

LAST year, just a month after the Covid-19 pandemic ground life to a halt across the world, former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev wrote: “What we urgently need now is a rethinking of the entire concept of security.” Rather than measure security purely in military terms, as we usually do, “the overriding goal must be human security: providing food, water and a clean environment and caring for people’s health.”

Gorbachev, who celebrates his 90th birthday on March 2, was perhaps the most radical thinker about security to ever lead a major world power – and certainly the most radical to ever lead a nuclear country. As Soviet president, he reversed generations of perilous military build-up and democratised the Soviet Union to help put an end to the Cold War, a struggle that won him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Since the end of his tenure, Gorbachev has continued to argue for new thinking about security, and recent events have vindicated his prescience. In the face of mounting global crises, today’s leaders should heed three lessons Gorbachev has promoted for decades.

First, militarisation does not make us safer. As Soviet leader, Gorbachev saw how it instead often escalates the threat of violence by driving other countries to build up their militaries. These expensive investments divert resources from investments in basic needs, such as healthcare and education.

Gorbachev was revolutionary when, in the 1980s, he called for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. Due in large part to his leadership, by 2015, 85pc of the US and Russian nuclear arsenals had been decommissioned from their Cold War-era heights. Yet his vision of demilitarisation remains not only unfinished but increasingly under threat. Key arms treaties have been allowed to expire, and some nations, including the US, Russia and China, are now modernising their arsenals. The US, for example, plans to order 600 new long-range missiles, each 20 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The total cost? $100bn (€82.24bn). That’s $100bn that, as Elisabeth Eaves of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists points out, could “pay 1.24 million elementary school teacher salaries for a year, provide 2.84 million four-year university scholarships, or cover 3.3 million hospital stays for Covid-19 patients.”

We gain far greater security by investing in our civilisation’s health and well-being than by purchasing 600 new ways to destroy it.

Gorbachev’s second vital insight is that security starts with co-operation – even when that seems impossible. President Ronald Reagan famously called the Soviet Union an “evil empire”. That position would deter many in Gorbachev’s position from attempting to open a dialogue. But, as I have often heard Gorbachev say in gatherings over the years, “if we don’t attempt what seems impossible, we will risk facing the unthinkable”.

So, he persevered. Eventually, both leaders came to see no one could win the Cold War. As Gorbachev put it: “We only won when the Cold War ended.” The improbable partnership made the entire world safer. Of course, this co-operation is even more important today, as the “unthinkable” also includes diseases that know no borders and a climate crisis that threatens the planet. (©Washington Post)