90-776, Post Cold War Security: Terrorism, Failed States, and New Threats

12 units

Prerequisites: None

Delivery Format: On-Campus

Description:

With the end of the Cold War, security policy has evolved to address both the changing nature of threats and the increasing complexity of the international security environment. New threats including information warfare, international criminal organizations, critical infrastructure attack, and the transnational spread of disease demand innovative applications of military, economic, and political power. The demise of the Cold War threat required nations, and the U.S. in particular, to intervene and interact in an entire new way. Humanitarian disaster and ethnic conflict in Somalia and Bosnia, for example, exposed the inadequacies of international peace and security strategies, dramatizing the need for an entirely new approach to security policy in the post-Cold War world.

The course is more than a retrospective on the transition from the Cold War to the challenges of terrorism, international crime, and failed states; it focuses also on continuing institutional and analytical problems facing the governments who must address these security issues today. Case studies will include Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq, Colombia, and Afghanistan. Challenges of counter-terrorism and homeland security will also be addressed.

The instructor was the first director of the Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office (CIAO), a new Federal agency created to coordinate U.S. policy against a range of emerging terrorist and new threats, and subsequently Senior Director for Critical Infrastructure at the White House National Security Council.

Last modified on June 1, 2006