The War on Terror and Other Security Concerns

There is no panacea for terrorism...we should not allow fear to distract us from the best ways to respond. Nor should fear stop us from saving many more lives by spending the money on less publicised issues facing the planet .

When Tony Blair made his statement to the nation on the 9th September 2001 few could have envisaged how an attack of 9/11’s magnitude against the world’s superpower could be possible; and how this ‘new’ war on terrorism would dominate Britain’s security policy for the following decade. The Global War on Terror (GWOT) had begun; this singular terrorist action sought to galvanise a global response to the most significant terrorist attack in living memory. Ten years after the invasion of Iraq, a fatal terrorist attack in London and a NATO-led invasion of Afghanistan, the GWOT endures. Today, the unchallenged aphorism remains: the GWOT is the greatest threat to UK national security. There is strong evidence however to suggest otherwise. The UK faces many threats to national security, many of which outweigh the GWOT. These threats or ‘Ringroad Issues’ are Climate Change, Innovation, Globalisation and Global Inequality.

This paper demonstrates the extent that the GWOT distracts the British Government from its more important security concerns, highlights those concerns, and suggests that Britain’s security focus has been hijacked by the GWOT. This paper will compare the GWOT in resource terms with the most ‘popular’ security concerns: Climate Change and Globalisation.

The Government’s decision to support the US-led GWOT placed the UK at the epicentre of the campaign, forcing the adoption of ‘policies, strategies, programmes, and other measures to deal with the Islamists, even though there was no indi...

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