Kuwait: Security Threats and Response

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the various security threats facing Kuwait. The paper contends that the Kuwaiti government must reassess its earlier national security priorities and replace the threat posed by Iraq, which had earlier dominated the country's security agenda, with the threat posed by terrorism, acting against the possibility of terrorists coming into the country from Iraq. At the same time, the principality has to place economic security high on its priority list and try to enhance it by confronting the need to have a national defense, while separating that defense from the United States.

From the Paper:

"The concept of national security and the types of threats which countries now have to plan and account for in their security agendas has undergone a tremendous, maybe even drastic change in recent years. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of multinational and nationless terrorist groups, security threats were reasonably clear cut. Leibstone, a military conflict and security scholar, mentions that security threats and concerns primarily arouse from the ideological conflict between the West and the Soviet bloc with there really being no possibility of open warfare or conflict in light of the military capabilities of both. In fact, it was even assumed that, in case of severe conflict between nations, the USA and the USSR would step in to contain it, as happened multiple times, including during wars between Israel and the Arabs (6). While that does not mean to say that the world was secure during the Cold War, security threats were more identifiable and, consequently, containable. However, following the downfall of the communist empire, the security threats have multiplied, most notably because they are not as identifiable. For instance, there are questions surrounding missing Soviet weapons of mass destruction with the primary fear being that they are either on sale in the black market or have actually fallen into the hands of terrorist groups. These groups, as mentioned directly above, now constitute a security threat of a new nature and dimension. They are now insofar as it is practically the first time that countries have had to deal with a strong but unidentifiable enemy. Their dimensions are unknown because, as an unidentifiable nationless enemy, the severity of their threat is incalculable because little concrete information is known about either the weapons they control, their average membership size or the countries that they operate it."

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