Is a country ever really secure?

The term security can have very broad implications and meanings. The term can be applied to almost anything imaginable but these days it is most commonly applied to the word national, meaning the security of the US. To me it seems that a security threat against the US or any other nation has to be decided on an individual case basis. What constitutes a threat to one nation may not be perceived as a threat by another nation. But it seems that no country can ever be fully secure for two reasons. As Athkor suggests, a primary reason for failure at national security has to do with the fact that a country cannot build up defense against a threat that it hasn’t imagined yet. Even if the country has imagined the threat it can’t necessarily secure its self from that threat. These are both insurmountable obstacles to a country’s security. These security threats can’t be made to disappear by making bigger missiles or more amassing more troops. They are events that COULD happen but can’t be planned for. Therefore, a chink in the nation’s security armor exists beyond the nation’s control.

A good example of this stems from September 11. Before that date the US thought that it was secure on its own soil. To my knowledge, no one in this country had ever imagined the possibility of terrorists taking over commercial airplanes and running them into buildings. This was such a new, radical idea that the terrorists had, using the planes as their weapons. The only time that this had been done before was with kamikaze pilots. But they used their own planes, not commercial airlines full of people. Since the US had never thought of this, there was no way that we could secure against it. It’s only after the attack that we’ve taken a reactive response by increasing our airline security. Now we wait because we believe the terrorists are bound to find a new, unique tactic to strike the United States. But since we can’t imagine what it might be, we can’t really protect against it. So, no, we as a country are never really completely secure, because we always have groups like terrorists wanting to strike with new means that this country isn’t ready to defend against.

An example of a threat that we can’t secure against even though we’ve imagined it is that of Iran possessing nuclear weapons. America has certainly imagined that possibility and is trying to defend itself against the possibility of Iran getting the weapons. But short of bombing Iran and killing many innocent people and escalating the situation, the US cannot directly stop Iran. Right now the US is in the process of engaging the Iranians diplomatically and offering them incentives if they discontinue the nuclear weapons program. So a country can never really be secure because there is always some threat that hasn’t been imagined yet or because there are some situations that can turn into threats that are beyond a nations control.