We Owe it To Ourselves to Elect Honest and Trustworthy Leaders

The accelerating spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, brings with it some valuable lessons and opportunities for growth. We are learning firsthand the dangers of putting up with leaders who are dishonest and untruthful and who are more concerned with their own interests, whether political, personal, or financial, than the interests of the people they represent. We are becoming more deeply aware that truthfulness and trustworthiness are no longer qualities that are merely desirable in our leaders. Rather, they are essential and non-negotiable criteria of electability, as our very lives depend on them.  

COVID-19 is affording us the opportunity to witness firsthand the disastrous ramifications of a culture of obfuscation, concealment, and outright lying that has become endemic to our social and political lives worldwide. In the midst of this public health crisis, the inability to trust what our leaders tell us can prove fatal. If we find our leaders have downplayed the severity of the contagion as occurred in China, Iran, and currently in the United States, why should we believe them when they tell us that it is time for drastic measures such as quarantine? Similarly, if our leaders have misled us regarding the availability of medical equipment such as masks, ventilators, and hospital beds, we are more likely to believe rumors and to discard instructions not to hoard materials, such as masks, that must be reserved for our health workers — our first line of defense.  

Even when it comes to the likely economic fallout from the coronavirus infection, our past experience with health crises indicates that only one third of the economic impact is attributable directly to the crisis, for example as a result of death, inability to go to work, and reduced production. By contrast, as Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund explains in a recent interview on the PBS News Hour, a whopping two thirds of the economic impact is due to loss of confidence and uncertainty. Leaders have the responsibility to bolster our confidence by being open, transparent, and truthful; at the very least they must refrain from behavior that exacerbates any existing uncertainty and confusion or contributes to loss of confidence.

The good news is that if we don't like the state our world is in, we are not stuck with it, nor are we doomed to repeat the habits and patterns of the past if they no longer serve us. We have the opportunity to make different and more empowering choices that will eventually change our social reality. We could begin by demanding that candidates for political leadership be known for their qualities of honesty, truthfulness, and consequent trustworthiness, which we know are so crucial to our wellbeing and security. We should prioritize such qualities over platforms and promises, many of which are often left unfulfilled. 

If we are to be successful in electing leaders worthy of our trust, we must first be willing to continually hone our ability to investigate the truth without prior prejudices or conceptions. In other words, we must refuse to abdicate our responsibility to discern the truth by blindly believing everything we are told regardless of the reliability of the source.  

Having adopted this new mindset, we must examine the motives, record of service, and demonstrated qualities of the candidates. In the digital age, such information is relatively easy to ascertain. It is not hard to glean information about a person's past dealings, both in matters of family and business. If a candidate has shown themselves to be incapable of being faithful to their spouse, the one person they have sworn to love and cherish all their lives, why would we expect them to treat us, the unknown masses any differently? It doesn't make sense to assume that, once in office, they would miraculously transform their character and demonstrate a high degree of loyalty to their electorate. Maybe they will, but chances are they won’t. The same holds true for those who have demonstrated their untrustworthiness in business dealings. If they have been in the habit of cheating, lying, and fraudulently dealing with their business partners, vendors, or customers, why would we have any expectation that they would behave differently once they are in positions of power and subject to greater temptation of larger rewards? It is similarly easy to ascertain a person's motives based on their record of service: Have they been more interested in advancing their own ego and interests or have they consistently demonstrated that they put the interests of their communities above their own?

In sum, our experience with the coronavirus, while painful, is also providing us a rich opportunity to build a more peaceful and secure world. If we start by recognizing that we have the power to make different, more constructive choices by honing our individual ability to investigate the truth for ourselves and by demanding that our leaders possess the qualities of honesty and trustworthiness, we will have taken some crucial strides toward such a peaceful and secure world. 

It is Time To Create a European Intelligence Agency: A Step Towards Creating A Much-Needed International Intelligence Agency

We live in a world that is interconnected and interdependent in ways that it has never been before.  Human beings are moving from country to country in unprecedented numbers, both voluntarily thanks to the explosion in affordable means of travel and as refugees fleeing persecution, or economic migrants seeking a better life.  Advances in communications technology have made it possible to communicate instantaneously from from one end of the globe to the other.  Although these advances have enriched our lives in many ways, they have also made it possible for those animated by hate, prejudice, or unalloyed lust for power and glory to wreak havoc and destroy lives more easily.  Terrorist networks benefit from access to encrypted communications technology and freedom of movement to kill, maim, destroy and spread terror.

Despite the tremendous advances we have made in turning our world into a global village, one in which we are inextricably interconnected through global trade, communications, finance and travel, we are lagging behind in the creation of critical collective institutions that are necessary to serve our growing collective interests.  The events of the past few year have increasingly pointed to the need for an international intelligence agency that would serve the collective interests of the international community by providing accurate, timely, reliable and shared intelligence.  Questions such as whether Iraq still had a secret nuclear weapons program and a cache of weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq war, whether Iran was and is in fact trying to build a nuclear weapon, or the true extent of North Korea's nuclear activities, are all ones that could most effectively and reliably be answered if the world had such an agency.  The lack of such an agency serving humanity's collective need for security was palpably felt in Paris last weekend when the city and many innocent people in it became the target of six simultaneous terrorist attacks that by all accounts had been meticulously planned over a period of time.  

It is not too late: world leaders should now bend their efforts to creating a formalized, supranational intelligence system that integrates national intelligence capabilities and is responsible for gathering credible and timely intelligence for a reformed Security Council that is more representative of the people and nations of the world and whose mandate to preserve peace and security has been fleshed out and made more clear.  The existence of such a system would make it much harder for those intent on committing heinous acts that instill terror into the hearts of people to carry on their activities undetected. Moreover, the fact that such intelligence is shared, means that it is more likely to be trusted by the countries which it impacts, making it more likely that they would feel comfortable relying and acting upon it and doing so more swiftly and decisively.  It would also lead to greater unity in decisions made by the Security Council, which is, after all, the international agency tasked with maintaining peace in the world.

Europe can lead the way by creating a European-wide regional intelligence agency.   In the aftermath of last weekend's attacks in Paris the question that is being asked in some quarters is whether Europe's informal system of sharing intelligence is adequate to deal with the threats it is facing.  There is a call in some quarters for "some form of institutionalized sharing of electronic and human intelligence." Such action could serve as a first step along the road towards the creation of an international intelligence agency.  It could serve as a testing ground from which we could all learn how we might to do this successfully at a global level.  One valuable lesson such a step will hopefully  model is that it is possible to get nations to trust each other enough to be willing to share intelligence in a systematic and timely manner.  An even deeper lesson will likely be that ultimately such trust will come only when the nations involved are convinced and deeply understand that ceding a modicum of sovereignty by sharing intelligence is in their own best interests and will benefit them both individually and collectively in the face of collective threats like terrorism.  This was the fundamental and powerful lesson and operating principle upon which the foundations of what we now know as the European Union were based.