Students and faculty can feel more comfortable when confronted with the possibility of a threat, thanks to a threat assessment seminar held Tuesday evening.
“Terrorism is not one of the greatest threats facing the United States,” Joseph Caddell, a teaching assistant in history said at the seminar.
Caddell said he views threat assessment as looking at the obvious, the intentions and the capabilities. Information about intentions is hard to collect but a capability to harm the U.S. can be more obvious, Caddell said.
“We’ve only had two real threats in the history of the United States,” Caddell said. “The confederacy, and the space race with Russia.”
Sept. 11 is not considered to be a major threat to national security, according to Caddell. He thinks the U.S. government “may have overreacted” to the terrorist attacks in 2001.
Prior to World War Two, the United States government never really dealt with assessing threats, Caddell said, but then the attack on Pearl Harbor “changed the way Americans view the world.”
Multiple government organizations, including the Central Intelligence Agency, were created to assess threats after Pearl Harbor, Caddell said. The U.S. government began focusing on which countries proposed a “worst case scenario” situation on our country, according to Caddell.
Currently, North Korea and China are threats against the U.S., according to the Director of the School of Public and International Affairs, Richard Mahoney. China owns eight percent of our nation’s national debt, Mahoney said.
“China has the world’s fastest growing economy,” Mahoney said. “They’ve become the dominant economic power in Asia.”
The word “pivot” recently emerged as a trending word in the Obama Administration in relation to China, Mahoney said. For the U.S. it means that we’re turning towards China in hopes to establish better relations, according to Mahoney.
“China views the word ‘pivot’ more like ‘access,’” Mahoney said. “They’ve taken it as a word meaning we want to contain them, or defeat them.”
According to Mahoney, the U.S. needs to engage Chinese principles in multiple ways, especially in education. Mahoney said he believes that more Americans should study Mandarin and study abroad in China.
Mahoney also said he believes the U.S. national debt is a “serious threat on our security” especially since the republicans and the democrats can’t come to any agreements on how to handle debt situations efficiently.
North Korea is becoming a nuclear threat, according to John Mattingly, a teaching assistant in the history department. In hindsight, Mattingly said, it’s obvious what North Korea has been up to with regard to gaining more nuclear power.
“When someone or some nation or what-have-you has both the intention and the capability to harm you, then they’re a threat,” Caddell said.
The Threat Assessment Seminar was the last of three in the Global Issues Seminar Series hosted by the School of Public and International Affairs.
