Domestic Income Fairness and Strategic Global Security …now one and the same? /

E ver since the end of World War II, there has been a wide – and far too polite – space between global and strategic security strategy; with all its military, intelligence and geopolitical fellow riders on the one hand, and the domestic politics of income and employment policy on the other. [...] While the efforts often misfired and Taliban combatants sought to destroy these small bits of progress first, the principle emerged that, even in a war-torn part of the world, strategic and social security had compelling value, both for advancing the human condition and sustaining the bona fides of Allied forces. [...] From the decision of Allied and Canadian troops to distribute their own tinned rations to starving Dutch citizens of all ages during the World War II liberation of the Netherlands from the Nazis, to the historic joint deployment of both the generous financial investment of the Marshall Plan in Western Europe, along with the strategic defence framework embodied. [...] The sacrifices of the War in the front-line countries like the UK and occupied Europe, the rationing and massive commitments of personnel and resources in the aerodromes and arsenals of democracy in Canada and the US, and the devastation experienced by the defeated Axis powers in Europe and Asia similarly underlined a social security imperative at the centre of any effective liberal-democratic reb [...] That the Soviet Union, despite its immense courage and suffering as the entire Eastern front that stopped and attacked the Nazis, was not part of this liberal democratic order reflected the long-held view that a dictatorship of the proletariat requires strong collective state power, exercised in reasonably harsh and authoritarian ways to sustain the revolution going forward.