“What we urgently need now,” former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev wrote last year, just a month after the COVID-19 pandemic ground life to a halt across the world, “is a rethinking of the entire concept of security.” Rather than measure security purely in military terms, as we usually do, “the overriding goal must be human security: providing food, water, and a clean environment and caring for people’s health.”
OP-ED
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Learning from Gorbachev
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev (C) is all smiles, while joining Foreign Ministers Roland Dumas of France (2nd-l), Eduard Shevardnadze of Soviet Union (3rd-L), US Secretary of State James Baker (behind Gorbachev), East German Prime Minister Lothar de Maiziere (2nd-R), West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher (behind de Maiziere) and British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd (R) 12 September 1990 in Moscow after the signing of the treaty on German reunification. A date for German reunification was agreed three weeks ago when the East German parliament voted in favour of Oct. 3, 1990.
