By Richard C. Longworth
Guest Insights Columnist
So here we sit, resolutely mid-continental, a thousand miles or so from any ocean, cocooned by neighboring nations that are friendly if not always obedient, well beyond the impact of North Korean missiles and California earthquakes, unscarred by 9/11, as safe as safe could be. For a reporter on the national security beat, Chicago and its hinterland would seem to be barren soil indeed.
But dig a little deeper and there are national security stories aplenty here, not just vague threats but on-going activity. Granted, some stories, such as non-proliferation theory or Pentagon management, have to be datelined Washington. But there are many other security stories that can be done without leaving town.
For instance:
Chicago is a major city because of its location, which makes it the premier transport hub of the nation. It started life as a trading post along the trails from the East. It is still the western terminus for shipping down the St. Lawrence Seaway and through the Great lakes. It became and remains the nation’s train depot. Most goods transiting the U.S. pass through Chicago. Because phone lines follow railway lines, Chicago is now the leading internet switching center in the Western Hemisphere.
The recent report on the Chicago Tri-State Metropolitan Region by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development summed up this centrality:
“The region is North America’s premier transportation and logistics hub. It is a major continent-wide player in passenger air travel, air cargo, railways and trucking, with a concentration of warehousing and intermodal facilities across the metropolitan region. This hub contributes not only to regional growth but to national performance.”
Any that disrupts this immense flow of goods and people would literally pull the plug on the American economy. What could cause this disruption?
The person who had given this the most thought is probably Stephen Flynn, former Coast Guard officer, former fellow at the Council on Foreign Affairs in New York, now a professor at Northeastern University. In appearances here, Flynn speculated that a nuclear device put inside a container in, say, Karachi could be shipped to Long Beach, offloaded onto a train there and carried across the American West to the vast Chicago transshipment yards where it could be detonated.
In the 12 years since 9/11, Flynn and others have campaigned for stricter controls on contents of containers bound for the United States and for closer inspection of containers both in foreign ports and in American ports like Long Beach. As they say, once a container leaves the port, it’s too late to find out what’s in it. The question is: how much progress have we made on this? How good are inspections and other controls? Ask Flynn. Or go to Long Beach and have a look.
Complications — and questions
All this gets a little complicated. There are questions of sovereignty: can we station American inspectors in foreign ports to check containers as they are loaded on ships? There are questions of budgets: the federal government has refused to pay for this, on the grounds that the ports, by and large, are owned by their cities and it’s up to the cities to pay. There are questions of business practices, with government inspectors insisting on knowing what companies are shipping, or giving some companies that agree to certain standards a sort of an I-Pass through inspections. Mostly there are questions of the sheer ability to thoroughly check the millions of containers that pass through ports each year: the last I heard, each container got a check that average about 30 seconds.
As the nation’s leading internet switching center and a city that depends on broadband to do business, Chicago is vulnerable to cyber attacks that could cripple not only the city but much of the American economy. Once upon a time, only the ocean ports — the New Yorks and San Franciscos — were open to the outside world, taking in its goods and graft and using them before passing them on to inland places such as Chicago. Today, when the main items in global trade are information and ideas, every city is a port, and Chicago is one of the biggest of them all.
What is Chicago and the nation doing to protect this vital center from cyber attack? It’s worth a story, if you’re a national security reporter.
So is the Office of Emergency Management and Communication, known generally as the “911 center” (911 in this case referring to the emergency telephone number, not to the 9/11 attacks.) The office is on West Madison Street, on the way to the United Center, and should be on every security reporter’s beat. It’s the HQ of first responders, a place filled with people thinking about what would happen in an attack or disaster.
Conspirators close to home?
Most Americans still expect that terrorist attacks, if they come, will be planned in the Afghanistan wilderness by groups such as Al Qaeda. The bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City or the more recent Boston Marathon bombing taught us that terrorism can strike anywhere and can be carried out by American citizens whose ties to organizations such as Al Qaeda are tenuous or non-existent. The Midwest is pocked with militias and other home-grown groups, often survivalist or white supremacist and sharing a hatred of the government: one such group in Michigan spawned one of the Oklahoma City conspirators. The FBI is working with local law enforcement to watch these groups and stop them before they convert their ideology into mass murder. This is a steady, quiet campaign, hard to report but definitely worth a story.
Anti-immigration activists argue that increased immigration, especially from Mexico, opens the door to foreign terrorists. In fact, there is no recorded case of a terrorist entering the United States across the Mexican border: of the thousands of undocumented immigrants arrested at the heavily guarded frontier, not one has been involved in terrorism.
If there’s a national security threat from immigration, it probably lies in the drug trafficking and gang activities that have become as global these days as banking. Many would argue that this criminal activity poses a greater threat to the U.S. than any foreign jihadists.
Finally, America’s economic problems are beginning to impact its ability to remain secure. It’s expensive to be a superpower with global responsibilities: the Soviet Union lost the Cold War and broke up partly because its incompetent economy could no longer support its strategic ambitions. Already, some commentators say that America’s economic decline is undermining its ability to pay for a strong military, to project force across the world – and to provide its homeland security.
Nowhere is this economic decline more evident than in the Midwest, in decaying cities such as Detroit and Flint, in hollowed-out factory towns across the region and in the huge disparities in wealth between Chicago’s Gold Coast and the savage streets of its inner city. If the nation’s economic future determines its national security, a reporter can write this story without leaving town.
Richard C. Longworth is a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He is the author of the book, Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism, published in 2008 by Bloomsbury USA, now out in paperback. Longworth was a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and United Press International and was the Tribune’s Chief European Correspondent. He has reported from 80 countries on five continents.
