“It wasn't that long ago when (Vladimir) Putin showed he had designs on the Baltics, aspirations on the Ukraine, he's doing everything to undermine NATO. He's back in a significant way in Syria and Iran," Cheney said

Key Highlights Days after Saddam Hussein was captured, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi turned over all his N-materials and designs to the US: Cheney

"Globalisation in danger, particularly after Brexit and Donald Trump's election"

NEW DELHI: The next terror attack against the US won't be with airplanes and boxcutters. It will be with something deadlier. Describing it as the gravest threat the world faces since World War II, former US vice-president Dick Cheney said globalisation, indeed the world itself, was being challenged.

Cheney, vice-president to George W Bush and arguably one of the most powerful occupants of that office in recent US history, gave a tour de horizon of security threats confronting the world, particularly the US.

Addressing the ET Global Business Summit, he said: “My concern about threats to globalisation is about national security. I'm concerned that we're at a time when those trends and developments, that is, growth of globalisation and trade, Cold War and the US's unipolar moment, are over.“

He described Russia as a significant threat. “It wasn't that long ago when (Vladimir) Putin showed he had designs on the Baltics, aspirations on the Ukraine, he's doing everything to undermine NATO.“ He's back in a significant way in Syria and Iran, Cheney said, adding that Putin took his capabilities in cyber warfare and tried to “influence“ US elections, which could have been close to “an act of war“.

Enumerating the “rising number of threats“ he painted an almost perfect storm of nuclear rogues ganging up with forces of global terrorism at a time when the US military is, as he described it, at its weakest, having gone through eight years of budget cuts during Obama's administration.

He recounted how in 2007, Israel's former Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, showed him pictures of Syria's Al-Kibar nuclear facility, which showed collusion between North Korea and Iran (Syria is Iran's ally). The Israelis bombed that reactor and destroyed it -“that facility was near Raqqa, which is now the IS base.“ Had that reactor stayed on, today the IS would have had something else to terrorise the world with. “North Korea is working with Iran on warheads and ballistic missiles.“ Days after Saddam Hussein was captured, Cheney said, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi turned over all his nuclear materials and designs to the US. (It's another matter that Gaddafi was lynched by Islamist mobs later.) Libya, he said, went down to Islamist groups, and had Gaddafi retained his nuclear programme, that could have been in their hands today .

Predominantly Sunni al-Qaida collaborated with Shia Iran, he said, a fact that came to light after US forces removed documents from Osama bin Laden's Pakistan compound in 2010.

Meanwhile, China grows as a challenger in Asia. With the South China Sea, Beijing is “claiming territory in international waters“.

Answering whether globalisation was in danger, Cheney conceded it probably was, particularly after Brexit and Donald Trump's election. The Trump election, which he says nobody saw coming, said a lot about the evolution of America's body politic.

That was partly a response to the growing perception in the US that the global economy or the trading system had shortchanged them. “Trump believed the US didn't do a good job of negotiating them,“ Cheney said, adding he had supported Trump as the Republican candidate though he wasn't part of Trump's campaign.

“As we go forward, it makes sense to be concerned about globalisation,“ he said, because “political and national security circumstances are unique“.

