An emerging Buffer-Crescent  

John Snyder writing for Foreign Policy once offered as examples of idealist foreign policy, Bin Laden and Gandhi. Some might find equating the two to be perverse but in fact they have something specific in common. Snyder was comparing International Relations constructivism with Realism and Liberal Internationalism and in this context, constructivists share their opposition to methodological individualism, i.e. materialist approaches.

Ultra-salafists like Pacifists believe in natural law – that certain rights and values are immanent and naturally present in all individuals – and also believe in taking the initiative in promoting their goals: were they to take a tactical and for the lack of a better word ‘political’ approach, they’d be as centrist and unprincipled as those they criticise; they therefore prefer to take a stand and stick to it. As constructivists, idealists wish to engineer a new and virtuous world and they believe that ideas alone can guide change. They thus present themselves to the world and fight henceforth for the implementation of their ideals.

Bin Laden proclaimed Jihad on America, Gandhi warned the British to go. They differed on methods but the righteousness of their cause was never at stake. They both believed that their values were superior and universal. Islam is the only true religion and freedom to all peoples would be only conducive to inter-community dialogue and peace.

Of course an absolutist doctrine tends to emerge from and provide incentives for the increase in polarisation. This is clearly visible in the US today after all the gerrymandering that was seen throughout decades and which has generated a very politically divided atmosphere. The same is true of the Middle East where forces such as neoconservatives, jihadists and radical shia have been busy pushing the region towards extremes since the beginning of the century.

Until now the Middle East had broadly two buffer zones –areas where spheres of interest juxtaposed: Iraq and Lebanon with their religious and ethnic separations stood as irrevocably vulnerable to some form or another of foreign intervention. Lebanon tried to deregulate itself in a libertarian fashion in order to appease its neighbours but as soon as core national interests related to security came into question it fell into civil war and/or weak governability. With Saddam Hussein Iraq was multicultural and unified; without an authoritarian government however, it soon fell into ethnic and creed strife. None of these countries has ever existed before and it would now seem that such lack of precedent is not without reason for the absence of a strong national identity prevents them from ever rising above devolution or extreme centralism. In other words they are non-functional polities.

 In spite of the artificial nature of the borders, the colonial legacy left in place a modicum of balance of power in the Middle East and this important legacy for stability has now been corrupted by the Freedom campaigns: in seeking to exogenously rid the region of its non-conformal nature with the values of the West, the successive interventions there have only managed to upset local hegemons or disrupt otherwise stable dependencies.

 One of the nasty consequences of polity engineering has been a massive redistricting of the Middle East: just as in America gerrymandering led to more ideologically pure constituencies, so have the identity barriers deepened in this region – where they were already feeble. As a result, the viability of cohesive-enough polities to sustain the balance of power has eroded and with them stability. This is the direct outcome of trying to insert ‘fundamental’ rights in areas where security takes precedence, of trying to build federal models where civil society and democratic culture have little or no bearing on political priorities and needs. The Arab Spring seems to be continuing this trend, as ethnic tensions in Egypt, Libya and Syria apparently demonstrate.

Minorities Meridian

 On a wide perspective what were but two buffer zones for regional power centres – Iraq, Lebanon – have now become three – Syria. An immense Buffer-Crescent of instability is now a political reality in the Middle East and the Arab world seems to be its greatest victim. While the Iranian and Turkish polities have prospered, the Arab world seems to more and more bear the brunt of ethnic plurality. Apart from the Arab-shia/Curd components of the Buffer-Crescent, the Levantine ethnic exception to Middle Eastern Suni Arab majority is now also causing problems as a minorities meridian of Armenians, Alawites, Druzes, Maronites, Arab Christians and Jews stretches from the borders of Turkey to the Sinai, ready to be instrumentalised by the regional powers.

Rumours have it that Saudi Arabia and Jordan would be interested in having Syria’s Euphrates valley and Deir Al-Zour, along with its traditionalist Sunni population, amputated and eventually merged with Iraq’s Anbar province so as to create a polity loyal to Saudi Arabia and the GCC and which might thus be able to expand and consolidate the Arab anti-Iranian influence in the Mashreq.

 In the long term, were this minorities-meridian to unite, it might constitute a strategic counter-balance to Arabs, Turks and Iranians. While its profuse diversity might hinder plans of geopolitical union, the Balkans are a good example of how polities can merge in order to face an external threat. Given unity, a political entente with one of the other hegemons – probably Iran –  might help reshape a new balance of power.

Like the sensationalist political pamphlets of the early stages of the printing age, today’s humanitarian activists’ purpose is to, artificially, stir public sentiment through their writing. Samantha Power’s manifest A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide and the professor’s rhetoric seem to nowadays produce the same effect on those who read it.

Early in the last decade, when the name Paul Wolfowitz was controversial, Power had nothing but compliments for the Bush Administration’s “Iraqi Freedom” hawk. An uncomfortable truth considering that the Democratic Party withdrew its endorsement of the invasion of Iraq once weapons of mass destruction were found not to exist. Certainly if one takes into consideration that for some in the ranks of its pro-war intellectual base, the weapons were never the issue (a propos, a mirror image of French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner). But an even bigger embarrassment if we take into account that she currently sits on President’s Barack Obama’s National Security Council.

This should not come as a surprise since both the Republican neoconservatives and the Democratic liberal interventionists aspire to the best tradition of no other than John F. Kennedy. A wildly loved, charismatic and young president whose term was cut short right before it actually had to pick up the pieces of the many idealist policies he enacted.

This Peace Corps generation keeps leaving its mark on the minds of the youth MTV humanitarians and Bono-Brangelina peaceniks with wars of excellence such as Libya, where the no-fly zone was actually an intervention, where the “matter of days” timeframe turned into months, where the war is to be called only conflict and all to avoid a genocide that wasn’t.

In the run up to the Libyan campaign, Power’s voice was heard loudly, as The New York Times reported that she was one of the main instigators of action. Once again the Rwanda precedent was used to incite military action where few American interests were actually at stake. 

In a recent article in The Atlantic, Rebecca Hamilton writes of the inceptive influence that A Problem from Hell had on Lorne Craner, an assistant to Colin Powell who in 2004 organized the State Department investigation into whether Darfur should be classified as genocide or not. And who really would be surprised today if rumors surfaced of her militancy for action in Uganda?

Afghanistan was before Libya, the main focus of Libints and Constructivists in the Obama Admin. as Samantha Power's article "Keeping Canada in Afghanistan" in Time magazine demonstrates.

Power’s activist legacy stretches as far back as the Yugoslav wars and the Clinton Administration. For her Kosovo is the model to follow—which bodes poorly for Libyans. But Samantha Power isn’t alone. Other high officials of the Obama Administration like Anne-Marie Slaughter certainly harbor the same fantasies of the liberal interventionist creed and the biblical terminology is ever present in their language. One of Slaughter’s friends (Sarah Chayes—surprise, surprise, a former Peace Corps volunteer) who was advocating for an American nation building effort in Afghanistan wrote a book entitled Punishment of Virtue.

Like the high priestess of the Church of Human Rights, Power and the Libints embody today what the papal envoys represented in Europe up to the sixteenth century: diverters of national interests on behalf of a morality which they alone could arbiter. The Treaties of Westphalia would eventually redirect Europe and its dominions into the path of sovereignty and rational diplomacy but only after the bloodiest conflict since the Hundred Years’ War had ravaged the old continent. Who better than the Jesuit of humanitarianism to let us all know what awaits those of us sinful enough to ignore “a problem from hell”?

Many pointed fingers at George W. Bush’s lack of tact when in one of his many slips of the tongue he called the intervention in Iraq a “crusade”. Would they by as critical of Power? The term suits her agenda so well.

For the politically correct academia and civil society the hallmark of sophistication is now “Responsibility to Protect” (or R2P for the t-shirt makers). R2P is a humanitarian’s “limited sovereignty” doctrinal version. It draws on international humanitarian law—a field of law which is still in its early stages and being written based on principles instead of practicality or empiricism—to claim that states are obligated to protect their citizens and that whenever they fail in this mission, the international community gains the legal right to intervene. In its light form, the territory is to simply be “civilized” by the missionaries of liberal democracy. In its worse form, military force is to be applied promoting forceful regime change.

As strategy blogger Joseph Fouché put it, R2P is for Libints what Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) was for neoconservatives—a doctrine in which to ground the Pentagon’s approach to belligerence. RMA was supposed to allow small deployments of hyper sophisticated forces to promote regime change en masse and simultaneously in different theaters around the planet in an effort to overcome undemocratic regimes. It didn’t work because as it turns out some populations aren’t that eager to be freed and as in Iraq, they must be helped to “liberate themselves.”

R2P on the other hand bases itself on international law (unprecedented and inapplicable) to argue for small deployments of military forces in service of transnational human rights, mainly in a peacekeeping capacity but able to rapidly change into peace enforcement. If Iraq was the neocon moment, Libya is the Libint one but if Libya is indeed Obama’s Kosovo, then the post-Cold War reality of America is one of centrist consensus on idealist interventionism.

Neocons failed because they put belligerence at the service of ideals rather than interests and attacked a regime which actually served American interests—by keeping geostrategic balance in the Middle East. Libints and R2P will fail for the same reason. They abandon allies that don’t comply with their version of morality and without courage (or money) to go after big targets, they occupy themselves with campaigns in insignificant countries. Insignificant countries bring insignificant gains and what little is gained can quickly turn into a big loss when regional powers that don’t share American interests decide to exert influence against it in the political vacuum the idealists don’t want to fill with troops or support for less moral proxies.

Ultimately, because Libya isn’t essential to American strategy, there’ll be no incentive to keep American involvement which will award the country’s foreign policy with yet another example of erratic and counterproductive interventionism.

(* Originally published in the Atlantic Sentinel)

Having had the chance to listen Francis Fukuyama speak in the Netherlands, I came out of the lecture with mixed feelings. It was good to understand that Fukuyama no longer believes in the end of history and in fact he values geography as an explanation for the many development differences between civilisations. That said, he still takes a distinctive western approach to history and IR: he speaks of rule of law and democratic accountability as essential building blocks for the future of human society. This is by no means certain if – as he posited – normative civilisation characteristics are afterall circumstantial. Why then does he believe in this? Because he is still limited by the “linear progression” frame of mind. In other words, since he believes that western liberal democracy is the pinnacle of human social evolution, all civilisations must ultimately adopt some form of it in order to thrive.

Obviously this is a fundamental contradiction but it is important to go further and assess why it is that many westerners – inclusively in the political arena – eventually go down this road.

While profoundly sceptical of modern constructivist institutions one cannot also refrain from acknowledging that constructivist inroads into areas of former sovereign state control, keep getting made and at an accelerated pace at that.

• The False Laicité between Bureaucratic and Political

Something apparent in the West nowadays is what could be called, the normative republican convention. The values of the bourgeois republics have been made the standard in the West and in the world. Any ideology, form of government, legal system or economic model seem to have to be compared a priori to the normative republican standard of the Atlantic liberal democracies.

Just as the Church was once the source of normative standards, today republican bureaucracies have replaced it as the general norm. As per the trend set by the British, the civil servants are to be a separate class, independent from politicians but under their hierarchical command – elections and office terms being a check on an overwhelming institutional superiority of the political class.

Theoretically the bureaucratic apparatus isn’t supposed to be a part of policy making but in fact, as ideologies fade and moderate centrism rules more and more supreme, bureaucrats tend to have a gradually superior say in politics. They deny they have it of course, because they know they’re not supposed to have it. But the reality shows us the opposite. Having had contact with Brussels administrative eurocrats and the Hague’s international juridical community, I now reckon that the independence of the bureaucrats is gained at the expense of that of the politicians’.

While war is as present as always in the international scene for example, numerous conventions attempt to forcefully take Kellogg-Briand to the next level. Thus last year in Kampala, aggression was elevated to the purview of the ICC.

Of course jurists are correct in pointing out that politicians ultimately have the last word in such decisions but as Judge Theodor Meron once cheekily added in the context of the approval of further blurring between internal and international armed conflict as far as international jurisdiction was concerned (speaking specifically of the Tadic Case and its precedent): “I was quite surprised they let us keep it in”. What is more important, since Hitler is often condemned for democratically revoking democracy, jurists should be condemned for legally revoking separation of powers.

Security for example, is perhaps the most important matter which the State is supposed to manage and yet the right to wage war (jus ad bellum) is normatively becoming more and more a competence of the courts. Lets be clear: war didn’t come about because of a complete absence of social mechanisms to resolve disputes between groups or individuals. War has been a constant in human history because social organisations compete and have divergent interests in a world of finite resources and dissimilar cultures.

Law on the other hand, depends on morality. The set of norms that guides us depends on our ideal of justice which in turn depends on a social ethical convention. If theft is a crime common to most cultures, promiscuity is not (some criminalise it, others don’t). Social sciences aren’t exact sciences and therefore there are no rational logical empirical evolutionary grounds as to why some cultures should identify with certain values.

The morality which currently guides the world is not ultimate or absolute – at least it hasn’t been since the Catholic Church stopped dictating it – and just as the clerics were rightfully expelled from the temporal domain, so too the jurists ought to be. Otherwise the claims of those who want democracies to refuse to do business with dictatorships, or of those who wish developing states starved developed nations of natural resources, might very well be heeded.

Even Fukuyama, who still cannot get rid of his western perspective, recognises the importance of geography in denying Africa wealth and stability. Even he can discern that the world’s social chasm derives from different historical experiences. The Professor however always optimistically concludes that liberal democracy and the institutions of the West will win the day. While he is right in pointing out that countries such as China lack the same level of rule of law that we see in the West, he fails to even ask himself if such a characteristic is essential to the future development of the world. One suspects that moral prejudice rather than rational deduction drove him into this conclusion.

Wondering for instance which civilisation would be most capable of amassing the necessary resources or mobilizing the manpower and technology for a programme to explore and settle space, one seriously doubts such project would be commenced in the West. Even India would be a doubtful option and Fukuyama himself attributed to the subcontinent’s timid experiences with historical centralism, much of the blame for their lagging behind China…

With all this said, it is imperative to stop and think why someone who knows history and reflects on it would still allow himself to be seduced by petty contemporary delusions of justice. This is an important question since the universalist obsession infects much of the academia e perhaps even more of the world’s intelligentsia.

• The Transformational Critical Mass

When trying to rationalise the Arab Spring, the paramount importance of the divide between the globalised intellectual elites of the Arab countries and their traditionalist masses, becomes apparent. But there is more than that at work. The resilience of universalism is based on more than just the West’s prosperity and subsequent influence on the global narrative through West-encultured-brain-drain-origin elites preaching the West’s canon to the ‘Rest’.

Ultimately, we have to face the fact that while the world is by no means normatively universal, the western universalists still manage to push their agenda through the multilateral fora. The answer here is but one: critical mass. The West continues to be able to dictate the narrative because even if growing weaker, its paradigm will continue to be forwarded by the sheer comparative weight of the western civilisation.

Unlike the Asian and African civilisations which survived the wave of Western colonisation by being remote, inaccessible and compact enough to avoid being permeated by the Berlin Consensus, the world as a whole is not. When western philosophy and values rule unopposed in the Americas, Europe, Oceania and even parts of Asia and Africa, it is difficult to avoid consensus being generated around the one discourse which seems to be the only minimum common denominator: liberalism. This is why even minority western states with particular traditions cannot escape being further and further integrated into constructivist structures: the UK into the EU, the US into the UN, etc.

Samuel Huntington when dividing the planet into civilisations adopted biased American criteria. In fact, the West as a category should not be merely reserved for the north Atlantic. Latin America and Eurasia also base their values on the Eurocentric space, if for no other reason because they were colonised by it. The fundamentally different cultural areas of the world are Africa, the Middle East, the Subcontinent and the East. But these areas aren’t strong enough to resist the philosophical synthesis that the West impregnates the world with.

• Worms Vs. Westphalia

The obvious next step is to reflect on what the world will evolve to be. If the current dilution of executive strategic power in favour of normative based prerogatives proceeds unhampered, then will James Burnham be vindicated? Will we observe a Hobbesian technocratic compact of Judaic style Kritarchy, ruling a centralised world? In any event it is very telling that Fukuyama elevates the Worms Concordat as a more seminal event to the western civilisation than the Treaties of Westphalia…

Many in the media have compared the Arab Spring to 1989. If none of the most obvious arguments against such analogy were enough, here is another: unlike the Soviet satellites, America’s are fighting back the revolutionary wave! Of course the socialist bloc was dependent on the unitary leadership of the USSR, the Warsaw Pact was imposed and did not serve the interests of the states in question (except for Russia of course), Gorbachev foolishly hoped eastern Europe to remain neutral and unilaterally decided to remove Moscow’s grip, the revolutionaries were unquestionably pro-western and last but not least the soviet bloc served ideals as much as strategic interests – unlike the strict usefulness of the current pro-western Arab regimes.

•   ‘You’re either very smart… or incredibly stupid’

What is the Obama Administration doing? No one knows. For all the proud transparency and democratic credentials of the leader of the free world, at times Obama and his team seem to be as Byzantine as a Eurasian regime. Gates says one thing, Clinton another and Obama says more than he does. Is Obama being extremely subtle, arranging behind the scenes deals – Chicago style – with the Arab regimes that will keep them in power while assuaging the young protestors? Or does he actually do what his speeches profess and he pushed for a fully free electoral system based new Egyptian regime without the tutelage of the Army? Was he truly not informed of the GCC’s mobilisation to Bahrain? If he really was not informed that should hardly be seen as something positive: either he is too weak to deserve the respect of his allies or he is consistently undermining them after reassuring them in private.

• The Shia Crescent and Containment

What is at stake? The geopolitical control of the Middle East is at stake and Bahrain proves as much. Saudi Arabia has rarely intervened in the affairs of its neighbours. Notorious exceptions have been the wars against Israel, the support for Yemeni royals against Nasser, the fight against the shia Houthi rebels in the same country and now Bahrain. He who controls the flow of oil controls the world? At the very least, it helps. Most of all, depending on who controls the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, the world can be made more stable or less. Up to this point the US have controlled the Middle East. They are the only external entity that has the power to do so. The alternative is not the Europeans, or Russians or Chinese; the alternative is Iran. Can Iran be trusted to responsibly manage the region? The answer is unequivocally ‘no’!

Iran is led by a revolutionary regime that is more interested in the millennial narrative and the well being of its leadership than in the national interests of the state it runs. Why intervene in Lebanon? Why deploy its navy to Syria? What are Iran’s interests there?

Tehran also lacks the naval projection ability to control the Arabian and Red seas and its inevitable rivalry with Turkey would never make it an undisputed hegemon. Those who predict a Turko-Iranian condominium might also start by explaining who gets what; because Syria and Lebanon would be very much part of any Turkish sphere and Iran is not handling control of Hezbollah or Damascus to Ankara. No, stability is not what one can expect from the Islamic Republic.

Thus, the Arab powers have strived to contain Iran’s irredentist impulses and they have done so in spite of America’s squandering of the potential of local allies. In 1979, the regional supremacy of the Iranians was endangered by the Islamic revolution: the Iranian intelligentsia was chased out of the country, its military apparatus was purged, its closest patron – the US – shunned and the new regime turned to social endowments to seduce the part of the population it had not intimidated. The Arab leadership didn’t miss a beat and quickly moved to explore Iranian weakness. The jingoistic ambitions of Saddam Hussein suited them well and they financed their proxy’s aggression against Iran. By 1988 both Iraq and Iran were exhausted and Iran’s regional geostrategic hegemony was a thing of the past. Its military might gone, its economic potential kept in check by international sanctions, the shadow of Iranian deployments to the Middle East in case of world war, vanished. With the Arab League led by US allies – KSA, Egypt – the USSR in crisis and Iran isolated, the Arab world reigned supreme and trade between the Arabs and the West flourished.

The XXI century however brought the end of the Arab-American peace. America’s decline, the economic emergence of Russia and Turkey, the strategic rise of Iran (thanks to the War on Terror) and the European stagnation have levelled the playing field. Saudi Arabia and its allies have done their best to prolong the containment of Iran. They have financed the Sunni factions in Iraq’s internal squabbles, tried to do the same in Lebanon and have made sure Israel is undisturbed in the Levant, lest Egypt become distracted with a country which represents no threat to the Arab community. Containment has its limitations though, since Asia represents more and more a vital lifeline of FDI to Iran. China, Japan, Korea, Russia and to some extent India, help keep Iran afloat.

Now Egypt, one of the two pillars of Western-Arab Middle East supremacy, is in danger of falling under the influence of isolationist and/or constructionist elites. This leaves the KSA alone in the leadership of a pro-Western order in the Middle East.

• From Suez to Syrte

In 1956, France and Britain mobilised to defend the international/European control of the Suez. In the wake of the formation of OPEC and widespread third-world nationalisations of first-world assets, Nasser turned to Egypt’s closest and most profitable European asset: the strategic passage of the Suez Canal. Paris and London wished to draw a line in the sand and determined not to lose any more of their empires, they allied with Israel and seized the Suez by force. The Sèvres Pact was ultimately not to succeed as it posed too great a threat to the new bipolar world order.  Paris and London walked out with different lessons learned. The UK used its anglosphere credentials to build a partnership with the US and was able to salvage some of its influence and assets from the anti-Berlin-Consensus and bipolar driven UN decolonisation process. Paris on the other hand understood the only answer to American-Soviet dominance was to build an alternative Gaullist lead sphere of interests.

• Falklands, Françafrique

Interestingly, both policies paid off. When Argentina invaded the Falklands, the US looked the other way and abstained from enforcing its Monroe Doctrine mechanisms in favour of the ‘special relationship’. The UK was given free hand to engage the South American political game in its favour and defeat the Argentine military. France on the other hand supported anti non-aligned-movement (NAM) forces and alternative solutions to the decolonisation master narrative. In Biafra and Katanga, the French prerogative of preserving an independent sphere of third-world dependencies was very visible with Portugal, South Africa, Israel and others coming together to crush when possible the UN-NAM canon of colonial border maintenance – an entente the NAM would come to classify as ‘Unholy Alliance’ and which on rare occasions (like Biafra) managed to mutually reinforce itself with the socialist bloc’s own polar offshoot: the Chinese led communist alternative. While the fall of Portugal’s dictatorship, the RSA’s apartheid as well as France’s new found Arab policy prevented further cooperation, Paris went on to keep its own sphere of influence by intervening at will in Chad, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire.

• The Hyperpower’s Orphan Offshoots

Now it seems that an American empire revamping itself from the War on Terror overstretch, prefers to leave its former allies to themselves. While the European partners may have enough power to defend their own interests, the second and third world ones, if left to fend for themselves, may eventually fall. At the moment the pro-western order in the Middle East is adrift but Saudi Arabia and the Emirates will not suffice to keep it afloat. The French military base in the UAE and the Arab League’s backing of the overthrow of Gaddafi – under Gulf designs no doubt – however seem to indicate that mutual cooperation in the near future is possible in an Euro-Arab understanding of sorts, which might become an adequate counter-weight to looming universalist challengers. The EU may become an obstacle though, just as inconvenient as UN based moral initiatives.

• Incoherent Alignment translates as Fair Game

When one’s property degrades, one refurbishes. But the preference is for an upgrade, not for a temporary second-hand replacement. The principle of sovereignty, while well grounded, is deficient in the face of polities devoid of strategic coherence. A polity’s interests do not change according to ideology, they are constant. Thus, while sympathetic towards democratic movements throughout the world, any regime change would only be worth it if it entailed the maintenance of the status quo or its improvement. If the only governance alternatives imply a worse situation, they should be fought. Here, intervention is justified. Mubarak’s regime had been eroding for some time and certainly Washington should and could have facilitated a transition earlier. But not to a democratic model since as plainly visible now, the replacements anointed by the masses lack in realism what they over-profess in ideals.

It is important to further state that the burden of normative adaptation falls always upon the new political arrivals. Unlike what one hears from the Arab Street, it is not up to the US to adapt itself to an imperfect change (any support for the current regime may radicalise the opposition) but rather it is up to the revolutionaries to guarantee that Egypt’s strategic paradigm remains unaltered, in order to gain America’s blessing for the revolution. No country – even one as powerful as Egypt – can expect its domestic dynamics to remain undisturbed in the face of foreign policy changes – the world is interdependent. If on the other hand, foreign affairs were independent from domestic political dynamics, foreign intervention would not be legitimate; yet this isn’t the case with Egypt or with the rest of the Islamic world.

A good example can be found in Riyadh’s approach to Bahrain and Libya: in the former political change is objectionable, in the latter it is welcome. It is of little importance what kind of regime is in place so long as it serves the interests of the Kingdom.

A bad model is that of the Obama Administration: in Egypt the problem so far hasn’t been Obama’s inaction but rather – apparently – his wrongful choices: If he truly chose not to intervene that would have to mean abstaining from judging the actions of the government as well as those of the protestors; conversely he did intervene to undermine his allies in Egypt in favour of their (and America’s) rivals. As long as the military regime remains in place though, Obama should be given the benefit of the doubt.

The truth is that any and all polities that fail to solidify a coherent and bipartisan foreign policy orientation, become preferential targets of external intervention. Fortunately, principled multilateralism seems to be an affliction contained in just a few western capitals. Unfortunately additional antibodies to the disease of sympathy/moral ego, are nonetheless very much in need nowadays.

These days the western media can’t help but give in to their magical feelings of wonder before a contemporary crumbling of a dictatorial bloc. Their darlings in the Middle East – the university educated youths – are a veritable intellectual vanguard for the overthrow of patriarchal royalty and the rise of a benign liberal democracy that will liberate the poor Arab masses…

The American right has caught on to the inherent problem that the West’s allies are falling and Iran is celebrating for a reason. This doesn’t make Fox’s pundits any less hypocritical but at least they are one step ahead of the liberal media which under the leadership of CNN has had nothing but kind words for the fall of loyal allies. In fact the western media in no way falls behind such outlets as Russia Today in the absolutely partial coverage of these events. The demonstrators always represent ‘the people of Egypt’, the regime is always tactical and never concerned for the national interest of the state in question.

The harsh reality is that much of the vulnerability of these regimes stems from liberalising reforms result of Western pressure. The reality is that many of these youths have no political platform whatsoever to replace the falling regimes. The reality is that corporatist domestic elites had a vested interest in ‘facilitating’ the exit of the economically liberal Mubarak clan. The reality is that the intellectual elite which is out in the streets may be secular but it also is leftist and will likely drive Egypt into a neo-Nasserite wave if elected. In fact the January 25^th movement is not unlike the May of 68 one. A new order is envisioned based on lofty ideals, but just as the southern European democracies (5^th Republic France, post-Franco Spain, 3^rd Republic Portugal, 3^rd Hellenic Republic) failed to emulate the civic and economic achievements of their social-democratic heroes of northern Europe, so too will Arabs fail to become liberal democratic republics – with the possible exception of Tunisia – even if so self-proclaimed in name.

Every regime distorts history in blaming its predecessor system for the economic faults of the state. In the case of Egypt and the Arab world, this will likely drive the new elites into a social endowment wave which will degrade even further the financial health of the different Arab societies. For all the hype that the corrupt regimes have left the Arab youth in poverty, Egypt was a notable case of fast economic growth in spite of a sluggish and over-centralised state apparatus. In fact Egypt’s credit ratings are still higher and healthier than Greece’s for example. All this will be endangered by any dramatic increase in social benefits. It is true that Egypt’s youth was driven to the streets by economic difficulties but it is also true that these are much more due to exaggerated demographic growth rather than economic mismanagement on the part of the government. Besides, there are protests against the effects of the global crisis all throughout the world and governments needn’t fall for that. No, the rhetoric of the youth of Egypt says nothing of one-child policies or birth-control, its platform is simply ‘more employment’ and this can only translate in more artificial government sponsored jobs. Any benefit in tackling corruption that freedom of speech might bring stands to be quickly squandered by more bureaucracy and true economic negligence stemming from demagogic policies.

If all this is true for many Arab states, Libya is a special case. Libya unlike Egypt, has never truly been an ally of the West. While the recent overture to American and European investment prevented further trouble for the Qadhafi regime – after all the country is located in NATO’s Mediterranean pond – Tripoli has persisted in remaining outside of the American sphere of influence. Its military purchases are made in Moscow, its diplomacy favours African and Arab fora and much of the investment that rivals with that of the West comes from Russia, China and Turkey. While Libya has apparently reversed its pro-terrorism pan-third-world stance, it is still rabidly and irrationally anti-Israel and anti-American.

For all these reasons, it isn’t as strange to find a lack of goodwill towards Libya in Western capitals, as it is towards Mubarak. Libya also demonstrates that the national interests of western states differ irrespective of the nature of their regimes (democracy) or constructivist arrangements (EU, NATO).

Not all capitals of the West would like to see Qadhafi gone. Rome stands out as the state with most to lose from an overthrow of Qadhafi. Half of Libya’s exports to the EU wind up in Italy and the Italian Republic provides for almost 40% of the Jamahiriya’s imports. This is mostly the result of a legitimate and natural pursuit by Italy of close relations with its former colony. The Berlusconi governments in particular have been avid pioneers in Libya’s opening to the West, also using in their favour the special relationship Italy has entertained with Russia for some decades now. Companies such as ENI, Finmeccanica, Ansaldo or UniCredit are to a great extent interdependent with the Libyan economy.

But Rome suffers from an original sin which is common in the West: lack of strategic posture. Scholars such as Patrick Porter have been keen on pointing out – a propos of Britain’s defence review – that “with no obvious major enemy to focus the mind, British strategy has been shaped by Washington’s agenda, and become overly concerned with ‘narrative’”. The same is true for much of Europe since naming likely enemies is politically incorrect and choosing interests over values, a media suicide.

Let us look at the foundations of modern Italy. Italy was born a kingdom for a reason yet the Allied Powers led by the US thought it best to turn it into a federal republic after its fascist experience during WWII. Usually the US despises the royals and with the exception of Japan, it is America’s model that serves as a stepping stone for the re-engineering of other countries (Germany, Italy, Iraq, Afghanistan). Consequently, without strong tradition in democracy, Italy becomes an expectedly fragile and unstable republic. Italian governments rarely fulfil their constitutional term and the country has become a ‘dictatorship of the Directors-General’. While some may see in this the technocratic ideal of governance, one of the problems is the inherent lack of strategic planning. It is all too well that Rome’s bureaucracy understands what Italy’s needs are and how to get them. Berlusconi’s opportunistic behaviour certainly brought a high degree of success. Ultimately though, Italy’s interests in Libya were not protected by any coherent strategy, as the diplomatic debacle of Berlusconi plainly demonstrates it now.

In simple terms: what’s the point of getting there first if you can’t hold your ground?

Strategy shouldn’t be too complicated but it should also be sustainable and coherent. Italy has in effect lost Libya (If the current regime falls, its replacement will seek ties with those who in the past aided the Benghazi rebellion. If the current regime survives it will become a pariah, probably under EU and UN sanctions, and giving preference to those who do not morally condemn it – Russia, China, Turkey) because it did not anchor its economic conquests with the necessary diplomacy to sustain dealings with radical regimes. At first the Italian government kept quiet and then it felt it had no other choice but to jump into the train of European and Western condemnation, thus risking forfeiting its business investments. Apart from incoherent positioning, Italy also found itself isolated. Couldn’t the Italians have reminded the French that they weren’t the only ones protecting a dictatorial regime? Couldn’t Rome have persuaded Germany that actively siding against Qadhafi might cost money in a near future? What about partnering with Turkey and others in demanding that the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) be put in charge of the response to the crisis – and in so doing prevent a consensus on intervention?

It is comprehensible that Paris and London are interested in removing Qadhafi, it is not that Rome doesn’t move a finger to salvage its assets.

This is also due in part to the pacifist indoctrination the country experienced to counter the legacy of Mussolini’s militarism. A great part of Italy’s elite, civil servants and diplomats abhors unilateral action. Italy embarks on every multilateral project without regard to the consequences. It doesn’t hold a permanent seat in the Security Council and indeed the ‘enemy state’ language is still in use, but Italy is one of the hardest proponents of UN backed legitimacy for intervention – hard to understand how it mustered the strength to prevent Germany from gaining a permanent seat in the UNSC. It is a central and founding member of the EU, yet it bows to the will of the Paris-Berlin axis. It adhered to the UfM, a structure under French leadership. It is a member of NATO and went along – even if reluctantly – with the campaign in Kosovo, even though it was for the benefit of Washington and Berlin.

The Italian MFA is a disgrace but so is Berlusconi for not having had the statesmanship to secure Italy’s national interest. Italy as a central country – in the Mediterranean, Europe – simply cannot afford to completely depend on others. It must engineer its own regional diplomatic framework to allow the prosecution of its interests. What good are its armed forces and financial power if only used for the sake of others? Libya is not a crucial territory for other European or Middle Eastern powers; if Italy can’t stand up for itself there, where can it do so?

Realists throughout the world share two main characteristics: they are few and they are constant. In every foreign policy establishment one can find Realists. They are the essence of diplomacy, with their obsession for national interest and little appetite for the values of whatever may be the ideological soup du jour. Unfortunately they are also few: be it because Realism doesn’t appeal to the masses or because political factions struggling for power need an ideological platform. Most diplomats, politicians and statesmen prefer to whenever possible convey an image of piety and morality, in an ever elusive attempt at monopolising the moral high-ground.

As discussed before, ‘Pre-eminence Derived Universalism’ tends to corrupt the gains acquired through pragmatic competitiveness with prior great powers. This was the case with the reaction of America’s intelligentsia to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 with many political-realists defecting the Kissingerian canon for either side of the political spectrum. The ‘Wilsonian Realists’ saw before them the long sought opportunity of their youth years, to transform the world according to the vision of leaders such as Kennedy. Now, the Wolfowitzes of America could finally grab the opportunity to ‘make the world safe for democracy’ and become pro-active on ‘Democratic Peace’. Their long lost battles with the Kissinger doctrine or the Kirkpatrick doctrine, veritable Sisyphusian efforts within the government, at fighting all communists and forsaking illiberal allies, would finally pay off since they now possessed the empirical weapon of transformative democracy. ‘Jeffersonian Realists’ on the other hand now saw the political meddling of the US throughout the world as unnecessary given that there was no other global rival to American power and Offshore Balancing would offer an effective tool of management at little cost. There was little need for Washington to take a stand in regional conflicts since neutrality and local balancing would suffice to implement its national interest. Additionally America could begin to dismantle a far too onerous military-industrial complex which began to burden the quality of its democracy at home.

These tectonic shifts within American political-realism – colouring the grey, as it were – were exacerbated by Operation Iraqi Freedom and later epitomised by two seminal events in the academia: the 2005 take-over of ‘The National Interest’ by The Nixon Center and the 2007 publishing of ‘The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy’ by Mearsheimer and Walt. The first saw a secession of neoconservative minded academics such as Samuel Huntington or Francis Fukuyama from TNI going on to found their own ‘Realist’ publication ‘The American Interest’. The second consisted of a denouncing of American interventionism in the Middle East as counter-productive, using Washington’s Israelophile policies as case in point for a wider critique of burdensome military commitments all through the world.

As Trombly suggests in his article over at Slouching Towards Columbia, traditional Hamiltonian Realism is withering in America. The reason why is not terribly complex: America is the remaining superpower and does not need to seriously strategise its international moves. America’s power is as uncontested as to allow Washington to afford incurring in idealist or semi-idealist pursuits. Similarly I agree that super-presidential administrations are much more required in times of war – or imminent war – rather than in peace, and that this constricts arbitrary presidential decisions to employ less popular foreign policy experts (such as Kissinger).

There is yet another problem for America: being a young nation, ideology is still an intrinsic identity factor in the American psyche. As long as an American finds it politically incorrect to identify its nationhood with language, ethnicity or history, he’ll resort to values. This need only strengthened with the demise of the Soviet Union for America remains today an exceptionalist empire at odds with an international community composed of older and more cynical national experiences.

The attempt at harmonising the United States’ exceptionalism – as the forefront of the ‘free world’, the champion of the ‘end of history’ – with a globalised and interconnected world reality resulted in the – perhaps unavoidable – idealist contamination of Hamiltonian Realism and its slide to leftist anti-elitist trends.

Will traditional realists be forced to wait in the shadows of the American right, lingering in institutions such as the Nixon Center, the Kennan Institute or the Kissinger Institute, until a new global threat to America emerges? Or will the multipolar world push Washington into an offshore balancing act earlier than anticipated?

For the time being, it is the most irredentist trends that thrive and realists who remain isolated in the ideological shantytowns of foreign policy debates, sharing the exile from limelight with paleoconservatives and libertarians. Cold War dinosaurs like Kissinger and Scowcroft continue to be respected but their protégés don’t make the talk shows. As for Robert Gates, his position with the Obama administration is precarious due to his Republican credentials and the most likely Republican successors prefer to make noise using neocon undertones.

The Cold War forced into the academia and the intellectual elites a securitarian logic which constrained to a great extent any idealist temptations. The conclusion of what the neocons call the ‘Third World War’ brought with it the end of the convictions of a bloated realist intelligentsia. Realists have now returned to their position of general discretion and minority, having lost their less dedicated extremes to the easy peace time idealism. It is also worth keeping in mind that in times of ideological moderation – such as the era we live in – the relative difficulty in claiming distinctions in domestic policy areas, drives the ideological discourse to the foreign policy niche – among others. It is significant for instance that the Israelo-Palestinian conflict is as important as it is for the Left, given the loss of its Marxist platform with the fall of the USSR.

There are those who remain hopeful that a presidential candidate originating from the military might enact if elected a sufficient ‘imperial presidency’ to cut with the current tilt towards populism but for now this remains wishful thinking.

In 2006, Germany was selected to lead the UN maritime force that was to be stationed off the coast of Lebanon. This was the single largest deployment of the German Navy since World War II.

In the aftermath of the Israeli Operation Accountability enacted to weaken Hezbollah’s ability to bombard Israel, the UNIFIL operation was restarted to monitor the Lebanese-Israeli border. The UNIFIL mission would ultimately be proven as almost completely ineffective since not only was Hezbollah allowed to continue to exist in Lebanon proper but its political subversion of the Lebanese state apparatus actually increased, as did in time its arsenal with more and better weaponry supplied by Iran and Syria. During the hostilities of the summer of 2006, the Israeli government had warned that if Tel Aviv was hit by Hezbollah’s rockets, Israel would have retaliated against Damascus; now that Hezbollah possesses the ballistic technology to do precisely that, UNIFIL as an interposition force is obsolete.

Part of the UNIFIL mandate is also the monitoring of the Lebanese territorial waters and the prevention of smuggling or belligerent acts off Lebanon’s coast. This ‘Maritime Task Force’ was mobilised in September of 2006 and Germany mandated to lead it. The choice of Germany was due to a number of added benefits: it was a neutral party to the conflict, with bona fides credentials in both Israel and the Arab world and it possessed the military and financial means to immediately dispatch a naval force meeting the required specifications.

The Marineeinsatzverband was to have three components: a force of coastal patrols, a number of frigates for the high seas and some logistical vessels. On the 21^st of September a fleet sailed from Wilhelmshaven headed by the Bremen class frigate Karlsruhe. Behind the Karlsruhe followed the two Danish corvettes Ravnen and Glenten, and the German Gepard class patrol boats Nerz, Dachs, Ozelot and Hyaene. They’d be eventually joined by the Brandenburg class frigate Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (after conducting boarding exercises in the bay of Biscay), the Berlin class supply ship Frankfurt-am-Mein and the supply ship Elbe.

In so proceeding, Berlin completed a century of direct naval intervention in the Mediterranean which began with the Tangiers Crisis of 1905/6. But that which is different this time is the geopolitical context: be it the Imperial Navy in Morocco, the Kriegsmarine in the western Mediterranean or now the German Navy in Lebanon, the need for an external power to deploy to the middle sea is a constant but in this intervention Germany broke with its traditional Arab policy. For the first time Berlin did not conduct a major naval deployment to the Mediterranean intending to prop up Arab forces against its continental Europe rivals. It is also true that Germany’s continental rivals no longer control the Middle East and that Germany’s Arab policy is no longer as needed. Yet Germany is still held back by the pacifist indoctrination of the post-war and its consequential constructivist theories which require international mandates for German military action.

These are also the ones that give this deployment its less original character: it was not the first time the German navy intervened in the Mediterranean at the service of a universalist doctrine… However, just as integrating the UNIFIL’s Maritime Task Force on behalf of the UN’s peacekeeping efforts was universalist, Berlin has on other occasions intervened in the name of much more national goals. In 1999 the Deutsche Marine dispatched a frigate and a supply ship to support NATO’s campaign against Yugoslavia and most recently the frigate Sachsen was deployed to Somali waters integrating operation Atalanta, also under the banner of the Atlantic Alliance, to fight Somali piracy. But even these deployments depended on multilateral mandates.

It’d be interesting to assess whether the current right-wing government coalition would’ve been as voluntarist as the centrist SPD-CDU coalition and its SPD Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was.

Also noteworthy is the German Navy’s clear readiness and resources for force projection. Provided that the EU’s southern belt continues to experience financial difficulties, Germany may very well be enticed to intervene in the Mediterranean with its own resources in a near future, so as to not depend on the French, the British or on local proxies.

One of the nefarious consequences of nowadays’ entitled generation is the necessarily idealist distortion of reality. The 60s counterculture was bought by social endowments but also by a pretence vision of the world which keeps their moral reflexes at ease. The maps of the world are a politically correct UN fairy tale façade. Apart from most of the northern hemisphere and parts of Asia, there are no states in the world. There are regimes, protectorates and ungoverned territories. Such is the case with Côte d’Ivoire and most of Africa.

Jean-François Bayart coined the term ‘extraversion’ to explain how in Africa the inherited European state apparatus is subverted by the local realities. This is exactly the case in Côte d’Ivoire where the governmental apparatus has been hijacked and transformed into an ethnic based transnational rent-seeking enterprise. The whole territory is not culturally unified except for having French as lingua franca. In this circumstance each ethnicity competes for power within the internationally prescribed borders, even if these don’t correspond to the ethnic territorial distribution. During the reign of Houphouët-Boigny the ethnic inconsistencies were kept under balance but ever since his death the elites of the south and those of the north have been competing for power, i.e. control of the government.

The context of these elections is nothing surprising: Côte d’Ivoire as mishmash of ethnicities and clan structures sees a dispute between major ethnic groupings. Monsieur Ouattara represents the northern ethnic groups and Mr. Gbagbo the southern ones. The difference is that the southern ones are Christian, richer and they reap the benefits of being closer to the oil wells, cocoa fields, fishing areas and commercial ports. Mr Gbagbo is thus supported by the urban ethnicities and Ouattara by the Muslim rural ones. To be clear though, the victory of one of the sides would not alter the underlying reality of Côte d’Ivoire, for the different ministries and state companies would have to be shared among ethnicities comprising the winning clan confederacy power bid – just as has been the case so far.

Côte d’Ivoire’s instability dates back to the decolonisation process. Sub-Saharan Africa was politically stable prior to the European colonisation when the local polities – be they ethnic groups, clans, tribal confederacies or chiefdoms – managed their own power relations. The arrival of the European powers destroyed this reality and Africa has seen its power politics dictated by the rulers of the Atlantic Ocean ever since. The Europeans ruthlessly ‘globalised’ Africa but ultimately the biggest change was not slavery but instead the forceful inclusion of all of Africa into the international trading system. Allegedly decolonisation was to liberate the African peoples and return the continent back to its idyllic days. This is not what happened: there was no decolonisation but rather the process was a scapegoat for the replacement of European hegemony for American and Soviet control, the borders were not changed and peoples were not liberated because generally speaking there were no nations or states to liberate from occupation and the liberation movements did not seek to revert the political reality back to the tribal system, the main markets and biggest military powers in the Atlantic are still European and American and therefore power relations are naturally influenced from the north.

In the case of Côte d’Ivoire the main external power is France which dominates every sector of the country’s economy, from telecommunications and construction to finance and military. Apparently the Quai d’Orsay does not trust the Gbagbo government to be able to serve its interests in the foreseeable future. The why is unknown: perhaps the southern elites believe they can govern without dependency on the French, perhaps they wish to liberate Côte d’Ivoire from the intrinsic meddling of neighbouring countries. Burkina Faso counts many Burkinabés living within Ivoirian borders and other bordering countries depend on commerce made with the north of Côte d’Ivoire, which has for many years been de facto free from the Ivoirian government, both in taxes and security. Whatever the reason for Gbagbo’s loss of French patronage, Ivoirians are still a French protectorate and they cannot go against the wishes of Paris without external support. So far the US and Britain support France’s narrative and the electoral victory of Alassane Ouattara, leaving only Brazil as willing to support the Gbagbo government but constrained from publicly doing so given France’s co-option of the UN, the African Union and Francophone Africa, along with the timing and coordination difficulties brought about by the process of the new Brazilian government’s taking of office. Russia and China, always looking for an opportunity to penetrate western dominated markets, sent representatives to President Gbagbo’s swearing in, which was officially attended only by the ambassadors of Angola and Lebanon.

With France, Britain, the US and the EU preparing sanctions packages against Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria led ECOWAS threatening to mobilise the ECOMOG against Yamoussoukro, the loyalty of the army and Gbagbo’s apparatchiks may not last longer. Add to this ECOWAS’s decision to stop printing money for Côte d’Ivoire and the regime has its days numbered.

While Gbagbo’s decision to resist the Élysée is ill-advised, the crisis may very well be prolonged by such organs as the ICC which may be causing Gbagbo’s clique to fear loss of power and international war crimes indictments from the universalist institution.

So far, the reactions to the political crisis in Côte d’Ivoire can be divided into three categories: the ones who recognise Ouattara as the winner and demand Gbagbo to step down, those who realise there is a deficit of popular cohesion and stand for a power-sharing agreement (namely Russia, China, Angola and Equatorial Guinea) and finally the ones who only accept Gbagbo as the solution to the entanglement. Given that the bulk of the international community and virtually all stake-holders are against the final two solutions, the likely outcome will be the ousting of Gbagbo. Zimbabwe is often pointed as an example of possible intransigence but even Mugabe has Angola to support him.

The UK, the US and France favour Ouattara but how sustainable will France’s yield on Côte d’Ivoire be with the US involved? Equally important to observe is Angola’s position vis-à-vis that of Nigeria’s. Luanda comprehensibly dislikes all the democratic resonance of France’s campaign against Gbagbo. If the UN and the African Union intervene under a democracy-enforcement mandate,  José Eduardo dos Santos will resent the precedent, even if at the service of the specific interests of France and Nigeria…

There is a national debate in Côte d’Ivoire about who can claim Ivoirian identity. The problem is that the region never had borders, and multi-ethnic states without a historical tradition of political coexistence or a hegemonic ethnicity tend to disaggregate, all the more when their borders are artificial and they’re subject to the influence of more powerful states. Anthropology explains that social bonds are adapted to the geographical environment where they evolve. If in Europe its individualistic cultures, small family aggregates, natural borders isolating cultures in islands or peninsulas, gave rise to the modern bureaucratic state, how can the same be true for West Africa where we find the exact opposite reality? If indeed Côte d’Ivoire’s southern elites plan to make of it a sovereign state, they are in for a bitter surprise.

In order to understand Brazil’s current foreign policy, one must understand one thing: hubris is not equidistance.

There comes a time in the history of the nation when its success goes to the head of its population. It is sadly a common misconception that that which is achieved with tolerance and pragmatism is a gift from the heavens, fruit not of cautious management but of intrinsic cultural superiority. Take the Spaniards and Portuguese in their imperial overstretch, when at a time in which their economies were giving way to the Dutch and English, they decide to glorify their Catholicism with a nice little Inquisition. Not only was the purge of society not a priority but the persecution of the commercial and intellectual Jewish elites contributed to increase the pace of the loss of economic competitiveness. Not to mention of course gratuitous wars in Morocco or the Netherlands in a period of financial difficulty.

The same applies to America: ended the Cold War and victorious in the tripolar game for global domination (between central Europe’s German bid for power and the eastern European Russian and western European/Atlantic Anglophone ones) America tends to believe in the strength, not of its pragmatic policies, but of its ‘spirit’ and ‘values’.

Just like in Madrid and Lisbon success was perceived as a gift from almighty God to the foremost Catholic powers, so too in Washington it was democracy which had won and not competent offshore balancing. Forget the non-constitutional subversion of leftist movements in western Europe and south America, ignore the valuable authoritarian allies throughout the world; no! it was Yankee democracy that saved the day.

This we shall designate as Pre-eminence Derived Universalism.

Brasilia, following the steps of its Portuguese forefathers, also sees the XXI century world as a defeat of the developed North in favour of the decolonised, developing, post-modern and morally superior South. Of course in the case of Brazil, it is not the zenith of its power that brings forth this delusion, but rather the rapid rise of its geopolitical status.

Putting aside pubescent Brasilia’s controversial takes on climate change (assigning blame and burden of repair exclusively to the West) or its less than pathetic attempt at intervening in the global stage in a clumsy non-alignedish tone to mediate between America and Iran, the focus will be on Brazil’s latest foreign policy controversy: the February 23^rd declaration of support by President Lula da Silva to Argentina’s territorial claim over the Falkland islands.

There are two scenarios that may justify this positioning:

I – Narrative Consistency

The Brazilian Presidency is in fact idealist and wishes in a spirit of solidarity to help a fellow developing country against a developed (imperialist) northern nation.

In this scenario Brasilia does not look to calculations of power or of political convenience, it bothers only to assess which party is morally superior according to the regime’s current politically correct ideology. Thus former colonialist and imperialist Britain does not have the right to deny a former colony, sovereignty over what the latter perceives its territory to be.

II – Legal Precedent Building

Another possibility is based on self-interest. Perhaps there are those in the Itamaraty who see in Argentina’s claim a possibility to increase Brazil’s diplomatic leverage over the industrialised north in such a way that Brazil might be able to rally the south behind its leadership in the UN or in trade negotiations with the EU.

There might even be the off chance that Brazil may one day claim south Atlantic islands itself (such as Ascencion, St. Helena or the Tristan da Cunha) and sees in the Falklands the opportunity to establish legal precedent.

I counter that the sensible alternative is:

III – Balance of Power in Detriment of Argentina

Brazil’s geostrategic future is in the South Atlantic. Brazil does not need to direct its focus towards South America because its size makes it an effortless regional hegemon there. In the South Atlantic however, there are rivals and Brazil will not succeed in having a say in world affairs as long as it does not control its own sphere of influence.

It is not just the natural resources or the transit flows, it is the power to be the geopolitical arbiter from the Magellan strait to the Caribbean, from the Cape of Good Hope to Macaronesia.

In order to accomplish this Brazil will have to ultimately confront those that will want to stand in the way. The US will be most displeased with this and the US Navy’s 4^th fleet is as much a deterrence against Venezuela’s anti-American impetus as it is a counter-weight against Brazil. Fortunately for Brazil the US seems to be concentrating its attention on Asia (Obama’s choice for the new National Security Advisor reflects this) and thanks to the financial crisis, Robert Gates and future SecDefs will have no choice but to scale down defence spending.

Then there are those countries that want the south Atlantic to continue as multilateral as possible. Brazil’s long time rival Argentina is one of them and South Africa is the only possible other. These two countries are the only ones to be capable of projecting a modern navy into the South Atlantic and last month they signed a new military cooperation agreement. Neither of them would be happy to trade one hegemon for another. But while the RSA’s navy needs to worry about protecting naval transit around the Cape and in securing its Indian Ocean flank, Argentina’s has no such concerns and is ready to rival with Brazil, at least in so far as it prevents Brasilia from achieving naval primacy.

Brazil has a special interest in securing a balance of power in the Atlantic Ocean since this would almost certainly result in its pre-eminence in the south Atlantic rim. During the 90s Brazil cleverly resisted America’s ALCA free trade pact in favour of Mercosul’s European connection. Today this imperative of Brazil’s foreign policy is very much alive in Brazil’s dealings with France. The military, industrial and commercial cooperation between Brasilia and Paris is ideal in economic terms given the two economies’ complementarity but also in geopolitical terms for it offers a solid counter-weight to American influence. Given that America is now more concerned about Asia and that France and Britain are coming closer strategically, Brazil should take the opportunity and enact a rapprochement with Britain rather than seeking to isolate it.

This is why Brasilia’s championing of Buenos Aires is in fact counter-productive for its interests. One shouldn’t empower a potential rival, especially at the cost of a potential ally.

What is more, not only is there no danger of Britain or France intervening in south America – while the XIX century US did not have the same certainty – but Argentina’s claim is not even reasonable. Britain had been around the archipelago and even established claim over it long before Argentina was even independent. Both the ‘uti possidetis, ita possideatis’ (what one has owned, one shall continue to own henceforth) and the ‘in pari turpitudine, melior est causa possidentis’ (in equal claims to an object, the successful claim is from the party which already owns said object) legal principles deny Argentina legitimacy over those islands. Not to mention the fact that the islands have been inhabited by British nationals for over a century.

Hubris is not equidistance. If Brazil truly wished to be equidistant it’d worry about its own regional rivals instead of pursuing a values based foreign policy. If the PT (Labour Party) government wanted equidistance, it wouldn’t take sides. No, the Itamaraty is enacting a clearly left-wing policy which will hurt Brazil’s national interest in the long-term. Hugo Chávez recently stated on his TV show that ‘Caracas-Brasília-Buenos Aires is the articulating axis of south-American unity, the land of utopia where a new world is being created‘.

Brasilia’s constructivists, now promoting the UNASUL and the South-American Defence Council, will inevitably stumble across the geographical and historical imperative of adjacent friction and when that happens, their linear normativism will be useless in the defence of Brazil’s national interest.

Perhaps Brazil – like America – is still prone to revolutionary exceptionalism, in which case one will anxiously long for a tropical Kissinger…

Portugal is the westernmost European state and it was also the country that brought forth the West’s global primacy. In 1415 Portugal became the first European kingdom to conquer territory outside of Europe and that date marks also the beginning of the Age of Discovery. Carthage, Rome and Byzantium, the Crusades and subsequent Mediterranean powers controlled territories in Africa and Asia but always in a regional pursuit for dominance. The Portuguese were first to bet on a global empire in pursuing their national interest and that mission began in the north-African city of Ceuta, marking its Christian dominance until today.

Portugal was not the first country to adopt a global strategy. Mongolia, China, the Caliphate did it first and Alexander tried it as well but managed only to turn the Hellenic community into Persia’s successor state. Portugal was two thousand years later, Europe’s pioneer in putting the teachings of the Renaissance to use on power projection beyond the ‘known world’.

Robert D. Kaplan calls the Indian Ocean the ‘hub of the twenty-first century world’ but the Indian Ocean rim has long been the best barometer of world power, from the Arab and Gujarati traders’ evangelisation to the Ming dynasty’s diplomatic armadas. The Portuguese though, were the first to export Europe’s technologies and values to a non-contiguous civilisation by establishing their ‘Estado da Índia’.

At the signing of the Treaty of Lisbon, the Portuguese PM referred to the Portuguese capital as a ‘safe haven’ from the EU’s troubles and he’d probably like to replicate just such an allegory with NATO. However just as Lisbon led the West into six centuries of global dominance so too today it seems to lead it to its twilight: the EU’s Treaty of Lisbon and NATO’s Lisbon Summit are the symbols of the Western civilisation’s fall from power. During the Pax Americana of the 90s and early 00s, America and Europe fought paid and nurtured the project of global liberal democracy. NATO’s and the European Union’s recent landmarks though are only meant to manage stagnation. The Treaty of Lisbon was an unambitious version of the aborted ‘Constitutional Treaty’ and even that will have to be amended very soon. Had the EU been less adamant on socially engineering a post-modern utopia, it might just have managed to convert some of its influence into hard-power. The euro-sceptic backlash that a normatively overbearing EU caused may just have pushed away further strategic cooperation and it is anyone’s guess how and when Europe will be rid of this crisis or the economic downturn. NATO in turn adopted Russia and became a more diffuse security mechanism. The missile shield is nice but for all intents and purposes NATO is becoming a more glorified OSCE; what else to call a military alliance that embraces the likeliest state to wage war – Russia – on the likeliest state to next join – Georgia – the organisation?

Lets be frank, the main security issues are not being tackled: border disputes in Europe are ‘crystallised conflicts’ – Cyprus, Gibraltar, Ceuta and Melilla, Olivença, South Tyrol, Kosovo, Belgium, etc – NATO or the EU refuse to touch the frozen conflicts – Karabakh, Georgia, Ukraine – and the hot spots are not working out that well – Iraq is falling under Iranian influence, the Afghan campaign is unsustainable. The only successes are unilateral or bilateral: the sanctions on Iran are the product of bilateral cooperation (5+1) and the missile shield is basically a US initiative with Russian acquiescence.

Then there’s the problem of Turkey, which in this summit seemed to be approached more as a NATO-Turkey Council than as an inner core NATO member. Certainly the Turks have valid reasons to object paying for a security structure which also serves the needs of an organisation (under the Berlin + agreement on burden-sharing) Turkey isn’t part of, i.e. the EU.

SAS Drakensberg - the South African Navy's ship on board which the new military cooperation protocols between Argentina and the RSA were signed, during the naval exercise ATLASUR VIII (this is also the ship dispatched to Ivoirian waters by the RSA, following the Ivoirian crisis of 2010-11)

As for the EU, if its apologists said that its successes were primarily in terms of soft power and cooperation, the rise of Germany shattered many europhiles’ delusions. This is not about Angela Merkel’s whims nor about a temporary lack of cooperation between the European capitals, this is about the same problem that drove Europe to the Great Wars: the emergence of a new power polity in the continent. This is structural, not cyclical. Russia and America kept Germany in check throughout the XX century in order to safe-keep their interests in a divided Europe. Now though, Russia is weak, America is waning and turning its attentions to Asia, and the traditional European powers have in the meantime been devoid of their colonial critical mass to be able to successfully counter-balance Berlin: Britain France and the western Europeans saw their grip on overseas possessions jointly subverted by the superpowers, Warsaw and Belgrade have been deprived of their Międzymorze and Yugosphere strategic depths and ditto for Vienna’s and Budapest’s Alpine-Carpathian dominions.

The German Empire never relied on Prussia or the eastern agricultural spaces for its strength, it was the industrial machine of the Rhein valley that drove them into hegemony and apart from the loss of Alsace-Lorraine they were allowed to retain it. Consequently the German population was always set to become primary in Europe. German reunification simply sealed the deal but it also destroyed the strategic balance between Germany and France which was at the origin of the European treaties.

It is ironic that after a century of American interventionism in Europe, the old continent will simply return to its old ways. In a way, just as Asia is reacquiring its role in the world, so is Europe falling back to its previous geopolitical configuration.

Now more than ever the US needs regional allies. The white star navy will have to undergo cutbacks and new deployments will have to be made in order to reinforce the 7^th and 5^th fleets in the west Pacific and Indian Ocean respectively. This means that those countries in Europe and the Atlantic which can regionally provide America with reliable help will be preferred but it also means that America is no longer available to aid in the maintenance of balances of power. The West will require realignments and in Europe there are already four major power zones emerging: the continental hegemons Germany Italy and Russia – in a new Molotov-Ribbentrop dynamic – the Mediterranean hegemons Spain Italy and Turkey, the continental middle powers France, Britain and Poland and the Mediterranean middle powers France, Egypt, Israel and Greece. Basically, Europe will be picking up where it left off prior to WWII, with an anti German alliance. In the Mediterranean things may be trickier since the states that control the chokepoints seem to have a lot to gain from cooperating with each other leaving transit states such as France or Greece dependent on them. Russia has already chosen to bow to Turkish dominance of the eastern Med and the odds are not good that the Greece-Cyprus-Israel connection will be able to successfully counter Ankara’s ascendancy.

If the continental hegemons choose to partner with the Mediterranean hegemons though, only an outside power will be able to help London and Paris in keeping alive a balance of power. Will America be able to keep projecting some power into Europe? Will the Atlantic concert resort to new partners such as Brazil?

There is a strong anti-interventionist tendency in America which may be happier dismantling the United States’ global intervention infrastructure and simply relying on regional powers for ad hoc arrangements. The rise of the Tea Party, while not strictly a libertarian movement, may in time vindicate the views of the Paul dynasty. Simultaneously, in Brazil the Labour Party’s foreign policy is strongly third-worldist and seems determined to rally behind Brazil the developing ‘South’. These ‘autonomistas’ are less likely to partner with industrialised powers than the Brazilian right’s ‘institucionalistas pragmáticos’ and little cooperation will be seen between the southern hemisphere and Europe while the Lula legacy is in power, even if not all of the south Atlantic Ocean rim seems to agree with Brazil’s preeminence.