The Desolation of C.H.A.O.S.
On May 18th 2022 and after 75 years of neutrality, Finland and Sweden submitted their applications for entry into the North Atlantic Alliance.
For a dispassionate observer, the bid might seem irrational. Throughout the Cold War, with a totalitarian superpower as a neighbour, Stockholm and Helsinki did not dare contribute to the joint Western effort against the Soviet threat. Moscow sought to subvert every state with an active communist party, it sponsored wars in continents where Russia had no obvious interests, it directly invaded Afghanistan (not to mention Finland in the 1930s) and crushed dissent in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, it maintained totalitarian regimes in its eastern European satellites, it acted as patron of some of the worst totalitarian dystopias on Earth and it brought the old continent to the verge of nuclear catastrophe during the Chernobyl disaster. Yet, non of this ever swayed the bothnian brethren into abandoning their non-alignment.
No, the baltic brothers decided that it was in 2022 that it would be finally worth joining the Atlantic Alliance. The decision was made in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the stated goal of increasing the security of the two neutral nordics, ostensibly against the threat of the Russian Federation.
This is a rather inconsistent position on the part of the two countries. The USSR is no longer and while Russia is an economy of global importance integrating the G20, it is hardly a superpower anymore. Furthermore, the ruling conservative regime in Moscow has shown exactly zero interest in promoting or forcing any ideological doctrine on the world. Much to the contrary, it seems focused on promoting its economic and strategic interests by partnering with as many marxist inspired regimes (Venezuela, Cuba) as conservative ones (Saudi Arabia, Hungary), democracies (India, Serbia) or autocracies (Belarus, Iran). Moreover, under Vladimir Putin himself, Russia was originally quite interested in joining NATO and never shied away from commercial agreements with the EU member-states, even subjecting itself to the jurisdiction of the Council of Europe and its ECHR on humanitarian issues.
It is true that Russia has seen itself involved in a number of conflicts during Putin’s tenure but at a closer lens, Moscow has been on the reactive side of the disputes, not on the aggressor side. In Georgia, it was Saakashvili’s government that chose to defreeze the Ossetia issue and bomb russian troops. In Syria too, it was the West that decided to endorse the revolution while the russians had always been close to the regime in Damascus and merely helped it survive. During events in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, Moscow acted always as a defender of the status quo and it was atlanticist forces that pushed externally for regime change. Therefore, even if one were to interpret Moscow’s 2022 intervention in Ukraine as an aggressive move, one would have to concede that it was most certainly not part of a pattern with the potential to threaten Sweden and Finland.
If the timing appears off, the strategic vision informing the policy is just as much fraught with inconsistencies.
Going by the rhetoric, swedes and finns wish to join NATO motivated by fears of political aggression, especially from an authoritarian power with reckless disregard for human rights; Democratic Peace Theory reigns supreme in the foreign policy of both the Hereditary Prince Palace and the Marine Barracks.
Let us firstly concede the obvious contention that the nordics are more likely to see themselves involved in a conflict with Russia than they are with the United States. Indeed, the elites and technocratic establishment maintain far closer relations and enjoy greater cultural proximity to the Atlantic than to Eurasia.
That being said, NATO is hardly an answer to what the nordics seek. In terms of aggressive conduct, illegal under International Law, Brussels has been far more aggressive than Moscow for the past decades and with far deadlier and more destructive consequences. It is worth reminding that the nordics’ attachment to one of the EU’s Four Freedoms (circulation) went out the window when they were forced to suspend the Schengen Area agreement, shortly after the NATO regime change intervention in Libya which caused an invasion of Europe by millions of third world illegal immigrants. Staying on the topic of illegal invasions, one must inevitably focus on Turkey since Ankara is currently occupying three different states. The human rights record is not better with the Turks currently imprisoning more journalists than Russia and Ukraine combined.
Empiricism is always useful and while Finland had to endure a soviet invasion, Sweden has not had to fight Russia since 1809. Helsinki also allied with Nazi Germany during the Second World War and fought Britain – another democracy – during the global conflict. True, the finns were ‘finlandized’ throughout the Cold War but Moscow remained true to its peace guarantees to this day. It is therefore hard to make a convincing case for an emerging threat from Russia. In addition, let us not forget that as members of NATO, Stockholm and Helsinki will be asked to contribute to the war effort, the next time Brussels and DC decide to intervene in the name of ‘peace enforcement’, ‘responsibility to protect’ or some other perversion of international norms by any other name.
Shortly after the announcement of their candidacy, Sweden and Finland were caught off guard by the stance of the Turkish government, warning of a veto on principle, to the entry of the two countries.
Here we enter into even more controversial territory given that while the northern peoples may be culturally distant from the slavic russians – as already admitted – they are arguably even more incompatible with their Mediterranean would-be-allies. The example of Turkey is not unique, for Greece too endured difficult relations with the nordics during its dictatorial times. Within NATO, Athens was heavily criticised by Denmark and Norway for its anti-democratic practices and in the Council of Europe, the two nordic kingdoms were joined by Sweden and the Netherlands in denouncing and lambasting the hellenic republic – some allies… Perhaps the most egregious example might be that of Portugal. Not only a member but actually a founding member by American and British invitation, Lisbon had to endure decades of derision from Oslo and Copenhagen. Not content with diplomatically discriminating against the portuguese, the nordics not only did not aid their ‘ally’ when it was attacked by communist forces equipped by the USSR, in South Asia and Africa, but they actually rejoiced when the iberian member lost its territories to the friends of Moscow. Tensions between the supposed allies came to a head in the 1971 NATO meeting in Lisbon with norwegians exchanging recriminations with the greeks and portuguese. As if that were not enough, the puritanical nordics went to the extreme of floating the option of either Portugal and Greece being expelled, or they themselves exiting the Alliance.
Recently, following the Great Recession, tensions arose between the EU’s fiscally sound northern states and the infamous southern PIIGS – with even Finland joining the mix, this time. This past does not bode well for the future of an alliance with the added membership of Sweden and Norway – perhaps we should start calling them the CHAOS countries: Copenhagen, Helsinki, Amsterdam, Oslo, Stockholm.
NATO insiders or not, the nordics have always insisted on humanitarian foreign policies. Their obsession with values has led to their hosting various international normative initiatives such as the Helsinki Accords, the Reykjavík Summit, the Oslo Accords or, of course, the Nobel Prize ceremonies. They have equally been at the forefront of several humanitarian minded conventions and were some of the first to impose normative conditionality in their commercial and diplomatic dealings around the world. Sweden’s success in exporting its fighter aircraft, SAAB’s JAS-39 Gripen, for instance, is widely recognised as being hampered by Stockholm’s humanitarian demands. Norway has often courted diplomatic trouble with the choice of Nobel Peace Prize winners. Generally, the nordics are usually the ones to instigate sanctions aimed at human rights violators around the world.
It is uncertain how any of this behaviour actually benefits the nordics but their external relations are their own prerogative and they cannot possibly be accused of inconsistency. That is until they request access to the hallways of international military alliances. One would imagine that Stockholm and Helsinki would be more at ease partnering with the likes of New Zealand or Bhutan for their security arrangements since such choices would make little sense strategically but at least they would be consistent with their clear conscience imperative. Approaching NATO is bizarre at best but more to the point, it raises another problem: the consequences of their actions in the past half century.
Technically, no NATO member is undemocratic at the moment but who knows what the future may hold? The West’s definition of ‘democracy’ is certainly not becoming more encompassing… The current problem that Finland and Sweden face is related to their defence of the kurdish cause in Turkey but why should, say, Hungary or Poland be willing to accept the two states into the Alliance? It is not like they have been making their life easier within the EU. Why should they wish to invite their recalcitrance into yet another vital forum?
Moralpolitik has always been rid with strategic pitfalls for strategy requires cold blooded calculations and not pink unicorn utopias conceived in politically correct academies. As is typical of idealists, the nordics are trying to reach for the best of both worlds: the moralist prestige and the realist means for their defence. It is high time that the idealists to the north learn that the two don’t go together and that their doctrine’s chickens have finally come home to roost.
Bending Over Backwards the Polish Way
None more than the Polish conservatives, has become utterly hypocritical and contradictory over the Ukraine crisis.
We have, thus far, abstained from devoting much attention to Polish foreign policy as it has so far been logical and predictable. Yet, the 2020s have brought some heavy schizophrenia to polish external relations, in particular when articulated by the current polish conservative government.
Warsaw was treated with particular care by Moscow during the Iron Curtain times, as suppressing a rebellion in Poland would have been incommensurately more politically costly than the lightning Red Army operations in Prague and Budapest.
Thusly, while not as independent and free as Yugoslavia, communist Poland was still awarded a ‘special relationship’ with the USSR and a slightly higher modicum of tolerance comparatively to other soviet satellites.
However ‘mild’ the treatment of Poland might have been, the Katyn massacre, the annexation of polish territory, the economic impoverishment and the totalitarian oppression, left Warsaw with a justifiable paranoia regarding Russia. Add to this the polish experience with successive partitions at the hands of the Tsars.
Consequently, that the poles would be interested in integrating any and all alliances which could assist Poland in the event of a conflict with Russia, is perfectly rational policy. So rational that even Russia understands it. President Putin has made it a point to recognise soviet atrocities against Poland and even sought to make the most of the Katyn Remembrance Day, by paying homage and offering to deepen relations with the old nation.
Nevertheless, while Russia has been apologetic and even facilitated Polish deployments to Afghanistan, Poland has proceeded to undermine Russian interests at every turn. Moscow has awarded Warsaw a certain leeway but with Ukraine and Belarus, the patience ran out. The Russians have also abstained from grandstanding and antagonizing the poles over polish intervention in Iraq or their reneging their commitments in Ukraine – the Yanukovych-opposition deal as well as the Minsk Accords.
Were these the only factors to take into account, one might be critical of the poles for their insolence but the context, in particular for Poland’s conservatives, is far more disorienting.
Ever since entering NATO, Poland has had to send troops to a panoply of theatres which bear zero relevance to its national interests. If one can understand polish deployments to the Baltic, the presence of polish troops in controversial interventions south of the Mediterranean, is utterly bewildering. Far from begrudging these deployments, Poland has gone into them with enthusiasm, aiming to prove its value to its new allies.
Additionally, Poland has eagerly facilitated the West’s ideological subversion of eastern Europe, by partnering with the universalist efforts to convert Europe’s traditionalists into the new dogmatic faith of progressivism. Taken to extremes, these efforts result in ‘colour revolutions’ which contribute only to aggressively expel Russian influence in the continent.
Worse still, the progressivism which the poles facilitate is very much antithetical to conservative values, by financing NGOs and media which promote cultural Marxism, anti-national sentiment as well as racist and anti-religious policies.
These policies have contributed only to increase tensions with Russia which Poland should rationally try and avoid.
With the EU, while Poland has greatly profited commercially, it has had to endure successive betrayals and humiliations. Brussels has only further expanded its powers in non-democratic ways, including by making use of biased courts to ensure that ‘European integration’ is unidirectional. Polish conservatives have protested but not only have their objections fallen in deaf ears, Warsaw has been systematically embarrassed, co-opted, and subverted by the eurocrats. The discrimination which Poland suffers along with countries such as Hungary should be unacceptable to a nation zealous of sovereignty and national pride but yet again, the poles have swallowed it whole.
This attitude reaches an apogee of cognitive dissonance with the 2014-2022 Ukraine crisis where Poland has supported and helped a Ukrainian state whose soviet borders include parts of historical Poland and whose regime is heavily influenced by nazi worshipping factions inspired by hitlerian collaborators who massacred poles, in the first half of the XX century.
As stated, even the Russians understand Poland’s paranoia but aligning with everything the polish conservatives hate, against the polish national interests, in order to incite passions to the brink of nuclear tensions, can no longer be perceived as a rational policy. Poland has gone too far. At a certain point, moderate conservatives should acknowledge that Russia is no longer the greatest natural threat to Poland. Much to the contrary, Russia does not seek to overthrow governments nor does it promote regime change. That is very much the almost exclusive priority of Warsaw’s newfound allies, to the west.
For how long will Poland’s conservatives sacrifice all their standards, values and interests in order to obsessively attack Russia? Must Russia be the only concern of polish foreign policy – one before which all others shall be martyred? Especially a Russia which is largely attacked by the same institutions and totalitarian ideologies and for the same reasons, of those that aggress Poland…
The Potemkin West and Strategic Cacophony
Browsing through the current offer of entertainment drama, one notices a certain pattern of late: the fraud genre. From the story of Elizabeth Holmes in ‘The Dropout’, to Anna Delvey’s ‘Inventing Anna’ and the ‘Tinder Swindler’, the most interesting stories are of those who tried to fake it till they made it …only to all end in disaster.
This is not a coincidence, this is a wider tendency.
When the Great Recession of the 2010s hit, one of the realisations was that the financial world had changed dramatically during the 1980s. The enthusiasm of deregulation had led to promiscuity between the commercial and investment sectors of banking. Perhaps most importantly – as The Big Short so well illustrates – not only had the banks become irresponsible, the regulators and auditors had as well. The rating agencies and the auditing consultancies had ceded to the temptation of short term gain.
In part this was due to the monopolistic ‘too big to fail’ structure of the market but there was also the human element. In an era when Ivy League universities privilege political correctness, the quality and the critical thinking abilities of the respective graduates is questionable at best. More importantly, the West had drunk too much of its own democracy Kool-aid. In mixing 80s capitalism triumphalism with counter-culture, the path was open to an extreme atomisation of society.
The millennial generation was born to a world without ethics: there is no more sense of honour towards societal norms, towards the state, towards the profession, towards religious community, towards family, nor, as the divorce and marriage rates indicate, there is no loyalty even to the significant other. Deontology is extinct.
Whereas, in the 1980s, many of the banks were not yet consolidated and some were still owned by old Atlantic coast clans, Jordan Belfort style institutionally vampiric conducts, could still be checked by the dynastic sense of institutional honour. The name of an institution still reflected its reliability. But arrived at the 21st century, all the collectivistic dependencies of the individual are gone and we reside in the ethical wild west.
This too is reflected on the international institutions which are unduly revered as if they were still the moral arbiters of the days of old. The modern cosmopolitan bureaucrats of the alphabet soup are born of nowhere cities (The Hague, Geneva, NYC, Brussels, Vienna) and embody loyalty to no one but themselves. Often emanating from the nowhere dynasties, they possess multiple nationalities and their children will go on to perpetuate the family’s original sin. The only purpose of the EU, the UN or NATO is to perpetuate themselves, not to serve the national interest of the states who fund them. It is this logic which leads to the gratuitous antagonization of states such as Russia or Hungary, when they don’t play ball.
The same phenomenon has begun to infect national technocracies as well, with the US federal government outright being seditious and subversive towards Donald Trump during his tenure.
This atomisation and institutional extraversion can also explain the current Ukraine crisis in which the West seems to be completely adrift.
Brandon and BoJo are both …’out of it’. Both elected on reactive platforms without any coherent strategic overview of how to steer the ship of government, both have utterly failed at managing the great challenges they have faced in Brexit and the pandemic. Not being genuine articles, they owe too much to special interests and know too little to argue with the technocrats when they skew policy-making in the direction of institutional inertia. Bojo did not believe he could accomplish Brexit without negotiating and Biden’s senility has resulted in there being no arbiter to contradicting lobbies in his administration, leading to a schizophrenic system where all agencies and factions get their way and all ends in a chaotic cacophony: defund the police but don’t, exit Afghanistan but double down on NATO, spend trillions domestically but endanger the petrodollar as a reserve currency externally, incite Ukrainians to resist to the end but cancel any actual military aid.
When the Pentagon directly contradicts the State Department in the same week, things are not well.
This is not simply the lack of a strategic vision, this is the complete lack of deontological bearing. Trump or Reagan might not have been strategic geniuses but they had an ethos which they followed and occasional adequate instincts. The current pretence Ivy Leaguers in charge, have nothing.
The one aspect of western policy making which seems to have worked in the present crisis, was the propaganda. After decades of self-involved social media marketing, all the alphabet virtue signallers are exceedingly efficient at ginning up a moral panic. However, as with the Netflix fraudsters du jour, western policy makers too will inevitably meet an inglorious end when their escape forward doctrine smashes head first into hardcore cold blooded reality. ‘Empire of Lies’ indeed.
Omegamania Occidentalis
UK’s ‘Desert Rats’ fight their way into Basra; 2003
Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President George H. W. Bush hailed the coming of what he called the ‘new order’. This new order was ambiguously interpreted throughout the globe: whereas in the Third and Second Worlds, it meant only the end of the bipolar geopolitical system, in the West it meant something else entirely. For Europeans and Americans the new order was a post-modern one and globalization was its hallmark. ‘Peace through democracy’ and ‘democracy through trade’ were the rallying cries of all those who, in their Fukuyama moment, saw the ‘end of history’ and the ultimate triumph of Western values, as Mankind’s normative synthesis for future prosperity. This civilisational pride would result in a number of ideological trends in all fields of human endeavor, from economic neo-liberalism or religious agnosticism to foreign policy universalist doctrines such as liberal and conservative interventionism.
Politics was now perceived as corrupt and obsolete following the end of the ideological blocs, thus giving way to the age of the NGO. Unlike such predecessors as the ICRC, the new NGOs aimed not at operating under the scope of the state – making up for its shortfalls – but rather at replacing it: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or Greenpeace are critical of state action and seek to mobilize the civil society into realizing autonomously their view of the ‘good society’. Hugo Slim describes this vision as consisting of the full implementation of rule of law, democratic political practices, freedom of speech, equality of gender, sustainable development, respect for the rights of women and children as well as pacifism.
Thanks to this politique engagée, state responsibilities previously seen as foundational and primary are now neglected. ‘Democratic peace theory’ empties the once absolute need for ‘manu militari’ for instance and politicians find it difficult to justify military spending in a world where inter-state conflict is taboo and asymmetric threats are described as ‘strategic’. Security has throughout history been the state’s foremost function with the very definition of secular power being authority over the military, but social programmes have taken its place without concern for the foundations of the modern state – in Iraq, Coalition forces paid a heavy price for daring to put development before security. Therefore we can also conclude that the western citizenry understands military action only IF it serves a moral cause and, according to the vision of such constructivist authors as Slaughter or Ikenberry, consequently soldiers are no longer soldiers but are instead painted as social workers, they exist not to defend interests but to build states and nations, they altruistically fight for the rights of others not for ours, warfare is not enemy centric but population centric, ‘responsibility to protect’ trumps ‘national security’.
As morally righteous as it may be, the practical outcome of such policies is often strategically detrimental: authors such as Edward Luttwak or Nikolas K. Gvosdev agree that NATO operations in the Balkans did not stop the killings but prolonged the conflict by instilling parity in offensive capabilities, interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo did not prove that Europe lives now in democratic peace but rather made it inevitable the presence of foreign troops to enforce the peace indefinitely, Operation Iraqi Freedom did not spread democracy in the Middle East but rather weakened the counter-weight to Iranian and Syrian regional influence thus emboldening their interference in Lebanon and Palestine, the overthrow of Qadhafi did not deter other tyrants from oppressing their populations but drove them into massacre frenzy so as to suppress any notion of territorial bridgehead for foreign interventions, Libya also proved to normatively dissonant regimes that WMDs are adequate means of deterrence whereas trust and cooperation with democracies is not – given the latter’s tendency for foreign policy inconsistency.
One of the best barometers for poor strategic planning is the concept of ‘overstretch’: many an empire have found themselves biting more than they can chew as a result of hubris. Not only does this seem to be happening to the West but worse still the rest of the world is not following suit. While Western nations easily jump to the next humanitarian crisis without providing a stable outcome to the previous one, Russia and China refrain from foreign adventurism but are very zealous in maintaining their own regional spheres of influence. In fact, be it Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya, the pattern repeats without consideration for the consequences. This is due to the belief that hard-power and high-politics have no place in post-modernity and whatever strategically negative consequences may derive from humanitarian policies, the long term benefits outweigh ‘short term’ losses: both the European Commission and the US State Department often declare that democratic governance and human rights are the best guarantee of stability on the long term, and both institutions claim to work to bring these priorities to fruition.
There is then an abandonment of realpolitik principles for state action and their replacement with moralpolitik. Nowadays decision-makers are contrived to ‘do something’ and ‘do what is right’, and because the Machiavellian maxim of politics being necessarily amoral is understood as old-fashioned, when confronted with good society lacking, humanitarians adopt linear constructivism and call it a ‘work in progress’: Bosnia lacks nationhood but only on the short term since as a EU associate, state-building and nation-building as per Brussels Consensus will eventually complete its inexorable development towards EU standards; ditto for Kosovo who along with Bosnia symbolically earned a brand new flag with EU colors.
NATO enters Kosovo
Conversely, together with Iraq and Libya the Balkans remain strictly ethnically divided. Security dilemmas and historical rivalry seem more relevant now since these societies remain democratically imperfect – according to Freedom House – their political liberties were largely exogenously introduced – taking into account American geopolitical pressure for normative conformity and EU accession conditioning to achieve the same – and dangerously favor the development of partisan civil society association – which may give rise to sectarianism as it happened in Iraq or the post-soviet space. In fact ‘doing what is right’ only seldom accomplishes the ‘good society’ standards aimed at – post-war Germany and Japan for instance.
On the other hand because doing what is right translates as ‘standing up for the little guy’, ‘doing good’ usually involves applying manicheist categories. It is simplistic to call Kosovo Albanians the good guys simply because they are being oppressed or doing the same today for the Syrian opposition. If we were to apply truly objective principles, the key would be to ascertain not who is ‘good’ but rather who will behave according to humanitarian standards. In non-western states though, few political factions would live up to such standards. This was observed by Stathis Kalyvas who studying the Philippines during the Second World War, found that the real struggle was between local elites who adopted the ideological narrative of Americans or Japanese depending on which side they were fighting. Thus the civil strife may have been a fight by proxy between Americans and Japanese, but ideology was only a guise for legitimacy. Similar patterns can be seen in the Balkans where both Bosniaks and Croats were guilty of the same crimes as Serbs during the War in Bosnia or where Kosovo Albanians and Kosovo Serbs were equally guilty of atrocities and ethnic cleansing be it before or after the 1999 NATO intervention. Particularly troublesome is the example of Libya and Syria during the Arab Spring, where the West either did involve itself under the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine, or was instigated to do so. In both cases the opposition to the oppressive regime was guilty of much of the same atrocities during and after the civil war, a reality ironically epitomized by the 2012 Al-Qaeda attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.
It is often the case that Western politicians prefer to yield to simplistic categorization and choose sides morally. The risk inherent to morality based decision-making is to recurrently side with the weak against the strong as it was done in the Balkans by supporting Bosniaks and Croats against Serbs or Kosovo Albanians – again – against Serbs. However this is a global pattern with any given ‘cause’ resonating with American voters and leading to US government support for: nationalist Chinese – Taiwan – and Tibetans against mainland China, Israel against the Islamic world, Gulf monarchies against Republican Arabs, post-Soviet states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Ukraine) against Russia and of course Albanians against post-Yugoslav states.
But there is a cost to invariably siding with David against Goliath: Goliath always has a better chance at victory. Since the end of the Cold War, as the remaining superpower, America has managed to create a balance of power in favor of the status quo but with the Asian awakening and the emerging economies narrowing the power gap, one has to wonder for how long the US and the West in general, will manage to keep the ‘little guy’ from being overwhelmed by its demographically and economically senior neighbors. American troops protecting the Gulf monarchies and Albanians won’t be around forever, nor will the treasury propping up Israel, Taiwan and Russophobe Europe. Europeans will find equally hard to justify the projection of their forces to the Balkans, Darfur and the Gulf when there is a weak chance of success and increased risk of loss of life, which Western electorates cannot bear.
This concern with the little guy or omegamania, also brews bad blood with emerging powers and spawns ad-hoc anti-Western coalitions as it happens today in the UN Security Council a propos of Syria or happened earlier with Sudan during the Darfur crisis. More to the point, what would the West’s response be if such structures as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Collective Security Treaty Organization or the Alternativa Bolivariana para las Americas were to move towards an equally interventionist approach against Western partners?…
The Croatian Air Force Legion was a collaborator volunteer unit of the Luftwaffe during WWII – Just like the Germans suddenly found numerous allies within the minorities of Eastern Europe – and chiefly among the oppressed peoples of the Soviet Empire – so too today the Western powers find allies in many of those same peoples. However, the illusion is that the bond is forged with common values whereas in truth, foreign powers are mere proxies of the struggle of Eastern Europeans against the centripetal power of Russia or other regional powers.
Yet the West is capable of making wise decisions as well. Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait was successful largely because it was conducted with pragmatic interests in mind, Lebanon’s cedar revolution was a good example of Western pressure and soft-power, the decision to abstain from intervening in Georgia in ’08 or Syria in ’12 was sensible, as was to refrain from going to great lengths in chastising China over strife in Xinjiang, to maintain support for Bahrain’s regime in the face of the Arab Spring or to recognize the new Singhalese post civil war political reality. What all these decisions have in common was the recognition by the West that the minority party did not have a sufficient chance of success against the majority, or at least chance enough worth risking Western political capital supporting.
The secret for sound strategic planning is not to always side with the strong and the predictable winners of violent conflicts but rather to apply strategic criteria when choosing sides, rather than moral criteria. It is often advantageous to prop-up the weaker party but this should be done sparingly. To indulge in systematic white knight grandstanding is dangerous and destabilizing; the West must pick its battles, not the other way around.
The fall of the Berlin Wall did not originate a united world, it generated a tragedy of the commons on a planetary scale which the West has failed to take advantage of since. While opportunistic powers moved quickly to establish spheres of interest and seize resources, the West wasted time and capital to consolidate its own particular and ethical vision of the end of history. Future multipolarism may yet forcefully invert this tendency but the West is capable of making informed and rational decisions on its own and all it takes now is for Westerners to understand that the return of history has deprived them of their former normatively exceptionalist status.
Red Lines Aren’t For Everyone
The conflict in Syria has raised many questions about international intervention. Critics from the right and left alike have berated President Obama for staying America’s hand and thus preventing any form of intervention. Indeed without US capabilities, as much as other states like France and the UK would like to intervene, they are unable to.
The Obama administration came under media fire especially when its self-imposed catalyst for intervention was reached: the use of chemical weapons by the regime. Obama’s red line was discovered to be more hazy than expected and the press cartoonists had a field day.
However, it is not unusual for democracies to display incoherent foreign policies given the political representatives’ dependence on popularity with the public. Other countries do not face the same level of scrutiny and Russia has been particularly coherent throughout the length of this conflict and even throughout the past decades. Vladimir Putin has himself drawn lines in the sand before, the difference being he tends to keep them. The West might want to borrow a few lessons from Putin’s playbook.
Chechnya
The first indicator of such an attitude was Chechnya. In the primordial days of Vladimir Putin’s top level political career, the PM was touted by President Boris Ieltsin as a prodigal son to bring order to Russia. The most distinctive legacy of Vladimir Vladimirovich’s first stint as PM was undoubtedly the 2nd Chechen War. Under his premiership Russia adopted a very clear policy of rejecting any secession that was not based on the territorial precedents of the USSR administrative divisions. The Russian Federation itself, while the self-proclaimed successor state of the SU, based its legitimacy for independence on self-determination for all the Soviet Socialist Republics.
Until then there was no consensus or doctrine on where the limits for self-determination should be drawn and Moscow had even briefly recognised the Chechen Republic. At the end of the first Putin government, Chechnya was subdued and Russia’s territorial integrity was no longer a matter for debate.
Missile Defence
With the internal front consolidated, Putin turned to foreign affairs. Unlike what Russian leaders had always pleaded, NATO progressively encroached into Eastern Europe by extending membership and similar agreements to central and Eastern European states. Russian leaders claimed that Eastern Europe should be left as a neutral buffer zone but Moscow was politely ignored and given the NATO-Russia Council as a reassurance.
In the 2000s, with Putin now President and Russia reeling in considerable oil profits, the tone changed and soon enough so did the actions: NATO’s plans to establish a missile defence system for Europe which was partly based in Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania met with considerable Russian resistance and counter-pressure. Russia still maintains its Cold War nuclear armed intermediate-range missile deterrence, which makes Russian diplomatic outrage somewhat bewildering (as NATO’s limited systems could never hope to best Russian capabilities) but even if only motivated by Moscow’s preference to keep Eastern Europe as unimportant for NATO as possible, this has however been a battle that Vladimir Putin has chosen to fight.
L-39s seem to be a weapon of choice in small scale civil wars and certainly prominently featured in the Arab Spring in both Libya and Syria
It is difficult to assess whether it is being won since NATO’s system is yet to be made operational but officially the deployment continues. Will Russia’s threat to redirect the targeting of its own ballistic devices towards Eastern European sites be fulfilled and will it persuade NATO to recede? It would seem Moscow is attempting to put forth objections to further fading of the geostrategic neutrality of Eastern Europe but given these countries inclusion into NATO, it is too late for that.
Georgia
Another important red line was that drawn against the colour revolutions which Putin has now succeeded in reversing in practically every country they struck: the Orange coalition is out of power in the Ukraine, the Tulip revolution’s leaders were driven from Bishkek and then there was Georgia, the original sin. The Rose revolution was the first in which a Russophobe pro-Western regime came to power through civil society pressure. Saakashvili wasted no time in switching allegiances and soon found himself at loggerheads with Moscow. These tensions would eventually culminate in the 2008 Ossetian War, trade embargoes declared against Georgia, Russian occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and finally Saakashvili’s own defeat in Georgia’s national elections.
Moscow was thus conveying a clear message: while Russia’s advanced Warsaw Pact buffer zone was now lost, the new buffer’s politically neutral integrity is sacrosanct. In other words, regardless of regime or leadership, no European state east of the ‘near abroad’ curtain – east of Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova – has permission to adopt an anti-Russia geopolitical positioning.
The US, the French and the Germans understood and backed off; Georgia’s and Ukraine’s accession to NATO was indefinitely postponed. It is not as if they could do much seeing as how their forces were not only tied in the Middle East but the campaign in Afghanistan actually depended on Russian air routes.
So far Putin has successfully drawn 2 out of 3 red lines against the West. There are those who would criticise Putin for his anti-Western stance and actually accuse him of anti-Western bias. Secretary Brzezinski notably stated as much last April in Bratislava, outraged that Moscow cannot see its interest in cooperating with the West against more dangerous foes like China. Putin however is flexible and has a keen strategic mind. Putin only cooperates with China as long as it is the West trying to encroach on Moscow’s sphere of influence; China on the other hand, attempts nothing of the kind. Putin probably does not believe that Russia can rely and trust in Beijing ad eternum, or even that Russia’s culture should be viewed as Eastern rather than Western, he however understands that were China to make any menacing moves towards Siberia, it would be as much a Russian interest to fight back as it would be a Western interest in general.
Syria
Syria is Putin’s latest attempt at drawing a line in the sand. This time Putin is not securing its domestic legitimacy or its hegemonic sphere of influence, this time Russia is claiming back a chief role in world affairs. Russia would never attempt something similar in Latin America, Africa or Southeast Asia. The Mashreq though is of vital importance to a number of Russian strategic and geoeconomic interests. Russia is then drawing a line in which world affairs it perceives itself to be too weak to influence and those where it simply cannot allow its stakes to be overlooked by ultra-voluntaristic Western forces.
If Putin succeeds it will have proven once again that the new Russia is not to be trifled with. If he doesn’t, he will understand he overstretched his country’s projection abilities.
For the time being however, Russia’s actions cannot be criticised since the West rhetorically entrapped itself into being unable to negotiate with the Syrian regime. The time to negotiate was when the regime was on the defensive, but last year the West was too busy making arrogant demands for Assad to step down and surrender unconditionally. Now it may be too late.
If Putin can be accused of making mistakes, then the S-300 delivery to Syria would be one of them. If this actually takes place rather than being used as a bargaining chip, then Putin will be escalating the strategic implications of the conflict by risking that Syria delivers such systems to its patron Iran. This would incur the rightful wrath of both Israelis and Westerners and would unnecessarily broaden the conflict.
One reason why the US has stayed its hand is because Barack Obama prioritises Iran and China over small sideshows like Syria. While defeating Assad would deal Iranian projection a severe blow, it would do nothing against the Iranian regime and its nuclear programme. Syria is also very much a regional power game rather than a global one. For the US to intervene would be to ask the Chinese to drop their cooperative diplomatic attitude in the UNSC.
Democracy is Geostrategy-adverse
One of the sad conclusions of the whole ‘red lines’ affair is once again that democracy does not deal well with long term planning. In a way, it is precisely because Russia has kept the current leader in place for over a decade, that such red lines can be drawn and successfully implemented. As much as liberal democracies would like to do the same, their emphasis on soft power undermines their red lines, as do their ever-changing geopolitical doctrines. There is much to be said for stability and coherence. Putin is not a firebrand, quite to the contrary he has remained remarkably steady in the course he set for himself and for Russia, and done so in the face of explosive interventionism by the West as well as unforeseen shifts like the Arab Spring.
Who Is Who’s Proxy?
USAF F-22s are deployed for the first time to the Persian Gulf in 2012
If as rapper Eminem’s song goes ‘words are weapons’, then it is high time for some gun control. A rational stance against Iran’s nuclear program is today the outcome of nothing other than demagoguery.
Many imagined the Obama administration’s approach to the Iranian nuclear program to differ starkly from that of the Bush years and yet it has not: it basically balances holding the Israelis back from a direct attack with cumulative sanctions pressuring the regime into a compromise. The need to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is a constant.
Let us closely scrutinize the argument: why would it be negative for Iran to acquire nuclear capability? Because it would deploy nuclear weapons, launch them and engulf the world in a nuclear cataclysm? No, more likely because a nuclear armed Iran would become invulnerable to conventional military attacks. Through a WMD deterrent it would then have the ability to project power throughout the region at will – think Hezbollah times three, a USSR of the Middle East. But the ones most affected by this scenario are not the US, or Europe or even Israel, it is the Arab world. More instability in the Middle East would certainly hurt westerners and their supply of oil but there are alternative suppliers. Israel would feel threatened and might sustain more problems with terrorist organizations or unstable neighbors but for them, this is almost a way of life, and a nuclear Iran would think twice before directly threatening a close US ally. The Arab world and in particular the Persian Gulf monarchies however stand to lose much more as instability in the region might contaminate their own societies: oil being their main source of income any interruption in exports would severely cripple their economies and the possible removal of the western military shield through Iranian pressure, would leave Iran along with Turkey as the remaining regional powers – setting the Arab world back a century to the time of Ottoman Turkey and Arab submission. One should note that unlike Israel, there is little love for Arabs in the West and it would not be unreasonable to expect western electorates to pressure their politicians into disengagement from the region, if the stakes became too high, a sort of post ‘Black Hawk down’ Somalia reflex or even Munich syndrome.
Indeed the Arab world is said to be urging Israel to attack behind closed doors and Wikileaks made public Saudi statements enticing the US to do the same. Why then is the US and Israel on the brink of war with Iran but not a single Arab state? The last time the Gulf monarchies were threatened by an outside power was when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and back then many Arab countries joined the coalition to confront him. What is more, Iran is a much more difficult target for Israel than it is for the monarchies and the US has little appetite and capability for war while its finances are under stress. Arab countries conversely have the geographical ease and the advanced military technology to do so. They also have the economic instruments to manipulate the price of oil should Iran attempt to disrupt the international supply and this is to not even mention that Gulf Arab financial resources pooled together are in much more abundance to sustain a war than Israel’s or America’s.
It should be Saudi Arabia and the GCC making ready for war and threatening Iran rather than Israel or the US. But lets go even further with this rationale: it should be the Arab world pressuring Israel and the Palestinians into a two state solution for the conflict in Palestine, rather than Washington for it is they who are desperate for a counter-weight to Iranian influence and who need a sufficiently intimidating coalition to persuade Iran to negotiate; Israel should be a part of that coalition – and an obvious part at that.
Saudi forces retake Khafji from the Iraqi army during the Gulf War
But rhetorical entrapment makes our world a bizarre place to live indeed. Objectively speaking, the Gulf Arabs have little beef with Israel, and Palestine is supremely immaterial to the interests of most Arab states. Yet the plight of the Palestinians has remained on the top of their foreign policy agendas for decades leading to direct wars with Israel and to expensive sponsoring of proxy ones. Nothing was gained from it for the Palestinians or for the Arabs in general and one wonders what would have been gained even if the Arabs had had the upper hand. The Arab world declared a punitive embargo on the West in 1973 to protest the West’s protection of Israel and that led to a push for energy diversification in the west that to this day finds consensus between the left and the right and serves to demonize Arab countries.
All this might have been affordable until now but today it is not some small fledgling nation the Arabs are antagonizing, Iran is a country which represents to them an existential threat. Through their money and lobbying they managed to equip Iraq to fight revolutionary Iran from the onset of the Islamic revolution and along with the West have done their best to politically isolate the ayatollahs. But Iraq is no more and the US is still licking its wounds from its ‘freedom’ campaigns. What time and urgency would better justify recognizing Israel and have it join the anti-Iranian coalition?
It is not like in the case of Greece and Turkey where in spite of both being US allies, adjacent friction will always exist; Israel is far from the Gulf. What is more, it is as well armed as the peninsular monarchies and shares with them a dread of a nuclear Iran.
No, it is the power of words and especially a narrative which has been at play for decades that prevents further cooperation. Anti-western rhetoric dating back to the time of European colonization and Cold War alliances still has an impact on the ‘Arab street’. So too does antisemitic propaganda unleashed after Israel’s successful war for independence, being propagated today in virtually every Arab country through a politically correct anti-Jewish prejudice that Islamic clerics instill rather than combating.
It is not as if Arab leaders don’t know where the national interest of the states they run lies but rather that their hands are tied by the vitriol they themselves financed in the past.
The absurd of the pretense goes to the extent that Americans, Israelis, Europeans and even Iranians have to pretend for the sake of domestic Arab opinion that not only are relations between Arab countries and Iran good but that any Israeli attack using Arab air space would be carried out without authorization.
This absurdity deserves ridicule when one realizes that Arab leaders need secret help from their allies to help protect their own citizens from a conspiracy theory they themselves finance.
A reality check is long overdue on the ‘Arab street’: Israel and Jews are not the enemy nor is the West. Conspiracy theories and the narrative of victimization will not get Palestine independence nor build a credible coalition against Iran.
Sadly this seems to be a corner Arab leaders have backed themselves into and from which Israel and the West are being used to exfiltrate them.
The Western Bloc Fights Back
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.
Brazil’s Monroe Doctrine
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 23rd 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 4th 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…
Drôle de Paix I – Lisbon’s Occident
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 7th and 5th 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.
The Dragon and the Pachyderm
Pakistan is in dire straits, literally and figuratively. Things didn’t always go well for Islamabad and they haven’t been well for a long time. Pakistan has been in the middle of some quite unstable regions of the world but it has also itself to blame for much of that instability and tension.
The concept of Pakistan is one of the strangest to come out of the decolonization process. Like many African failed states Pakistan is not a nation; never to have existed before, never to have fought before, its citizens patriotism grounded on religion and geopolitics alone. This is not a good recipe for success and Pakistan’s shameful economic underperformance when compared to other emerging nations is proof. If true that many new states such as Canada or Australia thrive in spite of their weak national identity and historical precedent, it is also true that states such as these are more the exception than the rule. Pakistan like many African or Latin American countries, is devoid of any collective memory or administrative tradition that can hold the state together in times of need. Everything about Pakistan seems the product of arbitrariness: from the shape of its borders, the location of its capital, the composition of its people, the form of its government or the very name of the country. Nothing was organically constructed, all of the country’s features having been decided on the negotiating table and implemented top-down in a megalomaniac social engineering endeavour. The economic performance of Australia and Canada is mostly due to small populations living in wide resource rich territories and an ethnic population largely made up of protestant Europeans with their productive mentality. Pakistan is the paradigmatic example of the planet’s general opposite, a weberian insult in name as well as in essence.
After so many decades of political instability and military defeats, Pakistan won’t disaggregate now, but the light national coherence that Islam, the military establishment and Pakistan’s geopolitical allies provide, can only help it to a certain extent. Many analysts of Yugoslavia would look at Pakistan and call it a disaster waiting to happen. The past few years, one must admit, have been particularly strenuous. America’s tensions with the Islamic world have exposed Pakistan’s inclinations for the sponsoring of terrorism bringing it the contempt of the international community, India’s economic success has left its inferiority complex and Indophobia even more exacerbated, NATO’s campaign in Afghanistan has destabilised the Northwest Frontier Province and brought a home grown insurgency to but a few kilometres from Islamabad, Pakistan’s Afghani strategic depth is all but lost, India backed or otherwise Baluchistan is momentarily rebellious, America’s and Europe’s rapprochement with democratic India has relatively deprived Pakistan of western FDI and reliable sources of technology, the international community’s lobby for a democratic government has given Pakistan a weak and unstable leadership and last but not least the massive floods will demand massive investment, will cause widespread popular discontent and will require decades to recover from.
It is against this backdrop that we must put emerging China at play.
The Indian Ocean rim is the home to what strategists call the shatter-belt: a region of juxtaposed political, economic and strategic interests which a shifting world order is yet to balance. The flow of Persian Gulf oil to the East through the Indonesian straits, to the west through the Red Sea, the regional power politics in the Indian subcontinent, in Eastern Africa, in Indonesia, in the Indochina peninsula and of course, the interests of the external powers. Historically the Indian Ocean rim was never dominated by local powers for the continental character of these polities always made sure that the strategic emphasis was on land disputes and not naval ones. We can thus explain the Arab trade routes stemming from the Arabian Sea, the Ming dynasty’s influence projection armadas and the European colonial empires in modernity. What local naval power there was, was largely confined to coastal rivalries. Then and now, capable fleets are to be found in the Ocean’s northern and north-eastern rims – Australia’s and South Africa’s capabilities being a historical oddity. Indonesia’s big fleet is always poised to act in its own territory being tasked to prevent any insular uprisings. It must also serve as a centripetal counter-weight to regional rivals Malaysia and Australia as well as any potential external force. Africa cannot sustain a naval military establishment and the Middle Eastern states always use their navies with their own regional concerns in mind. This leaves Delhi and Islamabad as the only naval forces prone to project power in the Indian Ocean rim. But Pakistan’s troubles make it unlikely that it will dare challenge India’s primacy any time soon.
Conceivably, only China can now help preserve an anti-India orbit within the Ocean. In addition, there are several indicators that point to a possible Chinese naval deployment in the near future. First and foremost, China is in the process of finishing the infrastructure that will allow it to keep the Indian Ocean from becoming an Indian lake. Facilities in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan and perhaps even in Sri Lanka along with plentiful goodwill towards China make sure that Beijing’s vessels can soon be welcomed. China’s recrudescing assertiveness in the South China Sea demonstrates that Beijing is leaving its non interventionist stance, to take a more active role in Asian affairs.
The issue of China’s economic growth is also an important factor since it is not guaranteed that this growth can continue indefinitely. In the case of a slowdown or the bursting of a financial bubble for instance, the Chinese government may face heavy domestic criticism. In this scenario, the more accommodating Chinese foreign policy pundits might find it hard to argue in favour of interdependence and lose ground to the more belligerent pundits – mostly voices within the Chinese military establishment – which favour a hard power approach. In the last few months these voices have been stronger than usual. As has been observed in the past, as far as Beijing is concerned domestic opinion counts more than any other. It is not impossible that the Chinese leadership might put strategic issues in the agenda in order to minimise the popularity loss deriving from economic malaise and in this case Beijing would naturally prefer a smaller challenge like India than the big challenge of the American and Japanese control of the ‘first island chain’ and Taiwan.
In modern times the only external powers to have attempted and failed at projecting power into the Indian Ocean were Japan and the USSR. During World War II Japan was able to go as far as to bomb Darwin and to attack India and Sri Lanka with a carrier task force in the Andaman Sea. The USSR kept a squadron of the Pacific Fleet in the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb with logistical help from local client states and the Vietnamese base of Cam Ranh Bay. Japan failed because it couldn’t hold off the US Navy while keeping the war going in the west and because it had virtually no allies in the rim. The USSR failed because its supply lines were too long and the American presence too strong for its naval force to have a significant impact. China does not ail from these predicaments: its allies are numerous, the US Navy is otherwise distracted with the Middle East as well as in process of downsizing its assets and India’s navy is not as pervasive as to not be checked by a Chinese rival presence.
Hence the future of a Chinese naval presence in the Indian Ocean may be closer than expected and the first glimpse the world had with the deployment of a frigate task force to the Somali waters in an anti-piracy mission may be the prelude to something more ‘significant’.
The Westphalian Post 