According to a recent poll, 71% of Americans don't think that their president has a "clear plan" about how to handle the disaster in Syria. And hey, they might be right, and President Obama is just doing things at random, running out the clock until his term ends. But I find that unlikely. I think the reason people would even think that there is no Syria Plan is because their logic is as follows: "if someone has a plan to achieve victory, then they would use it to achieve that victory. Therefore, if someone has not achieved victory, they obviously don't have a plan to win a conflict."
Now I haven't snuck into the Oval Office lately and don't have the latest copy of Obama's Syria Plan on my desk. But I have been paying occasional attention to what's going on in and around Syria, and from America's activities I can make a guess at what the president's trying to do.
First, US forces have been performing air strikes to hit ISIS targets. Lots of air strikes, for more than a year now. Air strikes are a tempting policy tool for leaders, especially in situations like this, because their results are impressive (boom!) and, against a low-tech foe like ISIS, low-risk as well. It's not like those fanatics have an air force.
Second, America has been supporting ground forces in both Iraq and Syria to take advantage of the aforementioned air strikes and retake territory lost to ISIS. This only makes sense - if the Iraqis and Syrians aren't willing to fight for their countries, why should the US put its own soldiers at risk? Plus the local forces speak the language, know the terrain, don't have to tote supplies halfway around the world, and so forth.
Third, President Obama has been building a regional coalition to combat ISIS. After all, the Islamic State is a revisionist power that made a big point about scuffing out the old colonial border that divided Iraq and Syria. It aims to transform the entire region - or rather revert it into its idea of what the medieval Caliphate was - and therefore poses a threat to states beyond Iraq and Syria.
There you have it, Obama's mythical Syria Plan exposed. But it's not very comforting, is it? Because despite this plan, we're obviously not winning in the fight against ISIS, to say nothing of the fight to have a non-authoritarian leader in Syria.
The air strikes aren't working because you can't retake ground with planes. They have a limited amount of fuel to stay in the air, and a limited number of bombs to drop. They can't go house-to-house, clearing out insurgents, and they can't rebuild towns and comfort refugees. If no one is able to follow up on an airstrike, the enemy can simply crawl out of hiding and wheel in a new artillery piece to replace the one you blew up. Plus there's something fundamentally dissatisfying about sending a 150-million-dollar fighter jet to blow up a pickup truck with a machine gun mounted in the back.
The ground forces we're supporting in Iraq and Syria aren't accomplishing much because they suck. The Iraqi Army in particular should be replacing the WWII French Army when it comes to military insults, and has shown itself capable of retreating despite outnumbering threatening forces ten-to-one. $818 billion well spent, there. There is no unified Syrian resistance, just a bunch of rebel groups that aren't aligned with Assad or ISIS, and of course our attempt to train a mythical "moderate" Syrian rebel army fell so disappointingly short that the Obama Administration has put the program on hold. The exception to this bad news would be the Kurdish Peshmerga, which has shown itself capable of both holding the line and taking back territory.
The regional coalition we're building also sucks. Sure, countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia have pitched in when it comes to air strikes, but they all have their own agendas to look after as well. The Saudis are distracted by the civil war in Yemen and have to prop up the government there against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Turkey has been a major avenue for foreign fighters to pass through as they join ISIS, famously sat and watched the border town of Kobani get pounded by ISIS because it was being defended by Kurds, and even as it finally mobilizes against ISIS is also deploying against Kurdish forces fighting the same group. And of course, nobody's sending in ground forces, and see my above point about airstrikes.
The only nation that seems eager to get involved in Syria is Russia, and Putin's fighting on behalf of its dictator.
In short, the American public is not so much upset that their president doesn't have a Syria Plan as they are upset because the Syria Plan isn't working. Obviously Obama needs to change his plan, but there's a problem - part four of that plan, Do Not Get Involved In Another Ground War in the Middle East. After inheriting miserable occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq from his woefully inept predecessor, President Obama has made it clear that he's eager to get Americans out of those countries as quickly as possible. He actually succeeded in withdrawing from Iraq, only for the country to all but immediately collapse in the face of ISIS' assault, and our withdrawal from Afghanistan has been delayed because the Taliban is causing the same problems there.
And because our attempts to build stable democracies in those countries have gone so badly - hell, we'd settle for a illiberal but stable country capable of defending itself at this point - you can understand why the president is in no hurry to start another military adventure in the reason. Because what would sending ground troops to Syria lead to? The evidence suggests more years of US soldiers getting picked off during patrols, more years of tribal or religious violence, more years of bundles of dollars disappearing into the desert, and the result is a corrupt and ineffective government that collapses the minute someone pokes it with a stick. It sure would be nice to think that this country has learned something after over a decade of occupation and nation-building, but since at least some of us are eager to try it again, I'm not that optimistic.
And yet, committing American ground forces seems to be the only thing that could turn this conflict around. And there's the dilemma facing the president, and if they thought about it, the American public. Either we stay our hand, refuse to put boots on the ground, and "lose" to ISIS, or we go all in yet again and probably end accomplishing very little at great cost over the next decade.
There's no clear route to victory, and that, I think, is what the disapproval about the Syria Plan is really about. Americans don't like to lose, we like to think that we have the power and know-how to fix any problem. But occasionally a situation comes along that humbles us, and it looks like Syria is one of them.
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Structural the Same, Emotionally Drained
Once upon a time, the world was multipolar. The great powers of Europe all competed to see who would dominate, but employed a shifting alliance system to balance out anyone who seemed to be getting too powerful. When new players joined the game this system fossilized, leading to World War I and as a consequence World War II. After that, the world was dominated by two superpowers with opposing ideologies, who led coalitions of like-minded governments to see whether communism or democracy would triumph. The winner turned out to be democracy, and so with the Soviet Union's collapse, the United States became the world's sole superpower, a country with unrivaled military strength able to deploy anywhere on the globe.
Back in 1989, Fukuyama talked about the "End of History," since after all the great political debate seemed to be over, liberalism was ascendant, and the former Warsaw Pact countries were kicking out their communist regimes and clamoring for democracy. Others looked forward to a Pax Americana, in which the United States would use its preponderance of power to protect the international system as a mostly benign overlord. The original Gulf War seemed to vindicate this idea, and saw the US enforce a United Nations resolution to kick Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. Everything seemed to be going well, and the future looked bright.
We are not living in that world anymore. Global freedom has been in decline for nine years running. The former Soviet satellite states are under threat by a resurgent, authoritarian Russia that's undermining their autonomy through means just short of outright war. The United States went back to Iraq, defying the United Nations in doing so, spent nearly a decade there, and now tries to keep the dysfunctional "democracy" it created from being toppled by an Islamic State even worse than Saddam Hussein's despotism. Everything seems to be getting worse, and there's little hope in sight.
Has the global distribution of power changed over the past quarter century? I would say no, not substantially. The world isn't multipolar, there's no "great game" being played on the global stage by a handful of major powers. The United States is still supremely powerful, despite the exhaustion from decade-long deployments in two countries. Russia is resurgent - that is, aggressive, it's still an economic time bomb and its army hasn't recovered from the USSR's collapse - but it still can't match the United States. As I've said before, this isn't Cold War II, Russia has no ideological appeal. At best Putin can try to start an "absolute power" club with the rulers of Iran and Syria, but nobody else is looking at Russia as a model government.
No, the world still seems to be unipolar. What's changed is our understanding of what that means. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we've seen that just because you have a state-of-the-art army capable of pulverizing any adversary doesn't mean that you'll be able to build something in the resulting ruins. We've seen the international community picking and choosing when and where to live up to its ideals, intervening in Kosovo but watching the Rwandan genocide. And we've seen a supposed bastion of freedom imprison people without trials, torture them as suspected terrorists, and turn into a surveillance state that spies on both its own citizens and its allies.
But rather than describing the world in terms of how power is distributed in the international system, an alternative is to name an era after something more intangible. There were the Dark Ages that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, an era popularly perceived as one of ignorance and barbarism. There was the Renaissance, when the Western world rediscovered the good parts of Greek civilization while skipping the pederasty. There was the Enlightenment, in which liberalism blossomed and transformed political thought, laying the foundation for modern democracy.
And now? I call the current era the Disillusionment.
The big difference between now and the end of the Cold War is not in the distribution of power, or the emergence of some rival to the liberal international order. What's changed is us - we've seen the limitations and shortcomings of these things, but don't have a viable alternative to them.
We thought freedom and democracy would fill the vacuum left by communism, and while Eastern Europe was able to pick up the habit of letting people vote, in the rest of the world, that didn't happen. China's one-party government has gotten so good at quashing dissent and controlling information that most of its subjects don't know anything happened in Tienanmen Square. In Russia, when President Yeltsin's opponents objected to his power-grabbing, he had the army shell Moscow's White House; his successor Putin never leaves power, and when a rival politician is gunned down just outside the Kremlin, Russian state media is quick to decry the murder as an attempt to discredit their beloved leader. In the Middle East, the Arab Spring saw the region rise up against its repressive and incompetent regimes, but only Tunisia can be said to be better off for its revolution; the others either failed or resulted in regimes that are at best as bad as the ones replaced.
And what of the democracies that won the Cold War? America’s political system is increasingly partisan, its conservative faction is increasingly radical, and the national legislature is so dysfunctional that it is now an accomplishment to pass an unbalanced budget without the GOP's lunatic fringe shutting down the federal government. The national debt is skyrocketing and neither party is willing to risk votes by properly fixing it, the country’s infrastructure is decaying, and attempts to reform America’s health care system - well short of the sort of comprehensive government health care seen in the Nordic countries - have been viewed as a socialist takeover and led to the aforementioned government shutdowns. Voters aren't happy, Congress' approval rating is in the toilet, and yet the public keeps voting for politicians who exacerbate these problems.
It's rather telling that we set up parliamentary systems in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of the brand of federalism America currently fails to function under.
Across the pond, the socialist democracies of Europe have been peaceful since World War II and have come together in an unprecedented European Union, but this is showing signs of strain. It’s easy to support a lot of social programs when America has effectively paid for your national defense, but with the current global economic downturn it’s getting harder to find the funding - plus Putin’s antics make defense spending more relevant than it’s been in decades. The EU is struggling to deal with the economic malaises of its least successful members, leading countries like Great Britain to talk about dropping out. And now there’s a flood of refugees from a war no one did anything about that is putting Europe’s welcoming, open-minded reputation to the test.
Global governance, the liberal international order, the same system that punished Saddam for invading his neighbor? Helpless to do anything about Syria because Russia has its Security Council veto. Capitalism, the free market system that maximizes wealth while minimizing government interference? The gap between the rich and everyone else keeps growing wider, a global economy means you can lose your job simply because it’s cheaper to have a foreigner do it on the other side of the world, and the people ostensibly in control of the economy are willing to wreck it in pursuit of short-term profits.
All the systems and principles the West fought the Cold War for just don't seem to be living up to their potential. And since the Cold War is over, there's no viable alternatives to them. Communism was a failure, it was simultaneously naive and ruthlessly brutal. The medieval society the Islamic State is trying to construct in the ruins of the Middle East lacks appeal to anyone but sufficiently sociopathic Muslims. Nobody wants to live under an authoritarian regime like in Russia or China, and people outside of them would take democracy on its worst day over a dictatorship on its best, but it's going to be hard for a Russian or Chinese to get galvanized to stand against the system when they see the US government shutting down over Obamacare or Europe threatening to kick out Greece if it doesn't get its economy together, especially if those authoritarian regimes can deliver a similar standard of living.
So disillusionment, pessimism. Recent events have done for politics and economics what World War I did for science, so I suppose you could say we've been living in one long Age of Disillusionment for a century now.
As gloomy as this situation is, there's a straightforward way out - if the system is broken, and we don't have an alternative, fix what we have. Of course, "straightforward" isn't the same as "easy." Can the American electorate support candidates who vow to bridge the partisan divide and solve their nation's problems, instead of politicians who stick to their principles and refuse to compromise? Can Europe hold itself together and maintain its standards in the face of an uncertain economy, Russian aggression, and an influx of refugees? Can we reform the international system so that disasters like Syria aren't allowed to happen, and have free markets that benefit more than the richest participants?
The Western world getting its act together is an important first step, but that in itself won't bring us back to the good old days of 1991. Saddam's gone, but there's plenty of people like him out there. But if we can't solve the problems at home, how can we expect to fix what's wrong with the rest of the world?
Back in 1989, Fukuyama talked about the "End of History," since after all the great political debate seemed to be over, liberalism was ascendant, and the former Warsaw Pact countries were kicking out their communist regimes and clamoring for democracy. Others looked forward to a Pax Americana, in which the United States would use its preponderance of power to protect the international system as a mostly benign overlord. The original Gulf War seemed to vindicate this idea, and saw the US enforce a United Nations resolution to kick Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. Everything seemed to be going well, and the future looked bright.
We are not living in that world anymore. Global freedom has been in decline for nine years running. The former Soviet satellite states are under threat by a resurgent, authoritarian Russia that's undermining their autonomy through means just short of outright war. The United States went back to Iraq, defying the United Nations in doing so, spent nearly a decade there, and now tries to keep the dysfunctional "democracy" it created from being toppled by an Islamic State even worse than Saddam Hussein's despotism. Everything seems to be getting worse, and there's little hope in sight.
Has the global distribution of power changed over the past quarter century? I would say no, not substantially. The world isn't multipolar, there's no "great game" being played on the global stage by a handful of major powers. The United States is still supremely powerful, despite the exhaustion from decade-long deployments in two countries. Russia is resurgent - that is, aggressive, it's still an economic time bomb and its army hasn't recovered from the USSR's collapse - but it still can't match the United States. As I've said before, this isn't Cold War II, Russia has no ideological appeal. At best Putin can try to start an "absolute power" club with the rulers of Iran and Syria, but nobody else is looking at Russia as a model government.
No, the world still seems to be unipolar. What's changed is our understanding of what that means. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we've seen that just because you have a state-of-the-art army capable of pulverizing any adversary doesn't mean that you'll be able to build something in the resulting ruins. We've seen the international community picking and choosing when and where to live up to its ideals, intervening in Kosovo but watching the Rwandan genocide. And we've seen a supposed bastion of freedom imprison people without trials, torture them as suspected terrorists, and turn into a surveillance state that spies on both its own citizens and its allies.
But rather than describing the world in terms of how power is distributed in the international system, an alternative is to name an era after something more intangible. There were the Dark Ages that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, an era popularly perceived as one of ignorance and barbarism. There was the Renaissance, when the Western world rediscovered the good parts of Greek civilization while skipping the pederasty. There was the Enlightenment, in which liberalism blossomed and transformed political thought, laying the foundation for modern democracy.
And now? I call the current era the Disillusionment.
The big difference between now and the end of the Cold War is not in the distribution of power, or the emergence of some rival to the liberal international order. What's changed is us - we've seen the limitations and shortcomings of these things, but don't have a viable alternative to them.
We thought freedom and democracy would fill the vacuum left by communism, and while Eastern Europe was able to pick up the habit of letting people vote, in the rest of the world, that didn't happen. China's one-party government has gotten so good at quashing dissent and controlling information that most of its subjects don't know anything happened in Tienanmen Square. In Russia, when President Yeltsin's opponents objected to his power-grabbing, he had the army shell Moscow's White House; his successor Putin never leaves power, and when a rival politician is gunned down just outside the Kremlin, Russian state media is quick to decry the murder as an attempt to discredit their beloved leader. In the Middle East, the Arab Spring saw the region rise up against its repressive and incompetent regimes, but only Tunisia can be said to be better off for its revolution; the others either failed or resulted in regimes that are at best as bad as the ones replaced.
And what of the democracies that won the Cold War? America’s political system is increasingly partisan, its conservative faction is increasingly radical, and the national legislature is so dysfunctional that it is now an accomplishment to pass an unbalanced budget without the GOP's lunatic fringe shutting down the federal government. The national debt is skyrocketing and neither party is willing to risk votes by properly fixing it, the country’s infrastructure is decaying, and attempts to reform America’s health care system - well short of the sort of comprehensive government health care seen in the Nordic countries - have been viewed as a socialist takeover and led to the aforementioned government shutdowns. Voters aren't happy, Congress' approval rating is in the toilet, and yet the public keeps voting for politicians who exacerbate these problems.
It's rather telling that we set up parliamentary systems in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of the brand of federalism America currently fails to function under.
Across the pond, the socialist democracies of Europe have been peaceful since World War II and have come together in an unprecedented European Union, but this is showing signs of strain. It’s easy to support a lot of social programs when America has effectively paid for your national defense, but with the current global economic downturn it’s getting harder to find the funding - plus Putin’s antics make defense spending more relevant than it’s been in decades. The EU is struggling to deal with the economic malaises of its least successful members, leading countries like Great Britain to talk about dropping out. And now there’s a flood of refugees from a war no one did anything about that is putting Europe’s welcoming, open-minded reputation to the test.
Global governance, the liberal international order, the same system that punished Saddam for invading his neighbor? Helpless to do anything about Syria because Russia has its Security Council veto. Capitalism, the free market system that maximizes wealth while minimizing government interference? The gap between the rich and everyone else keeps growing wider, a global economy means you can lose your job simply because it’s cheaper to have a foreigner do it on the other side of the world, and the people ostensibly in control of the economy are willing to wreck it in pursuit of short-term profits.
All the systems and principles the West fought the Cold War for just don't seem to be living up to their potential. And since the Cold War is over, there's no viable alternatives to them. Communism was a failure, it was simultaneously naive and ruthlessly brutal. The medieval society the Islamic State is trying to construct in the ruins of the Middle East lacks appeal to anyone but sufficiently sociopathic Muslims. Nobody wants to live under an authoritarian regime like in Russia or China, and people outside of them would take democracy on its worst day over a dictatorship on its best, but it's going to be hard for a Russian or Chinese to get galvanized to stand against the system when they see the US government shutting down over Obamacare or Europe threatening to kick out Greece if it doesn't get its economy together, especially if those authoritarian regimes can deliver a similar standard of living.
So disillusionment, pessimism. Recent events have done for politics and economics what World War I did for science, so I suppose you could say we've been living in one long Age of Disillusionment for a century now.
As gloomy as this situation is, there's a straightforward way out - if the system is broken, and we don't have an alternative, fix what we have. Of course, "straightforward" isn't the same as "easy." Can the American electorate support candidates who vow to bridge the partisan divide and solve their nation's problems, instead of politicians who stick to their principles and refuse to compromise? Can Europe hold itself together and maintain its standards in the face of an uncertain economy, Russian aggression, and an influx of refugees? Can we reform the international system so that disasters like Syria aren't allowed to happen, and have free markets that benefit more than the richest participants?
The Western world getting its act together is an important first step, but that in itself won't bring us back to the good old days of 1991. Saddam's gone, but there's plenty of people like him out there. But if we can't solve the problems at home, how can we expect to fix what's wrong with the rest of the world?
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