Escalation by Proxy?

 

“Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the ‘falling domino’ principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So, you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have profound influences”.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 1954

Dominoes

January 18, 2024. Much is being made in some Western media about apparent connections between the war in Gaza, missile strikes in the Red Sea, global supply chains and geopolitics. It is as though the world is again the same row of dominoes that so exercised the late Henry Kissinger between 1955 and 1976.  Does such a simplistic analysis stand up to scrutiny or by making connections where none really exist does the world appear more dangerous than it really is?

The world today is clearly more dangerous than it was twenty-five years ago.  That was the message both British Foreign Secretary, David Cameron and Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps gave during their respective speeches over the past week with the Middle East the apparent crucible where local, regional, and geopolitical conflict meet. What is clear is that whilst all the world’s most powerful states are in some way involved, they are being equally careful to avoid escalating the conflict in Gaza to the point they go to war with each other.  Iran clearly does not want a war with either Israel or the US. Russia is focussed on Ukraine, whilst China seems primarily concerned about preserving the global supply chains that have made it rich and powerful, whilst Europeans simply want to remain comfortable and dependent.

Escalation by Proxy

There is a systemic war underway, but it is not being fought directly but rather escalation by proxy. It is almost a systemic war, a world war in the grey zone, and stretches from Europe through the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific.  It is a war in which state and non-state threats to the West merge into a form of grand strategic asymmetry and in which the great powers use smaller ‘powers’ to probe for chronic vulnerabilities in the societies and systems of their enemies. It is also a war of technology. Fake news and cyber-attacks are the short-of-war weapons of grand asymmetry designed to exploit weaknesses in democracies caused by increasingly atomistic societies. Using the latest cyberware deniable troll factories constantly seek to disrupt and distract powerful adversaries and threaten the critical digital nodes and infrastructures open societies rely on. Consequently, deterring such threats is no longer simply about the demonstrable capability of conventional and nuclear armed forces, but also a proven capacity to respond to the information and cyber domains, much of which is dependent on space-based systems.

Phoney war?

It would also be easy to suggest this is a phoney war between autocracies and democracies.  That, indeed, is one of the many layers of conflict implicit in this war, but a better characterisation would be to see this struggle as between those who benefit from the current status quo and those that believe they have lost out to it. This is leading to a host of coalitions and ententes none of which are particularly stable.  In the Middle East, through the Abraham Accords Israel is in an anti-Iran accord with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States. Russia and Iran are in an anti-Israeli and by extension anti-American coalition and trying to use that to weaken US resolve in Ukraine and wider Europe.  Iran is using proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen to force Israel into a two-front war. China is tacitly supporting Western efforts to keep global supply chains through the Red Sea even as it seeks top keep the US out of the South China Sea to isolate Taiwan. Europeans are simply hoping it does not bother them too much even as the EU’s Frontex announced this week that there was a 17% increase in the flow of irregular migrants into Europe in 2022-2023, the highest number since 2016 with many saying that their ultimate destination is Britain.   

Grey asymmetry and Western strategy

Three things are clear:  grand asymmetry is morphing into a systemic grey war; that said war is making the international system ever more fragile; and the shape of the future will depend on whether the US can escape from its domestic political psychodrama, Europeans can climb down from Euro-utopia; and to what extent control freak Beijing continues to see globalisation as an instrument of Chinese grand strategy; and whether or not Moscow and Tehran can be put back in their respective nonsense boxes.  Given the world-wide forces at play it would be easy to make the same mistake made by Kissinger and others back in the 1950s and 1960s and see connections and dominoes where none really exist.  There are other lessons from the past which should rather be heeded such as 19^th century British diplomacy which took a very pragmatic view of threats and dealt with each one iteratively by applying specific knowledge to specific cases. 

What is needed, and as always, is a coherent Western strategy in the face of such complexity to preserve the rules-based order which is now under attack and detach one conflict from another. Any such strategy would in turn need resilient solidarity (at best partial), sustained engagement to resolve each conflict (no evidence as yet), the replacing of highly efficient but fragile supply chains with more resilient and redundant trade networks (no evidence as yet), assured Western access to micro-chips and rare Earth minerals (no evidence as yet), supported by greater economic resilience (no evidence as yet), military capability relevant to the threats at hand (some increases in European defence expenditure but, for example, the British have a £16.9 billion shortfall between states ends, ways and means), and a European willingness to once and for all get their hands dirty in the messy mire that is contemporary geopolitics (no evidence beyond the rhetorical).         

Ultimately, the worldview of falling dominoes was not only lazy analysis, but it was also ideological and dangerous.  Therefore, the West should be seeking to divide China from Russia, isolate Iran from its region, and contain Russia by exploiting its many weaknesses. Then if one domino falls it will not trigger a cataclysm.  After all, that is the very purpose of grand diplomacy in grand strategy.   

Julian Lindley-French   

2024 or 1848?

 

“Where nationalism means the lust for pride and power, the craze for supreme domination by weight or force; where it is the senseless urge to be the biggest in the world, it is a danger and a vice. Where it means love of country and readiness to die for country; where it means love of tradition and culture and the gradual building up across the centuries of a social entity dignified by nationhood, then it is the first of virtues”.

Winston Churchill’s Speech to the Dutch States-General, May 9, 1946

In 1848, a wave of revolutions swept across fifty European countries. Whilst many insurrections were driven by a liberal desire to overthrow aristocratic elites the underlying force was nationalism. 2024, I fear, will be 1848 redux: the year of nationalism, and not just in Europe. It will have profound implications for the New Geopolitics.

It is not often I disagree with Churchill’s insights about power and identity, but on this occasion I do.  There is no such thing as good nationalism.  What Churchill was referring to as “love of country” was patriotism, not nationalism.  There is a profound difference.  Nationalists tend to be large groups motivated by an extremist belief that they and their respective countries are intrinsically superior to other countries, normally driven by a false narrative of history. Nationalism is thus the uncontrollable thin end of a very unpleasant political and geopolitical wedge.  It is also one step short of fascism, the totalitarian control of a state by a relatively small and usually murderous elite who not only believe they are superior to everyone else in their own society who do not share their rigid views, but willing to impose their beliefs on others beyond their borders, usually in the name of some past ‘glory’.  

Fascism, Nazism and Communism also have many similarities, especially for those on the wrong end of them, but whereas the former is a murderous form of extreme nationalist government the latter two are/were murderous ideologies involving racial and ethnic superiority and hatred of ‘the other’, or class war. Historically, fascists and aristocrats have also often made common cause but for very different reasons, for whilst the former is populist the latter is anything but.

Today, fuelled by social media nationalism is fast eroding the institutions set up in the wake of World War Two to prevent the extreme state behaviour that twice led to war in Europe. That is what institutions do, when they work – aggregate, legitimise and mitigate. It is not without albeit understandable irony that it is the Germans who are most concerned about this erosion. Once embedded state power is leaking out of institutions and again becoming increasingly nationalistic in the relatively few states that are the real competitors in geopolitics.

The problem is that the response of the European elite is not unlike that of their conservative forebears in 1848 which is precisely what in 2024 makes Europe vulnerable to nationalism.  In June, elections to the European Parliament will take place. The Brussels Eurocracy is profoundly concerned that their liberal, ‘ever more Europe’ parliamentary majority which has for decades rubber-stamped the concentration of ever more unaccountable power in the hands of ever fewer elite hands will be defeated by a rag-tag array of nationalists.  They want power given back to Europe’s nation-states, but only so long as they control it.  Much like 1848 the drivers are mass migration, wars, poverty, fear of the other, and a sense amongst many that the EU has taken power ever further from the citizen to the benefit of a distant, out of touch and rich European elite who look and behave ever more like an aristocracy. 

Many readers of these missives will recall that I was both tough on the EU and yet believed Britain should have remained in it. The reason was simple: when the distance between the individual and power in a democracy becomes ever greater, power by its very nature becomes ever more unaccountable and those who wield it ever more a caste.  Europe is all too historically prone to the abuse of power by those who rule it which Britain has always prevented.  These days it is those who routinely ‘champion’ democracy even as the EU routinely flouts it and it is the citizen who must be the voice of restraint, in much the same way as a slave would stand behind a Roman general on his war chariot as he entered the Porta Triumphalis whispering, “Remember, you are mortal”.   

The Real Nationalists

For all the self-regarding superiority of the European elite I have seen at close quarters they simply think they know best.  They are not the real gilt-edged nationalists who are already doing mortal damage. Xi Jinping is a Han nationalist masquerading as a Communist, who has no need to concern himself with elections as he has been made China’s President/Emperor-for-life.  In his New Year’s address Xi made it clear Taiwan will be brought back into the fold one way or another. Putin, on the other hand, is good old-fashioned Russian imperialist-nationalist masquerading as an anti-fascist. In March, Putin will ‘face’ a presidential election but as he is also president-for-life and thus ‘indispensable’ for a wartime Russia in a war he started the ‘election’ will also be anything but as he endeavours to rebuild the never built Novorossiya empire.

Whilst China and Russia are the ‘usual’ nationalist suspects they are not alone.  In May, the world’s largest democracy, India, will elect members of Parliament, the Lok Sabha.  It is almost certain that the current nationalist BJP Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, will be returned to power.  Modi is partly motivated by resentment at India’s past treatment by a former colonial power, Britain, and partly by Hindu nationalism. He has a willing victim in Britain which is kowtowing (Shabdkosh) to New Delhi in the hope of a trade deal even as Modi moves closer to Russia and away from Britain and West.  Humiliating the needy old colonial master will do nothing to damage his electoral chances, which is helped by useful idiots in London who have decided the British Empire was pretty much the Original Sin and that the British should, therefore, prostrate themselves before the likes of Xi and Modi for past imperial ‘crimes’.  

Not So Useful Idiots

Talking of (not-so) useful idiots the British will also hold a General Election in 2024 that could well see Britain being Britain – perverse.  It is likely a Labour Government will be elected even though the reasons it will be elected will be because the country is moving to the nationalist Right on issues like mass immigration upon which the Labour Party is traditionally soft.  The reasons are twofold.  First, Nigel Farage, Mr Brexit, will return to frontline politics by leading the Reform Party thus siphoning off many votes to the right of the Tories.  Second, the spectacular incompetence and weakness of the Conservative Party in government means many True-Blue Tories will simply not bother to vote. They will thus wake up to a Labour Government as split between the centrists and the hard Left as the Tories are between the centrists and the Hard Right.  

Then it is the turn of the Yanks!  In November, the Americans go to the polls in their quadrennial presidential elections.  My bet is that President Joe Biden will not run, partly because he can hardly stand. His opponent? One Donald J. Trump, the isolationist’s nationalist. If he regains the White House, and depending on which way Congress will go, there is every reason to believe that a second term Make America Great Again (Again) Trump will be a nationalist isolationist Trump as his focus will be on the ‘war’ he will conduct on what he calls the Washington swamp.

There will be at least one constant throughout 2024; efforts by both Putin and Xi to cyber-rig all and every election of all and any geopolitical consequence.

2024 or 1848?

Julian Lindley-French