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