“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 19th 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
