Alphen, Netherlands. 2
September. President Obama’s 31 August decision to authorise but delay a
military strike against Syria’s Bashir al-Assad’s regime in the wake of the
alleged use of chemical weapons is an important moment. Taken together with the 29 August decision of
Britain’s Parliament to deny Prime Minister Cameron permission to use force two
changes are apparent. First, an
evolution is taking place in both America and Britain over the use, utility and
place of force in strategy. Indeed, what is striking
about Obama-Cameron is how far they are from Bush-Blair, even if their
respective peoples fear otherwise.
Second, the now traditional confusion between values and interests is
morphing in the presidential mind into a new Obama doctrine - the value
interest. This is a place where Justus Lipsius meets Machiavelli (not to
mention Talleyrand).
The problem for Obama
is that the subjectivity implicit in the value-interest and the law of
unintended consequences to which it is heir makes it hard to discern any
relationship between ends, ways and means.
Would an Assad regime with the blood of tens of thousands of its people on
its hands feel a slap on the wrist?
Would cruise missiles slamming into empty command and control bunkers
and arsenals degrade the regime? Would
the action in and of itself send a message to other tyrants not use chemical
weapons? Would such a strike open up new
avenues towards a regional political settlement?
It is precisely the
cracks in the American (and British) strategic mind between punishing Assad and
sending a broader message into which ends, ways and means are falling. The punitive strike Obama has on offer is neither
intervention nor punishment, something Senator John McCain has rather pointedly
alluded to by suggesting there is neither plan nor strategy.
The
value-interest is the strategic sibling of democratic legitimacy in that it beautifies the national interest. This is particularly important now that international law is in crisis and the
UN Security Council has once again been reduced to the theatre of big power
cynicism.
A Washington power struggle is now taking place between values and interests with the President casting himself as arbiter rather than leader. Whilst the slaughter of innocents should indeed
cause deep moral indignation it is not enough of and in its own right to act as
the basis for American grand strategy.
The language of US Secretary of State John Kerry has at times come close
to being a statement of values masquerading as interests. This is precisely what made the Bush 2 years
so unpredictable. Getting the balance
right between values and interests is absolutely essential at such moments and thus a
pause for reflection is no bad thing.
Equally, the very
hybridity of the value-interest makes it an uncomfortable partner for strategy
given that it occupies an indeterminate and ill-determined space between Western
liberalism and Realpolitik. At one end
of the spectrum the value-interest leads many on the left to call for Western
intervention in all the world’s conflicts under the UN’s tattered and
sovereignty-flouting Responsibility to Protect.
This is Tony Blair’s view.
However, given the experience of Afghanistan and Iraq and cuts to
Western armed forces the value-interest simply makes a mockery of ends, ways
and means.
At the other end of the
spectrum the Chinese and Russians uphold the utterly cynical view that the
national state interest is the only test of intervention and sovereignty the sovereign coin of the realm. Indeed, 'sovereignty' is the new fault-line in international
politics. This does not suggest a rosy international future should China ever dominate.
The value-interest has
also masks a deep fault-line between Americans and Europeans over the ends, ways and means of geopolitics. Americans believe in the value-interest
because it is part of American ‘moral exceptionalism’ whereas Britain and
France still retain just a smidgeon of global reflex, albeit one that it is fast-eroding. However, for many other Europeans national
sovereignty is simply an empty shell in which the remains of the national interest
occasionally twitches but is now by and large dead. For them the dystopian uplands of legalism offer
a false refuge against the imperatives of the age. With the UN Security Council stymied that
means utter inaction.
The only way for Obama to
some restore balance between ends, ways and means and the value-interest would
be a return to American statecraft. This
is clearly what President Obama was referring to when he said “...this mission
is not time-sensitive; it will be effective tomorrow, or next week, or one
month from now”.
Statecraft demands a balanced
package of co-option and coercion in pursuit of ends that are both desirable
and achievable. It requires strategic
judgement, sound intelligence, the patient building of coalitions but above all a political strategy supported by
credible national means – political, economic, diplomatic and finally military
- applied consistently over time and distance.
In Syria and the wider
Middle East it is the absence of statecraft that has done so much damage and
the confusion of values with interests could be about to make the situation a
whole lot worse.
Julian Lindley-French
