A Modest Proposal to Help this Generation’s “Boat People”
By John T. Kuehn
First, this article may be too late. What do I mean? I mean that we—as in the global community and the United States in particular—may be too far behind the power curve to do something meaningful about helping the refugees fleeing across the sea from the Syrian Civil War-Islamic Thirty Year’s War raging in the Middle East. This is my way of saying I wish I had written this about six months ago when the problem was manifest to all. So why write at all? Something might be STILL done with forward deployed naval forces of the United States today, perhaps with like-minded maritime allies to help the unfortunate masses of humanity fleeing their homelands from a particularly cruel conflict. Even if it is too late for current policy, the trend of “boat people” fleeing war to a better life elsewhere has many precedents in history, especially the last one hundred years and it will most certainly occur again. This means that ringing the clarion now might contribute to effective humanitarian policy action in the future. So it is worth a try.
First, let us briefly review some relevant history on these sorts of refugee crises as they pertain to migration in unseaworthy craft in search of a better life on distant shores. Case one takes us back to 1975 and the late 1970s when the United States’ lost war in Vietnam resulted in the flight of the boat people of South Vietnam (and Cambodia, too) from the proletarian utopias established by the new Vietnamese government in Hanoi and the Khmer Rouge. The United States was caught napping somewhat on this one, too, but before long had started making efforts with naval assets based in the Western Pacific to help with this crisis. However, years later a particularly unfortunate incident occurred in the 1980s wherein the captain of a U.S. warship (the USS Dubuque) failed to render proper assistance to fleeing “boat people” who later survived to present evidence against him. We will return to this issue since it is a feature of the law of the sea that mariners must render aid to people in danger on the high seas. More recently Americans saw the flight of people from both Cuba and Haiti to the United States in the 1990s, fleeing various natural and man-made disasters in the Caribbean.
Why should the United States use its assets, especially its Navy, to help these people? There are three principle reasons: moral obligation, humanitarian, and practical. The practical value for the United States involves two factors, leadership and what, for lack of a better term, might be called “good press.” If the U.S. is to be a leader it must take the lead in areas where it claims an interest. By getting more involved and working with other states of the region while at the same time committing actual naval forces to help, we build partnerships, lead, and help. It is a win-win-win result.
From a moral standpoint we owe it to these people. Here is the causal logic—when the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq all those years ago we removed the government in power and destabilized the region. From that context Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) developed. During the final years in Iraq we estimated we had pretty much solved the problem of AQI, but instead it had simply transformed itself into the current Islamic State (ISIS). At the same time Syria fell into civil war, a conflict not unrelated to our actions in Iraq and has been further de-stabilized, especially since 2013, by an increasingly powerful and dangerous ISIS. The upshot is that some, not all, of these refugees can be traced to American policy choices, so there exists something of a moral obligation to help with the result of our, for lack of a better word, blundering in the Middle East.
Finally, we get back to the purely humanitarian reasons—the salvation of (mostly) innocent human life. Obviously things are being done, but there is little reason to allow people to helplessly drown or die of exposure at sea on un-seaworthy craft. They already think they can make it and so the arguments that they would not flee if they did not think someone would help are not only ill-informed, they are morally wrongheaded. In fact, the United States by simply having ships in the Eastern Mediterranean is obligated to “render assistance” should it run across people in distress on the high seas. Simply stationing ships on patrol in that area will naturally result in a requirement to render assistance because we certainly do not want any more Dubuques like we had in the South China Sea after the Vietnam War had ended.
As with any use of American taxpayer-funded projects, use of U.S. Navy assets must be judicious. Also, we must coordinate with partners and allies in the region, but rendering assistance on the high seas is part of international law and a moral imperative, more than one might think given our distance from the Eastern Mediterranean. However, if the United States is to use its Navy as the “sysadmin” of the global maritime regime, as Captain Peter Haynes discusses in his recent book on the “new maritime strategy,” then this sort of action and use of naval power is part of the responsibility that the mantle of maritime leadership confers. Or perhaps we no longer aspire to lead in this domain? I think not.
Dr. John T. Kuehn is the General William Stofft Chair for Historical Research at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College CGSC). He retired from the U.S. Navy 2004 at the rank of commander after 23 years of service as a naval flight officer flying both land-based and carrier-based aircraft. He has taught a variety of subjects, including military history, at CGSC since 2000. He authored Agents of Innovation (2008), A Military History of Japan: From the Age of the Samurai to the 21st Century (2014), and co-authored Eyewitness Pacific Theater (2008) with D.M. Giangreco as well as numerous articles and editorials and was awarded a Moncado Prize from the Society for Military History in 2011. His latest book, due out from Praeger just in time for the 200th Anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo is Napoleonic Warfare: The Operational Art of the Great Campaigns.
The views are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
The United States has been a maritime power since its inception. Maritime trading has always been essential to its economy and over the years has stretched across the globe. Protecting these interests is the job of U.S. Navy. Its origins date back to when North African pirates began seizing American merchant vessels and holding their crews to ransom. This article will explore what could have been if the United States had decided to appease the pirates instead of investing in a national navy to protect its economic interests on the high seas.
The United States had barely stepped on to the global stage, when it faced its first foreign crisis. Its merchant fleets were increasingly coming under attack by North African pirates from the Barbary States. This problem of piracy was hardly new: since the 16th century, European commerce in the Mediterranean had been under threat from the Barbary Nations in North Africa. These states consisted of Tripoli, Algiers, and Tunis, which were nominally protectorates of the Ottoman Empire, along with the independent Sultanate of Morocco. The economies of this region were heavily dependent on piracy and a series of warlords, called Deys, maintained their power largely by bringing in tribute. The European nations had found it easier to simply pay off the pirates rather than engage in sustained military action that would likely forge either temporary peace or require an expensive occupation of North African territory.
American merchant shipping had, in its early years, been protected by European powers: by the British during the colonial period, and during the Revolution later by the French. The onset of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, however, drew attention from the pirate threat in the Mediterranean and left American merchant vessels with European help. Furthermore, upon achieving independence, the fledgling U.S. government found itself short of money. The Continental Navy, which fought during the revolution, was disbanded and the remaining vessels were sold off to raise funds. Unfortunately, this left American merchantmen to fend for themselves on the high seas.
The first U.S. merchant ship was seized in October of 1784 by a Moroccan raider. The crew was held captive for a decade and many wrote letters home describing the deplorable conditions of their imprisonment. The resulting public outcry compelled renewed interest in dealing with this persistent pirate threat.
Dealing between Morocco and the U.S. were not necessarily negative, however. Morocco was the first nation to recognize the United States in 1777 and subsequently signed The Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship in 1786. The other Barbary States were not as easily dealt with. Algiers continued to demand tribute from the U.S. and ransomed captives, although a peace treaty was signed in 1796. The agreement proved very costly for the U.S. (requiring up to 10% of its annual revenue) and military options were increasingly considered. In 1801, Congress approved the construction of six frigates for use in protecting American shipping and compelling the Barbary States to allow American ships to sail the Mediterranean unscathed. Tripoli declared war the same year after its demands for tribute were refused by the newly elected President Thomas Jefferson.
The U.S.S. Chesapeake, one of the U.S. Navy’s original six frigates.
A fleet under the command of Edward Preble was ordered to blockade the port of Tripoli. The expedition was largely successful although losses were taken. The decisive action of the conflict occurred when the former U.S. consul William Eaton led eight U.S. marines and approximately five hundred foreign mercenaries on an overland march to capture the city of Derne, and threatened the capital of Tripoli. The fall of Derne marked the first U.S. victory on foreign soil (and is immortalized in the lyrics of the Marine Corps Hymn). Tripoli subsequently signed a peace treaty with the U.S. in 1805, ending the first Barbary War.
With this first American victory on foreign shores, the Navy demonstrated its ability to project power over long distances and sustain an extended naval campaign away from home ports. In addition, this was the first U.S. Marine landing and subsequent land campaign. The U.S. had demonstrated that it could protect its citizens and could meet any aggressive acts against it with force. In addition, the U.S. was no longer compelled to pay tribute to any foreign nation.
A second Barbary War began when the War of 1812 again drew European attention away from North Africa. Once again U.S. merchant ships were taken by pirates and again the Navy was dispatched to the Mediterranean. In 1815, a fleet under the command of Stephen Decatur won several battles against Algerian pirates and forced Algiers to sign a treaty protecting American vessels from piracy.
Building a navy and launching military expeditions against the Barbary pirates was by no means a unanimous policy decision on the part of the U.S. government, however. Even within Jefferson’s own party, the Democratic-Republicans, there was considerable opposition to the idea of creating a regular navy in the first place. Many prominent Americans were skeptical of creating a centralized standing military because they felt is could be used by rulers to oppress its citizenry. From the Anti-Federalist papers (Brutus X):
“The liberties of a people are in danger from a large standing army, not only because the rulers may employ them for the purposes of supporting themselves in any usurpations of power, which they may see proper to exercise, but there is great hazard, that an army will subvert the forms of the government, under whose authority, they are raised, and establish one, according to the pleasure of their leader.”
Even if the military remained subservient to the state, there were concerns that a standing peacetime military would encourage the government to provoke wars and promote their own agendas that would not be in the best interests of the nation. Still others felt that future of the new United States lay in expanding westward across the continent. Building up a navy, they felt, would allocate resources away from this expansion. In the end, Jefferson and his supporters won out, but it could have easily gone the other way.
Had history followed this alternate course, and the anti-navalists won out, the trajectory of America becoming a world power would have been curtailed. The U.S. would have contended with numerous economic and geopolitical problems. A U.S. Navy would have eventually been created, but not until an event such as the Civil War prompted renewed interest in military expansion. Even then, the resources and expertise would not be in place to accommodate such a policy.
In the meantime, the U.S. would have continued paying tribute to the Barbary States in order to secure safe passage for its merchants, thus straining the national budget. Even if westward expansion became a priority, maritime trade would have remained the economic backbone of the country. In order to continue its overseas trade, the U.S. would be forced to remain reliant on Europe for maritime protection or limit its trade with Europe accordingly and remain a strictly regional power. Instead, America would probably turn its gaze southward to the Spanish colonies in Central and South America. This alliance would almost certainly spark tensions with Britain, France, and even the Dutch, the primary competitors for territory in the Americas. Any number of conflicts could break out, making the War of 1812 look like a border skirmish by comparison.
Alternatively, an agreement could be reached whereby U.S. goods would be transported in European hulls to overseas markets. Such an agreement would deter piracy at the cost of ceding control of the U.S. economic lifeline to foreign powers who could gain immense leverage by threatening to choke it off. While this would have prevented a rising America from coming into coming into conflict with other states, ultimately, this would have the effect of reducing the U.S. to little more than a de facto European colony yet again.
Strategically, policies like the Monroe Doctrine would not be viable for the U.S., given the lack a strong deterrent. Other European competitors would have free access to U.S. waters and generally be able to do as they pleased. Indeed, the Quasi War with France in 1798 and the War of 1812 proved that the U.S. needed a naval force that could stand up to the other European powers. In both cases, the Navy was able to protect American interests at sea. Hiring privateers for protection would be an option for the U.S., though likely an expensive strategy in the long run. In addition, with naval action relegated to secondary importance, it is unlikely that the U.S. would develop the capability to produce homegrown warships. Noted ship designers such as Joshua Humphreys, the designer of the first U.S. frigates, would take their expertise elsewhere, not to mention the great American naval commanders who would remain unknown.
Instead the U.S. began a strong naval tradition of projecting power globally that would manifest itself in the coming decades with the Great White Fleet, the opening of Japan, and the Spanish American war, and continued into the modern era. It is telling, perhaps, that the 2011 Libyan intervention is sometimes referred to the Third Barbary War.
Christopher Stephens is a graduate from the College of William & Mary and is currently with the Project for the Study of the 21st Century. He has formerly completed internships with the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command and the Joint Forces Staff College.
Sources
Ohls, Gary J. Roots of Tradition: Amphibious Warfare in the Early American Republic. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2008
Peskin, Lawrence A. Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public, 1785–1816. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009
Tinniswood, Adrian. Pirates of the Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests, and Captivity in the 17th Century Mediterranean. New York: Penguin, 2010.
The Anti-Federalist Papers. Brutus X. January 24, 1788
The protracted “What happens to France’s two unwanted Mistrals” saga has seemingly drawn to a close with the agreement by Egypt late last month to acquire the highly capable amphibious assault ships (LHDs) for a total of €950 million. A number of commentators have argued that the rationale behind this eyebrow-raising decision is for Egypt to attain a maritime power-projection capability so as to hedge against rising Islamist violence in the region and a resurgent Iran. Indeed, one prominent defense journalist wrote of Egypt using the French-made Mistrals to quell trouble in neighboring hot-spots. In the same vein, another commentator spoke of the vessels giving their owners the ability to conduct expeditionary missions with significant ground and aerial assets.
That being said, the aforementioned statements are based on the assumption that Cairo would be able to effectively deploy the two ships in the first place. This is highly contentious, at least in the near term, for a number of reasons. They include Egypt’s dearth of experience in large amphibious-vessel and naval aviation operations, among others.
The Mistral’s Capabilities
Defense analysts often speak of the Mistral in glowing terms. Indeed, much has been made of the platform offering almost the same capabilities as the United States Navy’s potent Wasp-class LHD, but at only one-sixth the cost and crew size. And even though France officially calls the Mistral a bâtiments de projection et de commandement, or “projection and command ship,” it can also perform several other roles such as amphibious/heliborne assault and humanitarian
France’s Mistral-class Dixmude warship in Jounieh bay, Lebanon. (Source: Wikicommons)
assistance and disaster relief. With 69 beds for patients, it can even act as a hospital ship. An important component of the Mistral is its air wing, which consists either of 16 heavy or 35 light helicopters. It can also accommodate 450 troops (900 for surge operations), four small landing craft or two hovercraft, and a 40-strong Leclerc main battle tank (MBT) unit.
In recent years, France has put its Mistrals to good use in support of its foreign policy. For instance, during the 2006 Lebanon War, the lead ship of its class, the Mistral, was involved in the evacuation of French citizens from the Levant nation. Two years later, the same vessel provided humanitarian aid supplies, albeit indirectly, to victims of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar. And in 2011, the Tonnerre was deployed with Tigre helicopter gunships off the Libyan coast to support France’s military intervention in that North African country.
Assessment
Ship Handling:
At first glance, therefore, the introduction of the Mistral into Egypt’s order of battle would seem to boost considerably the latter’s expeditionary capabilities. However, a more critical assessment reveals that this would not be the case. Firstly, Egypt simply lacks the experience and know-how in handling a vessel like the Mistral. Warships are highly intricate technological entities. As cited in Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-first Century (Routledge, 2013):
To… operate [warships] requires a mass of technical, industrial and professional skills, ashore and afloat, and a sophisticated system of management to mold them into an effective whole… Ships can be constructed relatively quickly, but the skills and capabilities which make up an effective navy can only be built up with long years of investment.
Indeed, Cairo’s experience in handling warships is limited warships significantly smaller than Mistral. The Egyptian military’s current largest amphibians are its three Polnochnys. This Polish-made landing ship is some 70 meters long and displaces 830 tons; in stark contrast, the corresponding figures for the Mistral are 200 meters and 21,000 tons. Furthermore, the mainstays of the Egyptian surface fleet – the formerly Knox- and Perry-class frigates procured from the U.S. Navy – are around 4,000 tons in displacement. Even the largest warship currently in Egyptian service is nowhere near the specifications of the Mistral. Egypt’s sole FREMM frigate, which is 140 meters long and displaces 6,000 tons, was commissioned into service only in June this year.
This dearth of experience in operating a large and complex multi-purpose naval platform like the Mistral would arguably be exacerbated by a failing that plagues most Arab militaries: their personnel’s deficiency in terms of technical skills. In Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948-1991 (University of Nebraska Press, 2004) Kenneth M. Pollack maintains that Arab armed forces, including Egypt’s, often show an inability to fully exploit the capabilities of the military hardware they possess.The Middle East defense expert adds that this lack of technical skills and other military weaknesses of the Arabs are likely to persist.
Then again, even First-World countries with highly educated citizens who are familiar with advanced technology can struggle with regard to operating LHDs. The time-frame in which Australia hopes that HMAS Canberra will achieve initial operational capability (IOC) and final operational capability (FOC) is illuminative of the challenges Egypt might face with its Mistrals. The Canberra – the lead ship of a new LHD class – was commissioned last November, and Australia is working towards its IOC and FOC to be attained in late 2015 and late 2017 respectively. In other words, Australia is hoping that HMAS Canberra will only be fully deployable a good three years after its commissioning.
That being said, media reports state the Mistrals will be delivered to Egypt in March next year and that their future crews have already begun training. To be certain, nobody will claim that Cairo could get its LHDs up and running within a meager six months. However, Egypt’s technical deficiency means that it could take a longer than than Australia to achieve operational capability with their LHD platforms. Furthermore, it must be noted that the Royal Australian Navy possesses some institutional knowledge in handling flat-tops, having operated light carriers during the Cold War. In stark contrast, Egyptian expertise in this area is essentially zilch. The crew of the two Mistrals will therefore need significant assistance from France and also Russia, as there are several Russian systems on-board the vessels.
Amphibious Operations:
A key mission the Mistral is expected to carry out is amphibious operations, and specialist skills and training are essential to the success of such endeavors, according to esteemed naval commentator Geoffrey Till. Though Egypt has a small marine force, a Stratfor analysis suggests it is not proficient enough to deploy optimally from the Mistral. This particular report, however, does
Amphibious Operations aboard a Mistral during Exercise LION MISTRAL in 2014.
not differentiate between the scales of amphibious operations to be conducted. Does it apply for large- or small-scale landings? It is certainly true that Cairo lacks experience in major amphibious operations. As a matter of fact, a Jane’s report argues that the Egyptian military cannot conduct “unilateral, opposed beach landings”, adding that it can only perform small-scale amphibious operations such as infiltrating special forces teams. Such an assessment is hardly surprising considering the fact the Polnochny landing craft can carry a maximum of 180 soldiers and six MBTs, while the Egyptian navy’s other amphibious asset, the Vydra landing craft of which it has nine, can deploy only 100 troops or three MBTs.
However, the Mistral is not built solely for major troop landings, but a range of missions scalable for different objectives. Indeed, Middle East security expert Ahmed S. Hashim believes that the platform would be used extensively for special forces missions to combat Islamist extremism in the region.Such small-scale operations usually involve helicopters, but Egypt does not have the requisite experience vis-à-vis missions of this nature that are launched from ships at sea.
Sea-Based Aviation
This shortfall is manifested in the fact that Egypt’s sea-based aviation experience consists merely of operating an anti-submarine warfare helicopter or two from each of its formerly Perry- and Knox-class frigates. To be sure, the flight-deck and hangar-bay choreography on helicopter carriers like the Mistral is not as complex as that on regular flat-tops. That being said, operations involving several ship-borne helicopters – the Mistral has six launch spots on its flight deck for them – are nevertheless challenging, even more so for a navy with limited experience in sea-based aviation like
Flight Ops aboard Mistral during LION MISTRAL 2014.
Egypt’s. To compound matters, the Arab nation will have to train the crew for the navalized Ka-52K helicopters – an asset currently not in its order of battle – which could be procured for deployment on the Mistrals.
Integrated Task Force Operations
Finally, the Egyptians do not have any experience organizing their warships into task forces centered on a capital unit like the Mistral. The LHD makes for an inviting target for adversaries and hence has to be screened by consorts such as frigates and other surface craft as part of a task force. Having a fully operational entity of this sort, however, requires the Egyptians to imbibe the intricacies of maritime task force operations, and this would involve learning from scratch the doctrinal and technical expertise critical to such endeavors. For instance, each component of such a task force will have to train and operate together so as to improve their ability to fight as a coherent whole.
Much has been said about the uphill task the People’s Liberation Army-Navy, which had no experience with flat-tops prior to the commissioning of the Liaoning, is facing in creating a viable aircraft carrier battle group, and the consensus is that this could become a possibility only after several years of concerted effort. The same goes for any Egyptian Mistral task force becoming an effective fighting force. The Egyptian fleet’s lack of operational experience as a whole further complicates the issue. Indeed, it was only tangentially involved in the various Middle Eastern conflicts during the Cold War. In the post-Cold War period, Egyptian warships have been largely placed in the back-burner and have not even joined international peacekeeping missions.
Conclusion
Rounding up, Egypt’s acquisition of the Mistral seems to mark a quantum leap in its capacity to project force; the platform offers multiple capabilities previously unavailable to Cairo. Nonetheless, Egypt is unlikely to utilize the Mistral optimally because of its lack of experience in such crucial areas like handling such a sizable and complex vessel, ship-borne helicopter operations, and integrated naval task force maneuvers. With these in mind, it would be an extremely steep learning curve for Egypt vis-à-vis her most ambitious naval acquisition so far. While most nations, including advanced ones, also struggle with regard to adopting new military technology, Egypt’s case is especially pronounced considering its people’s general lack of technical proficiency.
Going forward, there has been talk of the Egyptian Mistrals operating with Saudi units as part of a joint Arab force; after all, Saudi money is believed to be behind the procurement of these platforms. However, “jointness” is difficult to achieve even between the service arms of a particular country, let alone with another country. Such an arrangement, if it ever materializes, is likely to further complicate Egyptian Mistral operations.
In the final analysis, it is worth noting that countries that are able to operate effectively aviation-capable platforms like the Mistral belong at least to the category of nations regarded as “medium powers”. Think Japan with its Izumo-class “helicopter destroyers” and South Korea with its Dokdos. This invariably raises the following question: was the Egyptian Mistral acquisition grounded in operational realities, or was it an vainglorious decision conditioned by the fact that large amphibious warfare ships are so du jour nowadays? During the Second World War, there was a famous saying in Japanese naval circles that went: “The three great follies of the world are the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids and the battleship Yamato.” In the near future, could this statement be modified to include the Mistral? Based on the current state of affairs, it is highly probable.
Ben Ho Wan Beng is a Senior Analyst with the Military Studies Programme at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies; he obtained his master’s degree in strategic studies from the same institution. He would like to express his heartfelt gratitude to colleague Colin Koh Swee Lean for providing his insights on this article. Ben can be reached at iswbho@ntu.edu.sg.
Let’s briefly discuss the Russian expeditionary force in Syria and the European refugee crisis, because from a systems standpoint they are both emanations of the same phenomenon.
The great challenge of international relations and national security is to maintain a system in being: specifically, defending a global order presided over and more or less guaranteed by the United States, while preserving a toleration for the inevitable dynamism of that system. American hegemony will not last if it is expressed as a frozen status quo, nor if it sees an absence of American engagement. The problem is that American policymakers understand this rather poorly.
Two sorts of arrogance have characterized the American approach to this systemic-preservation imperative in this century. The first was the belief that American systemic hegemony was sufficient to impose outcomes on individual subsets of that system without accounting for their own dynamism. This brought us the outcomes we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan. The second, succeeding the first and in reaction to it, was that American systemic hegemony on its own — absent deliberation and engagement — was sufficient to defend America and its core interests from the consequences of unattended disorder in those same subsets of the system. This brought us the outcomes we see in Syria and Europe, and deserves some exposition.
Both types of hubris were on display in the September 2013 Syrian crisis, in which the President of the United States first declared that America would make war on the Assad regime (type one, determinative arrogance), and then declared that it was not necessary to make war on the Assad regime (type two, the arrogance of self-sufficiency). Having declared enmity against a power engaged in an existential struggle, and then having failed to act upon that enmity, the United States reaped all the disadvantages of antagonism with none of the potential advantages. One specific disadvantage it relinquished was the friendship of that power’s own enemies, all of whom perceived that alliance with the Americans would yield no positive outcomes. Those enemies instead turned to perceived-effective foes of that power, among whom the radical Sunnis of Al Qaeda and (arguably worse) ISIS emerged as chief. Further muddying the waters have been American efforts to placate the Assad regime’s major ally and sponsor in Iran, guaranteeing that no anti-Assad force in its right mind will trust us — and in fact many believe we are secretly in league with their antagonists.
Soldiers of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA).
The outcomes in Syria ought to be a testament to the futility of existing policy. Disorder in the system, left unattended, has spread as entropy does. The Assad regime, once perceived as the worst player in the region — or the system’s local minimum — is now arguably the best, and inarguably not the worst. Disengagement has completely failed for all parties, as disorder emanates to Europe in the form of refugee flows, and to America as a challenge to its hegemony with the dispatch of a Russian expeditionary force. The refugee crisis is a rebuke to the Europeans, who pay the price of freeloading off an American-led order (and therefore suffer when the Americans refrain), and also (along with the Greek crisis) seen their continental union project exposed as mostly a superstructure for the benefit of elites. European separation from the broader system has failed. Similarly, Americans are learning that their disinterest in war does not diminish war’s interest in them.
It is worth noting that the Russian expeditionary commitment to Syria may be, given visionary strategic leadership, a master stroke. (That given is of course not a given where the Russians are concerned.) The narrative roles the Russians have the potential to fill are a cornucopia of goodwill-generating engagements: defender of Christians, destroyers of ISIS, vigorous great power, guarantor of order, ender of refugee flows, et cetera. Every single one of these narrative roles is in direct contrast to American and European actions (or more properly inactions), and have the added benefit of likely commanding the sympathy of significant minorities within both populations. Russia is not well-equipped to pacify a fractious nation of 20 million people — but it is eminently qualified to ruthlessly crush a local faction, and that is all that matters here. A task leveraging the player’s strengths with such massive prospective benefits embedded in the narrative flaws and faulty assumptions of strategic rivals is either the result of strategic genius — or stupefying luck.
Here’s the bottom line: both conceits that have governed the American approach to foreign engagement are false. Entropy extends throughout systems, and one does not get to secede from them as situations demand. We cannot impose control upon dynamic systems. Nor can we secede from those systems and their effects. We are all part of a gigantic meta-system, as a nation and a people, and so our charge is to see to its continuance. That does not mean decisive engagement or disengagement. It means entanglement and — this is unpopular and opaque — maintenance. It means we venture abroad, not to decide and direct, but to contend and affect. It means that sometimes the choice is between dangerous great-power opportunism and catastrophic migrations on the one hand, and desultory and interminable expeditions to strange lands on the other.
This is the logic of hegemony and the nature of systems, and it is therefore what we must do. The tragedy is that a democratic society bottle-fed a narrative of “progress” is increasingly unable to do it.
Jack Hays is a pseudonym of a public-policy professional and amateur Russophile. See his 2014 analysis of the Crimean annexation here.
