“My good friends, for the second time in
our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace
with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom
of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep”.
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, 30
September, 1938
Alphen, Netherlands. 15 February. War is coming to the Middle
East. Russia, Iran and Assad have ‘won’ the Syrian civil war. Islamic State has
shot its bolt but remains undefeated in its ungoverned space. The West is
strategically and morally bankrupt. The liberal idea of a rules-based
international order has failed. Kurds in Iraq, Syria and Turkey are about to make
a significant move towards the creation of Kurdistan. That is clearly the
conclusion that Turkey’s President Erdogan has arrived at this past week and
why Turkish forces are shelling Peshmerga positions inside Syria.
Turkey is not alone in coming to that conclusion. Saudi
Arabia, Qatar, and a host of Sunni Arab states, alarmed by the growing
influence of Shia Iran in Syria, have also reached a similar conclusion.
Indeed, both Ankara and Riyadh are threatening to intervene on the ground
against the Russian-Iranian-Assad axis. Israel is quietly mobilising its forces
too with Premier Netanyahu making it abundantly clear behind closed doors that
Tel Aviv will not sit idly by if Syria and Assad re-merge as a direct threat to
the Jewish State’s security.
Why did the West ignore the first principle of international
relations; always negotiate from strength? The three main Western figures at
the Munich talks were US Secretary Kerry, British Foreign Secretary Hammond,
and German Foreign Minister Steinmeier. First, good intentions; the road to
hell paved and all that. The humanitarian situation is indeed appalling and
easing it rightly matters to Western powers. Second, politics is at play. The
Obama Administration is in its dying throes and the Administration is focussed
on its ‘legacy’; Cameron wants a diplomatic ‘triumph’ the week prior to this week’s
EU Brexit retreat, and Steinmeier is desperate to stop another massive wave of
asylum seekers from heading to Germany threatening the survival of the Merkel regime.
What are the implications of failure? The ‘agreement to cease
hostilities’ reached in Munich last week by the seventeen nation Syrian Contact
Group was a tipping point in a war that is now much bigger than Syria. Indeed,
the accord revealed just how weak the US and its European allies have become. Indeed, by crafting a politically-convenient
but strategically irrelevant piece of paper the West again gave Russia equal superpower
billing to the US, thus strengthening in one go the respective positions of
both Putin and Assad. Consequently, far from communicating resolve the
Americans, British and other Europeans simply confirmed in the minds of Erdogan
et al the retreat of the West into strategic denial and self-deception.
Interestingly, Washington was not unaware of this danger and
rapidly distanced itself from the accord. Indeed, from the moment the Munich Accord
was signed the Americans were putting it about that it was a ‘triumph’ for
patient British diplomacy, and the hard behind the scenes work the British had
done to seal agreement. The British, desperate as ever to be appear more
influential than they actually are were only too keen to let this rumour
circulate.
What are the options? Option one is in effect to do nothing.
In which case Russia will help Assad carve out an enclave in Western Syria,
Russia’s prestige will be enhanced, much of Northern Syria and Iraq will remain
in an IS-friendly anarchy, and the chances of major war downstream in the
Middle East will be increased.
Option two is to help establish protected refugee camps in
neighbouring lands, reinforce states such as Jordan and Lebanon, hold Turkey
close to prevent escalation of the conflict between Ankara and the Kurds, and
begin to contest the space that the Russia-Assad-Iran axis is carving out by
arming some rebel groups and supporting them with Special Forces where needs be
to increase the cost of the Putin-Assad strategy.
Option three is for the West to overtly choose sides in the
war. The current strategy is failing because the West is on one side but pretending
to be all sides accept that of Assad and IS. Russia is on Assad’s side and for
the moment in tacit league with Islamic State, but most clearly not on the West’s
‘side’. Such an overt commitment would also mean overtly backing ‘our bastards’
against ‘their bastards’. Specifically, the West would support the Saudi-led, Sunni
coalition, with Turkey, to intervene of the ground against Russia-Assad and
Shia-Iran. Such a strategy would also mean putting Western boots on the ground
in significant numbers and probably turn a lot of the people the West currently
supports into enemies.
Every available option involves risk and consequence. However,
the most risky course of action would be to do nothing or pretend to not do
next to nothing. At some point the Russians and their doctrine of using force
to change the political situation on the ground will need to be confronted. Indeed,
force Russia to back down and its surrogates and partners will also back down.
Indeed, only through a real show of Western strategic, political. and if needs
be military resolve is there now any chance that the war in Syria can be
de-escalated. It is the absence of such resolve that is threatening to turn a
civil war at the eastern end of the Mediterranean into something far, far
worse.
The strategic bottom-line is this; the West together will not
relieve the humanitarian crisis in Syria and the wider Levant, nor indeed the
duress under which Europe now labours, until it has confronted the strategic
crisis of which Syria is as much symptom as consequence. Any demarche that is
not built on that simple premise will not only fail, but it will make major war
in the region more likely.
The Turkey shoot is just the beginning…all we need do now is
await the next US president.
Julian Lindley-French
No comments:
Post a Comment