Category: War

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About Syria.

I have been thinking about Syria and coverage of the fall of the Assad regime, and to be honest I believe that there is something missing from the picture being painted, at least in NZ. Although I am no expert on Syria or the Middle East, I do have some experience working with irregular and unconventional fighting groups as well as writing about authoritarian regime demise and the modalities by which that occurs. I will therefore take a moment to reflect on what I think is missing.

Media reporting has it that the attack on Aleppo and rapid, two-week drive through Hama and Homs to Damascus was a surprise. That may be true for the media, many non-Syrian laypeople and perhaps the Russians and pro-Assad Syrians themselves, but otherwise I beg to differ. The reason is because the training and massing of rebel fighters in Northern and Central Syria would have taken time (some believe the uprising has been 5-10 years in the making), and would have therefore been detected by Western and regional intelligence services some time ago. If we think about satellite and aerial imagery, signals intercepts, ground based thermal and other technical acquisition capabilities as well as human intelligence on the ground, then consider that Syria and its armed factions are in the middle of a larger geopolitical conflict in the Levant and wider Middle East, and then think about who has a direct vested interest in Syria’s fate (as well as their partners and patrons), it is probably safe to assume that intelligence agencies grouped in the 5 Eyes, Jordan, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, France and/or Germany were monitoring at one level or another developments in rebel-held areas long before the assault on Aleppo was launched.

And then there is the pro-Assad intelligence community.

Perhaps distracted by events elsewhere, the Russians appear to have been genuinely caught off-guard, although it has been reported that they started pulling out personnel from Syria weeks before the attacks began (which would suggest they knew something was about to happen). Likewise, perhaps distracted by their own concerns regarding Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah, the Iranians eventually airlifted key personnel out of Damascus shortly after Aleppo fell, so even if they were blind to the preparations for the uprising, they clearly believed, correctly, that momentum was with the rebels once the assault was launched. More tellingly, weeks ago there were credible claims that the Syrian State had been “hollowed out” by senior officials (i.e. state coffers were raided, corruption and drug-dealing was endemic and public service provision halted), who then fled the country. Make of that what you will.

All of this would have given some clear indications that the Syrian status quo was about to change and Assad and the rest of his henchmen were soon to exit one way or another. What is telling is that the intelligence agencies that would have known about the rebel’s preparations (including NZ via its connections to 5 Eyes and other Western intelligence agencies including Mossad), maintained excellent operational security and did not let it be known, either by leaks or mistakes, that a major coordinated assault by the rebels was in the making. This was done not so much to spite the mainstream corporate media, which clearly had zero boots on the ground in rebel-held areas prior to the assault, but to prevent the Syrians, Iranians, Hezbollah, Hamas and Russians from learning about the uprising before it was underway. By the time the “axis of resistance” realised what was happening, it was too late to do anything but wait, watch and if need be, flee.

Whether the Russian, Syrian and Iranian intelligence failures were caused by them being stretched too thin on the ground, distracted with external events and/or incompetence, there are lessons to be learned learned from their lack of forewarning.

Israel’s successful (at least for now), multi-front campaign against Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis, with some sidebar strikes on Syria thrown in for good measure, degraded the axis of resistance’s capabilities to detect and prevent the uprising. Now it appears that Israel is opening another front in Syria with an eye to significantly changing the geopolitical landscape in the region. Hamas and Hezbollah have been decimated as military forces. Iran has been intimidated into passivity. The Houthis have gone largely silent. This, thanks to Israel’s scorched earth, targeted assassination and long-range missile strike operations against all of them. Now Israel has launched a two-pronged offensive in Syria, conducting a bombing campaign against weapons storage facilities (some containing chemical weapons stockpiles) while simultaneous targeting command and control facilities as well as the entirety of the Syrian Navy (which shares major port facilities with the Russian Mediterranean fleet at the city of Tartus, which in turn raises the question of what will become of the Russian presence there and at a nearby airfield once the rebels seize control of them).

The IDF has also sent ground forces into and beyond the UN-monitored buffer zone separating Syrian control from Israel within and beyond the Golan Heights. Much like in Southern Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, Israel has seized the opportunity provided by neighborly discord in order to expand its presence in its neighbours’ territory, perhaps with an eye to redrawing their common borders. Since there is no foreign power capable of stopping Israel or willing to do so, it looks like the Israeli gambit will pay off. But that may depend on what the rebel-led government in Syria does next.

If foreign powers were aware in advance of the rebel’s plans, it is also very likely that they conducted more than passive observation and information-sharing amongst themselves. The US has 900 troops in Syria, most of them US Army Special Forces (Green Berets), Green Berets’ main mission is to train, advise and assist local forces in any given conflict, so it is possible that they had working ties to the rebel groups in advance of the assault on Aleppo. The US also has combat troops stationed in Jordan, Israel and Iraq and a variety of military assets in Turkey, effectively surrounding Syria’s land borders. Likewise, in part because of the lingering presence of ISIS in central and eastern Syria, a number of other countries–NATO members most likely–have special operators and/or military intelligence assets “in theatre.” Turkey acknowledges its military working relationship with one of the rebel groups, the Syrian National Army (SNA) in Northern Syria. The US has close ties to Kurdish insurgents in Northwest Syria and Northwest Iraq. The Jordanians are said to have operatives in Southern Syria and one can assume that, if not an surreptitious military presence, Israel has its covert hand in the pie as well.

What this means is that it is quite possible that foreign forces provided training, advising and intelligence and logistical support in the years, months, weeks and days leading up to and through the assault on Aleppo. If so, it should not be surprising that he rebels maintained an unusual amount of discipline previously unseen in their ranks, and that the various armed factions worked well together, sometimes in coordinated fashion. Even some of their combat fatigues and weapons look new and Western in origin!

So who are these rebels? Basically they are Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), who are the remnants of a group formerly known as Jabbat al-Nusra (Nusra Front), an al-Qaeda and ISIS-connected Islamicist group; the Free Syrian Army (an anti-Assad “secular” group backed by the West); and the afore-mentioned, Turkish-backed SNA. There are also Kurdish PKK/YPG/SDF militias in the mix who control approximately one quarter of Syrian territory east of the Euphrates River (and major oil fields), although these divide their time between mopping up Syrian Army troops in Northeastern Syria and fighting ISIS militants, the SNA, the Turkish military and pro-Turkish militias.

The rebel coalition has formed a tactical alliance against its common enemy. None of the constituent parts are particularly democratic in orientation, and in spite of HST’s claims that it has served all ties with ISIS and does not espouse (Sunni) Islamicist beliefs such as Salafism or Wahhabism, such statements must be taken with a grain of salt. There are numerous reports of lethal attacks on Christians and Alawites (which is a Shiite sect) by rebel forces in Aleppo and Hama, so the proof of the rebel’s good intentions remains to be seen, especially if military discipline has broken down amid the quest for collective revenge.

The sectarian nature of the rebel coalition is worth noting because the Assad regime was Alawite, which is a mostly coastal minority community in an otherwise Sunni-dominated country. Assad reserved many of his governments’ top positions to co-religionists in the Syrian Baath Party (originally related to the Iraqi Baathists led by Saddam Hussein), so retribution and revenge against those who formed the support base and bureaucratic staff of the Assad regime can be expected, HST assurances to the contrary notwithstanding. What is promising is that HST has agreed to form an interim (not yet transitional) government with various sects represented and some carry-overs from the Assad regime appointed in order to restore and/or maintain continuity in public services.

The HST-led government is now focused on rooting out Assad loyalists, imposing social order, securing military and police facilities (including notorious prisons), and bringing public services back to life where possible. But reconstruction of battle-damaged areas will be lengthy and difficult process given that Syria’s treasury has been emptied, many public offices looted and/or damaged, and corruption is rampant within and between various sectarian groups. The international community will be asked to foot the bill and provide the human, material and financial capital required to return the country to some semblance of normalcy. This is complicated but the fact that the HST and PKK/YPGSDF have been designated as terrorist entities by the UN and a number of countries (although for different reasons, with HST designated because of its ties to ISIS and the PKK/YPG/SDF designated at Turkey’s insistence because of their irredentist activities in pursuit of an independent Kurdistan in territory now controlled by Syria, Iraq and Turkey). Before international relief can be offered, the terrorist designations will have to be lifted, something that will not please many interested parties for a variety of reasons.

More broadly, the fall of the Assad regime is one variant of what is known as “bottom-up transitions,” where before the regime is prepared to exit it is forced to do so by public pressure and mass collective action. Bottom-up transitions can stem from revolts, rebellions, general strikes, mass protests and the ultimate sub-type, revolutions (which, unlike the others, involve parametric change in the economy, social order and political society). These are not to be confused with top-down transitions, in which the outgoing regime frames the conditions by which it relinquishes power. This can be done peacefully or by a coup d’état, which is essentially an armed quarrel amongst elites in which the military acts as the arbiter of who wins and loses in the power struggle by siding with those that favour an exit strategy and transition to a different regime type. Examples of peaceful top-down transitions were seen in Brazil in the 1980s and Chile in the 1990s, where power was devolved from military control and handed over to elected civilian rule rather than be overthrown by force.

In Syria as has happened elsewhere, there will be major tensions between so-called “moderates” and “militants” (soft-liners and hard-liners) in the HST-led coalition. Hardliners and militants tend to come from fighting backgrounds. They tend not to seek compromise and conciliation because they have succeeded in imposing their will by force of arms. They are reluctant to forgive their defeated adversaries and many are sworn to avenge the affronts committed against their families, friends and communities (and in Syria, the affronts included atrocities and other forms of barbarism committed by Assad’s forces against the civilian population). Moderates, on the other hand, tend to come from the non-fighting political opposition, religious, business and community leaders and foreign interlocutors. These seek to draw a line behind them when it comes to dealing with the past in order to facilitate the reconstruction of society and promote national reconciliation.

The key to keeping the post-Assad transition relatively peaceful is for the moderates and softliners to gain the upper hand in negotiations to form the new government. For that to happen, inducements and constraints (think carrots and sticks) must be offered to and placed on the militant hardliners. Inducements can include open trials for those accused of heinous crimes committed on Assad’s behalf, placement of senior rebel commanders in leadership roles the Syrian security apparatus, establishment of Truth and Reconciliation Tribunals that address past sins committed on all sides, and even material rewards for those who refrain from continuing to use violence as a means to an end. Constraints could include weapons impoundments, criminal prosecutions, and other legal and material disincentives that discourage continuation of hardline or militant behaviour.

None of this will be easy but it is necessary is stability is to return to Syria. It is possible that the armed factions and their political and social supporters can use the common ground forged fighting the common enemy to expand the basis for commonality into other aspects of Syrian life. It could start with something as simple as national sports or cultural traditions and then move to the more thorny issues of governance, economic accumulation and distribution, religious and secular civil rights, and so forth.

What is clear is that, for the short term at least, the big losers in Syria are Alawites, Iranian and Russians. Assad is gone and his minions routed. Iran has lost its major overland transit route connecting it to Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Palestine (Hamas) as well as the intelligence, forward basing and logistical support of the Assad regime. Russia has lost it foremost ally in the Middle East as well as the intelligence and military assets that it had stationed in Syria prior to Assad’s fall (assuming that the new regime will confiscate the Russian facilities at Tartus and Khmeimim Air Base near Latakia city). Reputationally, both Iran and Russia have taken a major hit with their weaknesses as a security partner now exposed.

Israel appears to be the primary short-term beneficiary of Assad’s overthrow. To a lesser but significant extent, so are Western and Middle Eastern powers with a stake in the Levant. But a longer-term prognosis is more difficult to ascertain because the direction of the HST-led government has yet to be determined, and the post-Assad settling of scores has yet to be decided. Whether or not this involves a return of Islamicists with or without the ISIS brand is foremost among the concerns of many security agencies.

In any event the best we can do is embrace the uncertainties inherent in the moment, attempt where possible to bolster the moderate/softliner positions within the new government and offer concrete steps based on the experience of others as part of the path towards national recovery. History will be the ultimate judge of the process but for the moment all we can say is that we live in interesting times.

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Media Link: “A View from Afar” on the lame duck window of opportunity.

In the last episode of this year Selwyn Manning and I discuss the rebel assault on Aleppo in Syria and tit-for-tat missile exchanges between Russia and Ukraine as illustrative of foreign actor attempts to gain geopolitical leverage as part of hedging strategies undertaken before Trump assumes office on January 2025. We had good audience participation and discussion, which you can find here.

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US military-industrial-sports complex.

A US friend of mine wrote on social media about attending a Homecoming football game at her niece’s Red State university. Although the referees stunk and her team lost, my friend said that she enjoyed her visit, especially the halftime show that featured a tribute to veterans (it is approaching Veterans Day in the US). Because I have a self-righteous contrarian streak, I commented on her post by asking when did glorification of militarism and (by extension) war-mongering became a fixture US sports? I suggested that maybe it came from US military service academies (West Point, the Naval Academy and Air Force Academy) and somehow leaked into other sports institutions sometime after WW2. Not surprisingly given that my friend is a very patriotic and polite American, she declined to answer.

What I would have said to her had she answered is that I asked because cultural historians and sociologists have noted that although all liberal democracies have military ceremonies, displays, celebrations and commemorations on significant national dates and public holidays such as Anzac Day and Bastille Day, only the US has military displays at private sporting events from Little League to the professional level pretty much every week. American football, baseball, basketball, automobile racing (NASCAR is a patriotism fetishist’s delight), soccer, ice hockey, volleyball, lacrosse–these and more all regularly feature tributes to the military, with some including static and moving exhibits of death machines in the forms of warplane fly-overs, paratroop drops, assorted artillery gun salutes and even the occasional tank. Remember, this is not July 4th, Veterans Day or Memorial Day, which are genuine national holidays celebrated publicly with displays of patriotism, parades, picnics, pomp and circumstance even if the original, more sombre reason for them was about victory, sacrifice and service to the country, not the military per se.

So why and how did sports get turned into an adjunct to US militarism? Beyond the constant invocations of “fighting for freedom” (I guess “fighting for imperialism and “making the world more safe for Yanks” does not have quite the same ring to them), what normalised this practice?

Here is my hunch. At some point in the last half century a PR genius in the Department of Defense (DoD) realised that combining sports, especially “manly” contact sports, with militaristic displays and tributes framed as patriotic commemorations was a natural recruitment tool for the armed forces. The US military is already allowed to recruit in high schools and universities (some private schools refuse them but all public institutions receiving federal funding of any sort must allow military recruiters on campus). But sports, especially big-ticket sports like college and professional football, is a type of social glue that binds American society in a way that pretty much everything else does not. Race, class, religion, geographic location, now even gender–all bow before the alter of sports, with stadiums being the secular churches in which people congregate for common purpose. If you want to make friends and influence people by participating in the ritual, a sporting event is a good place to start.

(I use “American” here well aware that is is an appropriation of a continental name common to all of the Western Hemisphere simply because it has become normalised as a way to identify people from the US).

Partnering with sports is therefore way for the US military to get deeply involved in a core aspect of US society–the glue that holds together its social cohesion–by becoming an integral part not only of its sporting culture but also of its national identity. That perhaps is where US militarism is reproduced at its most basic level. If you can get people to adopt a certain favourable (and non-critical) mindset and predisposition regarding the military and its role in US society through sports, you pave the way for ideological reproduction of a military-aligned perspective. That in turn makes recruitment easier but also makes it easier to sell rationales for aggressive foreign polices, large military budgets and ultimately, war-mongering as a foreign policy tool. You can see the results in a number of popular culture artefacts: marching bands, camouflage apparel, guns, more guns and assorted accessories for guns (like bump stocks, silencers and extended magazines) in case the zombie finally arrive from south of the border, “tactical gear,” militarised local police forces, etc, to say nothing of the names of numerous sports teams themselves. You see it in the media, especially among conservative outlets. You see it in language, such as in the overuse of the word “heroes” to describe anyone who has served. You see it in oversized flags with Vietnam Era POW-MIA logos at car and gun dealerships, in the retail discounts offered to active duty service members and veterans and in the veneration of the military in churches. Militarism (I shall refrain from calling it military fetishism) permeates every aspect of US social life, and sports is at its core. I am not saying that there are no legitimate spinoffs and benefits from exposure to military culture and technologies, but in the US sometimes the crossover is a bit too much.

This occurs in spite of the fact that US in recent decades has not been particularly successful in war. For every victory in Granada, Panama or Gulf War One and in spite of overwhelming advantages in weaponry (courtesy of those enormous military budgets), most recent US expeditionary wars have ended in stalemates and withdrawal–sometimes chaotic–in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in a number of “low intensity conflicts” such as those in Niger, Somalia, and 1980s Lebanon. In fact, the US has been continuously at war, big or small, for the better part of my existence, and yet the world is arguably more dangerous today for the US than it was before it became the world’s policeman. Where is the national interest cost/benefit value in this?

That is where what former general and President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower’s phrase enters the frame: “military-industrial complex.” Ike warned about the emerging military-industrial complex in the 1950s, arguing that it was leading to distortions in foreign policy, particularly those associated with militarism for profit. Needless to say he was shouting into the dark because the beast that he was looking at then is now a Godzilla that through lobbying controls the Federal Executive and Legislative branches as well as those of most if not all states and even local districts. From the United Fruit Company’s backing of coups in Central America in the 1950s and 60s things have evolved into a conglomerate of blood-soaked profiteers ranging from Blackwater in the 1990s ((now rebranded and decentralised under shell fronts) to assorted outfits supplying staples, fuel, transportation, close personal protection, anti-piracy squads and even Halloween costumes to the troops deployed abroad. Godzilla is now too big too fail.

Godzilla is also very smart. By marrying the military-industrial complex to the sports-military complex it has created the prefect vehicle for the profitable reproduction of a permanent militarist outlook as a cornerstone of US society. I’ll say it again, bloodshed is profitable and if sports is means for the military-industrial complex to profit, it has found a welcome partner. It is therefore not surprising that sports moguls and big entertainment companies, including dodgy outfits like those that control cage fighting and staged wrestling competitions, have partnered with the armed services in order for both to sell their “product.” The arrangement works well for the synergistic (some might say “symbiotic”) enhancement of their bottom lines.

So what we have in the US is a military-industrial-sports complex that serves as an ideological and material war-mongering reproduction machine. Only in America!

And now, a digression.

I had my “Ike moment” in 1994 when the Zapatistas staged an uprising in Chiapas Province, Mexico. Initially overwhelmed by the guerrilla assaults, the Mexican Army sent an urgent request for helicopter gunships, armoured personnel carriers and special operations troops. This, in spite fo the fact that up and until that moment Mexico styled itself to be a leader of the non-aligned movement, one of the “old school” revolutionary regimes dating to the early 20th century and regularly gave the US the finger in international forums. Its authorities were not very cooperative when it came to the illegal drug trade, something that made some of them rich, made more of them dead, and which made all of them regret their indifference down the road.

Well as it turns out on January 1, 1994 I just happened to be the regional policy analyst for the InterAmerican region in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and got called into my office to consider the request before sending it up the chain of command on the way to the White House. I explained to a group of formidable civilian and military leaders (some of whom I still admire), that a rebellion/revolt like that of the Zapatistas (known by the acronym EZLN in Spanish and led by the much vaunted “Comandante Marcos”) was rooted in socio-economic inequality and broken government promises, not some global Marxist conspiracy. It was a symptom, not a cause of instability and therefore could not be solved via US military intervention (or any use of force, for that matter). I advised against agreeing to the request and instead recommended that the Mexicans tend to their internal affairs by listening to the EZLN demands and proposing a negotiated solution. After all, they were on the right side of history, only sought was was promised to the peasantry in the 1930s, and had no means or intentions of expanding their armed activities to make revolution at the national level.

Historical Note: The EZLN were acting on historical campesino (peasant) grievances about having their communal (State-owned) land holdings (known as ejidos) taken over by large private land owning entities in spite the promise made by the post-revolutionary government of Lazaro Cardenas in the 1930s. After years of dispossessions and usurpation by Cardenas’s political heirs working hand in glove with landed agricultural elites, Maoist and Guevara-inspired guerrilla forces emerged in the 1980s and finally began the forcible reclamation project on New Year’s Day 1994. Talk about starting that year with a bang!

My comments to the Pentagon brass fell on deaf ears. To their credit the uniforms in the room were more sympathetic to my view than were my civilian counterparts, but the overall response was silence. A day or so later I was passed an interagency memo signed off by the NSC, CIA, NSA, JCS, Treasury, my bosses in OSD, the department of the Army and various other lesser agencies authorising a limited provision of the requested items subject to the condition that they “respect all national and International humanitarian conventions and the laws of war.”

Yeah, right. I may not have known it at the time, but a Yanqui Tui ad was in the making.

I was young and stroppy at the time so in response I fired off an interagency reply denouncing the decision, pointing out the few of those who signed off had expertise In Mexican history history and affairs, much less the history of Chiapas (the poorest state in Mexico) or the nature of the rebellion, and some did not even speak or read Spanish. I received no replies and the project was approved.

A few days later I was summoned for a private lunch by a very senior DoD official. That was unusual because a mid-level C ring analyst like me did not usually get a 1-on-1 invitation to meet with an E ring heavyweight (the Pentagon is divided into five rings running five stories high and five deep on each side, connected by internal corridors and with the service branches controlling three sides of the Pentagon and the Office of the Secretary of Defence for which I worked controlling the side that faces the Potomac River from the West. With the best views and largest offices, the E ring was where the civilian big boys and girls played. Among a lot of source on the building, see: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pentagon)

The official complimented me on my knowledge of the region, the detail and energy that I brought to my job and the good work that I had done while serving in OSD/DoD. But he suggested that when my initial term expired I should return to academia and eventually write (once my security clearance lapsed) about my experiences there (subject to review and approval by DoD compliance mechanisms). Since I was hoping to extend my tenure in OSD I asked if the memo had something to do with his suggestion, to which he replied “yes.” I said that I thought that my job was to protect the US best interests in Latin America, balancing hard reality with as much idealism on human rights etc. as could be mustered under the circumstances (remember this was in the first couple of years of the first Clinton administration, when the US was pushing a so-called “Cooperative Security” doctrine based on confidence and security-building measures (CSBMs) as a replacement for Cold War “collective security” agreements based on credible counter-force). Since the Cold War had ended, part of my remit was to write the Latin American component of the new doctrine given the changed realities in my area of responsibility (Latin America and the Caribbean, which at the time meant that narco-trafficking and guerrilla warfare were the main concerns). His reply was to say “yes, that is true and commendable but you must understand that in this city corporate interests prevail.”

I left a short while after that conversation and a couple of years later emigrated to NZ. In the 25 years since then I have never once been asked by anyone in NZ government, academia, and the private sector about my experiences in that role, although when I was an academic I did illustrate to my students objective examples of foreign and security policy problems based on those experiences.

Instead, after 9/11 I got branded by the NZ (and now foreign) media as a security or terrorism “expert” when it fact those were just routine aspects–but not all of–what I did at OSD (TBH, I cringe when I am referred to as a security expert because those are people who install and maintain home and commercial alarm systems. And since terrorism “expertise” has become a cottage industry since 9/11, mostly directed at Islamicists (including in NZ), I would prefer to not be associated with those that currently embrace the label. Remember: terrorism is a tactic in unconventional, irregular and hybrid warfare (and sometimes even in conventional warfare if the laws of war are deliberately violated, as has been seen in recent times), but not an end in itself. Focusing on it is to consequently misses the forest for the trees (much like the US approach to the Zapatistas), something that just might have contributed to NZ being caught off-guard by the March 15 rightwing extremist terrorist attack in Xchurch. Just saying.

I will simply end this anecdotal sidebar by noting that even if the US sports-military-industrial complex does not deliver ” victory” in recent times, in the days when I associated with them the special and covert operations communities, with much more limited and specific mandates, did a very good job at solving problems for the US when nothing else could.

And as far as I know none of those that I worked with back then were recruited via sports.

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Media Link: AVFA on Israel going rogue.

In this episode of the “A view from Afar” podcast Selwyn Manning and I discuss Israel’s expansion of its war in Lebanon as part of a “six front” strategy that it thinks it can win, focusing on the decision-making process and strategic logic at play that led to the most recent turn of events. Plus some game theory references just to place things in proper context.

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Media Link: ” A View from Afar” on multidimensional hybrid warfare and the ineffectiveness of multilateral institutions.

This week’s “A View from Afar” podcast addresses the issue of multidimensional hybrid warfare using the Israeli pager attacks in Lebanon as a starting point before moving on to discuss the failures of multilateral institutions, the UN in particular, when it comes to handling war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is a sad state of affairs.

The Murky World of Israel’s Booby-Trapped Pagers and Walkie-Talkies

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Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Excerpt One.

This project analyzes security politics in three peripheral democracies (Chile, New Zealand, Portugal) during the 30 years after the end of the Cold War. It argues that changes in the geopolitical landscape and geo-strategic context are interpreted differently by small democracies with peripheral involvement in the major international security decisions of modern times, different geopolitical perspectives, foreign relations networks and dissimilar histories of civil-military relations (post-authoritarian versus post-colonial in this sample). These democracies react to but do not initiate changes in the strategic environment in which they operate. The specific combination of internal and external factors involved in security policy-making  translates into different strategic perspectives, institutional features and policy outcomes that combine the traditional interest in preservation of the nation-state with an understanding of the diplomatic as well as military and intelligence necessities of variegated partnerships in a fluid international environment in which the threat of traditional inter-state conflict shares space with asymmetric warfare involving state and non-state actors. 

The issue of how small states, and small democracies in particular, react to changes in the international security environment is especially salient during periods of global change such as the period following the end of the Cold War. During that time international security affairs suffered two appreciable modifications that required major adjustments on the part of a wide variety of actors, especially militarily and economically vulnerable countries such as those studied here. 

These milestones were the end of the Cold War and its attendant bi-polar security alliance structure at the beginning of the 1990s, the subsequent emergence of a unipolar international system in which the United States served as the world “hegemon” and systems regulator by acting as a global police force that intervened in a number of low intensity conflicts that were not existential in nature (to the US and its major allies), but which promoted regional instability that undermined the international system as a whole. 

This was manifest in the spread of Islamicist-inspired insurgencies in response to Western secular expansion after the decline of the Stalinist bloc. The latter saw its definitive pronouncement on September 11, 2001, which forced another turn of the international security “screw.” That was marked by the advent of global unconventional warfare in concert with ongoing conventional operations and increased preoccupation about the use of weapons of mass destruction by non-state as well as state actors. Notions of cooperative security, which had replaced collective security doctrines as the dominant Western security paradigm in the 1990s, gave way to global asymmetric warfare involving collective security partners. Multinational counter-insurgency operations in parallel with peace-keeping and nation-building (as operations other than war) became the dominant form of conflict until the mid 2010s, 

At the same time, while the US and various coalition partners expended blood and treasure fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Northern Africa, Syria, the Sahel and East Africa (and beyond), other powers directed resources into economic and military development unimpeded by the costs of those “small wars.” India, Russia and the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) poured resources into building the foundations for their rise to Great Power status (India and the PRC as emergent powers and Russia as a re-emergent former Superpower). From 2001 to the present the international system began a process of transition, as of yet incomplete, to a multipolar order in which the US is now just one of several Great Powers competing for influence using “hard” as well as “soft” (and “smart” and “sharp”) power in order to achieve strategic objectives. 

The move to multipolarity was accelerated in the 2010s by the end of many of the low intensity conflicts that preoccupied Western military leaders in the early 2000s. The US and its coalition partners withdrew from Afghanistan and Iraq and downsized their presence in other areas in which jihadism was present. The territorial defeat of the Islamic State (aka ISIS or Daesh) in Northern Iraq and Syria reduced armed disputes involving jihadists to localized encounters. Syria remains stalemated between the Russian-backed Assad regime, US-backed anti-Assad forces and ISIS remnants while post-Gaddafi Libya is rendered by sectarian violence unimpeded but armed by outside forces. The Taliban have regained control of Afghanistan. Shiite and Sunni militias vie with the post-occupation Iraqi defense forces for dominance. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, with the war ongoing, while Israel responded to the October 2023 Hamas attacks that killed 1300 people and in which 150 were taken hostage by engaging in asymmetrical collective punishment against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank that has resulted in over 40,000 deaths, mostly civilian non-combatants. The PRC has expanded its reach deep into the South China Sea, provoking clashes with its littoral neighbors, while at the same time pushing its land claims against countries on its western borders. The Sahel region has seen a rise of indigenous militant groups opposing local authorities and their Western partners (such as the Tuareg in Mali). Via proxies and directly, Iran has conducted attacks on Israeli and Western interests, and the Kim regime in North Korea continues to rattle its nuclear sword. In effect, by the end of the 2010s, the global “War on Terror” was effectively over but conflicts and wars, both conventional and unconventional, remained as a systemic constant.

In both East and West but more importantly, in the global North and South, the strategic gaze has returned to a “Big War” focus involving peer militaries in the emerging multipolar system. The PRC’s aggressive military diplomacy in the South China Sea, marked by island-building projects in disputed waters that defy international norms regarding territorial sovereignty and maritime laws, coupled with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, represent the two most obvious signposts that a return to “Big Wars” is now on the minds of strategic planners world-wide. The way in which peripheral democracies responded to these events and others therefore offers insight into the broader issues at play in the realm of comparative security politics in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. 

So why choose Chile, New Zealand and Portugal as case studies? The justification for their selection is made by the internal differences that underlie their geo-strategic commonality. All are small in population size and geographically distant from the major centers of international conflict and security decision-making. All are countries of the “West,” albeit of different ethnic and cultural traditions and democratic capitalist maturity. All have recent histories of UN-mandated peace keeping, and all have minor involvement in the larger conflicts of the early twenty-first century. Military forces from all of these countries are currently deployed overseas as part of UN-mandated multinational security commitments. All have seen their military politics transformed, to one degree or another, by the strategic-doctrinal and geopolitical shifts that followed the end of the Cold War. Yet, varying in length of democratic experience, institutional stability and levels of economic development, each has a very distinct set of civil-military relations, military institutional culture and strategic perspective that impact on their specific response to the changing global security context after 1990. It is the effects of these changes on national security politics across three geographic regions that are of concern here.

Why go “small, democratic and peripheral” when studying comparative security politics? The world strategic environment is dominated by large countries with substantial military resources and the nature of contemporary conflicts has taken on increasingly complex characteristics, so it appears counter-intuitive, if not inconsequential, to study countries that have no major impact on the strategic matters of the day. However, there is good justification to do so, because small democratic nations serve as weather vanes of larger global trends and the repercussive effects that they generate. It is equally clear is that there are few studies that systematically compare, on a cross-regional basis, the military politics of small, peripheral democracies. There are virtually none that do so with a specific focus on the way the post-Cold War move to unipolarity, subsequent rise of the War on Terror, followed by the shift to multipolarity and return of Big War strategising between peer competitors has influenced the evolution of military-security dynamics in them.

NEXT: A question of size.

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Excerpting “Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies.”

In the late 2000s-early 2010s I was researching and writing a book titled “Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Chile, New Zealand and Portugal.” The book was a cross-regional Small-N qualitative comparison of the security strategies and postures of three small democracies on the global geopolitical periphery, both physically and in terms of their involvement in the major strategic decisions of modern times. I set the time frame for the study as the period 1990-2020 because it covered the end of the Cold War as a starting point and included 9/11, the so-called War on Terror and the transition from bipolarity to unipolarity to multipolarity in the International system (the latter which remains ongoing). Its original endpoint will require some extension to account for developments since 2020, but the conceptual apparatus and analytic framework underpinning the study remains valid as a methodological approach (more on this later).

As some readers may know, I departed NZ academia in 2007 and after spending three years at the National University of Singapore I returned to NZ to follow my wife (who took an academic job in her homeland) and to help raise a family. I resurrected and rebranded a consultancy that I had started in the US prior to my arrival in NZ and left academia for good. That was a bittersweet decision to make, since I enjoyed teaching and research, but I am told and have seen that the academic Taylorism and market-driven managerialism that I butted heads with in the 2000s has gotten much worse since my departure from the academe.

Unfortunately, without the institutional support of a university and needing to monetarize my knowledge and experience via the consultancy in order to help pay the bills, I had to abandon the book project. I already had 13,000 words written by way of an introduction outlining the rationale behind and methodological approach to the project, but needed follow up research funds to undertake field research in the countries being studied. That was impossible given my new “business” orientation, plus I had already been turned down for a Marsden Research Grant while still at the NZ university where I used to work (it turns out the Marsden Fund award committee at that time was uninterested in security topics, much less a cross-national comparative study in which NZ was just one case study rather than the focus of attention). In fact, even such basic things as not being able to access a university library greatly impended my ability to do the secondary research required for the book to be comprehensive and thorough in its analysis. If one thinks of the cost of buying specialised books and subscriptions to professional journals and other pertinent material (for example, a single individual subscription to one political science journal can cost US$400/year), then it should be clear that writing academic books involving in-depth research in a social science discipline requires institutional support that I no longer had. Confronted by that reality, I shelved the project even as I thought of resurrecting it later or at least eventually writing an academic article that summarised my findings.

Ten years or so later, I have started to look at what I wrote and decided that I am going to except the introduction here at KP in order to share the conceptual premises and analytic framework used in it. I am hoping that some readers will find the argument of interest and if so inclined, offer critiques, comments and suggestions. I am not sure that the book will ever come to fruition but perhaps I can get that academic article out or simply publish it on the consultancy website even if it is more of a think piece than a targeted assessment of a matter relevant to paying client interests. Most importantly, it gives me a reason to re-visit the original argument and make updates as part of the review and revision process.

The excerpts will begin to appear in the next post. I shall try to keep them relatively short but true to the original book narrative.

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Media Link: “A View from Afar” on deterrence versus de-escalation.

In this week’s “A View from Afar” podcast Selwyn Manning and I return to the airwaves to discuss whether deterrence is still a useful concept in international relations and, if so, whether it applies equally to all states. We also consider whether deterrence contributes to international security dilemmas and whether it is antithetical to de-escalation. You can find the show here.

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Thoughts about contemporary troubles.

This will be s short post. It stems from observations I made elsewhere about what might be characterised as some macro and micro aspects of contemporary collective violence events. Here goes.

The conflicts between Israel and Palestine and France and Kanaks in New Caledonia are two post-colonial legacies born of reneged settler promises and betrayed agreements leading to dispossession, occupation, poverty, alienation and generational hatreds. Israel and France must recognize this for peace to obtain. So far they have not. Israel has opted for its own version of the final solution, something that, if not a “full” genocide in the formal sense of the word, sure has the looks of ethnic cleansing. That includes the West Bank, where the IDF is demolishing 2,500 Palestinian homes safeguarded under a previous pact in order to clear land for more Israeli settlements. Given Israel’s defiance of international norms and conventions, it appears that it has gone full “rogue” in its quest to drive the Palestinians from their ancestral lands.

Israel’s support in the West derives from its history and strategic location and orientation. It is a major provider of intelligence to Western governments and is a nominally pro-Western bulwark in the Middle East. Its patrons and supporters do not want to alienate it for fear of losing access to its formidable intelligence collection capabilities in the Middle East, which until recently meant casting blind eye on the increasingly apartheid-like behaviour it exhibits towards Palestinians. Israel operates with impunity against Palestinians and other antagonists because, in a sense, it has a Western insurance policy or “get out of jail free card”because of its geostrategic role. This has turned it into lightening rod for Global South versus Global North confrontation.

With that as the bottom line, peace in the Levant does not look possible anytime soon.

In another North-versus-South friction, France has opted for a different path but with a similar, albeit less catastrophic result. With the 1998 Nomuea Accords it proposed an incremental, referendum-based 20 year process towards national independence, or at least considerable political autonomy for New Caledonians. Instead, the French encouraged mass immigration by French mainlanders, (including ex-police and military members) before each referendum (three in total, in 2018, 2020 and 2020). 40,000 French immigrants entered New Caledonia between 1999 and 2021. This skewed the electoral demographics in favour of the anti-independence blocs, something accentuated in the final referendum when representatives of the indigenous Kanak people, particularly the FLINK political movement, boycotted the plebiscite because of disagreements about post-Covid impact on Kanak turnout. The 2018 and 2020 referenda saw 56, then 53 percent of the vote go to the anti-independence bloc. in 2021, with the boycott and an overall turnout of less than 44 percent of eligible voters, the anti-independence vote climbed to 91 percent, opening questions about its legitimacy. This did not deter France from moving ahead with drafting a new political charter for this “sui generis” overseas territory.

With independence rejected, France continues to control the military, police, justice, immigration, higher education, Treasury and civil service under the Noumea Accord, with limited autonomy conferred to the New Caledonia government in diplomatic affairs, taxation, border control and local governance. It is now in the process of drafting a New Caledonian constitution that gives recent immigrants more voting rights in local and provincial elections (diluting Kanak voting influence) and consolidating French administrative control of core aspects of public policy. That is the cause of the current troubles.

Incidentally, for a very good independent source on South Pacific issues, see Prof. David Robie’s Asia-Pacific Report. Here is a sample article but there is lots more.

It appears that France never intended for New Caledonia to achieve independence because the sui generis territory is too strategically important for it to relinquish full control. It is the home to the French Pacific Army (5,000 troops) and military aviation and naval units now increasingly engaged in anti-PRC containment operations in the Southwest Pacific. With PRC inroads made in other Melanesian countries such as the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, France and its Western partners (also former imperial powers or servitor imperialist allies) fear a type of domino effect occurring should New Caledonia “fall” under Chinese influence. This concern is compounded by the fact that New Caledonia is the 4th largest producer of the world’s nickel, accounting for 20-30 percent of the world’s nickel reserves, 90 percent of New Caledonia’s non-tourist export revenues, 20 percent of the country’s GDP and 40 percent of its employment. Given the taxation revenues accrued to France as a result of the nickel sector and the fact that the sector does not (yet) have a dominant Chinese presence in it, France has strategic reasons to want to retain control of the territory in which it operates.

The bottom line of the French position vis a vis New Caledonia is geostrategic, and its approach to the issue of independence a cloak for its real intent. Here too, the prospect for a long-term peaceful resolution seem distant even if the amount of violence is much less than in Palestine.

On a micro level, video has surfaced of young female IDF soldiers captured by uniformed Hamas fighters after an assault on an IDF base in Southern Israel. The video was released by families of the soldiers in order to exert pressure on Netanyahu’s government to negotiate their release. To be clear, the soldiers and their male counterparts are prisoners of war and therefore protected by the Geneva Convention. They might be freed in a POW exchange but Hamas must abide by the Convention in any event. It is in Hamas’s self-interest to do so, both for negotiation purposes but also as a sign of its accepting international norms as part of its claim to legitimacy as an agent of the Palestinian people. It is then up to the global community as to how to respond, and in this regard the move by Ireland, Norway and Spain to recognise a Palestinian State is a step in the correct direction because it might encourage moderation in the Hamas leadership with an eye towards that end.

On the other hand, although the international criminal court (ICC) charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity against Israeli and Hamas leaders is salutary albeit largely symbolic given the geopolitical realities of the moment, it adds a complicating factor in any attempts to get Hamas to moderate, much as is the case with the hardliners in the Israeli government. But if used as a coercive negotiating tool (i.e., as a stick rather than a carrot) to encourage moderation on both sides in pursuit of a durable ceasefire in exchange for dropping of the charges (known in the human rights literature as an ethical dilemma), then perhaps it too can help construct the bounded rationality in which moderation, negotiation and compromise is seen as the best option by both sides.

In the meantime we can only hope that when it comes to the treatment of prisoners held by Hamas and the IDF, the rules outlined in the Convention are respected. I shall not hold my breath on that.