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.
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
A question of size.
Small size generally means large vulnerability. The perception of threat is broader and often more immediate for small countries. The feeling of comparative weakness, of exposure to risk, and of potential intimidation by larger powers often permeates the security perspectives of small states. Some even exhibit “garrison state” approaches to national security, including adoption of policies of preemption. Israel is the salient case of recent times, but in this sample Chile has a history of garrison state outlooks due to its narrow land mass and extensive land and sea borders (leading to a lack of strategic “depth”). Irrespective of the specific response, such concerns about relative weakness and vulnerability translate into a pressing need to accurately read evolving threat scenarios, changing geopolitical contexts and strategic circumstances.
This is true regardless of physical location. As World War Two demonstrated, advances in military technology allow for global force projection by large military powers, something that even island states like New Zealand have experienced first hand. Thus, regardless of the lengths to which they are compelled to go in order to defend themselves, small countries often believe that they must be more vigilant than large countries against a variety of potential threats both near and afar. For example, domestic instability in Indonesia, the Solomon Islands or Papua New Guinea may hold relatively little concern to the United States, China or Russia beyond a potentially adverse impact on economic interests and the possibility of local proxies dragging them into direct conflict. The growing Chinese submarine presence shadowing its blue water fishing fleet in the South Pacific is of relatively low concern to European and African powers. But for New Zealand, instability in the Melanesian archipelago and Southwest Pacific or militarisation of the Antarctic constitute more immediate threats. That can either be by drawing New Zealand into direct military intervention, or from ethnic conflicts in the Solomons or New Guinea spilling over onto other island states in the Western Pacific and/or expatriate communities located throughout the region. For its part, the Chinese naval presence in the Southwest Pacific is seen as an emerging threat to important sea lanes of communication between East/Southeast Asia and the Antipodes. This has become a major concern for New Zealand as well as its larger security partners.
For its part, Chile has more to be concerned about Peruvian maritime territorial ambitions (and vice versa) than Brazil does with Peruvian land encroachment, while Portugal has more to fear from unchecked North African mass migration and the potential for backlash produced by its involvement in NATO deployments than does a similarly sized country like Austria. On the other hand many small nations do not exhibit undue preoccupation with external threats, either because they are seen to not exist, or more often, precisely because they are included in security alliances such as NATO. But that is exactly why they join: if they felt secure they would not feel the need to align with such umbrella organizations, or to seek the bi-lateral protection of larger defense patrons. To the contrary, the starting point for most small states is a quest for security that they find impossible to achieve on their own. How they do so is secondary to the imperative that they do so.
The issue, again, is a matter of size. Beyond the elements of discipline, motivation and will, a nation’s ability to defend itself, much less wage war, is determined by the size of its resource base. Size is physical, economic and human. Advantages in size translate into military strength, be it via economies of scale (production of basic military base materials such as iron and oil), population (ability to muster troops), or geography (that is, the concept of strategic depth (land mass and terrain under arms), the larger of which makes for difficult conquest by external aggressors (unless they adopt piecemeal warfare approaches such as those being employed by Russia in the Ukraine, which are susceptible to marshalling-of-force defensive strategies). Needless to say, the ability to translate resource advantages into war-fighting capability passes through a raft of other intervening variables such as political legitimacy, ideological motivation, technological sophistication and the like. But all things being equal, size confers military advantage. For those lacking in human and natural resource bases, sources of comparative advantage, or economies of scale and population numbers upon which to draw on, policies of complete self-defense are impossible. For them, neutrality, subordination or alliance are the strategic options.
To be sure, the value of well-trained citizen militias like those of Switzerland in deterring aggressors by raising the costs of invasion cannot be discounted. When strategically organized into a prolonged armed resistance employing guerrilla (irregular, non-conventional) tactics, small states may even stand a respectable chance of prevailing in an asymmetric war of attrition against larger adversaries whose vital interests are not at stake and who choose not to wage wars of annihilation. Vietnam is a case in point, and Cuban defense strategy is premised on such a scenario (although the origins of the Stalinist regimes in both countries brought with it the help of larger military patrons, which, if lessened now, guaranteed their initial survival and consolidation). But for most small countries, foreign military assistance and mutual defense agreements are the most sought after key to national security.This makes small states, and their military planners, especially conscious of changes in the geostrategic environments in which they operate.
Dependent as they are on their connections with larger powers, on the specific nature of these relations, on their internal political dynamics and on the ongoing relations between the larger powers themselves, security practitioners in small democracies must be able to respond quickly to changing geopolitical events and shifting strategic doctrines. This may not always be in accordance with the perspectives of civilian political elites or the public at large, who do not necessarily perceive security issues in a manner akin to those directly responsible for national defense. In fact, quite the contrary often occurs.
Absent dire, immediate and compelling threats to national sovereignty or physical integrity, the public in many small democracies see spending on external defense as a luxury that comes at the expense of other core areas of state endeavour such as health, education and welfare. The public perception often is that being small and insignificant on the world strategic stage means that these countries do not attract the unwanted attention of larger states, and when they do attract such attention, they can rely on others for protection. Conversely, political and military elites in small democracies are more cognizent of the fact that it is the commitment of military forces to external security roles, be they multilateral or bilateral in nature, along with or beyond cultural-diplomatic or economic and trade ties, that secure them the protection of larger patrons.
Because of this difference in perspective, spending on external defense often translates into a losing election proposition for democratic governments in small countries. This is due to the fact that domestic policy areas (including domestic anti-crime efforts) are more vital than military security when it comes to the reproduction of the contingent mass consent that is the foundational stone of democratic regimes. In any political system based upon competitive elections and contingent mass consent, foreign military commitments are particularly susceptible to the vagaries of public opinion, especially in times of peace. In small democracies the issue is particularly acute given the limited resource base available, which means that military involvement in foreign theaters requires universally compelling rationales that transcend patriotic impulses exploitable–one way or the other–during electoral cycles. In most cases the comfort of a larger security umbrella is the preferred option, with unilateral external force projection being the exception to the norm.
The was evident in Portugal in the 1980s and 1990s, where the slow process of post-authoritarian military reform towards new external missions was not so much due to ingrained corporate attitudes and bureaucratic entrenchment within the armed forces that favored continuation of internal security roles. Rather, it was more a product of two internal factors: inter-service rivalries over the strategic orientation to be adopted, and competing government priorities. The latter were driven by public concerns with domestic issues rather than military projection in the absence of immediate threats, especially given the “insurance policy” provided by Portuguese membership in NATO. (Vasconcelos, 1986; 1988). The former were driven by conflicts within the armed forces about which service branch should be given leadership priority and corresponding resources given the new strategic posture. The Army? The Navy? The Air Force? How should they be organised and how much should each be funded? That was at the core of the inter-service disagreements over future force composition and projection.
But are small democracies any more vulnerable or their concerns with military preparedness and projection any different than those of other small countries with non-democratic forms of rule? The answer is yes, and the issue is one of internal politics rather than external threat realities. Small authoritarian regimes may at times divert scarce societal resources to external defense operations because domestic mass consent is not sought or put to legitimate tests of accountability. What this means is that unlike small democracies, which must make the case for external military involvement in a way that passes successfully through the filter of popular consent, small authoritarian regimes simply do not have to do so. The colonial defense strategies of authoritarian Portugal are emblematic in this regard, and Chile’s territorial sabre rattling against Argentina and Peru under the Pinochet dictatorship was a manipulation of rather than a response to genuine threats or nationalistic sentiment on the part of the Chilean population. The fore-mentioned cases of Cuba and Vietnam, however “popular” they claim to be, are further examples of small authoritarian regimes unconstrained by the filter of freely given consent. Moreover, under all authoritarian regimes, big or small, the military-security apparatuses are primarily used for internal control, with the difference between inclusionary and exclusionary dictatorships being read by their management of political opposition, ideological mobilization capabilities, control of productive investment and labor market conditioners. In all cases, public expenditures on security in small authoritarian regimes far outstrip those seen under small democratic regimes, and their capabilities of control of the domestic population often exceed even those of larger authoritarian brethren (e.g. Singapore versus Myanmar).
NEXT: The notion of geopolitical periphery.
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.
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.
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.
Recent elections around the world got me to thinking about voting. At a broad level, voting involves processes and choices. Embedded in both are the logics that go into “sincere” versus “tactical” voting. “Sincere” voting is usually a matter of preferred choice, specifically of a candidate or outcome. Simply put, a person votes for their preferred option. But what about “lesser evil” or “second best” choices? Are they “sincere”? Rather than a matter of genuine sincerity of choice, the general demarcation separating “sincere” voting from “tactical” voting is not so much the motive for choice or the specific choices involved but the all or nothing of the process–it is the final selection point before an elected entity or outcome is confirmed. In other words, sincere choices are end choices, regardless of the logics by which they are made.
This allows us to distinguish between elections as a process versus elections as choices between options. Until the last vote is counted in the final round of voting, everything is tactical even if choices for individuals are sincere in the moment.
Under Mixed Member Proportionate (MMP) electoral systems like that in NZ voters do tactical voting all of the time. They consider the relationship between party and candidate votes and choose accordingly. Sometimes voters go with a straight party-candidate vote but other times they split votes between party and candidates. That depends on how they view specific party chances in inter-party competition, the electorate candidate in relation to their party, that candidate in relation to the electorate voting history (does she stand a chance?), and the merits of other candidates in a given electorate. Much of this assessment is done unconsciously in the moment of choice but in any event the voter’s calculation is multi-level and relative in nature.
A vote is tactical when we vote for a candidate or party or coalition or ballot option with the shadow of the future in mind, as far as we can foresee it. We may do so for defensive as well as win-seeking reasons, like what happened in France this past week, where the Left removed competing candidates in a number of electorates in order to improve the chances of designated “unity” candidates defeating rightwing opponents in the second round of parliamentary elections. That was done in order to help defeat the serious possibility of a rightwing victory in the second round parliamentary elections after the first round saw the Right win a significant plurality of the vote. The tactic of limiting inter-Left competition was defensive in nature rather than a “go for the win” effort because all involved understood the costs of allowing a rightwing victory and put their immediate preferences (and differences) aside in order to confront the common threat.
When it comes to tactical voting people may also vote for lesser evils rather than preferred options because the context in which voting occurs may advise them to do so. Voters may simply have to choose between otherwise distasteful candidates or options. In multiple round voting it is the process as much as the immediate outcomes that motivate voters in the first instance, as they are seeking to do something now in order to set up a better sincere choice option in the future. Think of the US primary system, where party candidates are selected not just for their merits but also with an eye towards their “electability” in the general elections. A candidate with lesser ideological purity or Party credentials may win in the selection round because primary voters feel that s/he is more likely to be elected in a general election where sincere choices are made.
On the other side of the coin, as a campaign strategy, what Labour recently did in the UK when it flooded electorates with candidates, even in Tory strongholds where it traditionally had zero chance of competing, was a “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” first-order approach. Labour put up slates of candidates who in many cases have little to no experience in politics and who were in a number of instances sent as electoral cannon fodder into historically secure Conservative electorates. Labour strategists banked on the belief that public disgruntlement with the Conservatives would spill over into Labour winning at least some traditionally Tory seats, and in that they were successful. But this was just the first order outcome. The second order outcome is how these candidates-turned-MPs will perform given their lack of experience. Some will do well but if enough turn out to be incompetent or worse, then Labour runs the risk of incurring a voter backlash against it in just one electoral cycle. That is the second-order problem of the “throw at the wall” candidate selection tactic: good for the short-run, but a bit uncertain over the longer term.
For his part, French President Macron has ruled out working with the largest of the Left parties (“France Unbowed”) in the coalition that came first in the second round of the French parliamentary elections thanks to the defensive unity candidate first order manoeuvres, so is now trying to carve away smaller Left parties from the Left coalition so they can form a majority coalition with his Centrists. He apparently has promised the Prime Minister’s job to a Left candidate if they agree to his terms (in France the president selects the PM). But if he cannot do this, then France will be in political gridlock through and beyond the Olympics. So his first order tactical gambit of calling snap elections and forming a defensive alliance against the Rightists worked, but now the second order consequences embedded in the process must be confronted and resolved less the otherwise unwelcome triumph of the Right become reality.
In Iran the reformist Pezeshkian won the run-off election against a conservative hard-liner. The latter could be seen as a “continuist” following the approach of his dead predecessor (recently killed in a helicopter crash), whereas Pezeshkian seeks a thaw in Iran’s foreign relations with the West and a relaxation of restrictions on social freedoms at home. But since the Council of Elders and the Ayatollah Khamenei are the real power brokers in Iran, perhaps they allowed Pezeshkian to run (they did not allow any other reformist to do so) in order to gauge public sentiment and/or use the elections as an escape value that eases social pressures on the regime by allowing the electorate to institutionally vent its views. Think of it as an Iranian political pressure cooker, with the electorate permitted to let off pent-up steam during the election process.
The first round of that vote only brought 40 percent of the electorate to the polls, but the second round brought in 53 percent. Beyond the narrowing of the field of candidates in the second round, the turnout and strong majority vote for Pezeshkian demonstrates the apparent need for some reform-mongering when it comes to policy making. This is a strong signal that the Elders must consider if they are to keep a lid on things. They have been sent a message about what the public wants in public policy, especially (judging from field reports) about social mores and behaviours. But what about the hard-liners? They have the guns, are not going away and are ill-disposed towards Pezeshkian’s proposals.. So the second order question is to reform monger or not and if so, how much is too much? Again, it is a process, and the choice of Pezeshkian is a first-order means towards a perhaps necessary but uncertain end.
In the US the Biden question is not only should he stay or should he go, but also how and when? Sooner or later? At the convention or before? Does he designate an heir if he goes (presumably Vice President Harris) or does he throw it open to a short-list of previously vetted candidates? The James Carville opinion piece in the New York Times was an interesting proposition, with its geographically organized Town Halls acting as an extended job interview process for designated candidates. And the George Clooney op-ed in the same newspaper pretty much spells out why Biden has moved from being an asset to a liability for the Democrats. Here too there is a process as well as the individual to consider, something that must converge into an electable platform that can defeat Trump. So the first order choice is about Biden staying or going, the second order choice is about when and how to replace him and the third order choice is about the agenda and team needed to defeat Trump. With those three parts of the process resolved, a sincere choice can be presented to the electorate in November.
This is about more than Joe Biden. In a democracy people serve their party in the first instance, the party serves the country in the second instance and the country serves the nation in the last instance (“country” being a political entity with territorial boundaries codified in the notion of “State” and “nation” being a political society or culture legally represented by a country). For the Democrats the issue is not just about choice of a presidential candidate in light of Biden’s perceived limitations (age, fragility, cognitive decline), but about the institutional process by which their candidate choice is made. The process is time-sensitive given the upcoming Election date, so the choices must be soon and facilitated by the institutional process. It remains to be seen if Biden and other Democrats fully understand the difference between his fortunes and those of the party–and the country itself, but if they do, then the process of candidate selection is as important as the candidates themselves.
Again, I am no voting behaviour expert (too much bean-counting and tea leaf-reading for me), so please take this very incomplete and shallow sketch as a a preliminary rumination about choice and process in voting. I will leave for another day discussion of certain hard realities about voting in practice–things like voter suppression, gerrymandering, redistricting, incumbent advantage, campaign finance laws and loopholes, polling, etc.–as well as the use of game theoretic and AI models as predictive tools in voting analysis. That is best left to those who focus on such things. But having said that I do think that recent elections offer an opportunity to ponder the process as well as the choices that democratic elections involve. Hence this note.
Author’s Postscript: This essay serves as the basis of my remarks for the “A View from Afar” podcast of July 14, 2024.
After a hiatus of over four months Selwyn Manning and I finally got it together to re-start the “A View from Afar” podcast series. We shall see how we go but aim to do 2 episodes per month if possible.
Here we start of with a catch up on events since the last podcast of 2023. Selwyn liked the KP moment of friction post from April 1, and so we used it as the stepping stone into a discussion that incorporates material from several recent KP posts and other news. I hope that you find the podcast of interest. You can find it here.
In strategic studies “friction” is a term that it is used to describe the moment when military action encounters adversary resistance. “Friction” is one of four (along with an unofficial fifth) “F’s” in military strategy, which includes force (kinetic mass), fluidity (of manoeuvre), fog (of battle) as well as uncertainty (of outcomes, which is usually referred to in military circles as the “oh F**k” factor)). Friction comes from many causes, including terrain, countervailing force, psychological factors, the adversary’s broader capabilities and more. As German strategist Karl von Clausewitz noted, friction can be encountered at the three levels of warfare: strategic, operational and tactical.In other words, “Clausewitzian friction” is not just confined to the battlefield.
The notion of friction is drawn from the physical world and has many permutations. It is not confined to one particular element or dimension. It is about opposition, even if of similar elements or forces, including the element of will. For example, when they meet, fluids and air of different weights create turbulence. Fire on different fire extinguishes or expands. Earth on earth leads to crumbling or inertial momentum. The product of the combination of these physical forces, say fluid on air or earth or fire, depends on the relative weight of each. The same goes for psychological factors in human contests. Mutatis mutandis (i.e., with the necessary changes having been made), this is applicable to international relations. It may seem like a conceptual stretch but I see the use of the notion of friction in terms of international relations more as an example of conceptual transfer, using Clausewitz as a bridge between the physical and the political/diplomatic worlds (more on this later).
In the past I have written at length about the systemic realignment and long transition in post Cold War international relations. The phrase refers to the transition from a unipolar post-Cold War international system dominated by the US (as the “hegemon” of the liberal internationalist world order) to a multipolar system that includes rising Great Powers like the PRC and India and constellations of middle powers such as the other BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, South Africa and recently added members like Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Ethiopia and perhaps Argentina (if it ratifies its accession)) as representatives of the rising “Global South.” In spite of their differences, these rising power blocs are counterpoised against what remains of the liberal institutionalist order, including the EU, Japan, South Korea and Australia. I have noted that the long moment of transition is characterised by international norm erosion and increased rule violations and the consequent emergence of conflict as the systems regulator until a new status quo is established (and from which that new status quo emerges). That conflict may come in many guises–economic, diplomatic, cultural and, perhaps inevitably, military or some combination thereof. When conflicts turn military, the moment of force has arrived. And when force is met by opposing force, then friction is inevitable.
Here I extend the notion of friction to include the international moment that we are currently living in. That is, I have conceptually transferred the notion of friction to the international arena because “transfer” in this instance means applying the notion of friction to a wider environment beyond the physical plane without distorting its original meaning. That allows me to avoid the methodologically dubious practice of conceptual stretching (where a term is stretched and distorted from its original meaning in order to analytically fit a different type of thing).
The long transitional moment is what has taken us to this point and allowed me to undertake the transfer, and it is here in the transitional trajectory from unipolar to multipolar international systems where the future global status quo will be defined. It is a decisive moment because it is the period where force has become the major arbiter of who rises and who falls in the systemic transitional shuffle. Given that there are many competitors in the international arena who are capable and willing to use force as well as other means to advance their interests, I suggest that the global community has reached its moment of friction, that is, the turning point in the long transitional process. Everything that has come before was the lead-in. Everything that comes after will be the result of this conflict-defined moment.
It is no exaggeration to write this. Besides the Ruso-Ukrainian war and the Israel-Hamas war, there is the armed stand-off in the Red Sea between Iran-backed Houthis and a naval coalition led but he US, the ongoing skirmishes between PRC naval forces and those of the Philippines, Vietnam and Western naval forces as well as the PRC military threats to Taiwan, the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict along the Israel-Lebanon border, Islamist violence in the Sahel and Eastern Africa as well as in Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other other parts of Central Asia, ongoing conflict in Syria between Assad’s Russian-backed forces, the remnants of ISIS and Western-backed rebels, the Turkish-Kurd conflict along the Turkish, Syrian and Iraqi borders, the civil war in Libya, escalating fighting between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda over mineral rich areas in and around the eastern Congolese city of Goma (in which private military companies and irredentist militias are also involved), narco-violence in Latin America that has reached the level of challenging state monopolies over organised violence in places like Ecuador and parts of Mexico, piracy in the Indian Ocean and in the Malacca Straits, cross-border ethno-religious conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, the PRC and Gaza, tribal conflict in Papua New Guinea and more. Norms and rules governing interstate as well as domestic forms of collective behaviour are honoured in the breach, not as a matter of course. Individuals, groups and States are increasingly atomised in their perspectives and interactions and resort to the ultimate default option–conflict–to pursue their interests in the face of other’s opposition..
Friction extends to economics. The era of globalisation of free trade has ended as nations revert to post-pandemic protectionism or focus on “near-“and “friend-shoring” in order to avoid supply chain bottlenecks resultant from commodity production concentration in a small number of countries. Although not a trade pact strictly speaking, the PRC Belt and Road Initiative undermines Western trade agreements like the TPPA and lesser regional arrangements because it ties developmental assistance and financing to Chinese industries and markets. Intellectual property and technology theft is wide-spread despite International conventions against them (endnote just by the PRC). The era of Bretton Woods is over and the agencies that were its institutional pillars (like the World Bank, IMF and regional agencies such as the IADB and ADB) are now increasingly challenged by entities emerging from the Global South like the China Development Bank and BRICS common market initiatives.
In addition, as part of international norms erosion and rules violations, many diplomatic agreements and treaties such as those prohibiting the use of chemical weapons and even genocide are also now largely ignored because, in the end, there is no international enforcement capability to reinforce what is written. The International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court can impose sanctions and issue arrest warrants but have no enforcement authority of their own. The UN can authorise peace-keeping missions and issue resolutions but is subject to Security Council vetoes on the one hand and belligerent non-compliance in the other (besides Israel ignoring UN demands for a cease-fire and humanitarian pauses in Gaza, people may forget that there are UN peace keeping missions in the Sinai, Golan Heights and Israel-Lebanon border, including NZDF personnel among them, because these “blue helmet” missions have had no ameliorating impact on the behaviour of the participants in the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah-Syria conflict). Adverse rulings in international courts have not stopped the PRC island-building and aggressive military diplomacy in the South China Sea. The examples are many. Given that state of affairs, States and other actors increasingly turn to force to pursue their interests.
Whatever restraint was promoted by the laws of war and international conflict-resolution institutions during the post-Cold War interregnum has been abandoned or become exceptions to the new anarchic rule. One might even say that the international community is increasingly living in a state of nature, even if the terms “anarchy” and “state of nature” are loose interpretations of what Hobbes wrote about when he considered the Leviathan of international politics. But the basic idea should be clear: the liberal internationalist system has broken down and a new order is emerging from the conflict landscape that characterises the contemporary international arena.
Again, the friction is not just things like the military confrontations between Russia, Russian and Iranian-backed proxies in the Middle East and the PRC against a range of Western and Western-oriented nations in the Western Pacific. The BRICS have proposed to develop a single unitary currency to rival the Euro and are openly calling for a major overhaul of international organizations and institutions that they (rightfully so), see as made by and for post-colonial Western interests. But the question is whether what they have in mind as a replacement will be any better in addressing the needs of the Global South while respecting the autonomy of the Global North. My hunch is that it will not, and will just add another front to the moment of friction.
I shall not continue enunciating the reasons why I believe that we have arrived at an international moment of friction (e.g. cultural degradation and social vulgarisation, etc.). That is because I cannot specify what will be come given that push has now led to shove, nor can I offer a solution set to the problems embedded in and underwriting this sorry moment. What I can say is, just like the fact that we need to learn to embrace uncertainty in the transitional process since outcomes are not assured and guarantees cannot be offered (although some industries like tobacco, liquor, weapons and insurance all profit during times of uncertainty and market hedging strategies become the common response of risk-adverse actors to uncertain economic times, so can be calculated or anticipated), so too we must, if not embrace, then learn to prepare for an era in which friction will be the dominant mode of international transaction for some time to come.
For small countries like NZ, repeating empty mantras about foreign policy “independence” no longer cuts it even as a slogan. The moment of international friction poses some existential questions about where NZ stands in the transitional process, how it will balance competing international interests when it comes to NZ foreign and security policy, and about who to side with when conflict comes.
Because it will.
Forget the date. This is no April Fools joke.
My son is back home recovering well. There are some more serious sequels to come, but for the moment we will enjoy the end of year respite and welcome in what we hope is a better 2024 even with the knowledge that he is not out of the woods yet.
I remain unhappy with much of the coverage of the Hamas-Israel conflict in NZ, so threw some thoughts together on the consultancy social media account. They are just sketches designed as food for thought rather than deep analysis. I have fleshed them out a bit here.
First. What does it take for Israel to be labelled a “pariah State” and subjected to international sanctions? North Korea, Iran and Myanmar have all been branded as such and sanctioned because of their behavior (seeking nukes, human rights abuses). So what is the threshold for Israel? Or is it because it is “of” or backed by the West (specifically, the US) that it gets a longer definitional rope? I realise that there is not specific criteria for why and when a State is designated as a pariah and sanctions invoked (which themselves are not uniform or standard in nature), but surely Israel has moved into that territory. Or not?
On the other side, when it comes to those who attacked Israel on October 7, note their differences. Islamic Jihad is a religious extremist movement that pursues holy war against non-believers, Jews in particular. Hamas are an ethno-nationalist movement with some religious extremist elements that seeks to reclaim traditional lands lost to Israel. Their alliance is tactical more than strategic because their objectives overlap over the short-term but differ over the long term. They have common patrons (Iran/Russia), allies (Hezbollah/Houthis/Iraqi militias/Syria) and enemies (Israel/US/ West/Sunni oligarchies) but should not be seen as being a single entity.
The difference is important because Western corporate media tend to treat islamic Jihad and Hamas as a single organization, which implies a unified command, control, communications and intelligence-gathering (C3I) hierarchy. Although there is certainly a degree of coordination of weapons and intelligence transfers between them and their allies and integration of operational units such as what occurred on October 7, the leadership structures of the organisations differ as well as their long term objectives. More specifically, it is my read that Islamic Jihad desires a holy war and the establishment of a Caliphate in the Levant and larger Middle East, whereas Hamas wishes to reclaim what has historically been known as Palestine (hence the phrase “from the river to the sea,” demarcating the territory between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean from the Lebanese/Israel/Syria border to the Red Sea). This well-known map shows the area of claim and what has happened to it since 1946.
The fact that Islamic Jihad and Hamas have different long-term objectives means that they are potentially divisible when it comes to both military approaches as well as diplomatic negotiating strategies.They and their patrons will resist the latter as a divide and conquer approach, and they will be correct in interpreting the situation as such. But for the larger set of interlocutors trying to achieve a solution to the current status quo impasse and endless cycle of violence, separating the approach to Islamic Jihad from that towards Hamas makes sense. Remember that Hamas wants to replace the Palestinian Authority as the main agent of the Palestinian people and has strong support in the West Bank in that regard (the Palestinian Authority is headquartered in the West Bank but is totally subject to Israeli edicts and controls). Islamic Jihad would prefer to see the current conflict broaden into a regional war out of which a new Caliphate will emerge from the ashes. The Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and Shiite militia attacks on US bases in Iraq are part of that effort.
Remember that Islamic Jihad and its allies do not need to win any major war in order to prevail (they militarily cannot). But their efforts have already caught the attention of the Arab “street,” where restive populations see the indifference or complicity of their oligarchical leaders when it comes to Israel as further proof that they are Western puppets. The idea is to expose who the real Masters are, undermine their Arab servants and promote jihad on a regional, grassroots level. it may seem like a pipe dream to those of us far from the streets of places like Cairo, Amman, Tangiers or Riyadh, but if and when anger takes to the streets of such places, then the outcomes are by no means certain when it comes to regime status quo stability.
It does not appear that Islamic Jihad will accept territorial concessions in order to achieve peace, as its project is larger than removing Israel and Jews from the Levant. Hamas, on the other hand, is arguably more nationalist than religious in nature, which means that the ideological focus is on specific ancestral territory rather than on religious orientation (even if Jews make for convenient historical scapegoats). It is also something that is obliquely seen in the fact that although Palestinians are largely Sunni Muslim in religious identification, Hamas’s main support come from Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite Iran and the Shiite Alawite (Assad) regime in Syria. These patrons and allies well understand that the Palestinians are much like the Kurds further to the East, claiming ancestral homelands that have long since been carved up by foreign occupiers (not just European colonialists) and who for many historical reasons are reviled by their co-religious neighbours (hence the refusal to grant or cede territory for either a Kurdish or Palestinian homeland by Sunni-majority regional neighbours or the acceptance of Palestinian refugee flows from the current conflict by these same States).
We must also factor in that both Hamas and Islamic Jihad have factions within them, including political and military wings, (comparatively) moderates and militants, pragmatists versus “idealists” in their ranks. Islamic Jihad has a more unified political-military command (which makes it vulnerable) even when using a decentralised guerrilla military strategy), while Hamas has separated its political and military wings while trying to professionalize its fighters. In any case, harder or easier, these divides can be exploited if the will is there. Conversely, if the divisions are self-recognised and there is a unity of spirit against an immediate foe n face of the odds, they can be mitigated even under the stresses of overwhelming kinetic assault.
In the end, Islamic Jihad is an existential threat to the Middle Eastern status quo because it, like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, want to overthrow the established order even if its current capability to do so is minimal and dependent on the help of others. Hamas is a stronger irregular warfare actor as well as an ideological movement in the local and international imagination because of its territorial focus, so does not pose as much a threat to the broader regional order other than the fact that it’s success could encourage similar insurrectionary movements in the near elsewhere.
Many difficulties exist on the other side of the road to elusive peace in Palestine. Israel will have to cede occupied territory for Hamas to even be approachable regarding negotiations, but what with the combination of recent orthodox Jewish immigrants from the US, Russia and elsewhere fuelling the settler movement, and with the Netanyahu government leaning hard right as a result of the conservative religious extremists in his cabinet, leading to the Israeli government arming of settlers and protecting them with military units, that is clearly not an option any time soon if ever. Israelis are hinting at the Sinai Peninsula as a place to re-settle Palestinians, but Egypt wants no part of that, nor for that matter do the Palestinians themselves. So the first thing that will need to happen is for the Israeli government to change and for it to abandon its settler policies. Again, this seems like a very high mountain to climb.
Another obstacle is that Netanyahu and his supporters may see the situation as a window of opportunity. They may liken the move to eradicate Hamas from Gaza and drive its population out of the Strip as being akin to the Six Day 1967 War in which Israel stripped Jordan of the West Bank, Syria of the Golan Heights and Egypt of the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip. Moreover, given the surprise of the October 7 Hamas attack this year, it is clear that Netanyahu does not want to be seen as Golda Meir during the Yom Kippur (or Ramandan) War of 1973, when Israel was caught unprepared for an attack on October 6 by Egypt and Syria, leading to large early losses for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Even though Israel ultimately won that war in 20 days, Prime Minister Meir was castigated for the lack of preparedness or forewarning and her coalition lost a majority in the legislative election the next year, resulting in her resignation. Netanyahu is acutely aware of her fate as well of the actions he took that helped facilitate Hamas launching its attack (like ignoring intelligence warnings and re-deploying active duty troops from the Gaza border to protect illegal settlers in the occupied West Bank). He knows that politically he is a dead man walking unless he comes up with something spectacular.
In his mind and that of his supporters and colleagues, seizing Gaza may be just that. Since there is no credible international deterrent levelled against Israel and a lack of enforcement capacity to stop its prosecution of the war even if there was a consensus that it has gone too far with its collective punishment/ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza, Netanyahu makes the plight of the Gazans a UN refugee problem while the IDF consolidates its physical control of the territory. That allows him to “eliminate” Hamas (and many innocents) as a physical entity in the Strip, opening the door for Israeli occupation and settlement. If that is the case, he may well overcome domestic anger at his pre-war actions and seeming disregard for Israeli hostages and instead ride a wave of nationalist sentiment to another term in office.
Should that happen, the shrinking map of Palestine shown above will have to updated yet again.