Russia’s recently launched bombing of opposition targets in Syria is a brutal reminder of the decline of Western influence in the Middle East and North Africa.
In Afghanistan, the growing military might of Taliban fighters, who are now in open warfare with Afghan security forces, has exposed the weaknesses of the NATO-led mission in that country. Since the alliance’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in December 2014 after an eleven-year stint there, the country is lurching into another war.
Meanwhile, the United States’ decision to leave Iraq in December 2011, when the government in Baghdad was paralyzed by sectarian interests and the security forces were unprepared for later taking on the so-called Islamic State, has plunged the country into a new war.
And don’t forget Libya, where in March 2011 a NATO-led mission used its United Nations mandate, anchored in the responsibility to protect, to get rid of Libyan strongman leader Muammar Qaddafi. But NATO didn’t bother to consider the day after. The vacuum was filled by a plethora of competing tribes, Islamist forces, and a handful of genuine democrats. State building is not their priority, nor was it NATO’s.
The European Union’s 28 member states are now collectively faced with three unpalatable truths that expose Europe’s appalling lack of strategy, foresight, and understanding of crisis management.
The first is Europe’s—but also the United States’—inability to do state building. The second is the questionable impact of hard power. The third is the fallout of wars: millions of refugees on the move, fleeing the areas of conflict.
The EU provided over €3 billion ($3.3 billion) in development aid and humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan between 2002 and 2013. In that time, the Afghans could boast how many girls were attending school for the first time and how many women were now able to work.
But neither the EU nor the United States was able to build strong state institutions that could preserve some of those gains. That would have required decades of commitment that the West was unwilling to invest.
Now, a mixture of deeply entrenched corruption, traditions, ethnic rivalries, and Taliban forces that never disappeared from the scene is coming back with a vengeance to undo the West’s intervention. Indeed, once it became clear that NATO’s military operation in Afghanistan was to be replaced by a small training mission, many competing groups quickly exploited the ensuing security vacuum.
The same could be said of Iraq. The 2003 U.S.-led military invasion, which actually destroyed the country’s preexisting state institutions, was not followed up by a sustained effort to build new ones. Libya is also another case in point.
The second issue is the efficacy of hard power. Military means can only be successful if they are followed up by a very long-term state-building strategy aimed at supporting and institutionalizing democracy.
This is what happened in Germany and Japan after 1945. That U.S. commitment was unqualified. Certainly, the Cold War played a crucial role in persuading the United States of the strategic need to bring stability to Western Europe and build democracy in Germany and Japan.
Had the United States neglected state building, America’s hard power would have been squandered. It would have done untold damage to postwar Europe’s stability, prosperity, and ability to defend itself against the Soviet Union. In short, without the duality of hard power and a long-term policy of soft power, countries have little or no chance of being stable.
In this context, Russia’s bombing of forces opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has little to do with the day after the conflict in terms of rebuilding state institutions. Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to intervene militarily in Syria could repeat the same mistakes of 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to protect Moscow’s ally in Kabul.
Finally, Europe (after Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey) is now picking up the pieces of these military ventures. Precisely because there are no stable, functioning state institutions—let alone the faintest hope of peace and freedom in several Middle Eastern countries—refugees are on the move.
And if any European government believes or hopes that Russia’s bombing campaign will end the flow of refugees, they are deceiving themselves. This is the new reality that European governments will have to accept.
It is questionable, however, whether Europe’s helplessness in the Middle East and its struggle to cope with refugees will make EU governments consider the miserable weaknesses of their foreign, security, and development aid policies.
Comments(4)
I find the comparison to the US engagement in Germany and Japan post-1945 somewhat misplaced. For starters the US had not been touched by war in its own homeland and had just emerged as the strongest economical and political power by far, it even had managed to design an international monetary system based on its own currency. Europe today doesn't have any of that - it's neither united (and any attempt at talking this flea circus into "unity" is doomed to fail) nor economically stable enough or even willing to project itself anywhere. At the same time the populations of both Japan and Germany were a lot mor homegenous than those of the problematic states, deep fissures as between the Shia and Sunni denominations didn't exist and disagreements were usually political in nature and dealt with in public discourse or parliamentary debates. The fundament for a working civil society was there in both Japan and Germany post-1945, but I doubt even a fraction of this could be found in any of the states you talked about today. The constant call for interventions is failing to take into consideration the core weakness of this concept: We don't have the mindset, the money, the resources and the will to engage for decades in countries which, for the most part, resent interference. Even the Afghan government is meandering its way between utter rejection of outside help on the one side and the entitlement mentality of a thoroughly-spoilt brat when things get tough on the other.
Regime change generally never works due to the vacuum it creates and the fact that the regime kept opposing forces at bay which now flood in to fill that vacuum. You may not have liked the regime but it kept the peace. You shouldn't meddle in affairs you know little about and try to impose an alien ideology on the populace. Not only does that country and region pay the price, now Europe will be paying the price for years to come.
Maybe "state building" is seen different from a german perspective. I see the euro crisis as "state building", not as a macroeconomic operation. The same is happening in the Ukraine and as far as I knew, the EU is starting to do something like that in Libya. I don´t trust the US to have any success with "state building" in Syria and Irak, so I was happy as I heard, that Ms. Merkel has started to look to Syria. I don´t think that anymore, because with Russia bombing Assads enemies, the US will be the main actor and pushing everyone to the side will be the result.
While I agree with your main point -- military means can be successful if only supported by a state-building strategy, I do not fully understand what you mean when you write about Russia's lack of the 'day after the conflict' strategy. Actually, they do have such a strategy -- it aims at making the existing institutions of the Assad regime stronger. Their problem is of a different nature --they try to support a repressive regime that has already been rejected by the 70% of its population. The result of their intervention will be -- more blood and more chaos. In Afghanistan, by the way, they were heavily investing into the state-building --the problem was they chose the wrong model (socialist, Soviet type state) not suitable the Afghan realities. While West, as it seems, has all the understanding about institutions but no will to support them, Russians have a will and no idea about democratic institutions. This may be a reflection of the simple fact they themselves, as a nation, have never been governed by the effective democratic government.
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