Having worked in various West African countries during the Obama admin and witnessed our military & diplomatic footprint first hand, the collapse of the 10 year investment in countries like Chad, Burkina Faso and (especially) Niger is shocking to me.
Not only did the US invest a lot of energy and capital in these countries through USAID, MCC and OPIC, but some of our best troops rotated through these countries. The US & France even had a semi permanent base in the Niamey suburbs!
As usual the US diplomatic corps will learn no lessons and take no responsibility for this failure, but if Washington can not influence a belt of impoverished countries with broadly aligned strategic interests (anti-insurgency, economic development) even with concerted investment then how can we expect to accomplish anything meaningful in more critical theaters?
How much is our failure in the Sahel due to the somewhat intractable problems in the region, or problems with our diplomatic/military approach? Is that really proof we can't accomplish other policy objectives in critical theaters?
I think the intractable problems require a different approach. Why was something like the rebuilding of Germany and Japan successful, but Iran and Afghanistan not?
Real change probably requires a much heavier hand than we are willing to take now days.
Germany and Japan were industrialized before and had BMWs and ships before hand. It was just rebuilding.
Iraq was a petrostate where America killed all the Baa'thists who had all the institutional knowledge. It was a oil rentier state, not an industrialized country with a real social contract wit its citizens.
Afghanistan wasn't industrialized either.
It's easy to rebuild a country that was already technologically advanced and many of the entrepreneurs and investors are there to rebuild commerce. That never existed the same way in Iraq a rentier state, and Afghanistan which never had world class cars or much industry.
I'm a West African, specifically Ghanaian-American with dual citizenship. It really shouldn't be shocking. The aftermath of NATO & Arab states helping the rebels defeat Gaddafi has contributed to the current situation. After Gaddafi's fall, his Tuareg mercenaries and radical extremists affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State wreaked havoc in Mali in 2012. The Tuaregs resented Mali's oppression, while the radicals aimed to spread chaos.
Historically, Mali and Niger have oppressed their Tuareg Amazigh nomads, leading to a strong desire for secession among the Tuaregs. Gaddafi had previously supported these groups & the Malian/Nigerien governments, but after his death, radicals established bases in Libya and extended their influence into the Sahel region.
Many Americans fail to grasp the complexities of the various tribes in these countries, often reducing the dialogue to a simplistic view of Africa as a single entity. The aftermath of Gaddafi's overthrow was chaotic. We supported the rebels, who then killed Gaddafi, leaving Libya unable to form a stable government. Khalifa Haftar, a former Gaddafi soldier and American citizen who lived in the Washington D.C. suburbs, has been a significant obstacle to a united Libya.
In 2013, France, Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS), and the UN successfully dismantled the secessionist state of Azawad in Mali. However, when the militants and secessionists resorted to guerrilla warfare and spread into Niger and Burkina Faso, France faced greater challenges, and terrorism proliferated. Adding to the complexity are France's colonial legacy and Russian propaganda claiming France is recolonizing Africa. This has led to growing anti-Western sentiments among Malians, Nigeriens, and Burkinabes, who are increasingly seeking support from Russia.
Very interesting, thank you! in your opinion, what should the west have done? Not intervened in Libya? Or responded more forcefully to the rebels/IS/militias afterwards?
I think people need to take a look at themselves and really examine if humanitarian intervention or "Responsibility to Protect" is a good doctrine.
There's a few ways to look at this. But let's contextualize Libya for the readers -
Intervention in Libya was a UN-sanctioned Resolution. The UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973, which authorized the establishment of a no-fly zone and the use of all necessary measures to protect civilians. The whole point why UN authorized the resolution was because Gaddafi was killing protestors (some numbers say a few hundreds were killed, some say up to 10K). Regardless, because Gaddafi did slaughter protestors is what put this up for a vote in the first place. The International Community had this new doctrine called "Responsibility to Protect" after the Rwanda Genocide & Bosnian Massacre. Based on what NGOs were saying, people really thought it could escalate to a Rwanda.
America, France, UK, Bosnia, Columbia, Gabon, Lebanon, Nigeria, Portugal, and South Africa said yes.
China, Russia, Brazil, India, and Germany abstained. The key point is that none of the permanent members of the Security Council (the UK, USA, China, Russia, and France) exercised their veto power, allowing the resolution to pass and the intervention to proceed.
However, the intervention has been criticized for extending beyond the original mandate of protecting civilians to effectively supporting regime change. NATO forces provided significant support to rebel groups, which eventually led to the overthrow and killing of Gaddafi. Despite Gaddafi’s calls for a ceasefire and promises of democratic elections, the rebels were determined to remove him from power.
There are several perspectives on how the situation could have been handled differently:
1. When Gaddafi was asking for a ceasefire, NATO could have tried to pressure the rebels to stop fighting and have elections. (I don't think this would have worked since the rebels really wanted Gaddafi dead).
2. America, UK, France, China, or Russia could have used their veto (If Putin or Xi could go back in time, they would have probably used their veto. That's why China and Russia used their Veto in votes about Syria)
3. Do nothing and let things shake out on their own. Libya wasn't the only country that had issues during the Arab Spring - Bahrain also did a crackdown to restore order, people died, and Bahrain still continues. In fact, Saudi Arabia saved Bahrain. In Egypt, people protested against Mubarak. Mubarak killed hundreds of protestors but the people removed Mubarak, then Morsi was democratically elected, then the military removed him because they fucking hate the Muslim Brotherhood. Iraq killed some protestors too, no one cared.
Libya still has problems today, and its not obvious that our intervention was worth it. Terrorists still in Libya...
My understanding is that U.S. and NATO support for the rebels in early 2011 was predicated partly on the belief that the rebels needed help to avert a Gaddafi-led slaughter in Benghazi. (I'm thinking, for example, of this: https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/04/07/was-there-going-to-be-a-benghazi-massacre/.) Do you think that it would've been better for the U.S. and NATO to stand aside, even if doing so meant that the slaughter in Benghazi would take place?
There are two facets to consider in this complex situation:
#1: The African Union always said the intervention was wrong. (In fact Nigeria, Gabon, and South Africa broke off with the AU to support the no fly zone). The AU also tried negotiating a ceasefire and a diplomatic resolution, but the rebels turned down the AU's proposal because Gaddafi would still be in power under the proposal. The UN, NATO, EU, US, and even Nigeria, Gabon, and South Africa gave the middle finger to the AU's ability to govern to African affairs.
You can either think of this as the the international community undermining the AU. Or you can see this as the AU being a feckless institution that couldn't make a diplomatic resolution or foster unanimous diplomatic consensus among its members. Maybe the AU & regional cooperation should be heeded more since it was still a majority decision of the AU to not intervene in Libya, and the Sahel bore the brunt of the aftermath taking place right now.
#2 What you asked is basically a trolly problem. Was it better to intervene in Libya, which allowed terrorists to bring their weapons to the Sahel and kill 34K+ people and displace 3M+ people? Or is it better to let Gaddafi kill slaughter civilians where he could have killed tens of thousands? (Or it could have been a little worst than Bahrain where thousands die instead of hundreds & stability remains.). The intervention in Libya weakened many African nation's trust of the West, which is why it shouldn't surprise people when they seek anti-Western help.
To a large extent the AU's opinion, to be blunt, doesn't matter much to anyone.(To be honest, its no big loss to the West either way... Kazakhstan, Australia, Canada and a few others can sell and have more uranium than Niger. Also, Niger. Mali and Burkina faso sell gold and can barely control their gold trade.)
To be clear, we have let brutal despots still in power all the time. Because of "responsibility to protect", Libya still isn't unified while Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali are ruled by military juntas who are struggling to destroy extremists where 30K are dead, 3M displaced, and is a huge traffic source of migrants to Europe.
Hey Yaw. Thanks for your very detailed explanation. Fascinating as usual. For clarity, do you believe that without that intervention in Libya we would not be witnessing all these conflicts in the Sahel region today?
Good question, the range of plausibility is that leaving it alone could be:
1. A worst version of Bahrain/(The leaders kill hundreds and jail 1000s, but stability is restored... ),
2. A worst version of Sudan/(The leaders kill hundreds and jail 1000s, but stability is restored.. for a few more years... until 2019. ),
3. A Yemen (the strongman is removed by the rebels but then descends to civil war),
4. A worse version of Egypt (remove strongman, elect an islamist, and then military removes him with a return to pre-Arab Spring dictator)
5. A Syria repeat (a clusterfuck war that destabilizes the country)
It is my opinion that if we did nothing, it would be closer to a Bahrain or even a Sudan with a higher death toll than to a Bosnian massacre or Rwandan genocide. But at least we wouldn't have 34K+ dead, 3M displaced, and you wouldn't have migrants from there trying to risk their lives to Europe. We have left strongmen in place many times
It's not... France & UN have been in Mali for ~10 years (and the other countries Chad, BF, and Niger) a little less and they couldn't kill all the terrorists. America had a $100M reaper drone base in Niger and the terrorism has just gotten worse. It's like an Afghanistan. Plus you have the rebels.
Mali and Niger are mainly desert.
Russia will figure out soon that this isn't that easy.
Why assume that we even can influence things that way? I think one of the big lessons we should have learned from the last 50 years is that no matter our desire or our resources, we don't really have an ability to shape events in far flung areas of the world.
That doesn't mean we should become isolationist or make no efforts, but we should remain both humble and skeptical about our abilities to get other people to act either in our interests or in even parallel with how we would see as the rational action.
My personal opinion is that we overlearned the lessons of the Bush administration being inflexibly overcommitted to certain outcomes. Now we face the opposite problem where we are somewhere between passive and indecisive in our approach to events.
Given the integration of JSOTF-TS at high levels of these partner militaries there must have been some sense of the discontent brewing in these countries. I understand that the options available to the United States are unpalatable - either support the plotters or attempt to foment a counter-coup - but doing nothing and letting the chips fall is also a choice. Then for us to throw up our hands and say "well we have rules that prevent us from doing business with coup plotters so I guess we'll just bail on the region" while Egypt is sitting there staring you in the face is embarrassing. Giving up and slinking away may even be the correct choice, but in that case we should not have treated the region as strategically important in the first place or should have some sense of why it isn't strategically important anymore. I don't think there is any movement to curtail or reduce MCC Compacts or Power Africa investments in the region, for example.
I don't think there's any evidence that Trump specifically caused any erosion in the US position in the region (diplomatic and military budgets rose significantly while he was in office) but I do think the 2017 ambush in Niger probably limited US Forces' ability to operate in country. Regardless, these were surmountable obstacles & US/French ability to project power in the region greatly exceeds Russian capabilities. The US is leaving because it wasn't worth it to stick around. Generally speaking it pains me to see so many brilliant people work so hard (and spend so much money) on a subject that Foggy Bottom & the White House (under 3 admins) obviously really didn't care about.
I visited Ethiopia for ten days in 2019, and I have to say I was shocked that several Ethiopian people engaged me in conversation about politics and were pro-Trump. My best understanding of why was that they were very upset about what happened in Libya under Obama (although it may have also been somewhat attributable to Ethiopia being very culturally conservative). So my very limited exposure to a country in the region confirms Yaw's contention that Gaddafi's fall was destabilizing and provided an opening for anti-American actors. Much as I despise Trump, I don't think he owns this chaos.
"I feel like nearly everyone here, were they in Obama’s shoes, would have taken out Qaddafi."
It wasn't necessarily the wrong move to take him out, but when we do such things, we have to have a solid plan for the aftermath and a real commitment to that country. If you break it, you own it. And that leads to all kinds of trouble, of course (Exhibit A: Afghanistan), so it behooves us to proceed with extreme caution when we decide to take out a tyrannical regime. It seems that opening the region up to warlordism was a step backward from dictatorship.
I want to be clear: At the time, I was in favor of what Obama did. It's only since then that I've concluded that he made a terrible error.
As for blaming Trump for everything...It's a fun joke, but seems to be the fallback position for many people who oppose him. It's a counterproductive tactic.
That was my thought, too. He spent four whole years selling out our foreign policy and decimating State.
It wouldn't be surprising that, amid his flashier corruptions, he might have ALSO been fomenting chaos in the "shithole countries" to try and extort their leaders for cash. It's exactly the sort of low-rent racket he's famous for -- preying on the weakest, rather than swinging for the fences.
The Libyan intervention happened in 2011, during the Obama administration. I don't really blame Obama though. Hilary and Obama really thought Gaddafi was genocidal. No one in the security council vetoed the decision:
That said the destruction of Libya brought cascading effects to the Sahel. Weapon smuggling was rampant since terrorists just took those weapons to rampage.
Libya's trajectory could have been markedly different. Perhaps we should have taken Gaddafi's ceasefire proposal seriously, seeking to halt the rebel advance and initiate a path towards democratic elections. Alternatively, we could have opted for non-intervention.
Admittedly, neither of these choices guaranteed success. Even if the UN had urged the rebels to spare Gaddafi, they might have pursued his demise, albeit with greater difficulty without NATO's support. There's a grim possibility that Gaddafi's regime would have resorted to extreme measures, resulting in a staggering death toll, one I'd prefer not to contemplate.
Nevertheless, a stable Libya could have translated into stability across the Sahel. Countries like Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali might not have faced the same extent of extremist violence had weapons not flowed unchecked through Libyan borders.
Thanks Matt. I imagine you had to do quite a bit of research and wrapping your mind around the situation to be able to synthesize it. I honestly had no idea what was going on in the region.
In the best sense! Not a, "This is what you should believe and here's why", but a genuine "Here's what's going on, WITHOUT the MSM sensationalization or ignorant grievance-peddling Faux News BS".
I've written about the economic and geopolitical histories of various African countries, spanning from pre-colonial times to the present day. While I haven't published my article on Sudan yet, I have covered Niger and Chad in a multi-part series.
Mali and Niger are grappling with internal issues, including the secessionist ambitions of the nomadic Tuareg Amazigh, corruption, weak governance, and pervasive poverty(They are both agrarian societies with terrible agricultural productivity). Externally, they face threats from jihadists affiliated with Al-Qaeda (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and JMIN) and the Islamic State (Islamic State in the Greater Sahara). The extremist problem initially emerged after the Algerian Civil War ended in 2002, but it exploded following the Libyan Civil War, drawing more jihadists to the Sahel region around Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Chad has also been dealing with extremists in the aftermath of the First Libyan Civil War.
Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso have shifted from relying on France to seeking military support from Russia. They perceive France as ineffective in combating guerrilla fighters, despite a decade of French assistance. While France successfully dismantled the secessionist Azawad state in Mali in 2013 during Operation Serval, its efforts against guerrilla fighters in Operation Barkhane were less effective. After nearly a decade of French involvement, local populations began to view France as a neocolonial power. Consequently, the coup leaders garnered popular support by removing French and Western influence.
Involvement can clearly be a range of things. Completely ceding the region to murderous dictators and the Wagner group doesn't seem like the right strategy to me.
What *REALISTIC* options exist that do not involve either murderous dictators or chaos/anarchy?
I mean, the reason this is so depressing is that, looking at the history of the region, after the fall of colonialism you seem to have nothing but a string of "Dictator A takes over and oppresses his people horribly, Wannabe Dictator B attempts a coup, there's a rebellion/civil war during which innocent people suffer horribly, Dictator B wins and turns out just as bad and oppressive as Dictator A, wash, rinse, repeat, with extra oppression and suffering" occasionally relieved by "a democratically elected leader manages to take power for a couple years before being overthrown in a coup, go back to Square 1."
I am 100% in favor of helping ordinary people who suffer, and I feel terribly sorry for them, but trying to pick winners between evil Dictator A and equally evil Rebel Leader B seems like a no-win game, and as anyone familiar with the movie "War Games" knows, the only way to win a no-win game is not to play.
"What *REALISTIC* options exist that do not involve either murderous dictators or chaos/anarchy?"
The International Crisis Group is a think-tank set up in the 1990s (*) to provide detailed background information and recommendations to policymakers when a humanitarian crisis is imminent or in progress. They have some recommendations on Sudan.
"The U.S., Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE – outside parties that wield significant leverage over the warring parties – have the best chances of persuading the two sides to stop fighting, allow humanitarian aid to reach those who need it and begin the hard work of knitting Sudan back together. The alternative is grim to contemplate, as the country teeters on the brink of chaos, mass starvation and a war that could spread across its borders to a troubled region. Time is of the essence – particularly since the parties are inveigling new warlords to join the fight with promises that they will share in victory’s eventual spoils, which promises to make negotiations to end the war that much more difficult.
"Against this backdrop, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are intent on reconvening talks in Jeddah. The new round should broaden to include roles for Egypt and the UAE, as Crisis Group has long argued, as well as for the new envoys from the AU, UN and IGAD, given the opportunity for reinvigorated diplomacy afforded by these appointments. A single consolidated negotiation process would allow for greater and more cohesive foreign pressure on the two sides, while closing avenues for the belligerents to continue forum shopping to evade serious negotiations. These talks should also expressly aim to reach an urgent permanent ceasefire, instead of dwelling on confidence-building measures as previously. If plans to turn the Jeddah talks into a high-level forum for ceasefire talks falter, then key actors (especially the U.S. and UN) should find a way to make the various negotiation tracks reinforce rather than undermine each other. Advancing as nimbly and quickly as possible toward a deal, using both informal and formal channels and steadily intensifying pressure on the sides should be the goal, no matter where talks take place.
"At the same time, moves to spare millions of Sudanese from starvation cannot wait. All those with influence on the conflict parties should prevail on them in public and private to allow unfettered food aid to communities in need. Outside powers should explore other options for getting food into the worst-affected areas of the country, including greater Darfur, if the warring leaders remain uncooperative. Donors should look into funnelling funds through local volunteers, particularly in the Khartoum, Darfur, Kordofan and Gezira areas, where millions are languishing after nearly all the major aid organisations fled. Donors should also stand ready to reach into their coffers to support the gravely underfunded aid response."
Unsure if there is an entirely correct strategy here and I don't have the knowledge base to craft the best one here. Conceptually, I'm just in favor of the US maintaining geopolitical influence in Africa, rather than ceding that ground to the Wagner group or China.
The words of the proverbial generic American who opens the paper, says “Wow, looks like a mess”, and closes the paper, the better to not see or hear the terrible things in the world, and imagines not hearing about them and not being “involved” in them, taking comfort in the broad wide oceans on either side of him, will make them disappear.
Matt himself used to vibe that way at times. I recall him mildly celebrating Russia’s growing displacement of US power in the Middle East years ago, arguing essentially “Well now THEY get to be the ones tangled up in the region; sucks to be them.”
He appears to be evolving on that, along with events. It’s one of the reasons I read him. Even if some of his audience doesn’t, or evolves in the opposite direction.
The benefit of being a superpower is ... well, the whole super powerful part. But it means we can't ignore bad things happening around the world as easily as a lesser power can do.
Given how the rest of the world largely doesn't seem to appreciate America's continued sacrifices here I'm of the opinion we should largely step back and let the rest of the world solve their problems as we focus on growth and prosperity at home.
I’m not isolationist, but I do admit there is an element of “damned if we do, damned if we don’t “ here.
Get involved? We will be accused of neocolonialism and blamed for anything that goes wrong, and a grumpy blogger will comment on how America is the GrEaTeSt sOuRcE of EviL in the world.
Don’t get involved? We’re a bunch of racists who don’t care about Black people getting killed, and/or naive fools who don’t understand the geopolitical implications. Sigh.
America’s growth and prosperity relies on open seas and if we let CCP’s imperialism go unchecked we are creating a world with markets closed to the U.S.
This might be overstated. While I'm not sure how I feel about Allan's position in general, it doesn't seem to me that our national prosperity relies on us continuing our current, highly interventionist, policy to try and preserve all existing market access.
Trade with Africa specifically is a small and shrinking share of our gdp.
More generally, we're not North Korea. The US domestic market is very large, making us less reliant on trade than most. This paper estimates an expected loss of 2%-8% of US gdp in a world with pure US autarky. (The paper also notes that this is interestingly similar to prior estimates of the effect size of the Jeffersonian embargo of 1807 and pre-Meiji Japanese autarky.)
We could eat a loss of that magnitude and still be substantially richer than just about everyone.
But, if that still sounds like too much to risk, I would note that there's no plausible case where a future imperial China is able to interdict US trade with Canada and Mexico, and it's hard to imagine even dramatic inhibition of our trade with Europe. And due to diminishing marginal returns, each trade partner we are able to preserve represents an outsized fraction of the benefits of trade generally.
So, the expected economic costs of more isolationism don't seem particularly weighty.
I suppose as long as the US isn’t too concerned about the price of oil, maybe not…but when have we ever not been too concerned about the price of oil? Domestic production might be sufficient to meet our needs, but the price is still set on world markets that can be disrupted by a war between major oil producers. Maybe the best argument for accelerating “green energy” is the possibility of not having to care about the Saudis or Iran.
I agree…there is an odd paradox that when a country like the US is at its most powerful in terms of ability to influence the world…that influence is less valuable. As the country faces more challenges and is less able to influence events is also when that influence is most important.
I think the benefits of being a superpower is being able to pick and choose what conflicts we actually want to be a part of. One thing I think America has sorely lacked in the last 50 years is the ability to prioritize. If America wants to weaken Russia’s grip in Africa, then the easiest way is to give Ukraine all of the weapons they could possibly want.
In my opinion, Russia can keep Syria; they're welcome to it. I wouldn't have us switch places with them for the world.
My view of America's place in the world is very simple. There are parts of the world that are incredibly important economically, socially etc and we have to be deeply involved in them to help keep the peace and maintain global prosperity: the Indo-Pacific region and Europe. And then there are places in our neighborhood that, because we are the dominant power and our long history, we have an interest in helping succeed and keeping peaceful: Central and South America (well, Canada too).
Other than those areas, we should get involved only to the extent that it is virtually costless and risk-free for us. Otherwise, wish them the best and both sides go on their way.
I don't think Matt is really so indifferent as he seems. I think the flippant comment is more about debunking the idea that miltary interventionism is about self-interest. The same Russian nationalist who thinks this is a good idea is the same person who can articulate exactly why the US intervention in Iraq was so self-destructive.
But that doesn't mean there is nothing humanitarianly productive we can do in the region, it just means we should fool ourselves into think "we need our guy in Sudan to seize the initiative in the Middle East" or whatever the imagined US interest would be.
His flippancy seemed to be more a 2021 thing, honestly.
Back then, a lot of otherwise far-seeing center-left pundits (Matt actually not being nearly the worst on this front) were anticipating/hoping with baited breath for a future world where the US could focus on child tax credits, housing policy, health care, and all kinds of lovely domestic priorities.
Matt himself got into a roaring Twitter fight back then with Michael McFaul, of all people, basically calling him a liar (about aspects of US foreign policy toward Russia, specifically). I still remember the Slow Boring article condemning America's "militaristic" policy regarding Ukraine--in January 2022.
Wild time, that.
I bring all this crud up not to ding Matt, specifically. If anything, his (generally very good) analysis and takes nowadays show his keen sense of what's important and real, and how changeable true liberals are in the face of changing reality around the world.
I bring it up, essentially, to point out the old maxim--Whether or not Americans are interested in the world, the world, from Ukraine and Taiwan to Syria and Sudan--is very much interested in us.
We look for excuses to back away from it at our peril. My two cents.
I mean, it is fine to argue which things we should be involved in, and if you think this is one of them, make that case.
But a dogmatic 'It is our duty to make all problems disappear, rather than to ignore them' philosophy is obvious nonsense. You must pick and choose.
Also, strawman. Just because the "proverbial generic American" wishes to ignore a thing, does not mean that they are stupid enough to believe that their ignorance will "make them disappear".
Did i mischaracterize this paragraph somehow? Is this NOT implying that we are morally obligated to care about, and "get involved in" all the "terrible things in the world"? That is the implication that I refute, and it is hardly a strawman. That is, in fact, obvious nonsense.
"The words of the proverbial generic American who opens the paper, says “Wow, looks like a mess”, and closes the paper, the better to not see or hear the terrible things in the world, and imagines not hearing about them and not being “involved” in them, taking comfort in the broad wide oceans on either side of him, will make them disappear."
If that isn't what you meant to imply, speak more clearly.
Priorities are a thing. Even cosmopolitans have to make a case that the RoI for intervening in Sudan is better than alternative uses of our attention and resources. Sudan is far away and apparently has a lot of complicated and seemingly intractable problems.
But we shouldn't pretended that resources are unlimited either. I don't know enough about Sudan to know whether it's worth it or not or what the costs are.
I mean, you say it isn't smart, but if you trained a parrot to say just that one phrase and had it travel around every room in Washington where foreign policy is discussed, its record would be about 80% better than the average cable news talking head, and 99% better than Lindsey Graham.
Right. It's actually true that the US doesn't have to be involved everywhere and the notion that it does is a very contested and contestable ideology with a spotty track record, not a self-evident truth.
Unfortunately, it's harder for people to be concerned about a war where two warlords are using a country as their playground for power. Without an "oppressor-oppressed" narrative or a clear "good guy," it's more difficult for people to support a side.
For those who believe "America shouldn't be involved in every conflict," Sudan serves as a poignant example. When America doesn't take a commanding role, middle powers step in to fill the vacuum. Americans must decide if they are comfortable with that. Of course, more nuanced discernment mechanisms are at play.
Similarly, there's the largely ignored decade-long civil war in the Central African Republic, right beneath Sudan and Chad. You can explore more about this conflict in the economic history of the Central African Republic here.
The UN is a lame duck, it can't lead an intervention without Russia's consent, which it won't.
Siding with either side means accepting their atrocities. Unilaterally attacking either one, or even both, even if it's just a bunch of airstrikes might change the balance of power, but could just as easily lead to more chaos and atrocities. Decapitation strikes are likewise frowned upon and prone to chaos as well.
Pretty much the only thing left is the boring diplomatic solution, which takes too long, is frustratingly opaque as to whether it's actually working -- in fact, it won't look like it's working until it finally DOES -- and requires us to rely on an absolutely depleted State Department.
I'm definitely not trying to pooh-pooh you here; I personally HATE when all a person does is shoot ideas down and not contribute any of their own. But I'm genuinely curious if you see a viable solution path here.
I didn't give an opinion either way. But my stance is America is doing the right thing by not choosing a side and by choosing the boring diplomatic resolution.
By not choosing a side, middle powers will support their side and there will be more deaths, but if America interferes, the regime that wins will look illegitimate and look like a US puppet.
I think America is at its best when it doesn't intervene directly.
Indeed, I think that America’s role should always be the balancing power and never the direct interventionist except for crucial conflicts that directly affect its interest
In 2008, I was in South Sudan less than a year after the peace agreement with the North (eg the Khartoum government). I previously knew nothing about the Sudanese civil war - I was just there working with a global health contractor firm on a brand-new USAID project. Got up to speed quickly. I learned that close to a million people had died in the Sudanese civil war in the last few decades, and my mind swam that absolutely no one in the U.S. knew or even cared.
I spent a lot of time with our country director. One night, she mentioned to me that she slept with her loaded AK-47 under her bed. I asked... why? She shrugged. "So when war comes again, we will be ready."
"Do you think war will come again?"
She smirked. "Yes. And then we will kill them, and then kill their children, just like they did to us."
That really stuck with me.
I spent a lot of time working in Africa. The vast majority of the continent is nothing like Sudan. But most Americans dismiss pretty much all of it, and certainly the Sudanese conflict, in a way they would never do to, say, what happens in central Asia or the Middle East, and it's hard to see it once you realize it.
Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, was in Kyiv this week. One stop was to play guitar in a local bar. No, I'm not kidding.
We've been so scarred by Trump's incompetence that we can't quite accept that the Biden Administration's foreign policy hasn't been effective. Yes, they are trying hard and face some difficult situations. But it hasn't been effective at avoiding escalations in almost every part of the world -- Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Iranian-backed Hamas attack on Israel, Houthis shutting down shipping in the Red Sea, what Matt describes today in Sudan and increasing tensions (thankfully not yet acted upon) between China and Taiwan. The NATO states like us better and the Administration says all the right things but I'm disappointed with the results.
Whenever we get into disappointment with Biden admin foreign policy, I have to bring up the counterfactual. Do any of the situations you describe above strike you as being better off on Earth 2 where Trump won a second term? I've detailed this in other comments, but the counterfactuals on Ukraine, Hamas/Gaza, Houthis, all would probably me more strategically favorable to our adversaries than the situation stands today, since Trump's foreign policy consisted largely of taking the US off the board and allowing the new Axis to establish their spheres on influence.
That world might look more "peaceful" but largely because we would not be backing any allies in the fight. The bad guys would still probably have gained more than they have in reality.
I think the disappointment you (and frankly I) feel is largely disappointment with the accelerating final unraveling of the unipolar moment. It sucks that the US can't keep a lid on things unilaterally anymore. The strategic way out is to revitalize alliances in Europe and the Pacific, which is something the Biden admin has been fairly successful at doing. Failure to do so will lose us Cold War 2.
I'll preface this by saying that I know basically nothing about foreign policy. But forget even comparing to the Trump administration. What could or should the Biden admin have done to prevent these things from happening? It's not like there is a "keep Russia from invading Ukraine" button that Biden could have pressed but didn't.
I'm disappointed in what's happening around the world too, but I think the Biden admin is doing the best that they can
Yeah, I'm very sympathetic to John's disappointment (I'm sort of disappointed too), but this seems to come back to other actors having agency.
To pick one, Putin made a catastrophically terrible decision, and there's only so much more you could have made his options catastrophically terrible-r.
Also, Trump depleted a lot of our state capacity... literally, at State. And in the military and elsewhere. That was 4 years we could have been ACTUALLY catching up on industrial capacity, but instead fell behind.
Yeah, I'm struck by the fact that given Putin pretty clearly was planning to invade Ukraine for years (everything with Paul Manafort and his shenanigans in 2016 I think have to be seen in this light), I'd say the Ukraine war has gone as "well" as could possibly have been expected.
Now I put "well" in quotes because I'm being very relative here. Of course, the best outcome is no war at all; I'm very aware there are already over 100K dead (depending on reports on Russian military deaths) and I've seen the videos and pictures of devastation on the ground. But again, I feel fairly certain in saying that no matter who was President, Putin was determined to invade. So given that reality, I'm not sure anyone is doing better than Biden in this situation.
The most consequential thing for Ukraine was Democrats failing to hold a few more seats in 2022. Nothing could have prevented the invasion and Biden responded exactly correctly. The battlefield situation would be better if the flow of arms hadn't been interrupted for months.
Agreed and some of this is the result of the very real issue that there is only so much that hard power can achieve in the long term. We have gotten so used to be the most powerful kid on the playground we have forgotten that bullies don't always get their way. I usually agree with what US foreign policy wants to achieve but I am less surprised that we don't get what we want when the outcome is extistential to the parties involved and only of limited impact on us.
I've come to believe that our influence in the world is positively correlated with our militarily restraint and diplomatic skill and negatively correlated with the number of bombs we drop.
Agreed. I tend to think that a lot of what makes public policy more complex that we would like it to be, whether we are talking about drug policy or foreign policy, is that our ability to get people do to something that we want them to do and they do not want them to do is more limited that we imagine. In both cases, the fact that we can resort to force whether bombs or arrest doesn't necessarily make that a morally defensible action, can create unwanted impacts, and may just frankly not be enough if the person is determined enough to be willing to risk or accept our show of force. I hate that Israel is killing civilians in Gaza at the rates they are for its own sake. I also fear that they are failing to learn the lessons of our war on terror which is that killing terrorists whack a mole fashion isn't productive if with each terrorist you kill you radicalize two more people traumatized and horrified by what you have done.
I am just more and more convinced that we need to ratchet down our expectations of how much we can really influence events in the rest of the world.
You mentioned above our super powerfulness, but I think that power is the power to never have to behave in a way someone else wants us to, and of course most importantly to know that no one poses any true threat to our people or our vital interests. There has been one successful attack on American soil in the last 80 years, and the result was we went apeshit, kicked off two poorly conceived wars, wasted more resources than anyone else would have been able to muster for any cause, and we're STILL better off than anybody else on the planet.
What I think we have a hard time reconciling is that although absolutely no one can dictate to us, it's not true that we can dictate to everyone else. We can and should try to influence events in the world, but we should have really low expectations about how effective that's actually going to be.
I think the notable exception to this is guaranteeing freedom of navigation at sea, where the United States has been very successful (so successful that "recent stupid nonsense from the Houthis" is actually a Big Story), and which also underpins our wealth and success.
The beauty of the ocean is there are virtually no innocent civilians milling around, and very little ambiguity to anyone's actions. Whether or not we bother to speak softly, we carry a very big stick out on the briny deep, and everybody understands it.
I haven't seen a lot in the news recently about either the Houthis messing around, or even the threat of them causing much disruption. That makes me think they and their enablers got the message.
I don’t think you should be comparing failure to success. You should be comparing actual outcomes to hypothetical outcomes under some alternative policy. There are many situations where every outcome counts as failure, but some are worse and some are less bad. Is there any clear alternative that leads to a less bad failure than what we god?
Given what we all feared on Feb. 22, 2022, I think the Biden strategy in Ukraine has been a stunning success. Perfect? No -- they were dilatory in sending arms that they wound up sending anyway. But otherwise? Really effing good.
And building up an alliance in the Indo-Pacific region to help tamp down Chinese ambitions? Fantastic.
"And building up an alliance in the Indo-Pacific region to help tamp down Chinese ambitions? Fantastic."
I don't think this is going nearly as well as we might have hoped. US treaty allies are in pretty good shape, but outside of that, there has been a surprising lack of success in building a coalition in Asia.
Getting Japan and South Korea to put their animosity aside -- fantastic. Strengthening ties with Australia, getting the Philippines back on our team -- well done. Carefully handling relations with India and its increasingly authoritarian leader Modi -- very nice job. Solidifying relations with Vietnam -- nice.
Other than waving a magic wand and resuscitating the TPP despite huge opposition in the US, what else could and should he have done?
That's my point though. Japan, S. Korea, Australia, Philippine are all treaty allies. Vietnam is a the only non treaty ally that is significantly closer to the US now than when Biden came into office.
Outside of that, most other nations are worse or much worse. A recent poll among ASEAN nations (population 50% larger than the EU) shows the US dropping from being the preferred ally 60-40 compared to China, to China surpassing the US again. The Philippines and Vietnam edged up, but the other nations plummeted in their preference for the US.
For all the talk about Biden focusing on Asia, there has been little actual progress made. Instead of actually trying to join the TPP or some other trade agreement, Biden introduced IPEF, which while initially well received has mostly been since dismissed as an agreement to negotiate, not an framework agreement of any kind. Even its limited benefits are considered to be more paperwork than payoff that constrain countries ability to negotiate going forward.
Most of these countries are desperate for economic growth and development, and the US has repeatedly not been serious about engaging with them in trade. Meanwhile, China is there wanting to buy and sell massive amounts of resources and goods.
It doesn't help the US cause in the region that all of these countries look at see the US response to Nippon steel. If one of our most trusted allies is not allowed to bail out a failing US steel company because of protectionism, what real hope do they have of getting any type of real trade going?
Congress forced Trump to get aid to Ukraine kicking and screaming and literally getting impeached for it.
Israel and Arab diplomatic normalization I'll bite. It's the one area I'm least certain is worse off on Earth 2, but if Hamas still pulled shit it would be much worse for Gazans on Earth 2 since the US wouldn't restrain Israel in any capacity. At the same time it's clear Bibi loves Trump and was on much better behavior, while here on Earth 1 it's obvious part of Bibi's war calculus is undermining Biden and getting Trump elected again.
"Trump's foreign policy consisted largely of taking the US off the board and allowing the new Axis to establish their spheres on influence."
I don't think that's true. Trumps foreign policy was all over the place --- with the exception of Iran, which he was pretty consistently opposed to.* Sometimes he withdrew (leaving former allies in the cold [1]), but sometimes he got pissed off and launched dozens of cruise missiles [2, 3], blew up someone important general [4], or helped forge a treaty [5].
I think what's true is that Trump was, on average, less involved in the outside world than Biden, however the variance in what he did was much larger. How this entered into the calculations of foreign powers was probably complicated and probably depended on their risk tolerance. However, it wasn't an inherently bad thing (deliberate or not). Nixon tried (and failed) to get himself seen as a "madman" [6]; Trump arguably achieved it --- arguably because he is/was a madman!
* In fact, I'd say that Trump worked harder to limit Iran's sphere of influence than either Obama or Biden has done. I'm not sure that any of them have been particularly effective, but it's certainly not the case that Trump took "the US off the board" when it came to Iran.
Trump certainly did more in opposition to Iran. But I’m not at all convinced that any of that made up for pulling out of the Iran agreement, which really seemed like a much more effective engagement with Iran that would have kept them out of some of these conflicts.
“ which really seemed like a much more effective engagement with Iran that would have kept them out of some of these conflicts.”
I’m not sure the agreement had much of an effect. The hope was certainly that more engagement with Iran would moderate its behavior, but I don’t think that happened. Iran didn’t put the brakes on its proxies, back out of Syria, etc. In general, the theory of engagement leading to better behavior seems to be a bust recently.
All of the proacticity outlined above is Trump following the Israeli right down some terrible paths. Blowing up the nuclear agreement and then deliberately provoking the Iranians while achieving some level of normalization with Gulf/Sunni Arab states is exactly what the Israeli right wants. It's a solid strategy if what you want is to confront Iran directly and get Sunni Arabs off your back on the Palestine issue.
In contrast, US interests much more clearly lie in keeping Iran from going nuclear, making it less of a pariah, and disentangling from the region generally to focus on the Pacific. The Israeli right does not want this, so it stirs up shit and Trump was more than happy to go along with it.
So even his proactive FP was really just delegating US policy to Netanyahu.
What he did with Iran may have coincided with what Netanyahu wanted, but I think the idea that engagement with Iran could get it to behave (and that the nuclear deal accomplished much of anything) is naive. I think the truth is that we don't really have any levers to make Iran behave (outside of some very costly ones), and we should just extract ourselves from this mess, but I don't think that trying the stick was any worse an idea than trying the carrot.
I'm with you Milan. I can't believe the number of Slow Boring readers that falling for this "gotcha" analysis of geopolitics.
"Blinken played the guitar so he can't be serious? Are you serious?" As if Blinken played the guitar and left, twiddling his thumbs and staring blankly all the way back home.
I mean if we're really bothering to talk about it, it does actually makes total sense for Blinken to play the guitar in Kyiv. Ukrainian's war culture has a kind of joyful courageous spirit, where playing the guitar as a basic act of symbolism that Russia won't break our spirits, we don't have war fatigue, and we care about human lives instead of insisting every male solider be emotionless deadmeat. Playing protest music is definitely something you can't do in Russia-occupied Ukraine. So I also think people just don't what they are talking about.
A lot of people saw it as tone deaf --- both literally and figuratively. Singing "Keep on rocking in the free world" while Russia opened up a new front in Ukraine in part due to arbitrarily US restrictions on weapons use [1] seems like a bit of a contradiction. You want a free world? Do more than sing about it [2].
He did do more than sing about it. He spent the last few weeks getting Congress to unstick that aid. But singing about it is a way to engage with the human side.
A lot of people tried a lot of things to convince Johnson to get the aid moving, but my understanding is that Blinken has mostly been engaged in other things recently. (Understandably so!) Much of Blinken's message during his visit to Ukraine was about helping develop Ukraine's industry, which isn't a bad thing, but is a longer-term goal that doesn't address acute problems.
Can you name a President whose foreign policy you are happy with? Foreign policy is hard. Also America is coming off a remarkable level of dominance that's heavy reliant on incompetence by its rivals. If China and India sort themselves out, America declines relatively and it would take a lot (One Billion Americans) for America to offset that.
The trouble is that the “success” of those Presidents held the seeds for the “failure” of this one….The eighties and nineties were great for the US, but the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, which Americans assumed would lead to a free, democratic Russia, was actually a disaster that set the stage for Putin’s rise. Obama’s “surge” in Afghanistan was doomed to fail, for the very reason many Republicans pointed out at the time—all the Taliban had to do was wait for American impatience to create pressure to leave. (There was also the fact that local contractors were robbing us blind, the Afghan government was regarded as a US puppet that Afghanis were unwilling to fight for, etc.)
As for Blinken playing guitar in Kviv, I think that’s great. Everyone needs to relax at some point, and this strikes me as a way of emphasizing our cultural ties to Ukraine (whose President, after all, comes from the entertainment industry, hard as that is to think about after more than two years of war).
Obama oversaw the rise of ISIS and endless chain of disasters that was the Arab Spring that brought us, among other things, the Syrian Civil War and an endless Islamist insurgency in both the Middle East and Africa. Maybe there was nothing he could have done about it but I don't think that's a foregone conclusion.
Bush 1 really did foreign policy well (probably not a surprise given his resume). Obama did great with the JCPOA but he showed failure of nerve in kicking the Afghanistan can down the road. Nixon was very clever in playing China and the USSR off against each other, but the evils he and Kissinger perpetrated around the world are a black stain on our reputation. Oh, and taking four years to get out of Vietnam -- not good, Bob. Very clever management of the Arab-Israel conflict, which did pave the way for Israel-Egypt peace -- good, Bob.
Clinton gets an incomplete because the US was so dominant in this brief interregnum that it would have been really hard for him to fail.
It seems very plausible to me that Putin held off on invading Ukraine until Trump was out of office. I also suspect Trump will start touting some real or imagined “deal with Putin to end the war” come October. Amoral strong men have more room for wheeling and dealing than principled, Democratic leaders. Look at all the deals Hitler and Stalin made between ‘37 and ‘41.
Counter-argument: Putin invaded after Trump was defeated because, with Biden in office and Trump seemingly discredited after Jan. 6, he saw the correlation of forces turning against him and so decided to achieve a more limited short-term goal with the (seemingly) strong military he had at his command.
Had Trump won in 2020, Putin could have reasonably anticipated the collapse of NATO and the withdrawal of the US from Europe, costlessly giving him a great strategic victory far greater than toppling the Ukrainian government.
Agreed. Also, Trump's response to foreign events had a vary large variance. Sometimes he did nothing. Sometimes he launched a barrage of missiles. I don't know if Putin cared, but Trump's unpredictable response would have given me pause.
"Amoral strong men have more room for wheeling and dealing than principled, Democratic leaders"
How...? I mean, yes, amoral strong men who constantly break their word tend to also give their word quite freely, because it doesn't cost them much to do so. So they make lots of deals... and break lots of them. But this just classic "act real busy and people will think you are accomplishing things" nonsense. The deals aren't really worth the paper they are written on.
Principled, democratic leaders take longer to strike a deal, because they don't want to be put into positions where they'd risk going back on their word (since this would undermine future deal making). So they need to work hard to find a deal that both parties can live with. It's slower, but not less effective.
I think it’s worth noting that amoral strong men make and break lots of deals and to try to tease out how this fact might affect the election and the world generally
I'm actually under the belief that Biden's foreign policy has been the best part of his administration. Truly. Forget Trump, I feel fairly certain that another President is still leaving troops in Afghanistan; which as far as I can tell would only have propped up a corrupt government that absolutely no one supported in the country (there's a reason the government collapsed so quickly. It really was a sign at least to me that the Afghan government that existed was Potemkin village).
With Ukraine. I don't think we appreciate how much coordination and diplomacy went in to implementing the sanction regime and united European and US response. Now unfortunately, those sanctions have major loopholes in them. But do we really think President Marco Rubio or President Bernie Sanders is getting that much united opposition or cooperation we have gotten on sanctions? I think at this point, we should probably take it as a given that Putin was invading Ukraine no matter what in February, 2022. This was a major military operation, this is not something he could have done a whim. In fact, I suspect he had a plan to invade for a decade ever since the Orange revolution (key piece of evidence to me is Manafort and how the GOP platform changed the way he did in 2016. Like honestly, why else do this). So given the invasion was baked into the cake so to speak, reality is this has gone about as well as could have expected. Putin clearly thought he was going to take Kiev immediately and that Ukraine would collapse in like a week (hence the paratroopers who had dress uniforms in their knapsacks ready for a parade in Kiev). I know there's still a decent possibility Russia will win but it's clearly been a quagmire way worse than anyone would have predicted circa 2022.
Middle East. What exactly is the "better" course for Biden with Israel/Gaza? I'm really asking here because last I checked this has been an impossible situation for basically my entire life.
As for other Presidents, I really think there is some rose tinted glasses going on. Early 80s looked like the world was going to hell too and seemed like America couldn't do anything. Our involvement in Lebanon only led to the deaths of 243 marines. What exactly of consequence did we accomplish in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Panama other than empowering drug lords and creating a massive scandal for the Reagan administration? As far as the big one, collapse of Soviet Union. I do think some credit should be given to Reagan's military buildup which helped push the Soviet spending on military over the edge of what they could really afford. But I would suggest OPEC and (I hate to say it) Saudi Arabia probably deserve more of the credit as the drop in oil prices is almost certainly the prime factor of what cratered the Soviet economy in the late 80s given how dependent they were on oil to prop up their economy.
We have a phrase in the military - "the enemy gets a vote."
There are many things the US can't control. Everything comes with tradeoffs.
I think Biden has made some bad decisions, but overall, I think most of them were good or defensible and the general thrust of US foreign policy is directionally correct for the most part.
To go down your list -
- Not sure what we could have done to stop the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was/is a continuation war from 2014, the consequence of two decades of previous events.
- The Hamas attack was a surprise to everyone - no one has better intel on Hamas than Israel, so it's not clear to me what the US failure was here
- The Houthis have not shut down the Red Sea, they are like the Sand People in Star Wars shooting at pod racers. It's not clear what would be a better option than managing the problem as we are until the conflict in Gaza is over.
- Sudan - it's a complicated civil war in a country that is not strategically important to the US. What more should we be doing?
- China/Taiwan - I think we recently passed a military aid package for Taiwan, Biden has promised to defend Taiwan even though we have no formal treaty, Biden has doubled down on Trump's tariffs. China is a major player, a world power, and sees itself as a peer to the US and wants it sphere of influence and its historic territories. This isn't a new problem and it's not clear to me what more Biden should be doing except cleaning house in the Navy and our naval procurement system.
I'm not happy with the results either, and there are some things I wish Biden would have done differently, but there are real limits to US influence and power.
Playing guitar in a bar probably strikes the wrong tone, but I'm far more concerned about more substantial aspects (which, as you noted, has been a lot of failure).
I think playing a guitar in Israel strikes the wrong tone. But part of our diplomatic approach to Ukraine is maintaining normalcy in the country and I think symbolic gestures like that makes sense.
I don't think we can judge it without seeing how it's covered or how it's seen in Ukraine, which is the audience it's directed at. I can see it as establishing a tie and a sympathy to the people of Ukraine. Showing that we're not just a bunch of suits who drop in and fly out; that our most senior leaders have an actual connection and concern for Ukraine, and a desire to know the Ukrainians.
I think that Blinken is generally seen in Ukraine as one of the better members of the Biden administration and is more willing to take risks that, say, Sullivan. But a lot of Ukrainians are pretty frustrated with the administration.
I think the measure of an administration is not that no bad things happen -- that's the way of the world! -- but how it responds to those events. If you assume that these things would have happened anyway, would you rather have the Biden or the Trump administration in charge?
It's possible that Ukraine was avoidable in a perfect world (I do think the rhetoric surrounding the conflict overstates the "inevitability of Putin's aggression"), but two things to understand about that counterfactual:
1. It goes back long before Biden all the way to dumb choices George W. Bush made and which Barack Obama and Donald Trump didn't have the guts to correct (nor did Biden).
2. It would have subjected Biden to massive Dolchstoßlegendes because the reason Bush made those mistakes and Obama and Trump didn't correct them is because there were very loud and influential voices in the foreign policy blob who wanted maximal conflict with Russia (and to be fair, also care a lot about Ukrainians and didn't want to sell them out) and had no interest in taking steps that might successfully assure Russia that NATO and the EU had no designs on Ukraine.
So basically, it would have taken a US President with both maximum cojones and enormous popularity to stand up and do something that might have prevented the Ukraine invasion but also would have gotten him labeled as Neville Chamberlain II. Biden wasn't that President.
They were stuck. They didn't have the technology or know-how to maintain a nuclear arsenal, and obviously the world powers did not want more proliferation. It wasn't happening.
I sometimes think people underestimate the extent to which even imperfect and repressive government can be better than continued conflict.
So I wonder if in places like Sudan, would they be better off if we just said: alright Saudi Arabia, China, or etc we are declaring this area a failed state so if you want to go in and seize control it's yours. Though obviously we'd have to make sure no country who helped destabilize the area benefits.
I mean, for all the Romans behaved really awfully (crucifixions etc) I tend to think they largely made people who they conquered net better off. So I sometimes wonder if, even if great respect for civilian suffering and humanitarian concern is the best outcome (eg in Gaza) whether sometimes half measures are actually worse than nothing.
This is less a serious policy proposal than just a sense that maybe we should take these considerations more seriously.
IMO "underestimating the harm of endless conflict" is the root problem in Israel. The international community needs to decide what it wants and commit to it. Two states, Jewish one state, Arab one state are all far better than never-ending war. Since 1967 Israel has been allowed to dominate the Palestinians very extensively, but not enough to end the conflict.
Exactly. Israel sees everyone look the other way while it builds settlements and concludes no one really cares about the Palestinians. Palestinians see a hundred UN resolutions in their favour and conclude they need to just hold on. An unambiguous signal is needed.
"Israel must immediately pull out of all occupied territories"
But Israel did pull out of Gaza in 2005. Then Hamas came into power, started shooting rockets into Israel, and then committed the atrocities of 10/7.
Yes, I know I'm omitting a ton of details, Netanyahu is an a-hole, etc. But if the solution were as simple as "Israel pulls out of Gaza and the West Bank AND in return, the Palestinians recognize Israel's right to exist and everyone lives in peace and harmony," it would have happened already.
Yeah, I mean I 100% agree with you. My guess is that pulling out of the West Bank produces a second Hamastan with much easier access to Iranian weapons...
The international community would probably also have to deliver a clear message to Palestinians: any future attacks will be treated just like any other act of war by a sovereign state. Israel would have to be allowed to win any subsequent wars.
I think it’ll probably need foreign boots on the ground to work. Probably American. Otherwise the people on either side of the border hate each other too much for peace to survive. They’ll be fucking with each other from day one. They’ll find whatever clauses in the peace agreement were ambiguously worded and start claiming the other side broke the deal and we’ll be back at square one.
I find it shocking people keep saying this. Israel pulled out of Gaza but maintained so many restrictions the UN continued to view it as the occupying power: "Following the withdrawal, Israel continued to maintain direct control over Gaza's air and maritime space, six of Gaza's seven land crossings, maintains a no-go buffer zone within the territory, controls the Palestinian population registry."
Israel also did not at at all withdraw out of the West Bank.
It's really wrong IMO to argue that this episode proves the Palestinians cannot be trusted with responsibility.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that because Hamas insisted on firing rockets into Israel? If your neighbor keeps shooting rockets at you, of course you'll want to control them! And if your neighbor is ruled by a fanatical death cult that wants you to die, yeah, no sh*t you'll want to maintain a "no-go buffer zone" between yourself and them. Also, zero sympathy for the way Hamas took billions of dollars in foreign aid and used it to build tunnels rather than make life better for Palestinian civilians.
I think a dirty secret no one talks about is the Jordanians aren’t interested in a Palestinian state in the West Bank because they trust them as much as the Egyptians trust the Gazans.
I'm calling Ben to immediately block and suspend any SB commenter who posts the "what have the Romans ever done for us?" Monty Python clip in response to Peter's comment.
Posting the "what has Rome ever done for us" bit in this context would be gilding the lily: it's too obvious and, given that obviousness, would make it, horrors, boring. To be effective it has to be surprising.
Indeed, one might say it works best when no one expects the "what has Rome ever done for us" bit.
Our chief weapon is self-control! — self-control and civility, civility and self-control.... Our two weapons are self-control and civility! — and Monty Python quotes.... Our three weapons are self-control, civility, and Monty Python quotes! — and an almost fanatical devotion to Matthew Yglesias.
Absolutely. The worst government is never as bad as fighting a civil war. And if you ever want to know how the worst governments stay in power, this is it.
And then opposition to the government finally does reach a breaking point, and a nasty civil war is fought with the insurgent side prevailing, it is still hard to gaurantee something good emerges out the other side. At the end, there is no functioning infrastructure left and armed groups with their own interests scattered across the country. Instability leads to instability.
It's not that there is nothing to be done, but the best result come when institutions can be held intact or be allowed to be built up again in a peace.
"The worst government is never as bad as fighting a civil war."
Eh, I think that one's going a bit far. By every casualty metric I'm aware of, Maoist China killed substantially more (like, at least several times over) of its citizens during the Great Leap Forward than died in the entirety of the 1945-50 phase of the Chinese Civil War. See also Cambodia/Kampuchea.
Agreed. I think this can be largely attributed to the fact that horrible governments at some level lose or risk legitimacy with their people and so have to engage is a sort of cold civil war of violent repression to maintain their unearned authority. Mao and Stalin both killed a huge number of their own people who they viewed as potential enemies. Bad government is better than civil war but "the worst" of governments is a lot worse than bad and can be very deadly.
I might try to conceptualize Mao's Great Leap Forward as a kind of civil war - an attempt by Mao to overthrow the social order he himself ushered into being. Maybe the Holocaust, Holodomer, are kind of wars against a defenseless population, etc. But if I were to do that I'd be trending into absurdity - its clear that unchecked authoritarian governments can become worse than violent attempts to overthrow them.
What's clear is that war is awful, and that moment-to-moment war is worse than the worse governance. But what about cost-benefit long-term?
If I take something like the Iraq war, where there were ~200,000 civilian causalties that's a huge tragic loss of life. Out a population of 45 million, that is 0.4% of the population. Scott does a similar calculation for the military intervention in Libya. But in strict utilitarian terms, if you come out of the war and make everyone else's lives ~10% better, you've obviously overwhelmed that loss. There will also be economic loss, but long-term growth rates can easily overwhelm that.
That might sound a bit ghoulish to talk about sacrificing a few lives for the moderate improvement of the many. But you can make it a life-for-life if the post-war stability includes things like "fewer lives lost due to government repression and criminal violence" or "lives saved by having a functioning healthcare system" or "guarantee of not going to an even bigger war with one's neighbors".
But... this is almost a Pascal's Mugging. Anytime you do a utilitarian calculation about the future you find that it will overwhelm the present, but the problem that it is extraordinarily hard to predict the future. Maybe there is a nasty civil war and everyone has freedom, prosperity, and compassion for each other after that. Or maybe you've just begun a pointless spiral of dysfunction, predation, and misery. Your assumptions about outcomes are doing all the work (even if one makes up probabilities to put on it).
So I think where Matt settles into this is wise, where one shouldn't think that battlefield success gaurantees the ability to pick a perfect government. At best military intervention lets you pick sides between two imperfect options and sometimes that makes sense. But if you are humanitarian, most of time you'd much rather prevent a war, or help refugees, or just do global health. And I think in other articles he argues that having a military can be part of preventing a war or ending one quickly, but the less you have to use it the better.
Not sure! Dr. Wikipedia says that 12-15% of all North Koreans died during the war (which is admittedly on the fringe of what you might describe as a "civil war").
My last focus area before I retired as an intelligence analyst was East Africa and that included a deployment there in 2014 right after the South Sudan civil war. Overall, I just want to say how excellent your piece is.
The fact that the most recent map available showing areas of control is four months old really says something about how Africa generally and this war in particular doesn't get a lot of interest in the global media and public, which, unfortunately, isn't anything new. I went looking through my sources to try to find something more recent that's publicly available and couldn't.
I guess the only thing I would quibble with is the extent of US involvement. Sudan has always been unstable and I don't think there is much the US can do to change that. The Obama administration's well-meaning goal to split off South Sudan did not improve things, a nasty civil war began immediately there, and that country is likely not going to see long-term stability either.
Fundamentally, the region has a history of weak state capacity, low levels of nationalism and national identity, and high levels of other group identities among the peoples there that cause intranational conflict and violence. That's not really something the US can solve., especially by picking sides in a conflict that we don't actually know much about and don't understand the long-term implications of our involvement.
"The fact that the most recent map available showing areas of control is four months old really says something about how Africa generally and this war in particular doesn't get a lot of interest in the global media and public."
I never comment on this board. I just want to say thank you to Matt and the Slow Boring crew for putting this one together. I knew virtually nothing about this conflict - except that it is happening - and now I know enough to have a basis to read about it in the dreaded main stream media! Thank you.
PS. The comments are incredible too. This is quite the informed community. Proud to be a subscriber. Kudos!
Not much to add, here, but wanted to point out that these conflicts are heavily fueled by extractive economies--gold and oil, but I would also include some less traditional stuff like shipping lanes in the Red Sea--where civilian populations are at best largely unnecessary and at worst an active impediment to exploitation of a valuable location-based resource that doubles as financial fuel for the conflict.
The resource curse concept has been a bit over-extended and beaten to death at this point, but I think a lot of the underlying logic about conflict in the modern world holds up well, in the worst possible way. And I feel like you could add a coda onto this article to connect it to yesterday's article: one of the things that makes America truly great and successful is our government's reliance on citizen tax regimes as its primary source of revenue. Tax Day should really be a national holiday.
Reading this article is like eating my vegetables: not my favorite to consume, but I know that ultimately what I am consuming is valuable. So thanks for writing
Multiethnic states in a stage of pre-industrialization are doomed to fail. The historical record is clear: nation states are much more likely to become peaceful, rich and democratic if they start from relative ethnic homogeniety. Once they have reached that state they can better cope with diversity.
It was a terrible mistake (or in some cases a conscious design) to not draw borders that more closely followed ethnic and religious divisions in Africa and the Middle East post-colonialism. Now we see constant zero-sum ethnic strife and power battles instead of democratic competition between left and right in a ethnically relatively homogenous democratic nation state.
This is not an argument for ethnic cleansing (if I need to point that out…) but possibly for redrawing borders when the option arises. For example, Iraq should have been divided into three or four new and more homogenous nation states after the US invasion, instead we saw it collapse under the weight of ethnic and religious zero-sum divisions.
And obviously I wish this wasn’t the case, that instead humans could live in peace with another everywhere. I’m merely observing what seems to me to be an unfortunate truth…
“ For example, Iraq should have been divided into three or four new and more homogenous nation states after the US invasion, instead we saw it collapse under the weight of ethnic and religious zero-sum divisions.”
I can’t really think of that many successful cases of partition after a long period of colonial enmeshment. I’d be willing to learn of some but it seems to me Iraq would have fell to civil war or ethnic cleansing regardless of what lines we wanted to draw on a map.
At least those partitions reflected pre-existing subnational governing regions that had many decades of experience. Unlike India/Pakistan or Israel/Palestine.
The other interesting counterpoint here is that both India and Pakistan are themselves multiethnic countries that, while certainly imperfect (especially Pakistan), aren't totally unstable.
"Ethnicity" is a slippery concept. I don't think we should put any weight on it. The more solid principle is that people who don't want to live together in the same polity should be allowed to live apart in different polities. Sometimes those divisions will line up with what we normally think of as "ethnic" lines, sometimes they don't, sometimes there are "ethnic" groups that don't feel that level of division for one reason or another.
I mean there's a lot of war's there that I wouldn't want to unleash except as an absolute last resort. I'm not really sure how I'd rank the cruelties of force based integration and second class citizenship versus mass slaughter of civilians in Yugoslavia.
That isn't what he is talking about but England and the Republic of the Netherlands remained separate states despite having a joint head of state.
That is common, the UK and Hannover had a joint head of state for decades but were run completely separately, the UK, Canada and Papua New Guinea have a common head of state today, India and Pakistan fought a war while sharing a head of state.
Well said. I was really trying (weakly) to be somewhat humorous. Just because the Netherlands supplied a royal to rule them (a constant thing back in the day) hardly meant that England was subservient to the Netherlands.
The UK signed the Treaty of Nonsuch, making it a protectorate and sent Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of of Leicester to be the Governor-General.
"The Earl had now "the rule and government general" with a Council of State to support him (the members of which he nominated himself). He remained a subject of Elizabeth, making it possible to contend that she was now sovereign over the Netherlands. According to Leicester, this was what the Dutch desired. From the start such a position for him had been implied in the Dutch propositions to the English, and in their instructions to Leicester; and it was consistent with the Dutch understanding of the Treaty of Nonsuch."
Saying that's not legally part of the UK and doesn't count is useless pedantry given the context of the current conversation.
Huh, that’s a weird and obscure part of Dutch history to talk about! I would have thought the earlier period that this treaty settled (the Netherlands being Burgundian and then Spanish) or the later period when William of Orange was both Stadtholder of the Netherlands and King of England would be more natural times to talk about. But in any case, if you want to talk about the modern Netherlands being ruled from some place outside, Spain, France, and Charlemagne are the examples to talk about, not England.
I appreciate your commitment to the deep cut for the sake of pedantic correctness. Figuring out what's factually correct comes first; figuring out what somebody meant comes second.
Apropos news events today*. I feel fairly certain that we can call Czechoslovakia a colonial possession of the Soviet Union from 1945-1991 and they had a pretty peaceful partition from all accounts.
The problem of neoconservativism is that it thought too highly of the middle east. Some places just don't have the moral and intellectual infrastructure to support Jeffersonian democracies.
It seems like the humanitarian thing is we should do nothing to get involved except accept refugees from the area who want to live in a liberal society.
I think this is too pessimistic. Japan and Germany quite recently didn’t look like candidates to become stable liberal democracies. They were both ethnically homogenous however (especially post-ww2).
Both Japan and Germany had decades of experience holding fair elections. Japan was a liberal democracy (with no civilian control over the military) till about 1937.
I think our biggest misinterpretation of historic events has been our view of the success of post war Germany and Japan. We have since 1945 seen our actions there and the subsequent outcomes as a template we can tweak and use with other countries and regions. But in truth they were both singular outliers, even the reasons that our post war efforts were successful were unique to each and came about for different reasons.
I think we're forgetting how much hubris went into the Iraq War and how much Bill Kristol's and Paul Wolfowitz were the intellectual sheen. But that war was decided by Chenny on 9/12.
I'm sorry, but Team America got the real reasons for this war better than anyone; it was America F**K yeah. I really think we're forgetting how much nationalist fervor went into everything we did from 2001 to 2006.
And I think someone who didn't forget is Joe Biden. Everyone clamoring as to why Biden isn't doing "more" or intervening more; I suspect the answer from Biden if you gave him truth serum is "do you remember the Iraq War? How did that go? Definition of pyrrhic victory" In fact we know based on reporting about Biden's reaction to the surge in Afghanistan. He knew it was a lost cause and wouldn't work and he was right! Am also quite certain that Biden's lessons from 2001 is 2006 is hugely informing his actions with Israel. Telling Netanyahu he can't respond at all (what protestors want) is just not going to fly for obvious reasons with Israeli public. But I feel fairly certain that he's telling Netanyahu "don't make the same mistakes we made"*
* seems Lindsey Graham learned nothing from this time period of the Sunday morning talk shows are anything to go by
In all honesty I suspect the real answer is in 2016, much like Ted Cruz he made proverbial "deal with the devil" and threw in his hat with Trump once his own staffers told him "most of your voters think Trump is Jesus reincarnate. If you cross him you risk a primary challenge you will likely lose".
There is something to your argument. The Gertrude Bells of history and their map drawing have caused a lot of contemporary problems and conflicts when combined with the modern Westphalian idea that borders are involiable.
I don't think the answer is for modern-day Gertrude Bells to try to repair the damage though. That was tried with South Sudan and it hasn't exactly worked out great.
Adam Tooze made a well-researched post about the origins and stakes of the Sudan conflict that readers here might find interesting. A key piece of context: the Sahel saw a huge gold rush over the course of the 2010s, and “who gets to control the revenue flow from the gold?” has been a major conflict driver both across the region and in Sudan in particular.
This reads a lot like the Lancastrians and Yorkists contesting the throne with murky and spasmodic interventions from Burgundians and French. A power vacuum is often worse than competent autocracy.
"It is the largest humanitarian crisis in the world right now, and it’s not particularly close." Are you sure about that? True, Sudan has been shockingly bad, but I'm under the impression that the long-term war(s) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been the worst by a long shot.
Having worked in various West African countries during the Obama admin and witnessed our military & diplomatic footprint first hand, the collapse of the 10 year investment in countries like Chad, Burkina Faso and (especially) Niger is shocking to me.
Not only did the US invest a lot of energy and capital in these countries through USAID, MCC and OPIC, but some of our best troops rotated through these countries. The US & France even had a semi permanent base in the Niamey suburbs!
As usual the US diplomatic corps will learn no lessons and take no responsibility for this failure, but if Washington can not influence a belt of impoverished countries with broadly aligned strategic interests (anti-insurgency, economic development) even with concerted investment then how can we expect to accomplish anything meaningful in more critical theaters?
How much is our failure in the Sahel due to the somewhat intractable problems in the region, or problems with our diplomatic/military approach? Is that really proof we can't accomplish other policy objectives in critical theaters?
I think the intractable problems require a different approach. Why was something like the rebuilding of Germany and Japan successful, but Iran and Afghanistan not?
Real change probably requires a much heavier hand than we are willing to take now days.
Germany and Japan were industrialized before and had BMWs and ships before hand. It was just rebuilding.
Iraq was a petrostate where America killed all the Baa'thists who had all the institutional knowledge. It was a oil rentier state, not an industrialized country with a real social contract wit its citizens.
Afghanistan wasn't industrialized either.
It's easy to rebuild a country that was already technologically advanced and many of the entrepreneurs and investors are there to rebuild commerce. That never existed the same way in Iraq a rentier state, and Afghanistan which never had world class cars or much industry.
I'm a West African, specifically Ghanaian-American with dual citizenship. It really shouldn't be shocking. The aftermath of NATO & Arab states helping the rebels defeat Gaddafi has contributed to the current situation. After Gaddafi's fall, his Tuareg mercenaries and radical extremists affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State wreaked havoc in Mali in 2012. The Tuaregs resented Mali's oppression, while the radicals aimed to spread chaos.
Historically, Mali and Niger have oppressed their Tuareg Amazigh nomads, leading to a strong desire for secession among the Tuaregs. Gaddafi had previously supported these groups & the Malian/Nigerien governments, but after his death, radicals established bases in Libya and extended their influence into the Sahel region.
Many Americans fail to grasp the complexities of the various tribes in these countries, often reducing the dialogue to a simplistic view of Africa as a single entity. The aftermath of Gaddafi's overthrow was chaotic. We supported the rebels, who then killed Gaddafi, leaving Libya unable to form a stable government. Khalifa Haftar, a former Gaddafi soldier and American citizen who lived in the Washington D.C. suburbs, has been a significant obstacle to a united Libya.
In 2013, France, Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS), and the UN successfully dismantled the secessionist state of Azawad in Mali. However, when the militants and secessionists resorted to guerrilla warfare and spread into Niger and Burkina Faso, France faced greater challenges, and terrorism proliferated. Adding to the complexity are France's colonial legacy and Russian propaganda claiming France is recolonizing Africa. This has led to growing anti-Western sentiments among Malians, Nigeriens, and Burkinabes, who are increasingly seeking support from Russia.
Very interesting, thank you! in your opinion, what should the west have done? Not intervened in Libya? Or responded more forcefully to the rebels/IS/militias afterwards?
I think people need to take a look at themselves and really examine if humanitarian intervention or "Responsibility to Protect" is a good doctrine.
There's a few ways to look at this. But let's contextualize Libya for the readers -
Intervention in Libya was a UN-sanctioned Resolution. The UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973, which authorized the establishment of a no-fly zone and the use of all necessary measures to protect civilians. The whole point why UN authorized the resolution was because Gaddafi was killing protestors (some numbers say a few hundreds were killed, some say up to 10K). Regardless, because Gaddafi did slaughter protestors is what put this up for a vote in the first place. The International Community had this new doctrine called "Responsibility to Protect" after the Rwanda Genocide & Bosnian Massacre. Based on what NGOs were saying, people really thought it could escalate to a Rwanda.
America, France, UK, Bosnia, Columbia, Gabon, Lebanon, Nigeria, Portugal, and South Africa said yes.
China, Russia, Brazil, India, and Germany abstained. The key point is that none of the permanent members of the Security Council (the UK, USA, China, Russia, and France) exercised their veto power, allowing the resolution to pass and the intervention to proceed.
However, the intervention has been criticized for extending beyond the original mandate of protecting civilians to effectively supporting regime change. NATO forces provided significant support to rebel groups, which eventually led to the overthrow and killing of Gaddafi. Despite Gaddafi’s calls for a ceasefire and promises of democratic elections, the rebels were determined to remove him from power.
There are several perspectives on how the situation could have been handled differently:
1. When Gaddafi was asking for a ceasefire, NATO could have tried to pressure the rebels to stop fighting and have elections. (I don't think this would have worked since the rebels really wanted Gaddafi dead).
2. America, UK, France, China, or Russia could have used their veto (If Putin or Xi could go back in time, they would have probably used their veto. That's why China and Russia used their Veto in votes about Syria)
3. Do nothing and let things shake out on their own. Libya wasn't the only country that had issues during the Arab Spring - Bahrain also did a crackdown to restore order, people died, and Bahrain still continues. In fact, Saudi Arabia saved Bahrain. In Egypt, people protested against Mubarak. Mubarak killed hundreds of protestors but the people removed Mubarak, then Morsi was democratically elected, then the military removed him because they fucking hate the Muslim Brotherhood. Iraq killed some protestors too, no one cared.
Libya still has problems today, and its not obvious that our intervention was worth it. Terrorists still in Libya...
My understanding is that U.S. and NATO support for the rebels in early 2011 was predicated partly on the belief that the rebels needed help to avert a Gaddafi-led slaughter in Benghazi. (I'm thinking, for example, of this: https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/04/07/was-there-going-to-be-a-benghazi-massacre/.) Do you think that it would've been better for the U.S. and NATO to stand aside, even if doing so meant that the slaughter in Benghazi would take place?
There are two facets to consider in this complex situation:
#1: The African Union always said the intervention was wrong. (In fact Nigeria, Gabon, and South Africa broke off with the AU to support the no fly zone). The AU also tried negotiating a ceasefire and a diplomatic resolution, but the rebels turned down the AU's proposal because Gaddafi would still be in power under the proposal. The UN, NATO, EU, US, and even Nigeria, Gabon, and South Africa gave the middle finger to the AU's ability to govern to African affairs.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2011/4/11/libyan-rebels-reject-african-union-peace-plan
You can either think of this as the the international community undermining the AU. Or you can see this as the AU being a feckless institution that couldn't make a diplomatic resolution or foster unanimous diplomatic consensus among its members. Maybe the AU & regional cooperation should be heeded more since it was still a majority decision of the AU to not intervene in Libya, and the Sahel bore the brunt of the aftermath taking place right now.
#2 What you asked is basically a trolly problem. Was it better to intervene in Libya, which allowed terrorists to bring their weapons to the Sahel and kill 34K+ people and displace 3M+ people? Or is it better to let Gaddafi kill slaughter civilians where he could have killed tens of thousands? (Or it could have been a little worst than Bahrain where thousands die instead of hundreds & stability remains.). The intervention in Libya weakened many African nation's trust of the West, which is why it shouldn't surprise people when they seek anti-Western help.
To a large extent the AU's opinion, to be blunt, doesn't matter much to anyone.(To be honest, its no big loss to the West either way... Kazakhstan, Australia, Canada and a few others can sell and have more uranium than Niger. Also, Niger. Mali and Burkina faso sell gold and can barely control their gold trade.)
To be clear, we have let brutal despots still in power all the time. Because of "responsibility to protect", Libya still isn't unified while Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali are ruled by military juntas who are struggling to destroy extremists where 30K are dead, 3M displaced, and is a huge traffic source of migrants to Europe.
Hey Yaw. Thanks for your very detailed explanation. Fascinating as usual. For clarity, do you believe that without that intervention in Libya we would not be witnessing all these conflicts in the Sahel region today?
Good question, the range of plausibility is that leaving it alone could be:
1. A worst version of Bahrain/(The leaders kill hundreds and jail 1000s, but stability is restored... ),
2. A worst version of Sudan/(The leaders kill hundreds and jail 1000s, but stability is restored.. for a few more years... until 2019. ),
3. A Yemen (the strongman is removed by the rebels but then descends to civil war),
4. A worse version of Egypt (remove strongman, elect an islamist, and then military removes him with a return to pre-Arab Spring dictator)
5. A Syria repeat (a clusterfuck war that destabilizes the country)
It is my opinion that if we did nothing, it would be closer to a Bahrain or even a Sudan with a higher death toll than to a Bosnian massacre or Rwandan genocide. But at least we wouldn't have 34K+ dead, 3M displaced, and you wouldn't have migrants from there trying to risk their lives to Europe. We have left strongmen in place many times
Thanks for the post…very helpful context!
Correct! In this case Rebels means the terrorists & secessionists.
It's not... France & UN have been in Mali for ~10 years (and the other countries Chad, BF, and Niger) a little less and they couldn't kill all the terrorists. America had a $100M reaper drone base in Niger and the terrorism has just gotten worse. It's like an Afghanistan. Plus you have the rebels.
Mali and Niger are mainly desert.
Russia will figure out soon that this isn't that easy.
Why assume that we even can influence things that way? I think one of the big lessons we should have learned from the last 50 years is that no matter our desire or our resources, we don't really have an ability to shape events in far flung areas of the world.
That doesn't mean we should become isolationist or make no efforts, but we should remain both humble and skeptical about our abilities to get other people to act either in our interests or in even parallel with how we would see as the rational action.
Disagree. I think we can. But we have to understand the cost, be willing to make tough choices and commit the resources
Edmund Burke.
Very interesting. What do you think the US should have done differently? Genuinely asking.
My personal opinion is that we overlearned the lessons of the Bush administration being inflexibly overcommitted to certain outcomes. Now we face the opposite problem where we are somewhere between passive and indecisive in our approach to events.
Given the integration of JSOTF-TS at high levels of these partner militaries there must have been some sense of the discontent brewing in these countries. I understand that the options available to the United States are unpalatable - either support the plotters or attempt to foment a counter-coup - but doing nothing and letting the chips fall is also a choice. Then for us to throw up our hands and say "well we have rules that prevent us from doing business with coup plotters so I guess we'll just bail on the region" while Egypt is sitting there staring you in the face is embarrassing. Giving up and slinking away may even be the correct choice, but in that case we should not have treated the region as strategically important in the first place or should have some sense of why it isn't strategically important anymore. I don't think there is any movement to curtail or reduce MCC Compacts or Power Africa investments in the region, for example.
I don't think there's any evidence that Trump specifically caused any erosion in the US position in the region (diplomatic and military budgets rose significantly while he was in office) but I do think the 2017 ambush in Niger probably limited US Forces' ability to operate in country. Regardless, these were surmountable obstacles & US/French ability to project power in the region greatly exceeds Russian capabilities. The US is leaving because it wasn't worth it to stick around. Generally speaking it pains me to see so many brilliant people work so hard (and spend so much money) on a subject that Foggy Bottom & the White House (under 3 admins) obviously really didn't care about.
And a second question is how much this erosion is attributed to the Trump administration?
I visited Ethiopia for ten days in 2019, and I have to say I was shocked that several Ethiopian people engaged me in conversation about politics and were pro-Trump. My best understanding of why was that they were very upset about what happened in Libya under Obama (although it may have also been somewhat attributable to Ethiopia being very culturally conservative). So my very limited exposure to a country in the region confirms Yaw's contention that Gaddafi's fall was destabilizing and provided an opening for anti-American actors. Much as I despise Trump, I don't think he owns this chaos.
"I feel like nearly everyone here, were they in Obama’s shoes, would have taken out Qaddafi."
It wasn't necessarily the wrong move to take him out, but when we do such things, we have to have a solid plan for the aftermath and a real commitment to that country. If you break it, you own it. And that leads to all kinds of trouble, of course (Exhibit A: Afghanistan), so it behooves us to proceed with extreme caution when we decide to take out a tyrannical regime. It seems that opening the region up to warlordism was a step backward from dictatorship.
I want to be clear: At the time, I was in favor of what Obama did. It's only since then that I've concluded that he made a terrible error.
As for blaming Trump for everything...It's a fun joke, but seems to be the fallback position for many people who oppose him. It's a counterproductive tactic.
"I feel like it’s pretty important for everyone to blame Trump for 100% of the country’s woes"
Thus proving Trumpists right?
Exactly. Ask the Kurds after 2019.
Rebels everywhere have to be asking themselves if Russia isn't a more stable ally than chancing another Trump or Trump-lite US president's whims.
seems like allies are asking them same after Biden abandoned Afghanistan
Umm, Trump abandoned Afghanistan.
Biden orders the withdrawal.
That was my thought, too. He spent four whole years selling out our foreign policy and decimating State.
It wouldn't be surprising that, amid his flashier corruptions, he might have ALSO been fomenting chaos in the "shithole countries" to try and extort their leaders for cash. It's exactly the sort of low-rent racket he's famous for -- preying on the weakest, rather than swinging for the fences.
The Libyan intervention happened in 2011, during the Obama administration. I don't really blame Obama though. Hilary and Obama really thought Gaddafi was genocidal. No one in the security council vetoed the decision:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_1973
That said the destruction of Libya brought cascading effects to the Sahel. Weapon smuggling was rampant since terrorists just took those weapons to rampage.
Libya's trajectory could have been markedly different. Perhaps we should have taken Gaddafi's ceasefire proposal seriously, seeking to halt the rebel advance and initiate a path towards democratic elections. Alternatively, we could have opted for non-intervention.
Admittedly, neither of these choices guaranteed success. Even if the UN had urged the rebels to spare Gaddafi, they might have pursued his demise, albeit with greater difficulty without NATO's support. There's a grim possibility that Gaddafi's regime would have resorted to extreme measures, resulting in a staggering death toll, one I'd prefer not to contemplate.
Nevertheless, a stable Libya could have translated into stability across the Sahel. Countries like Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali might not have faced the same extent of extremist violence had weapons not flowed unchecked through Libyan borders.
>>As usual the US diplomatic corps will learn no lessons and take no responsibility for this failure
I mean, they were kind of famously hollowed out by Trump. It's not surprising that these sorts of collapses might follow.
Thanks Matt. I imagine you had to do quite a bit of research and wrapping your mind around the situation to be able to synthesize it. I honestly had no idea what was going on in the region.
Agreed, it was a classic Vox explainer.
In the best sense! Not a, "This is what you should believe and here's why", but a genuine "Here's what's going on, WITHOUT the MSM sensationalization or ignorant grievance-peddling Faux News BS".
Would love to have more of these.
Yes this was a good and informative piece.
Agreed.
Learned a lot. I really appreciate the piece.
Great article.
I've written about the economic and geopolitical histories of various African countries, spanning from pre-colonial times to the present day. While I haven't published my article on Sudan yet, I have covered Niger and Chad in a multi-part series.
Mali and Niger are grappling with internal issues, including the secessionist ambitions of the nomadic Tuareg Amazigh, corruption, weak governance, and pervasive poverty(They are both agrarian societies with terrible agricultural productivity). Externally, they face threats from jihadists affiliated with Al-Qaeda (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and JMIN) and the Islamic State (Islamic State in the Greater Sahara). The extremist problem initially emerged after the Algerian Civil War ended in 2002, but it exploded following the Libyan Civil War, drawing more jihadists to the Sahel region around Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Chad has also been dealing with extremists in the aftermath of the First Libyan Civil War.
Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso have shifted from relying on France to seeking military support from Russia. They perceive France as ineffective in combating guerrilla fighters, despite a decade of French assistance. While France successfully dismantled the secessionist Azawad state in Mali in 2013 during Operation Serval, its efforts against guerrilla fighters in Operation Barkhane were less effective. After nearly a decade of French involvement, local populations began to view France as a neocolonial power. Consequently, the coup leaders garnered popular support by removing French and Western influence.
Niger Series: https://open.substack.com/pub/yawboadu/p/nigers-modern-economic-and-geopolitical?r=garki&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Chad Series: https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/the-economic-and-geopolitical-history-8d6
I'm still working on Mali but here's part 1:
https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/the-economic-and-geopolitical-history-26c
This isn't exactly smart analysis but this sounds like a clusterfuck we should not be involved in.
Involvement can clearly be a range of things. Completely ceding the region to murderous dictators and the Wagner group doesn't seem like the right strategy to me.
Completely sincere question with zero trolling:
What *REALISTIC* options exist that do not involve either murderous dictators or chaos/anarchy?
I mean, the reason this is so depressing is that, looking at the history of the region, after the fall of colonialism you seem to have nothing but a string of "Dictator A takes over and oppresses his people horribly, Wannabe Dictator B attempts a coup, there's a rebellion/civil war during which innocent people suffer horribly, Dictator B wins and turns out just as bad and oppressive as Dictator A, wash, rinse, repeat, with extra oppression and suffering" occasionally relieved by "a democratically elected leader manages to take power for a couple years before being overthrown in a coup, go back to Square 1."
I am 100% in favor of helping ordinary people who suffer, and I feel terribly sorry for them, but trying to pick winners between evil Dictator A and equally evil Rebel Leader B seems like a no-win game, and as anyone familiar with the movie "War Games" knows, the only way to win a no-win game is not to play.
"What *REALISTIC* options exist that do not involve either murderous dictators or chaos/anarchy?"
The International Crisis Group is a think-tank set up in the 1990s (*) to provide detailed background information and recommendations to policymakers when a humanitarian crisis is imminent or in progress. They have some recommendations on Sudan.
https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/horn-africa/sudan/sudan-year-war
"The U.S., Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE – outside parties that wield significant leverage over the warring parties – have the best chances of persuading the two sides to stop fighting, allow humanitarian aid to reach those who need it and begin the hard work of knitting Sudan back together. The alternative is grim to contemplate, as the country teeters on the brink of chaos, mass starvation and a war that could spread across its borders to a troubled region. Time is of the essence – particularly since the parties are inveigling new warlords to join the fight with promises that they will share in victory’s eventual spoils, which promises to make negotiations to end the war that much more difficult.
"Against this backdrop, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are intent on reconvening talks in Jeddah. The new round should broaden to include roles for Egypt and the UAE, as Crisis Group has long argued, as well as for the new envoys from the AU, UN and IGAD, given the opportunity for reinvigorated diplomacy afforded by these appointments. A single consolidated negotiation process would allow for greater and more cohesive foreign pressure on the two sides, while closing avenues for the belligerents to continue forum shopping to evade serious negotiations. These talks should also expressly aim to reach an urgent permanent ceasefire, instead of dwelling on confidence-building measures as previously. If plans to turn the Jeddah talks into a high-level forum for ceasefire talks falter, then key actors (especially the U.S. and UN) should find a way to make the various negotiation tracks reinforce rather than undermine each other. Advancing as nimbly and quickly as possible toward a deal, using both informal and formal channels and steadily intensifying pressure on the sides should be the goal, no matter where talks take place.
"At the same time, moves to spare millions of Sudanese from starvation cannot wait. All those with influence on the conflict parties should prevail on them in public and private to allow unfettered food aid to communities in need. Outside powers should explore other options for getting food into the worst-affected areas of the country, including greater Darfur, if the warring leaders remain uncooperative. Donors should look into funnelling funds through local volunteers, particularly in the Khartoum, Darfur, Kordofan and Gezira areas, where millions are languishing after nearly all the major aid organisations fled. Donors should also stand ready to reach into their coffers to support the gravely underfunded aid response."
(*) For background information on ICG, see https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cuny/bio/hero.html
What cost would you be willing to pay for a more correct strategy?
Unsure if there is an entirely correct strategy here and I don't have the knowledge base to craft the best one here. Conceptually, I'm just in favor of the US maintaining geopolitical influence in Africa, rather than ceding that ground to the Wagner group or China.
What does maintaining geopolitical influence mean? Specifics here would be helpful.
The words of the proverbial generic American who opens the paper, says “Wow, looks like a mess”, and closes the paper, the better to not see or hear the terrible things in the world, and imagines not hearing about them and not being “involved” in them, taking comfort in the broad wide oceans on either side of him, will make them disappear.
Matt himself used to vibe that way at times. I recall him mildly celebrating Russia’s growing displacement of US power in the Middle East years ago, arguing essentially “Well now THEY get to be the ones tangled up in the region; sucks to be them.”
He appears to be evolving on that, along with events. It’s one of the reasons I read him. Even if some of his audience doesn’t, or evolves in the opposite direction.
The benefit of being a superpower is ... well, the whole super powerful part. But it means we can't ignore bad things happening around the world as easily as a lesser power can do.
Given how the rest of the world largely doesn't seem to appreciate America's continued sacrifices here I'm of the opinion we should largely step back and let the rest of the world solve their problems as we focus on growth and prosperity at home.
I’m not isolationist, but I do admit there is an element of “damned if we do, damned if we don’t “ here.
Get involved? We will be accused of neocolonialism and blamed for anything that goes wrong, and a grumpy blogger will comment on how America is the GrEaTeSt sOuRcE of EviL in the world.
Don’t get involved? We’re a bunch of racists who don’t care about Black people getting killed, and/or naive fools who don’t understand the geopolitical implications. Sigh.
The tiebreaker is that the "damned if we don't" option will save American lives and money relative to the "damned if we do" option.
America’s growth and prosperity relies on open seas and if we let CCP’s imperialism go unchecked we are creating a world with markets closed to the U.S.
This might be overstated. While I'm not sure how I feel about Allan's position in general, it doesn't seem to me that our national prosperity relies on us continuing our current, highly interventionist, policy to try and preserve all existing market access.
Trade with Africa specifically is a small and shrinking share of our gdp.
More generally, we're not North Korea. The US domestic market is very large, making us less reliant on trade than most. This paper estimates an expected loss of 2%-8% of US gdp in a world with pure US autarky. (The paper also notes that this is interestingly similar to prior estimates of the effect size of the Jeffersonian embargo of 1807 and pre-Meiji Japanese autarky.)
https://www.nber.org/digest/apr18/how-large-are-us-economys-gains-trade
We could eat a loss of that magnitude and still be substantially richer than just about everyone.
But, if that still sounds like too much to risk, I would note that there's no plausible case where a future imperial China is able to interdict US trade with Canada and Mexico, and it's hard to imagine even dramatic inhibition of our trade with Europe. And due to diminishing marginal returns, each trade partner we are able to preserve represents an outsized fraction of the benefits of trade generally.
So, the expected economic costs of more isolationism don't seem particularly weighty.
Interesting food for thought…I’ll need to think more about this but appreciate the insight.
I agree with that...but the Saudi/Iran proxy war or what's going on in northern Africa doesn't seem that important.
I suppose as long as the US isn’t too concerned about the price of oil, maybe not…but when have we ever not been too concerned about the price of oil? Domestic production might be sufficient to meet our needs, but the price is still set on world markets that can be disrupted by a war between major oil producers. Maybe the best argument for accelerating “green energy” is the possibility of not having to care about the Saudis or Iran.
I agree…there is an odd paradox that when a country like the US is at its most powerful in terms of ability to influence the world…that influence is less valuable. As the country faces more challenges and is less able to influence events is also when that influence is most important.
I think the benefits of being a superpower is being able to pick and choose what conflicts we actually want to be a part of. One thing I think America has sorely lacked in the last 50 years is the ability to prioritize. If America wants to weaken Russia’s grip in Africa, then the easiest way is to give Ukraine all of the weapons they could possibly want.
Sure we can.
In my opinion, Russia can keep Syria; they're welcome to it. I wouldn't have us switch places with them for the world.
My view of America's place in the world is very simple. There are parts of the world that are incredibly important economically, socially etc and we have to be deeply involved in them to help keep the peace and maintain global prosperity: the Indo-Pacific region and Europe. And then there are places in our neighborhood that, because we are the dominant power and our long history, we have an interest in helping succeed and keeping peaceful: Central and South America (well, Canada too).
Other than those areas, we should get involved only to the extent that it is virtually costless and risk-free for us. Otherwise, wish them the best and both sides go on their way.
I don't think Matt is really so indifferent as he seems. I think the flippant comment is more about debunking the idea that miltary interventionism is about self-interest. The same Russian nationalist who thinks this is a good idea is the same person who can articulate exactly why the US intervention in Iraq was so self-destructive.
But that doesn't mean there is nothing humanitarianly productive we can do in the region, it just means we should fool ourselves into think "we need our guy in Sudan to seize the initiative in the Middle East" or whatever the imagined US interest would be.
His flippancy seemed to be more a 2021 thing, honestly.
Back then, a lot of otherwise far-seeing center-left pundits (Matt actually not being nearly the worst on this front) were anticipating/hoping with baited breath for a future world where the US could focus on child tax credits, housing policy, health care, and all kinds of lovely domestic priorities.
Matt himself got into a roaring Twitter fight back then with Michael McFaul, of all people, basically calling him a liar (about aspects of US foreign policy toward Russia, specifically). I still remember the Slow Boring article condemning America's "militaristic" policy regarding Ukraine--in January 2022.
Wild time, that.
I bring all this crud up not to ding Matt, specifically. If anything, his (generally very good) analysis and takes nowadays show his keen sense of what's important and real, and how changeable true liberals are in the face of changing reality around the world.
I bring it up, essentially, to point out the old maxim--Whether or not Americans are interested in the world, the world, from Ukraine and Taiwan to Syria and Sudan--is very much interested in us.
We look for excuses to back away from it at our peril. My two cents.
I mean, it is fine to argue which things we should be involved in, and if you think this is one of them, make that case.
But a dogmatic 'It is our duty to make all problems disappear, rather than to ignore them' philosophy is obvious nonsense. You must pick and choose.
Also, strawman. Just because the "proverbial generic American" wishes to ignore a thing, does not mean that they are stupid enough to believe that their ignorance will "make them disappear".
To paraphrase Stannis Baratheon, "Straw men cut both ways."
Did i mischaracterize this paragraph somehow? Is this NOT implying that we are morally obligated to care about, and "get involved in" all the "terrible things in the world"? That is the implication that I refute, and it is hardly a strawman. That is, in fact, obvious nonsense.
"The words of the proverbial generic American who opens the paper, says “Wow, looks like a mess”, and closes the paper, the better to not see or hear the terrible things in the world, and imagines not hearing about them and not being “involved” in them, taking comfort in the broad wide oceans on either side of him, will make them disappear."
If that isn't what you meant to imply, speak more clearly.
Priorities are a thing. Even cosmopolitans have to make a case that the RoI for intervening in Sudan is better than alternative uses of our attention and resources. Sudan is far away and apparently has a lot of complicated and seemingly intractable problems.
I'm definitely in favor of acting when we can.
But we shouldn't pretended that resources are unlimited either. I don't know enough about Sudan to know whether it's worth it or not or what the costs are.
I mean, you say it isn't smart, but if you trained a parrot to say just that one phrase and had it travel around every room in Washington where foreign policy is discussed, its record would be about 80% better than the average cable news talking head, and 99% better than Lindsey Graham.
Right. It's actually true that the US doesn't have to be involved everywhere and the notion that it does is a very contested and contestable ideology with a spotty track record, not a self-evident truth.
100% agree. Prioritizing is all about not doing certain things, and messing around in the middle east is absolutely not worth it.
Unfortunately, it's harder for people to be concerned about a war where two warlords are using a country as their playground for power. Without an "oppressor-oppressed" narrative or a clear "good guy," it's more difficult for people to support a side.
For those who believe "America shouldn't be involved in every conflict," Sudan serves as a poignant example. When America doesn't take a commanding role, middle powers step in to fill the vacuum. Americans must decide if they are comfortable with that. Of course, more nuanced discernment mechanisms are at play.
Similarly, there's the largely ignored decade-long civil war in the Central African Republic, right beneath Sudan and Chad. You can explore more about this conflict in the economic history of the Central African Republic here.
https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/the-economic-history-of-central-african
At the same time, what can actually be done?
The UN is a lame duck, it can't lead an intervention without Russia's consent, which it won't.
Siding with either side means accepting their atrocities. Unilaterally attacking either one, or even both, even if it's just a bunch of airstrikes might change the balance of power, but could just as easily lead to more chaos and atrocities. Decapitation strikes are likewise frowned upon and prone to chaos as well.
Pretty much the only thing left is the boring diplomatic solution, which takes too long, is frustratingly opaque as to whether it's actually working -- in fact, it won't look like it's working until it finally DOES -- and requires us to rely on an absolutely depleted State Department.
I'm definitely not trying to pooh-pooh you here; I personally HATE when all a person does is shoot ideas down and not contribute any of their own. But I'm genuinely curious if you see a viable solution path here.
I didn't give an opinion either way. But my stance is America is doing the right thing by not choosing a side and by choosing the boring diplomatic resolution.
By not choosing a side, middle powers will support their side and there will be more deaths, but if America interferes, the regime that wins will look illegitimate and look like a US puppet.
I think America is at its best when it doesn't intervene directly.
Thanks for all the input and context. Your comments have been very informative
Indeed, I think that America’s role should always be the balancing power and never the direct interventionist except for crucial conflicts that directly affect its interest
In 2008, I was in South Sudan less than a year after the peace agreement with the North (eg the Khartoum government). I previously knew nothing about the Sudanese civil war - I was just there working with a global health contractor firm on a brand-new USAID project. Got up to speed quickly. I learned that close to a million people had died in the Sudanese civil war in the last few decades, and my mind swam that absolutely no one in the U.S. knew or even cared.
I spent a lot of time with our country director. One night, she mentioned to me that she slept with her loaded AK-47 under her bed. I asked... why? She shrugged. "So when war comes again, we will be ready."
"Do you think war will come again?"
She smirked. "Yes. And then we will kill them, and then kill their children, just like they did to us."
That really stuck with me.
I spent a lot of time working in Africa. The vast majority of the continent is nothing like Sudan. But most Americans dismiss pretty much all of it, and certainly the Sudanese conflict, in a way they would never do to, say, what happens in central Asia or the Middle East, and it's hard to see it once you realize it.
Slightly off-topic, but not really.
Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, was in Kyiv this week. One stop was to play guitar in a local bar. No, I'm not kidding.
We've been so scarred by Trump's incompetence that we can't quite accept that the Biden Administration's foreign policy hasn't been effective. Yes, they are trying hard and face some difficult situations. But it hasn't been effective at avoiding escalations in almost every part of the world -- Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Iranian-backed Hamas attack on Israel, Houthis shutting down shipping in the Red Sea, what Matt describes today in Sudan and increasing tensions (thankfully not yet acted upon) between China and Taiwan. The NATO states like us better and the Administration says all the right things but I'm disappointed with the results.
Whenever we get into disappointment with Biden admin foreign policy, I have to bring up the counterfactual. Do any of the situations you describe above strike you as being better off on Earth 2 where Trump won a second term? I've detailed this in other comments, but the counterfactuals on Ukraine, Hamas/Gaza, Houthis, all would probably me more strategically favorable to our adversaries than the situation stands today, since Trump's foreign policy consisted largely of taking the US off the board and allowing the new Axis to establish their spheres on influence.
That world might look more "peaceful" but largely because we would not be backing any allies in the fight. The bad guys would still probably have gained more than they have in reality.
I think the disappointment you (and frankly I) feel is largely disappointment with the accelerating final unraveling of the unipolar moment. It sucks that the US can't keep a lid on things unilaterally anymore. The strategic way out is to revitalize alliances in Europe and the Pacific, which is something the Biden admin has been fairly successful at doing. Failure to do so will lose us Cold War 2.
I think the bar for competence should be higher than "would it better if Trump were President".
I'm not a foreign policy expert. But I know success or failure when I see it, and the last 3.5 years haven't been a success.
I can respect that, but I feel we're getting into "almighty vs alternative" territory
I'll preface this by saying that I know basically nothing about foreign policy. But forget even comparing to the Trump administration. What could or should the Biden admin have done to prevent these things from happening? It's not like there is a "keep Russia from invading Ukraine" button that Biden could have pressed but didn't.
I'm disappointed in what's happening around the world too, but I think the Biden admin is doing the best that they can
Yeah, I'm very sympathetic to John's disappointment (I'm sort of disappointed too), but this seems to come back to other actors having agency.
To pick one, Putin made a catastrophically terrible decision, and there's only so much more you could have made his options catastrophically terrible-r.
Also, Trump depleted a lot of our state capacity... literally, at State. And in the military and elsewhere. That was 4 years we could have been ACTUALLY catching up on industrial capacity, but instead fell behind.
Yeah, I'm struck by the fact that given Putin pretty clearly was planning to invade Ukraine for years (everything with Paul Manafort and his shenanigans in 2016 I think have to be seen in this light), I'd say the Ukraine war has gone as "well" as could possibly have been expected.
Now I put "well" in quotes because I'm being very relative here. Of course, the best outcome is no war at all; I'm very aware there are already over 100K dead (depending on reports on Russian military deaths) and I've seen the videos and pictures of devastation on the ground. But again, I feel fairly certain in saying that no matter who was President, Putin was determined to invade. So given that reality, I'm not sure anyone is doing better than Biden in this situation.
The most consequential thing for Ukraine was Democrats failing to hold a few more seats in 2022. Nothing could have prevented the invasion and Biden responded exactly correctly. The battlefield situation would be better if the flow of arms hadn't been interrupted for months.
We are all bearing the consequences of allies free-riding on the U.S.’s security guarantee.
Japan is rearming. Europe is flopping in the correct direction.
Agreed and some of this is the result of the very real issue that there is only so much that hard power can achieve in the long term. We have gotten so used to be the most powerful kid on the playground we have forgotten that bullies don't always get their way. I usually agree with what US foreign policy wants to achieve but I am less surprised that we don't get what we want when the outcome is extistential to the parties involved and only of limited impact on us.
I've come to believe that our influence in the world is positively correlated with our militarily restraint and diplomatic skill and negatively correlated with the number of bombs we drop.
Agreed. I tend to think that a lot of what makes public policy more complex that we would like it to be, whether we are talking about drug policy or foreign policy, is that our ability to get people do to something that we want them to do and they do not want them to do is more limited that we imagine. In both cases, the fact that we can resort to force whether bombs or arrest doesn't necessarily make that a morally defensible action, can create unwanted impacts, and may just frankly not be enough if the person is determined enough to be willing to risk or accept our show of force. I hate that Israel is killing civilians in Gaza at the rates they are for its own sake. I also fear that they are failing to learn the lessons of our war on terror which is that killing terrorists whack a mole fashion isn't productive if with each terrorist you kill you radicalize two more people traumatized and horrified by what you have done.
I am just more and more convinced that we need to ratchet down our expectations of how much we can really influence events in the rest of the world.
You mentioned above our super powerfulness, but I think that power is the power to never have to behave in a way someone else wants us to, and of course most importantly to know that no one poses any true threat to our people or our vital interests. There has been one successful attack on American soil in the last 80 years, and the result was we went apeshit, kicked off two poorly conceived wars, wasted more resources than anyone else would have been able to muster for any cause, and we're STILL better off than anybody else on the planet.
What I think we have a hard time reconciling is that although absolutely no one can dictate to us, it's not true that we can dictate to everyone else. We can and should try to influence events in the world, but we should have really low expectations about how effective that's actually going to be.
I think the notable exception to this is guaranteeing freedom of navigation at sea, where the United States has been very successful (so successful that "recent stupid nonsense from the Houthis" is actually a Big Story), and which also underpins our wealth and success.
The beauty of the ocean is there are virtually no innocent civilians milling around, and very little ambiguity to anyone's actions. Whether or not we bother to speak softly, we carry a very big stick out on the briny deep, and everybody understands it.
I haven't seen a lot in the news recently about either the Houthis messing around, or even the threat of them causing much disruption. That makes me think they and their enablers got the message.
The biggest, grayest stick.
I don’t think you should be comparing failure to success. You should be comparing actual outcomes to hypothetical outcomes under some alternative policy. There are many situations where every outcome counts as failure, but some are worse and some are less bad. Is there any clear alternative that leads to a less bad failure than what we god?
Given what we all feared on Feb. 22, 2022, I think the Biden strategy in Ukraine has been a stunning success. Perfect? No -- they were dilatory in sending arms that they wound up sending anyway. But otherwise? Really effing good.
And building up an alliance in the Indo-Pacific region to help tamp down Chinese ambitions? Fantastic.
On the big issues, I give them an A.
"And building up an alliance in the Indo-Pacific region to help tamp down Chinese ambitions? Fantastic."
I don't think this is going nearly as well as we might have hoped. US treaty allies are in pretty good shape, but outside of that, there has been a surprising lack of success in building a coalition in Asia.
Getting Japan and South Korea to put their animosity aside -- fantastic. Strengthening ties with Australia, getting the Philippines back on our team -- well done. Carefully handling relations with India and its increasingly authoritarian leader Modi -- very nice job. Solidifying relations with Vietnam -- nice.
Other than waving a magic wand and resuscitating the TPP despite huge opposition in the US, what else could and should he have done?
You’re also forgetting that the Philippines completely flipped and now has a lot of the United States to have bases again
That's my point though. Japan, S. Korea, Australia, Philippine are all treaty allies. Vietnam is a the only non treaty ally that is significantly closer to the US now than when Biden came into office.
Outside of that, most other nations are worse or much worse. A recent poll among ASEAN nations (population 50% larger than the EU) shows the US dropping from being the preferred ally 60-40 compared to China, to China surpassing the US again. The Philippines and Vietnam edged up, but the other nations plummeted in their preference for the US.
For all the talk about Biden focusing on Asia, there has been little actual progress made. Instead of actually trying to join the TPP or some other trade agreement, Biden introduced IPEF, which while initially well received has mostly been since dismissed as an agreement to negotiate, not an framework agreement of any kind. Even its limited benefits are considered to be more paperwork than payoff that constrain countries ability to negotiate going forward.
Most of these countries are desperate for economic growth and development, and the US has repeatedly not been serious about engaging with them in trade. Meanwhile, China is there wanting to buy and sell massive amounts of resources and goods.
It doesn't help the US cause in the region that all of these countries look at see the US response to Nippon steel. If one of our most trusted allies is not allowed to bail out a failing US steel company because of protectionism, what real hope do they have of getting any type of real trade going?
Trump got several peace treaties between Israel and Arab states (including Sudan) and massively increased military aid to Ukraine.
Congress forced Trump to get aid to Ukraine kicking and screaming and literally getting impeached for it.
Israel and Arab diplomatic normalization I'll bite. It's the one area I'm least certain is worse off on Earth 2, but if Hamas still pulled shit it would be much worse for Gazans on Earth 2 since the US wouldn't restrain Israel in any capacity. At the same time it's clear Bibi loves Trump and was on much better behavior, while here on Earth 1 it's obvious part of Bibi's war calculus is undermining Biden and getting Trump elected again.
Didn’t Trump very specifically withhold aid to Ukraine to make them try to prosecute Hunter Biden?
They were not peace treaties because Israel was not at war with any of them.
They were vague cooperation agreements that ended up meaning fuck-all.
"They were vague cooperation agreements that ended up meaning fuck-all."
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2024_Iranian_strikes_in_Israel&oldid=1223944775#Defense_provided_by_other_countries, "According to The Wall Street Journal, Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates shared intelligence, which included radar tracking information, with the U.S. and Israel prior to Iran's drone attack."
The Abraham Accords didn't include Saudi Arabia, so whatever that was, it wasn't because of Trump.
"Trump's foreign policy consisted largely of taking the US off the board and allowing the new Axis to establish their spheres on influence."
I don't think that's true. Trumps foreign policy was all over the place --- with the exception of Iran, which he was pretty consistently opposed to.* Sometimes he withdrew (leaving former allies in the cold [1]), but sometimes he got pissed off and launched dozens of cruise missiles [2, 3], blew up someone important general [4], or helped forge a treaty [5].
I think what's true is that Trump was, on average, less involved in the outside world than Biden, however the variance in what he did was much larger. How this entered into the calculations of foreign powers was probably complicated and probably depended on their risk tolerance. However, it wasn't an inherently bad thing (deliberate or not). Nixon tried (and failed) to get himself seen as a "madman" [6]; Trump arguably achieved it --- arguably because he is/was a madman!
* In fact, I'd say that Trump worked harder to limit Iran's sphere of influence than either Obama or Biden has done. I'm not sure that any of them have been particularly effective, but it's certainly not the case that Trump took "the US off the board" when it came to Iran.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-syria-ap-top-news-international-news-politics-ac3115b4eb564288a03a5b8be868d2e5
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Shayrat_missile_strike
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_2018_missile_strikes_against_Syria
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Qasem_Soleimani
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/us/politics/trump-israel-united-arab-emirates-uae.html
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory
Trump certainly did more in opposition to Iran. But I’m not at all convinced that any of that made up for pulling out of the Iran agreement, which really seemed like a much more effective engagement with Iran that would have kept them out of some of these conflicts.
“ which really seemed like a much more effective engagement with Iran that would have kept them out of some of these conflicts.”
I’m not sure the agreement had much of an effect. The hope was certainly that more engagement with Iran would moderate its behavior, but I don’t think that happened. Iran didn’t put the brakes on its proxies, back out of Syria, etc. In general, the theory of engagement leading to better behavior seems to be a bust recently.
All of the proacticity outlined above is Trump following the Israeli right down some terrible paths. Blowing up the nuclear agreement and then deliberately provoking the Iranians while achieving some level of normalization with Gulf/Sunni Arab states is exactly what the Israeli right wants. It's a solid strategy if what you want is to confront Iran directly and get Sunni Arabs off your back on the Palestine issue.
In contrast, US interests much more clearly lie in keeping Iran from going nuclear, making it less of a pariah, and disentangling from the region generally to focus on the Pacific. The Israeli right does not want this, so it stirs up shit and Trump was more than happy to go along with it.
So even his proactive FP was really just delegating US policy to Netanyahu.
What he did with Iran may have coincided with what Netanyahu wanted, but I think the idea that engagement with Iran could get it to behave (and that the nuclear deal accomplished much of anything) is naive. I think the truth is that we don't really have any levers to make Iran behave (outside of some very costly ones), and we should just extract ourselves from this mess, but I don't think that trying the stick was any worse an idea than trying the carrot.
This strikes me as a very long winded way of saying no matter how bad things are they would be worse with Trump.
Trump is so unpredictable in foreign policy that I’m unsure if that’s true. Maybe.
But we do have examples of Trump doing things that conventional wisdom said was bad and JB continues the policy now. Example, China tariffs.
So I can say that I really don’t know if it would be better or worse with Trump from a foreign policy perspective.
I can say Trumps a bad guy and I don’t support him.
I think Trump would use a lot more force against the Houthis than Biden has.
What’s wrong with Blinken playing the guitar?
I'm with you Milan. I can't believe the number of Slow Boring readers that falling for this "gotcha" analysis of geopolitics.
"Blinken played the guitar so he can't be serious? Are you serious?" As if Blinken played the guitar and left, twiddling his thumbs and staring blankly all the way back home.
I mean if we're really bothering to talk about it, it does actually makes total sense for Blinken to play the guitar in Kyiv. Ukrainian's war culture has a kind of joyful courageous spirit, where playing the guitar as a basic act of symbolism that Russia won't break our spirits, we don't have war fatigue, and we care about human lives instead of insisting every male solider be emotionless deadmeat. Playing protest music is definitely something you can't do in Russia-occupied Ukraine. So I also think people just don't what they are talking about.
"playing the guitar as a basic act of symbolism that Russia won't break our spirits"
+100 exactly
It's an abomination, just like Obama's beige suit was.
A lot of people saw it as tone deaf --- both literally and figuratively. Singing "Keep on rocking in the free world" while Russia opened up a new front in Ukraine in part due to arbitrarily US restrictions on weapons use [1] seems like a bit of a contradiction. You want a free world? Do more than sing about it [2].
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/14/ukraine-weapons-russia-00157970
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yygMhtNQJ9M
He did do more than sing about it. He spent the last few weeks getting Congress to unstick that aid. But singing about it is a way to engage with the human side.
A lot of people tried a lot of things to convince Johnson to get the aid moving, but my understanding is that Blinken has mostly been engaged in other things recently. (Understandably so!) Much of Blinken's message during his visit to Ukraine was about helping develop Ukraine's industry, which isn't a bad thing, but is a longer-term goal that doesn't address acute problems.
What is Tony Blinken's day job?
Telling the Ukrainians to be more self sufficient (because the USA is an unreliable ally).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/13/antony-blinken-ukraine-support-war/
It depends. Was the guitar blue?
Can you name a President whose foreign policy you are happy with? Foreign policy is hard. Also America is coming off a remarkable level of dominance that's heavy reliant on incompetence by its rivals. If China and India sort themselves out, America declines relatively and it would take a lot (One Billion Americans) for America to offset that.
Reagan (kinda), Bush I, Obama all come to mind. Nixon, in many respects also. Clinton, mostly.
The trouble is that the “success” of those Presidents held the seeds for the “failure” of this one….The eighties and nineties were great for the US, but the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, which Americans assumed would lead to a free, democratic Russia, was actually a disaster that set the stage for Putin’s rise. Obama’s “surge” in Afghanistan was doomed to fail, for the very reason many Republicans pointed out at the time—all the Taliban had to do was wait for American impatience to create pressure to leave. (There was also the fact that local contractors were robbing us blind, the Afghan government was regarded as a US puppet that Afghanis were unwilling to fight for, etc.)
As for Blinken playing guitar in Kviv, I think that’s great. Everyone needs to relax at some point, and this strikes me as a way of emphasizing our cultural ties to Ukraine (whose President, after all, comes from the entertainment industry, hard as that is to think about after more than two years of war).
I think Clinton's failure to provide more support to Russia in the late 90s as a real missed opportunity.
Obama oversaw the rise of ISIS and endless chain of disasters that was the Arab Spring that brought us, among other things, the Syrian Civil War and an endless Islamist insurgency in both the Middle East and Africa. Maybe there was nothing he could have done about it but I don't think that's a foregone conclusion.
Bush 1 really did foreign policy well (probably not a surprise given his resume). Obama did great with the JCPOA but he showed failure of nerve in kicking the Afghanistan can down the road. Nixon was very clever in playing China and the USSR off against each other, but the evils he and Kissinger perpetrated around the world are a black stain on our reputation. Oh, and taking four years to get out of Vietnam -- not good, Bob. Very clever management of the Arab-Israel conflict, which did pave the way for Israel-Egypt peace -- good, Bob.
Clinton gets an incomplete because the US was so dominant in this brief interregnum that it would have been really hard for him to fail.
It seems very plausible to me that Putin held off on invading Ukraine until Trump was out of office. I also suspect Trump will start touting some real or imagined “deal with Putin to end the war” come October. Amoral strong men have more room for wheeling and dealing than principled, Democratic leaders. Look at all the deals Hitler and Stalin made between ‘37 and ‘41.
Counter-argument: Putin invaded after Trump was defeated because, with Biden in office and Trump seemingly discredited after Jan. 6, he saw the correlation of forces turning against him and so decided to achieve a more limited short-term goal with the (seemingly) strong military he had at his command.
Had Trump won in 2020, Putin could have reasonably anticipated the collapse of NATO and the withdrawal of the US from Europe, costlessly giving him a great strategic victory far greater than toppling the Ukrainian government.
Agreed. Also, Trump's response to foreign events had a vary large variance. Sometimes he did nothing. Sometimes he launched a barrage of missiles. I don't know if Putin cared, but Trump's unpredictable response would have given me pause.
How did those deals work out for Stalin?
"Amoral strong men have more room for wheeling and dealing than principled, Democratic leaders"
How...? I mean, yes, amoral strong men who constantly break their word tend to also give their word quite freely, because it doesn't cost them much to do so. So they make lots of deals... and break lots of them. But this just classic "act real busy and people will think you are accomplishing things" nonsense. The deals aren't really worth the paper they are written on.
Principled, democratic leaders take longer to strike a deal, because they don't want to be put into positions where they'd risk going back on their word (since this would undermine future deal making). So they need to work hard to find a deal that both parties can live with. It's slower, but not less effective.
I think it’s worth noting that amoral strong men make and break lots of deals and to try to tease out how this fact might affect the election and the world generally
I'm actually under the belief that Biden's foreign policy has been the best part of his administration. Truly. Forget Trump, I feel fairly certain that another President is still leaving troops in Afghanistan; which as far as I can tell would only have propped up a corrupt government that absolutely no one supported in the country (there's a reason the government collapsed so quickly. It really was a sign at least to me that the Afghan government that existed was Potemkin village).
With Ukraine. I don't think we appreciate how much coordination and diplomacy went in to implementing the sanction regime and united European and US response. Now unfortunately, those sanctions have major loopholes in them. But do we really think President Marco Rubio or President Bernie Sanders is getting that much united opposition or cooperation we have gotten on sanctions? I think at this point, we should probably take it as a given that Putin was invading Ukraine no matter what in February, 2022. This was a major military operation, this is not something he could have done a whim. In fact, I suspect he had a plan to invade for a decade ever since the Orange revolution (key piece of evidence to me is Manafort and how the GOP platform changed the way he did in 2016. Like honestly, why else do this). So given the invasion was baked into the cake so to speak, reality is this has gone about as well as could have expected. Putin clearly thought he was going to take Kiev immediately and that Ukraine would collapse in like a week (hence the paratroopers who had dress uniforms in their knapsacks ready for a parade in Kiev). I know there's still a decent possibility Russia will win but it's clearly been a quagmire way worse than anyone would have predicted circa 2022.
Middle East. What exactly is the "better" course for Biden with Israel/Gaza? I'm really asking here because last I checked this has been an impossible situation for basically my entire life.
As for other Presidents, I really think there is some rose tinted glasses going on. Early 80s looked like the world was going to hell too and seemed like America couldn't do anything. Our involvement in Lebanon only led to the deaths of 243 marines. What exactly of consequence did we accomplish in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Panama other than empowering drug lords and creating a massive scandal for the Reagan administration? As far as the big one, collapse of Soviet Union. I do think some credit should be given to Reagan's military buildup which helped push the Soviet spending on military over the edge of what they could really afford. But I would suggest OPEC and (I hate to say it) Saudi Arabia probably deserve more of the credit as the drop in oil prices is almost certainly the prime factor of what cratered the Soviet economy in the late 80s given how dependent they were on oil to prop up their economy.
We have a phrase in the military - "the enemy gets a vote."
There are many things the US can't control. Everything comes with tradeoffs.
I think Biden has made some bad decisions, but overall, I think most of them were good or defensible and the general thrust of US foreign policy is directionally correct for the most part.
To go down your list -
- Not sure what we could have done to stop the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was/is a continuation war from 2014, the consequence of two decades of previous events.
- The Hamas attack was a surprise to everyone - no one has better intel on Hamas than Israel, so it's not clear to me what the US failure was here
- The Houthis have not shut down the Red Sea, they are like the Sand People in Star Wars shooting at pod racers. It's not clear what would be a better option than managing the problem as we are until the conflict in Gaza is over.
- Sudan - it's a complicated civil war in a country that is not strategically important to the US. What more should we be doing?
- China/Taiwan - I think we recently passed a military aid package for Taiwan, Biden has promised to defend Taiwan even though we have no formal treaty, Biden has doubled down on Trump's tariffs. China is a major player, a world power, and sees itself as a peer to the US and wants it sphere of influence and its historic territories. This isn't a new problem and it's not clear to me what more Biden should be doing except cleaning house in the Navy and our naval procurement system.
I'm not happy with the results either, and there are some things I wish Biden would have done differently, but there are real limits to US influence and power.
how is blinken playing the guitar a bad thing?
Don’t forget the mess in Afghanistan
Playing guitar in a bar probably strikes the wrong tone, but I'm far more concerned about more substantial aspects (which, as you noted, has been a lot of failure).
I think playing a guitar in Israel strikes the wrong tone. But part of our diplomatic approach to Ukraine is maintaining normalcy in the country and I think symbolic gestures like that makes sense.
"I think playing a guitar in Israel strikes the wrong tone."
I don't know -- the Clash taught us that punk rock could heal Arab-Jewish relations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ9r8LMU9bQ
I don't think we can judge it without seeing how it's covered or how it's seen in Ukraine, which is the audience it's directed at. I can see it as establishing a tie and a sympathy to the people of Ukraine. Showing that we're not just a bunch of suits who drop in and fly out; that our most senior leaders have an actual connection and concern for Ukraine, and a desire to know the Ukrainians.
It was generally covered negatively. Reminds me of a Tom Lehrer song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yygMhtNQJ9M
Interesting! I only saw positive coverage.
There were a lot of responses along these lines
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/blinkens-guitar-performance-ukraine-seen-tone-deaf-by-some-2024-05-15/
I think that Blinken is generally seen in Ukraine as one of the better members of the Biden administration and is more willing to take risks that, say, Sullivan. But a lot of Ukrainians are pretty frustrated with the administration.
I think the measure of an administration is not that no bad things happen -- that's the way of the world! -- but how it responds to those events. If you assume that these things would have happened anyway, would you rather have the Biden or the Trump administration in charge?
It's possible that Ukraine was avoidable in a perfect world (I do think the rhetoric surrounding the conflict overstates the "inevitability of Putin's aggression"), but two things to understand about that counterfactual:
1. It goes back long before Biden all the way to dumb choices George W. Bush made and which Barack Obama and Donald Trump didn't have the guts to correct (nor did Biden).
2. It would have subjected Biden to massive Dolchstoßlegendes because the reason Bush made those mistakes and Obama and Trump didn't correct them is because there were very loud and influential voices in the foreign policy blob who wanted maximal conflict with Russia (and to be fair, also care a lot about Ukrainians and didn't want to sell them out) and had no interest in taking steps that might successfully assure Russia that NATO and the EU had no designs on Ukraine.
So basically, it would have taken a US President with both maximum cojones and enormous popularity to stand up and do something that might have prevented the Ukraine invasion but also would have gotten him labeled as Neville Chamberlain II. Biden wasn't that President.
They were stuck. They didn't have the technology or know-how to maintain a nuclear arsenal, and obviously the world powers did not want more proliferation. It wasn't happening.
I sometimes think people underestimate the extent to which even imperfect and repressive government can be better than continued conflict.
So I wonder if in places like Sudan, would they be better off if we just said: alright Saudi Arabia, China, or etc we are declaring this area a failed state so if you want to go in and seize control it's yours. Though obviously we'd have to make sure no country who helped destabilize the area benefits.
I mean, for all the Romans behaved really awfully (crucifixions etc) I tend to think they largely made people who they conquered net better off. So I sometimes wonder if, even if great respect for civilian suffering and humanitarian concern is the best outcome (eg in Gaza) whether sometimes half measures are actually worse than nothing.
This is less a serious policy proposal than just a sense that maybe we should take these considerations more seriously.
IMO "underestimating the harm of endless conflict" is the root problem in Israel. The international community needs to decide what it wants and commit to it. Two states, Jewish one state, Arab one state are all far better than never-ending war. Since 1967 Israel has been allowed to dominate the Palestinians very extensively, but not enough to end the conflict.
“Allowed”? Would Israel have been so dominant if they hadn’t been invaded by the Arab states, fought back, and won resoundingly?
I think what Binya means is that the international community has consistently failed to make a choice between
1. Israel must immediately pull out of all occupied territories; or
2. Israel gets to win a victory *so* resounding that the Palestinians completely lose hope, effectively ending resistance forever.
The "Israel gets to win, but not too much" equilibrium is the alternative path chosen by the international community, leading to lots of problems.
Exactly. Israel sees everyone look the other way while it builds settlements and concludes no one really cares about the Palestinians. Palestinians see a hundred UN resolutions in their favour and conclude they need to just hold on. An unambiguous signal is needed.
"Israel must immediately pull out of all occupied territories"
But Israel did pull out of Gaza in 2005. Then Hamas came into power, started shooting rockets into Israel, and then committed the atrocities of 10/7.
Yes, I know I'm omitting a ton of details, Netanyahu is an a-hole, etc. But if the solution were as simple as "Israel pulls out of Gaza and the West Bank AND in return, the Palestinians recognize Israel's right to exist and everyone lives in peace and harmony," it would have happened already.
Yeah, I mean I 100% agree with you. My guess is that pulling out of the West Bank produces a second Hamastan with much easier access to Iranian weapons...
The international community would probably also have to deliver a clear message to Palestinians: any future attacks will be treated just like any other act of war by a sovereign state. Israel would have to be allowed to win any subsequent wars.
I think it’ll probably need foreign boots on the ground to work. Probably American. Otherwise the people on either side of the border hate each other too much for peace to survive. They’ll be fucking with each other from day one. They’ll find whatever clauses in the peace agreement were ambiguously worded and start claiming the other side broke the deal and we’ll be back at square one.
I find it shocking people keep saying this. Israel pulled out of Gaza but maintained so many restrictions the UN continued to view it as the occupying power: "Following the withdrawal, Israel continued to maintain direct control over Gaza's air and maritime space, six of Gaza's seven land crossings, maintains a no-go buffer zone within the territory, controls the Palestinian population registry."
Israel also did not at at all withdraw out of the West Bank.
It's really wrong IMO to argue that this episode proves the Palestinians cannot be trusted with responsibility.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that because Hamas insisted on firing rockets into Israel? If your neighbor keeps shooting rockets at you, of course you'll want to control them! And if your neighbor is ruled by a fanatical death cult that wants you to die, yeah, no sh*t you'll want to maintain a "no-go buffer zone" between yourself and them. Also, zero sympathy for the way Hamas took billions of dollars in foreign aid and used it to build tunnels rather than make life better for Palestinian civilians.
I think a dirty secret no one talks about is the Jordanians aren’t interested in a Palestinian state in the West Bank because they trust them as much as the Egyptians trust the Gazans.
“So apart from medicine, education, roads, aqueducts, sanitation, law and order, and wine, what have the Romans ever given us?!?”
You knew someone had to say it!
See also the guy chained up in the dungeon: “Fantastic folks, the Romans. They’re the only ones who can keep order in a place like this!”
I'm calling Ben to immediately block and suspend any SB commenter who posts the "what have the Romans ever done for us?" Monty Python clip in response to Peter's comment.
Splitter!
Come now, posting Monty Python and Dune references is a time-honored SB tradition!
Posting the "what has Rome ever done for us" bit in this context would be gilding the lily: it's too obvious and, given that obviousness, would make it, horrors, boring. To be effective it has to be surprising.
Indeed, one might say it works best when no one expects the "what has Rome ever done for us" bit.
No one expects the... ok, fine, I won't say it, I won't.
No one expects you to resist that overwhelming impulse.
Our chief weapon is self-control! — self-control and civility, civility and self-control.... Our two weapons are self-control and civility! — and Monty Python quotes.... Our three weapons are self-control, civility, and Monty Python quotes! — and an almost fanatical devotion to Matthew Yglesias.
Absolutely. The worst government is never as bad as fighting a civil war. And if you ever want to know how the worst governments stay in power, this is it.
And then opposition to the government finally does reach a breaking point, and a nasty civil war is fought with the insurgent side prevailing, it is still hard to gaurantee something good emerges out the other side. At the end, there is no functioning infrastructure left and armed groups with their own interests scattered across the country. Instability leads to instability.
It's not that there is nothing to be done, but the best result come when institutions can be held intact or be allowed to be built up again in a peace.
"The worst government is never as bad as fighting a civil war."
Eh, I think that one's going a bit far. By every casualty metric I'm aware of, Maoist China killed substantially more (like, at least several times over) of its citizens during the Great Leap Forward than died in the entirety of the 1945-50 phase of the Chinese Civil War. See also Cambodia/Kampuchea.
Agreed. I think this can be largely attributed to the fact that horrible governments at some level lose or risk legitimacy with their people and so have to engage is a sort of cold civil war of violent repression to maintain their unearned authority. Mao and Stalin both killed a huge number of their own people who they viewed as potential enemies. Bad government is better than civil war but "the worst" of governments is a lot worse than bad and can be very deadly.
Fair enough, maybe a little overstated.
I might try to conceptualize Mao's Great Leap Forward as a kind of civil war - an attempt by Mao to overthrow the social order he himself ushered into being. Maybe the Holocaust, Holodomer, are kind of wars against a defenseless population, etc. But if I were to do that I'd be trending into absurdity - its clear that unchecked authoritarian governments can become worse than violent attempts to overthrow them.
"The worst government is never as bad as fighting a civil war."
I agree that civil wars are incredibly bad, but long term oppressive governments can be worse.
Yes. An interesting back and forth between Scott Alexander and Matt Yglesias:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/30/military-strikes-are-an-extremely-cheap-way-to-help-foreigners/
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-failure-of-humanitarian-militarism
What's clear is that war is awful, and that moment-to-moment war is worse than the worse governance. But what about cost-benefit long-term?
If I take something like the Iraq war, where there were ~200,000 civilian causalties that's a huge tragic loss of life. Out a population of 45 million, that is 0.4% of the population. Scott does a similar calculation for the military intervention in Libya. But in strict utilitarian terms, if you come out of the war and make everyone else's lives ~10% better, you've obviously overwhelmed that loss. There will also be economic loss, but long-term growth rates can easily overwhelm that.
That might sound a bit ghoulish to talk about sacrificing a few lives for the moderate improvement of the many. But you can make it a life-for-life if the post-war stability includes things like "fewer lives lost due to government repression and criminal violence" or "lives saved by having a functioning healthcare system" or "guarantee of not going to an even bigger war with one's neighbors".
But... this is almost a Pascal's Mugging. Anytime you do a utilitarian calculation about the future you find that it will overwhelm the present, but the problem that it is extraordinarily hard to predict the future. Maybe there is a nasty civil war and everyone has freedom, prosperity, and compassion for each other after that. Or maybe you've just begun a pointless spiral of dysfunction, predation, and misery. Your assumptions about outcomes are doing all the work (even if one makes up probabilities to put on it).
So I think where Matt settles into this is wise, where one shouldn't think that battlefield success gaurantees the ability to pick a perfect government. At best military intervention lets you pick sides between two imperfect options and sometimes that makes sense. But if you are humanitarian, most of time you'd much rather prevent a war, or help refugees, or just do global health. And I think in other articles he argues that having a military can be part of preventing a war or ending one quickly, but the less you have to use it the better.
See: North Korea.
Not sure! Dr. Wikipedia says that 12-15% of all North Koreans died during the war (which is admittedly on the fringe of what you might describe as a "civil war").
Wow, great piece.
My last focus area before I retired as an intelligence analyst was East Africa and that included a deployment there in 2014 right after the South Sudan civil war. Overall, I just want to say how excellent your piece is.
The fact that the most recent map available showing areas of control is four months old really says something about how Africa generally and this war in particular doesn't get a lot of interest in the global media and public, which, unfortunately, isn't anything new. I went looking through my sources to try to find something more recent that's publicly available and couldn't.
I guess the only thing I would quibble with is the extent of US involvement. Sudan has always been unstable and I don't think there is much the US can do to change that. The Obama administration's well-meaning goal to split off South Sudan did not improve things, a nasty civil war began immediately there, and that country is likely not going to see long-term stability either.
Fundamentally, the region has a history of weak state capacity, low levels of nationalism and national identity, and high levels of other group identities among the peoples there that cause intranational conflict and violence. That's not really something the US can solve., especially by picking sides in a conflict that we don't actually know much about and don't understand the long-term implications of our involvement.
"The fact that the most recent map available showing areas of control is four months old really says something about how Africa generally and this war in particular doesn't get a lot of interest in the global media and public."
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:War_in_Sudan_(2023).svg is only about a week out of date, although of course it doesn't have legible institutions committed to its accuracy.
I never comment on this board. I just want to say thank you to Matt and the Slow Boring crew for putting this one together. I knew virtually nothing about this conflict - except that it is happening - and now I know enough to have a basis to read about it in the dreaded main stream media! Thank you.
PS. The comments are incredible too. This is quite the informed community. Proud to be a subscriber. Kudos!
Not much to add, here, but wanted to point out that these conflicts are heavily fueled by extractive economies--gold and oil, but I would also include some less traditional stuff like shipping lanes in the Red Sea--where civilian populations are at best largely unnecessary and at worst an active impediment to exploitation of a valuable location-based resource that doubles as financial fuel for the conflict.
The resource curse concept has been a bit over-extended and beaten to death at this point, but I think a lot of the underlying logic about conflict in the modern world holds up well, in the worst possible way. And I feel like you could add a coda onto this article to connect it to yesterday's article: one of the things that makes America truly great and successful is our government's reliance on citizen tax regimes as its primary source of revenue. Tax Day should really be a national holiday.
Reading this article is like eating my vegetables: not my favorite to consume, but I know that ultimately what I am consuming is valuable. So thanks for writing
Multiethnic states in a stage of pre-industrialization are doomed to fail. The historical record is clear: nation states are much more likely to become peaceful, rich and democratic if they start from relative ethnic homogeniety. Once they have reached that state they can better cope with diversity.
It was a terrible mistake (or in some cases a conscious design) to not draw borders that more closely followed ethnic and religious divisions in Africa and the Middle East post-colonialism. Now we see constant zero-sum ethnic strife and power battles instead of democratic competition between left and right in a ethnically relatively homogenous democratic nation state.
This is not an argument for ethnic cleansing (if I need to point that out…) but possibly for redrawing borders when the option arises. For example, Iraq should have been divided into three or four new and more homogenous nation states after the US invasion, instead we saw it collapse under the weight of ethnic and religious zero-sum divisions.
And obviously I wish this wasn’t the case, that instead humans could live in peace with another everywhere. I’m merely observing what seems to me to be an unfortunate truth…
“ For example, Iraq should have been divided into three or four new and more homogenous nation states after the US invasion, instead we saw it collapse under the weight of ethnic and religious zero-sum divisions.”
Joe Biden Thought
Worked out pretty well for Yugoslavia in the 1990s. /s
(Not to say that in the long run it won't work.)
I can’t really think of that many successful cases of partition after a long period of colonial enmeshment. I’d be willing to learn of some but it seems to me Iraq would have fell to civil war or ethnic cleansing regardless of what lines we wanted to draw on a map.
After the Soviet Union died, the State split into 15 republics. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are very happy not having Soviet passports.
After the Yugoslavia died, the state split into 6/7 states. Again, it's better off now.
At least those partitions reflected pre-existing subnational governing regions that had many decades of experience. Unlike India/Pakistan or Israel/Palestine.
The other interesting counterpoint here is that both India and Pakistan are themselves multiethnic countries that, while certainly imperfect (especially Pakistan), aren't totally unstable.
"Ethnicity" is a slippery concept. I don't think we should put any weight on it. The more solid principle is that people who don't want to live together in the same polity should be allowed to live apart in different polities. Sometimes those divisions will line up with what we normally think of as "ethnic" lines, sometimes they don't, sometimes there are "ethnic" groups that don't feel that level of division for one reason or another.
I mean there's a lot of war's there that I wouldn't want to unleash except as an absolute last resort. I'm not really sure how I'd rank the cruelties of force based integration and second class citizenship versus mass slaughter of civilians in Yugoslavia.
Isn't basically all of Europe a successful example of this?
I mean, back in the day: the Netherlands was part of the UK, Sicily was part of Spain, the entire Austria-Hungarian empire, Livonia was Swedish, etc
The Netherlands was never part of the UK.
Well, they did send William Prince of Orange over to become William III, King of England, so in some sense yeah sure.
That isn't what he is talking about but England and the Republic of the Netherlands remained separate states despite having a joint head of state.
That is common, the UK and Hannover had a joint head of state for decades but were run completely separately, the UK, Canada and Papua New Guinea have a common head of state today, India and Pakistan fought a war while sharing a head of state.
Well said. I was really trying (weakly) to be somewhat humorous. Just because the Netherlands supplied a royal to rule them (a constant thing back in the day) hardly meant that England was subservient to the Netherlands.
The UK signed the Treaty of Nonsuch, making it a protectorate and sent Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of of Leicester to be the Governor-General.
"The Earl had now "the rule and government general" with a Council of State to support him (the members of which he nominated himself). He remained a subject of Elizabeth, making it possible to contend that she was now sovereign over the Netherlands. According to Leicester, this was what the Dutch desired. From the start such a position for him had been implied in the Dutch propositions to the English, and in their instructions to Leicester; and it was consistent with the Dutch understanding of the Treaty of Nonsuch."
Saying that's not legally part of the UK and doesn't count is useless pedantry given the context of the current conversation.
Huh, that’s a weird and obscure part of Dutch history to talk about! I would have thought the earlier period that this treaty settled (the Netherlands being Burgundian and then Spanish) or the later period when William of Orange was both Stadtholder of the Netherlands and King of England would be more natural times to talk about. But in any case, if you want to talk about the modern Netherlands being ruled from some place outside, Spain, France, and Charlemagne are the examples to talk about, not England.
That is a huge stretch.
Spain and France are much better examples of places that used to own the Netherlands.
I appreciate your commitment to the deep cut for the sake of pedantic correctness. Figuring out what's factually correct comes first; figuring out what somebody meant comes second.
Everyone is defining this weirdly but the timescales are important. This didn't happen overnight, or even in decades.
Sure, but they got there via centuries of gradual state formation and endless war.
Bangladesh by way of East Pakistan, maybe? Sort of Pakistan / India itself in the longer term?
Not sure I'd hold up the India/Pakistan partition as an example of good policy, though I'm open to the broader argument.
Apropos news events today*. I feel fairly certain that we can call Czechoslovakia a colonial possession of the Soviet Union from 1945-1991 and they had a pretty peaceful partition from all accounts.
The problem of neoconservativism is that it thought too highly of the middle east. Some places just don't have the moral and intellectual infrastructure to support Jeffersonian democracies.
It seems like the humanitarian thing is we should do nothing to get involved except accept refugees from the area who want to live in a liberal society.
I think this is too pessimistic. Japan and Germany quite recently didn’t look like candidates to become stable liberal democracies. They were both ethnically homogenous however (especially post-ww2).
Both Japan and Germany had decades of experience holding fair elections. Japan was a liberal democracy (with no civilian control over the military) till about 1937.
I think our biggest misinterpretation of historic events has been our view of the success of post war Germany and Japan. We have since 1945 seen our actions there and the subsequent outcomes as a template we can tweak and use with other countries and regions. But in truth they were both singular outliers, even the reasons that our post war efforts were successful were unique to each and came about for different reasons.
I think we're forgetting how much hubris went into the Iraq War and how much Bill Kristol's and Paul Wolfowitz were the intellectual sheen. But that war was decided by Chenny on 9/12.
I'm sorry, but Team America got the real reasons for this war better than anyone; it was America F**K yeah. I really think we're forgetting how much nationalist fervor went into everything we did from 2001 to 2006.
And I think someone who didn't forget is Joe Biden. Everyone clamoring as to why Biden isn't doing "more" or intervening more; I suspect the answer from Biden if you gave him truth serum is "do you remember the Iraq War? How did that go? Definition of pyrrhic victory" In fact we know based on reporting about Biden's reaction to the surge in Afghanistan. He knew it was a lost cause and wouldn't work and he was right! Am also quite certain that Biden's lessons from 2001 is 2006 is hugely informing his actions with Israel. Telling Netanyahu he can't respond at all (what protestors want) is just not going to fly for obvious reasons with Israeli public. But I feel fairly certain that he's telling Netanyahu "don't make the same mistakes we made"*
* seems Lindsey Graham learned nothing from this time period of the Sunday morning talk shows are anything to go by
I think Lindsay Graham is in a constant regression in his knowledge and whatever small wisdom he ever possessed.
LOL
In all honesty I suspect the real answer is in 2016, much like Ted Cruz he made proverbial "deal with the devil" and threw in his hat with Trump once his own staffers told him "most of your voters think Trump is Jesus reincarnate. If you cross him you risk a primary challenge you will likely lose".
Were the United Kingdom and France relatively ethnically homogenous way back in the day? Not really. And yet here they are now.
I think the general rule we learn from history is that there are no general rules in history.
There is something to your argument. The Gertrude Bells of history and their map drawing have caused a lot of contemporary problems and conflicts when combined with the modern Westphalian idea that borders are involiable.
I don't think the answer is for modern-day Gertrude Bells to try to repair the damage though. That was tried with South Sudan and it hasn't exactly worked out great.
Adam Tooze made a well-researched post about the origins and stakes of the Sudan conflict that readers here might find interesting. A key piece of context: the Sahel saw a huge gold rush over the course of the 2010s, and “who gets to control the revenue flow from the gold?” has been a major conflict driver both across the region and in Sudan in particular.
https://adamtooze.com/2023/04/18/chartbook-209-the-sudan-crisis-and-the-sahel-gold-rush/
This reads a lot like the Lancastrians and Yorkists contesting the throne with murky and spasmodic interventions from Burgundians and French. A power vacuum is often worse than competent autocracy.
"It is the largest humanitarian crisis in the world right now, and it’s not particularly close." Are you sure about that? True, Sudan has been shockingly bad, but I'm under the impression that the long-term war(s) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been the worst by a long shot.