Russia, China complicate global security tasks for the West

Dragons return to global snake pit

Even a cursory scan of world news shows how complex the global security environment has become.

There are wars in Syria and Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Nigeria and several other African countries. Libya is emerging as a hub for jihadists, including Islamic State, and conditions there may be about to deteriorate significantly.

Russia has moved into Syria, is sponsoring rebels in Ukraine and is increasingly aggressive in the Arctic and Baltic.

This week China and the US engaged in maritime sabre-rattling in the South China Sea.

Conflict in Colombia continues, despite a possible peace deal, while Venezuela looks increasingly unstable (in part because of sustained low global oil prices). Violence is sweeping Israel and the Palestinian territories. Europe faces an unprecedented refugee crisis, and a rising trend of Islamic and far-Right extremism.

In Afghanistan, at least three provincial capitals and more than a dozen districts are at risk of falling to a resurgent Taliban.

The list goes on. How do we make sense of such a fast-moving, complicated situation?

One way is to dive into each conflict in detail and try to understand it in its own terms; that’s what people like me do for a living. But for smart, educated, globally aware non-specialists (also known as well-adjusted grown-ups) who have better things to do than track every war, everywhere, all the time, it pays to have a general framework to help interpret the daily news feed. One such framework dates back to 1993.

In February that year, a little more than a year after the fall of the Soviet Union, James Woolsey — US president Bill Clinton’s first CIA director — testified before the US Senate. Among others, John Kerry (then on the intelligence committee, now Secretary of State) asked for Woolsey’s analysis of the post-Cold War environment. “We have slain a large dragon,” Woolsey said, referring to the Soviet Union. “But we find ourselves now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes: and in many ways the dragon was easier to keep track of.”

Woolsey went on to give a prescient assessment of the threats of the 1990s: failed states, loose nukes, terrorism, civil war, insurgency, piracy, drug trafficking, people-smuggling and organised crime. His predictions turned out to be entirely accurate, and for almost exactly 10 years — from his 1993 testimony until the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 — Woolsey’s snakes defined the main set of global security issues.

Throughout the 90s, Australia (like many advanced democracies) was drawn into a series of humanitarian and peacekeeping interventions in an effort to deal with these post-Cold War challenges. These interventions included deployments to Somalia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bougainville, East Timor, Solomon Islands, the Middle East and the Balkans.

Terrorism — in particular the rise of al-Qa’ida — was a growing background threat that arguably didn’t get the attention it deserved until after the 1998 US embassy bombings in Africa. But for most of this period, state weakness and violence among ethnic groups (or from non-state actors) drove much of the conflict worldwide.

Despite occasional flare-ups on the Korean Peninsula or between India and Pakistan, state-on-state wars — conflict among great powers, or Cold War-style superpower confrontation (Woolsey’s “dragons”) — mattered less on a day-to-day basis.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the unifying but narrow construct of a “global war on terrorism” came to dominate Western security thinking. In practice, if not in theory, the US and its allies equated counter-terrorism with national security, in effect focusing on just one snake (terrorism), and primarily on the head of the snake (Osama bin Laden and al-Qa’ida). Then in 2003, with the invasion of Iraq, the US-led coalition became bogged down in a cycle of war, reconstruction, terrorism and counter-insurgency that continues today.

This Western preoccupation with jihadist terrorism (however justified it might have been) had the side effect of creating space for geopolitical competitors — Russia and China, in particular. Unencumbered by the post-9/11 wars, these powers pursued their interests in ways that competed with, and often ran counter to, those of the West, which simply lacked the bandwidth to compete.

The pivotal year was 2011. This was the year of the Arab Spring, which brought huge instability to Africa and the Middle East but failed to fulfil its promise of democratic reform. It was also the year of the US withdrawal from Iraq, the killing of bin Laden, the NATO intervention in Libya and the start of the Syrian civil war.

For a while after bin Laden’s death and the Iraq withdrawal, it seemed as if the war on terrorism was ending. The US “pivot to the Pacific” and President Barack Obama’s soothing statements that “the nation’s wars are ending” seemed like first steps beyond the post-9/11 morass.

Today they seem like wishful thinking, or worse, since the complacency they embodied helped blind policymakers to the rebirth of Islamic State from the ashes of al-Qa’ida in Iraq and encouraged the passivity and vacillation that enabled a humanitarian catastrophe in Syria and the resulting spillover of refugees into Europe that is creating tensions from Slovenia to Sweden.

Likewise, the fall of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi created a vacuum that drew in jihadists from across Africa and the Middle East, spawned Ansar al-Sharia (the network that launched the 2012 Benghazi attack that led to the death of the US ambassador, and murdered dozens of Western tourists earlier this year in Tunisia) and spurred conflict in Mali, Sudan and Algeria. But the Libyan intervention also marked the beginning of the end for the Woolseyan world order (where we mainly worried about non-state threats) and signalled the return of great-power military competition, by convincing Russia that the West wasn’t to be trusted.

In 2011, Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president at the time, had agreed not to oppose a UN resolution authorising the use of force in Libya, relying on assurances from US leaders that the intervention would be limited to humanitarian objectives (protection of Libyan civilians) and wouldn’t involve the overthrow of Gaddafi. But once the operation was under way the goalposts shifted, regime change became a key US objective, and Gaddafi was overthrown and assassinated within months.

Vladimir Putin, who was Russia’s prime minister at the time, was furious; his comeback as President in 2012 was linked, in part, to his loss of confidence in Medvedev over the perceived American bait-and-switch over Libya.

Russia began a crash military modernisation program, moved away from co-operation with the US and increasingly threw its weight around in its “near abroad”.

The intervention in Crimea, Russia’s sponsorship of the war in Ukraine, its maintenance of frozen conflicts in Georgia, Armenia and Moldova, and a newly aggressive pattern of Russian air and naval incursions in the Baltic Sea, the North Sea and the Arctic Ocean are all part of this pattern, which Russian analyst Dmitri Trenin describes as “Moscow’s clear breakout from the international system as it has been widely, if informally, understood since the end of the Cold War”.

Trenin argues that the new policy “challenges the unipolar world order both by erecting barriers to US democracy promotion and by refusing to submit to the norms and practices laid down, policed, and arbitrated by the West”.

The fruits of Russia’s military modernisation are on display now in Syria — vastly more capable strike aircraft, advanced sea-launched cruise missiles, more professional ground forces, a navy capable of long-range power projection, and (perhaps most significantly) an air component capable of launching 60 to 90 airstrikes a day, about six times the strike rate achieved by the US-led coalition during the past year. But the geopolitical implications are even more profound.

This is the first Russian military intervention outside the borders of the old Soviet Union since 1989, and Russia’s first combat operation in the Middle East since the invasion of Iran during World War II in 1941. Russia is competing directly with the US in the Middle East, creating a rival coalition that, although theoretically directed against Islamic State, is actually mainly attacking other groups.

Russia’s intervention has help­ed to consolidate the Assad regime’s hold on critical terrain, sidelined the US-led coalition by prompting a sharp decrease in US air operations over Syria and killed the US-Turkish concept for a humanitarian “safe zone” in northern Syria. And it increasingly looks as if it may expand into Iraq.

With Russia providing air cover, Syria and Iran providing ground forces, fighters from Hezbollah and Iraqi Shia militias assisting, and Russian marines guarding installations in the reg­ime’s heartland, Russia’s entry into the war has fundamentally ­altered the terms of the conflict and redefined an entire set of ­regional relationships.

Appropriately enough, the cover story in this month’s Foreign Affairs is headlined: “The post-American Middle East”.

While Russia was launching its breakout — seeking to erase two decades of humiliation since the fall of the Soviet Union (an event Putin once described as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century) — China, perceiving the US pivot as an effort at containment, continued its military modernisation.

Chinese efforts focused on maritime power projection and denial of access to contested areas and sea lanes. It expanded its merchant shipbuilding as part of a Maritime Silk Road project, and sought to extend its naval reach to what Chinese strategists call the “second island chain”, running from Japan through Guam to New Guinea and Australia.

This has brought it into confrontation with Japan and the US in the Pacific, while in the Indian Ocean Chinese engineers have constructed a string of ports and naval bases in Pakistan, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.

Simultaneously, Beijing continued building a highway from western China through Pakistan to the Chinese-built port at Gwadar, acquired control of the largest copper mine in Afghanistan, and greatly expanded its commercial presence in Africa.

In September 2012, China launched its first aircraft carrier (CNS Liaoning), part of a fast-expanding naval capability that now includes submarines, amphibious warfare ships and surface combatants, as well as advanced drones, long-range “ship-killer” missiles, wide-area surveillance systems, and more capable strike aircraft.

China also began building what are essentially a string of unsinkable aircraft carriers: military outposts and reclaimed islands on disputed reefs in the South China Sea. It was the US Navy’s effort to exercise the international legal right of freedom of navigation by passing within 12 nautical miles (22km) of one of these reclaimed islands that led to this week’s confrontation.

It’s important to note that neither Russian nor Chinese efforts are directed at intentionally provoking war, or even direct military confrontation, with the West. Both Moscow and Beijing emphasise that they are simply pursuing their national objectives, seeking a position of sovereign equality with the US, looking for military, political and economic parity.

But whatever the intentions of today’s Russian and Chinese leaders, there are clear dangers when two rising or resurgent great powers challenge an overstretched status quo superpower and its allies — especially when, as in many ­places today, military forces from different nations are closely intermingled in complex, often ambiguous situations (and when all three remain nuclear-armed). The risks of miscalculation, or unintended escalation of minor incidents, are far from negligible.

Even if none of this triggers great-power conflict — and everyone, presumably on all sides, hopes it won’t — these developments clearly show that the conflict environment of 2015 is no longer that of 1993, or 2003, or even of 2011. Woolsey’s dragons are back, and today we find ourselves dealing with them at the same time, and in many of the same places, as the snakes. But more than that, during the past decade, while Western countries have been engaged in the global war on terrorism, actual and potential adversaries (both state and non-state, dragons as well as snakes) have been watching and learning.

Our struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown adversaries exactly how to fight us, and a new set of tactics, techniques and technologies has emerged, purpose-designed to limit our effectiveness. I’ve written about many of them before — guerilla terrorism, leader­less resistance, urban siege, merging with and hiding among civilian populations, and so on.

But we’ve also seen the emergence of autonomous combat groups and swarming tactics optimised for a hostile air and electronic environment — and one of the most striking things is how different groups, widely separated geographically and without any direct connections, have hit on strikingly similar methods. Somali militias, Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine, the Taliban, and Islamic State in Iraq, for example, have all developed similar tactical styles — partly by tapping into easily accessible information online, but mostly (I think) by independently evolving responses to the modern battlefield that sidestep our technological advantages.

As US general HR McMaster says, “There are two ways to fight the United States: asymmetric, and stupid.” And after more than a decade of this, there aren’t many stupid adversaries left.

As a result of all this, we’re now in a post-Woolseyan world where state-on-state conflict is increasingly likely and great-power confrontation is taking place in multiple locations across the globe, yet we’re still dealing with the same set of “snakes” — state weakness, ethnic conflict, ­organised crime and so on — as ­before.

The post-Cold War order, dominated by a consensus around a series of institutions established or guaranteed by the US, is fading. The democratisation of lethal technologies is putting sophisticated weapons into the hands of non-state groups, while states have learned to fight in a non-conventional manner, even in support of utterly traditional geopolitical objectives.

Population growth, an explosion of electronic connectivity (especially in the developing world) since 2000 and increasing global urbanisation are also creating a networked, urbanised environment. As a result, a lot of modern warfare takes place in and around cities, and has a strong cyber or electronic-warfare dimension.

At the same time, increasing littoralisation (the tendency for human settlements to cluster on coastlines) means that more than 80 per cent of people on the planet now live within 100km of the sea, and an increasing proportion of people live in coastal cities.

All of this, in some ways, is just a fairly long-winded explanation as to why the conflict environment seems so complex these days. In part, that’s because it actually is more complex; in part, it’s because greater connectivity lets us see, in more detail, the kinds of complexities that have been there all along.

Whatever the reason, the ­results are plain: Western governments increasingly are struggling to come up with workable solutions to handle such a wide variety of overlapping, simultaneous ­crises.

One way to think of this is as a policymaker’s version of what ­pilots call “task saturation” — where so many things are happening in the cockpit at once that, even though each problem may be open to solution in isolation, their combined effect becomes overwhelming.

Another way to think of it would be as a sort of imperial overstretch on the frontier — where large, multinational empires with far-flung, remote interests are defeated in detail, and exhausted over time, by a large number of small challenges rather than one big one. The loss of freedom of action for Western decision-makers — especially after the Iraq invasion went bad in 2003 and after the global economic crisis of 2008 — along with the emergence of peer and near-peer competitors intent on taking advantage of that loss of freedom, are classic symptoms of overstretch.

The result is that we find ourselves in a crowded, cluttered, highly connected, predominantly urban and coastal environment, engaged in conflicts that involve a mix of state and non-state actors, all of which are applying asymmetric methods designed to overwhelm us by posing a massive number of simultaneous small challenges.

What can be done about this? At one level, it’s simply a fact of life — something we need to adapt to, the sooner the better.

But at the same time it’s clear there are at least two imperatives for Western countries (such as the US and Australia) that benefited from the post-Cold War world and stand to lose out considerably if it should continue to decline.

One is that we must figure out a way to secure the post-Cold War international order (and our interests within it) with a minimal footprint — call it classic frontier warfare, French-and-Indian style, or call it an evolved light-footprint approach — in a way that’s cheap enough and effective enough to be sustainable for the long haul without breaking the bank.

Large-scale occupation, counter-insurgency and reconstruction operations are almost certainly unsustainable in the long term (as Iraq and Afghanistan show), but failure to engage at all (as in Syria) or engaging only at the outset, “leading from behind” and failing to follow through (as in Libya), can be just as bad.

Either way, we have to develop a better model (and the civil and military capabilities to support it) or accept that the state system as it evolved after the end of the Cold War — and with all the benefits of sustained economic growth, political liberalisation and international security that it provided — is likely to become a thing of the past.

The second is that we must reconceive of national security strategy in broad enough terms to account for today’s “post-Woolseyan” mix of state and non-state threats, all co-existing at the same time and in the same places.

Neither the global war on terrorism (which focused too narrowly on the snakes) nor the attempt to pivot away from commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan (which ignored the resilience of the threat, and created openings for a newly capable set of dragons) can be the solution. Rather, we’ll need to get out of our defensive crouch and think creatively (and, on occasion, offensively) about how to leverage our comparative advantages.

Whatever happens, the international security situation is certain to remain complex, chaotic, fascinating and horrifying all at once, and deeply confusing without some kind of mental model (whether it be Woolsey’s snakes and dragons, or something else) to help make sense of it.

It will also require in-depth ­reporting and news analysis, both on and occasionally from conflict zones.

As your new contributing editor for military affairs, that’s what I’ll be doing — so that you don’t have to.