The new dynamic changing the global strategic environment

Graffiti depicting Aylan Kurdi, also known as Aylan Shenu, a three-year-old Syrian boy whose drowning off a Turkish beach has sparked worldwide grief.

The world was changed by a single photo — Aylan Kurdi, a toddler lying face down on a Turkish beach, dead after drowning while trying to reach Europe. He was a victim of people-smuggling, a victim of the war in Syria, a victim of the chaos in the Middle East, a victim of the failure of global order.

The image of his body, one among perhaps 300,000 Syrians to die violently in the last few years, shocked and galvanised the world, including Australia.

We made a historic commitment to take 12,000 extra Syrian refugees, at a cost of $700 million over four years, we gave an additional $44m to the UN refugee agency and we decided to conduct air strikes against Islamic State — or Daesh — in Syria. Britain and France are on the point of authorising similar military actions in Syria, and several European nations, as well as the US, announced special refugee intakes.

But the world’s shock also springs from confusion and ignorance.

It turns out that Barack Obama’s high-minded, do-nothing, soaringrhetoric, Nobel Prize winning approach to the Middle East is actually just as bloody, or perhaps more bloody, in its consequences than was George W. Bush’s muscular interventionism.

The Middle East is certainly a bigger mess today than it was when Obama took power.

Then again, you might say the same thing about Bush — he left the Middle East a bigger mess than he found it.

Syria, the centre of the present crisis and the site of a terrible and horrendous war, with an incalculable human cost and many more dead than in Iraq, is the country in the Middle East the US did not intervene in, or even have any influence in.

But now the unfolding tragedies of Syria threaten to unravel the already unstable geopolitics of the Middle East, overwhelm Europe socially and economically, draw Washington once more into intimate regional involvement in Arab affairs, accelerate the growth of international terrorism, heighten the searing Sunni/Shia conflict and embroil even distant Australia, whose national interests are at stake, as are those of most Western nations.

There are six separate but interlinked dynamics rolling out of Syria around the world today which are transforming the global strategic environment. They are: the geo-strategic struggle centred on Syria, the phenomenon of mass people movement originating in Syria, Europe’s specific crisis with these people, the self-defeating, self-loathing and ultimately just plain wrong analysis of the situation among Western intellectuals, the continuing crisis in Arab civilisation and politics and its encounter with modernity, and the tight, sinewy national interests and response of Australia, caught up so heavily in so seemingly distant a set of problems. Take them one by one.

First, geopolitics. Obama made a specific and clear decision to pull back from the Middle East, to reduce American effort there and to reduce its influence. After first declaring his support for the protests in Syria which were part of the Arab spring, and early on declaring that (Syrian dictator Bashar al) “Assad must go”, Obama then decided against making any serious effort to influence the course of the struggle within Syria. The diplomatic priority of his administration has been working on the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, and then the Iranian nuclear deal.

He has got absolutely nothing of any use out of either effort while Syria and much of the Middle East have slid into turmoil, a turmoil which reaches out to affect the West.

Obama pulled out US troops from Iraq prematurely. The Middle East, and the world, is paying a heavy price for Obama’s decisions. This is what the world looks like when American influence is in decline: catastrophic humanitarian disaster, vast refugee flows and distant allies like Australia trying to make up the slack of failing American effort.

The Middle East is racked by contending conflicts. Underlying everything is the Sunni/Shia divide. In Syria, Assad’s regime is based on the Alawites, who are religious cousins of the Shia. The majority of Syria is Sunni. In Iraq, the majority of the population is Shia, and the oppressed minority is Sunni. This conflict plays out in one way or another across the Arab Gulf nations.

The second great Middle East conflict is ideological. In 14 years since the 9/11 attacks al-Qa’ida and its offshoots, most notably Islamic State, have been extraordinarily successful in establishing their paradigm within Muslim populations in North Africa and the Middle East. A small minority accepts the call to jihadism in its most violent form. But a much larger population accepts the basic paranoid narrative that Islam’s problems arise from Western persecution.

The West, especially the US, was naive in supporting the Arab spring to the extent of conniving in the overthrow of stable governments. The Arab spring was quickly taken over by the Islamists. In Libya, the West intervened militarily to help oust Muammar Gaddafi. This was strongly supported by Australia’s foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, and the defence minister, Stephen Smith (and by this writer, let me add). It was a grave mistake. Libya has imploded and is now run by jihadist and tribal war lords. Much of its national armoury has found its way into al-Qa’ida and Islamic State hands and Libya itself is generating huge numbers of people trying to travel to Europe.

Tony Abbott surely reflected a new, realist Western strategic objective for the Middle East this week. In what might be termed the Abbott Doctrine, he said: “What we want throughout the Middle East are governments that do not commit genocide against their own people, nor permit terrorism against ours.

“What we’re working towards is not an attempt to build a shining city on a hill. This is not an attempt to build a liberal pluralist market democracy overnight in the Middle East. That’s been tried and it didn’t magnificently succeed.”

Abbott is right in these judgments and he emerges as one of the West’s most hard headed, strategically clear and effective ­national leaders. Australia is the second biggest contributor to the US-led military coalition in Iraq. Abbott has made, in per capita terms, by far the largest commitment to resettling refugees of any country other than one which cannot control the flow of people ­directly over its borders.

The real strategic purpose of Abbott’s actions is to encourage the Americans to do more. It is only that way, as retired general Jim Molan argues, that Australia can have a strategic impact. And in truth that is normally the case in Australia’s international actions, that one of our chief sources of global influence is that we are an intimate ally of the US.

Obama needs to be much stronger in the Middle East but he needs to adopt Abbott’s strategically limited ambitions. Western liberalism is no longer a viable project for the Middle East. The best and most effective Western intervention is to help an existing political and social structure to deal with security and economic challenges.

In Syria and Iraq, the populations have disaggregated themselves into Sunni, Shia and Kurdish constituent parts. It would be better if Western policy picked champions to help within each entity, and accepted the de facto fragmentation and partition of those countries.

Islamic State is of particular ­interest to the West not only because of its inhumanity, but because it attacks the west. Before the Arab spring, Assad was not an especially brutal dictator. His regime has behaved with appalling savagery during the civil war but if his regime collapses there will be even more terrible chaos and very likely a wholesale slaughter of the Alawite population.

Removing Assad no longer seems to be a serious objective of Washington policy. For the West, the point is not whether Assad stays or goes, but that some non-IS and non-al-Qa’ida leadership emerge among the Sunnis, and that some negotiation and ceasefire occur between the Sunni and Alawite dominated parts of Syria.

The population movements generated by the breakdown across North Africa and the Middle East are enormous. Perhaps four million people have fled from Syria alone. The one really devastating criticism of Europe and the West is that radically insufficient funding has been given to the camps and other arrangements set up to house these people in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. These three nations don’t want the displaced Syrians to stay permanently. But if Europe does not want them to travel to Europe, then they should make decent provision for them in those countries of first asylum. If there is a criticism of Abbott’s package this week, it is that $44 million for the refugee camps is too little.

Then there is Europe’s very specific crisis. Almost all the people movements of the last few weeks have been secondary movements, that is, not of people directly fleeing persecution but, having gained some safety in nations like Turkey, deciding to move on to Europe. Aylan Kurdi and his drowned brother and mother had been, with their father, on a people-smuggler’s boat and had been living in Turkey, receiving money from relatives in Canada and the father getting some paid work. There was even a report, unconfirmed, that Aylan’s father was involved in the people smuggling business.

No one can blame them for seeking a better life, but no country, in Europe or anywhere else, is obliged to accept an unlimited number of people seeking a better life economically. There are tens of millions, indeed probably hundreds of millions, of people around the world who would like to live in Europe. In time, it will be clear that Europe cannot absorb them all The dangers of this spiralling all wildly out of control are severe.

Europeans are caught between two conflicting emotions: compassion, and the desire to control their borders and decide who comes into their countries.

Europe has several specific structural obstacles to finding an effective way to deal with this sudden population flood.

The EU internal freedom of movement conflicts with its members’ divergent external border policies and national immigration policies for non-EU immigrants. It is akin to the contradiction in having a common currency without a political union, that is a common currency but separate national budgets and separate national debts. It’s a structural contradiction guaranteeing policy failure.

Because there is freedom of movement within Europe, would be immigrants need only find the weakest external point in any European nation and they are in, all then to head to Germany or France or Britain.

Further, Europe has absolutely no capacity for sending anybody back who does not qualify as a genuine refugee. Countless books and papers detail how easy it is in any event to scam the refugee assessment process, but even if an applicant fails, they are virtually never sent back. Eventually they get European welfare payments. This is an enormous incentive just to show up.

The welfare system and European labour laws are themselves another massive structural problem for the Europeans in dealing with North African and Middle Eastern asylum-seekers. The welfare system acts as exactly the wrong incentive for immigrants. And the over-regulated labour laws mean that entry level jobs, especially low skilled jobs, are ­extremely scarce.Germany talks of processing 800,000 Syrians this year and distributing them around Europe. If this goes ahead millions more will follow. In Europe’s post-industrial, high wage, highly regulated, high tech economies, where on Earth will millions of unskilled migrants with little or no European language work? And how will Eurorpe’s chronic budget crisis cope with this massively increased welfare bill?

The lesson of recent years is that no work, even with generous welfare payments, breeds coruscating social alienation. Two books are essential reading for understanding Europe’s crisis on this front.

One is Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, by Christopher Caldwell, which shows how systematically Europe’s immigration rules are scammed and how poor the long-term economic outcomes have been. The other is The French Intifada by Andrew Hussey, which shows how this alienation becomes a hatred of France itself.

Caldwell and Hussey are unusual scholars in that they look at the evidence rather than like most Western intellectuals just accepting a pre-cooked narrative that Western society is somehow to blame for all these problems in the Middle East.

An Australian version of this demented Western response was evident this week in the ludicrous argument that to focus on the Christian minority in the 12,000 extra places we take would be somehow wicked and even contribute to the alienation of Muslims within Australians.

Thousands, probably tens of thousands, of Muslims have come to Australia as refugees, hundreds of thousands as immigrants. we are allowed to focus on the suffering and plight of any Middle Eastern group, or indeed any ethnic minority in the Middle East, except Christians. When we supported actions to save the Yazidis on the mountain from slaughter by IS, no one said it was a racist or sectarian action. The persecution, murder and ethnic and religious cleansing of the Middle East’s Christians is one of the great and terrible stories of our time.

But because Christianity is associated with the West, a certain kind of faux intellectual mind sees any action to help Christians as some kind of act of Western ­hegemony. This is political correctness and ideological nuttiness gone mad.

Not only that, the government is perfectly entitled to choose some refugees who it thinks will have a good chance of settling well in Australia. As the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fischer, ­argued, Syrian Christians have close connections with Australia.

Similarly, very few Western intellectuals wanted to reflect on how much all of these events represent a continuing crisis for the Arab world in its politics, and its encounter with modernity.

In all this, Abbott has acted to protect Australia’s national interests, give expression to our values and make a contribution to solving the root cause of the problem: the conflicts within Syria and Iraq. It’s a serious example of Australian leadership internationally.