Chapter Seven: Current Flashpoints
For a genuinely durable peace, Israel would have to resolve its longstanding dispute with Syria over the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967; work out acceptable terms for Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza; and negotiate long-term sharing and management of scarce water resources with Syria, Jordan, and the Palestinians.
And it would have to do so all against the backdrop of decades of grievance and mistrust. It is a small wonder that the Arab-Israeli conflict has proven to be one of the world's least tractable!
The PLO ultimately recognized Israel's right to exist in 1993, prompting Israel to recognize the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people (which in turn led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank today).
But Hezbollah remained entrenched in Lebanon, from which it continued to harass Israel, firing rockets across the border into Israel and leading to another indecisive clash in 2007.
Class Notes
7.2.1 Israel/Palestinians Three Conflicting British Promises: 1. Balfour Declaration ---> Jewish Homeland 2. McMahon Correspondence ---> independent Arab state 3. Sykes-Picot Agreement ---> carving up of Arab World by France & Britain - Arab Anger i. No independent Arab state ii. Jewish migration iii. UN partition - UN Partition 1947 -- Israel / Palestine - Neighboring Arab states attacked Israel ---> "Naqba" - Arabs passed on every opportunity to recognize Israel - UNSCR 242 - 1979 Camp David Accords - 1993 Oslo Accords - Secret talks between Ehud Olmert/Mahmoud Abbas - Asymmetrical Conflict - Enduring Peace --> sharing territory
Class Notes
7.3 Kashmir India/Pakistan - 1947 Instrument of Accession - Maharaja of Kashmir ---> both side - Indian hypocrisy -- Hyderabad/Junagadh - Pakistani-supported Terrorism - Indian intransigence -- Kashmir
Several additional factors render the ongoing Indo-Pakistani rivalry particularly worrisome. What is a fourth?
Fourth, although India is a relatively stable democracy, Pakistan is not, and significant elements within Pakistan are sympathetic to radical Islam. Most analysts believe that the most plausible way in which a terrorist group such as al-Qaeda might get its hands on a nuclear weapon, unlikely though it might be, would be a diversion from the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.
To assess the power of a realist explanation, one has to have a sense of the relevant power trends.
After all, Thucydides claimed, it was the growing power of Athens and the fear that it inspired in Sparta that led to the second Peloponnesian War. One key measure of power, as we saw in Chapter 2, is the size of a country's economy, typically measured by gross domestic product (GDP), which for comparison purposes we usually adjust to reflect price differentials (purchasing power parity GDP, or PPP GDP). Figure 7.2 shows post-Cold War PPP GDP for the world's six largest economies. You will notice that it has essentially been a two-horse race between the United States and China. Economically, Russia is the weakest of the six. Classical balance-of-power theory, using GDP as the key indicator, would certainly predict rivalry between China and the United States, but would it predict rivalry between Russia and the United States?
Constructivism, in contrast, draws our attention to the ways in which identities and interests evolve through interaction.
A constructivist would say not that a new Cold War between Russia and the West was inevitable, but that once old animosities resurfaced, and in the absence of any serious efforts to overcome them, it is not surprising that an adversarial dynamic developed and snowballed. Which explanation fits the facts better?
The liberal paradigm has somewhat better conceptual tools with which to make sense of what has happened, but to the extent that a liberal explanation works, it works by highlighting the potential value of what might have been.
A liberal would say that if Russia had become more fully integrated with the West institutionally, if true democracy had taken root in Russia (rather than the faux democracy we witness under Vladimir Putin's authoritarian rule), and if economic ties with Russia had been thicker and deeper, cooperation would have been easier and relations more positive. That may all be true, but what liberalism cannot do is explain why none of that happened.
The fifth war was the Yom Kippur War of October 1973.
After Nasser died, he was succeeded by Anwar Sadat, who realized that Egypt could not destroy Israel. He decided that some psychological victory was necessary before he could make any conciliatory moves toward peace. Sadat decided to attack across the Suez Canal but not to try to recapture the entire Sinai Peninsula. Sadat colluded with the Syrians and achieved an effective surprise. In the first stages, the war went well for the Egyptians, but the Israelis vigorously counterattacked.
In the eighteenth century, nationalism was not all that important. Why have claims to nationalism become so important now?
After all, as constructivists showed, humans are capable of multiple crosscutting loyalties—above and below the state level—and these loyalties can change. Loyalties tend to change when the usual patterns of life are disrupted. The idea of the nation often starts among the most disrupted, with people who are marginal figures in their own cultures and less certain about their identity. They are often people who are jolted out of normal patterns, who start to ask questions. National claims often start with intellectuals or with deviant religious groups. For example, the early Arab nationalists in the nineteenth century were often Christians rather than Muslims. Gradually, their concern about a new identity developed broader support as industry and urbanization disrupted the traditional patterns and loyalties of rural societies.
Winning the war proved much easier than winning the peace.
Although the occupation was initially welcomed in some of the Shi'a and Kurdish areas of the country, many of the former Sunni ruling groups and some Shi'a formed an insurgency against the occupation. They were aided by foreign terrorists, such as the Jordanian-born al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who crossed into Iraq and sought to continue their radical jihad against the United States.
Many countries, however, saw the United States' proposed invasion as a "preventive" war of choice because the threat posed by Iraq was not imminent
And while the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding that Saddam cooperate fully with international inspectors to prove that he was complying with resolutions passed a decade earlier assuring that he had given up his nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs, all indications were that he finally was doing just that. He allowed inspectors to return to Iraq for the first time in four years and gave them unfettered access to any site of their choice, quite possibly because the United States and its coalition partners were pouring troops into the region.
Several additional factors render the ongoing Indo-Pakistani rivalry particularly worrisome. What is a second?
Another worrisome consideration is that although India's nuclear arsenal appears to be under relatively secure civilian control, Pakistan's is under military control, and the Pakistani military is highly politicized and known for its risk-taking.
Matters came to a head in the fall of 2013 as a result of events in Ukraine, a former Soviet republic with a significant Russian-speaking minority, particularly in the east and in Crimea.
As we mentioned earlier, Ukraine-Russian relations were in some ways a model of cooperation in the immediate post-Cold War period. Not only did the government of newly independent Ukraine readily agree to the withdrawal of Soviet nuclear weapons from its soil, it even permitted the Russian Black Sea Fleet to operate from bases on Ukrainian territory. But the big unanswered question about Ukraine was whether its future lay east or west. Those who spoke Russian and ethnic Russians (primarily in eastern Ukraine) valued their ties to Russia and feared a potential drift toward Europe. Far from fearing this scenario, ethnic Ukrainians, who were in the majority, increasingly desired it, for both economic and security reasons. When pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych reneged on a promise to sign an association agreement with the European Union (EU) and instead signed a treaty with (and accepted a multibillion-dollar loan from) Russia, outraged Ukrainian citizens flooded Maidan Square in central Kiev. After weeks of violence on both sides, the protests forced Yanukovych from office. The new president, Petro Poroshenko, signed the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement on June 27, 2014.
The Palestinian Arabs respond that they also have lived in the area for many centuries.
At the time of World War I, when the Balfour Declaration was issued, 90 percent of the people living in Palestine were Arabs. Indeed, as late as 1932, 80 percent were Arabs. They argue that Britain had no right to make a promise to the Jews at the Arabs' expense. What is more, the Arabs continue, the Holocaust may have been one of history's greatest sins, but it was committed by Europeans. Why should Arabs have to pay for it?
The international response to India and Pakistan's ascendancy to the nuclear club has been energetic if somewhat contradictory.
Both countries were roundly condemned and initially sanctioned for violating a growing norm of nonproliferation (although not for violating the NPT, which neither had signed), yet both were ultimately rewarded for their transgressions.
Owing to the superior organization and firepower of the IDF, many more Palestinians than Israelis have died in ongoing violence, the Palestinians have suffered almost all the physical destruction of infrastructure, homes, and property.
But both sides are vulnerable. The weaker side in an asymmetrical conflict often resorts to unconventional means of inflicting harm, and indeed Palestinians have often resorted to using tactics such as suicide bombings, particularly during the Second Intifada ("Uprising"). More than 500 people, mostly Israeli civilians, died in 140 suicide attacks between 2000 and 2007. The deadliest year was 2002, with 55 attacks killing 220 people, prompting calls to complete a physical barrier to prevent attackers from Palestinian-controlled areas from crossing into Israel proper and into Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.
There is no doubt that the United States (and possibly others) has tried to provide the Indian and Pakistani militaries with technology intended to help safeguard against the accidental or unintended use of nuclear weapons.
But without a durable, permanent solution to the Kashmir problem, and with the ever-present danger of a transborder terrorist attack having a catalytic effect, the possibility of an Indo-Pakistani nuclear war can never be dismissed.
In the 1920s, Jewish immigration to Palestine increased slowly, but in the 1930s, after the rise of Hitler and intensified anti-Semitism in Europe, it began to increase rapidly.
By 1936, nearly 40 percent of Palestine was Jewish, and the influx led the Arab residents to riot. The British established a royal commission that recommended partition into two states. In May 1939, with World War II looming, Britain needed Arab support against Hitler's Germany, so Britain promised the Arabs that it would restrict Jewish immigration. But restriction was hard to enforce after the war. Because of the Holocaust, many in Europe were sympathetic to the idea of a Jewish homeland, and there was a good deal of smuggling of Jewish refugees. In addition, some of the Jewish settlers in Palestine engaged in terrorist acts against their British rulers. Britain, meanwhile, was so financially and politically exhausted from World War II and the decolonization of India that it announced in the fall of 1947 that, come May 1948, it would turn Palestine over to the United Nations.
The 1991 Gulf War was short and one-sided.
Coalition air power pummeled Iraq's military infrastructure, and coalition ground forces pushed Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in less than a week. Desperate to avoid defeat, Saddam even ordered his troops to fire Scud missiles at Israel, hoping to trigger Israeli retaliation that would prompt the coalition's Arab partners to switch sides or stand down. But under intense diplomatic pressure from Washington, Israel weathered the barrage without responding, although it did covertly supply military hardware to at least one of its implacable foes: Saudi Arabia.
Among those who had this sense of unfinished business were Bush's son, George W. Bush, who became president in 2001, and key members of his administration who used the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as an excuse to focus the world's attention once again on Saddam.
Convinced both that Saddam still posed a dire regional threat that would have to be dealt with sooner or later and that he had an underground weapons of mass destruction program that he was hiding from UN inspectors, they played up the implausible danger that Saddam would supply al-Qaeda with nuclear weapons. In 2002, they decided on war and began building up the necessary forces in the region.
The history of violence between Israel and its neighbors shows how regional conflicts based on ethnicity, religion, and nationalism can become embittered and difficult to resolve.
Hard-liners reinforce one another. Arab governments were slow to make peace because they did not want to legitimize Israel, and in their rejection, they reinforced the domestic position of those Israelis who did not want to make peace with the Arabs. The extremists formed a de facto transnational coalition that made it very difficult for moderates who wanted to find a compromise. In 1973 and 1977, Sadat took risks, and he eventually paid for them with his life. A decade later, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin also took risks for peace and was assassinated by a Jewish religious extremist. In such a world of extremes, trust and cooperation are difficult, particularly when the conflict is over a private good such as territory, which, as you will recall from Chapter 6, is excludable and rivalrous.
Politically, Saddam was worried about the security of Iraq.
He believed that everybody was out to undercut his country. After all, in 1981, the Israelis had bombed his nuclear research reactor, and with the decline of the Soviet Union, it looked as though the United States and Israel were becoming ever more powerful.
In the early romantic days of colonial liberation movements, there was often a successful blurring of these differences in "pan" movements.
Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the rise of pan-Slavism, claiming a common identity of all Slavic-speaking peoples. The modern Middle East saw pan-Arabism, and Africa, pan-Africanism. Early opponents of alien rule argued that because colonized people all suffered alike from the external colonizers, they should form pan-African or pan-Arab nations. But when it came to the actual business of governing, as opposed to liberating or resisting colonialism, the business of government required the instruments of state such as budgets, policies, and civil service, and those instruments existed not on a "pan" basis, but on the basis of the artificial boundaries created by colonial rule. So, as the romanticism gradually wore away, identity based on the state began to replace that of the "pan" movements. The romanticism of the "pan" movements nonetheless often lingered on as a disruptive force.
As we saw in Chapter 6, intrastate war has caused more death, destruction, and displacement than has interstate war since World War II, and this imbalance has only increased in the post-Cold War period.
Even before the Cold War ended, the apparent decline of interstate war prompted political scientist John Mueller to argue that major interstate war had become "obsolescent." If that means that it is increasingly difficult to imagine a cost-benefit calculation justifying a major interstate war, Mueller is probably correct. The states that are capable of waging major wars are all either developed countries with enormous stakes in a peaceful, well-regulated international order that have at their disposal a wide array of conflict management tools or rapidly developing countries (such as China) that eagerly seek to take their place among this select group. But history shows that wars sometimes break out for reasons that are difficult to explain in traditional cost-benefit terms. Accidents, misperceptions, and inadvertent actions have played important roles in triggering wars from time to time. History also shows that states sometimes wage war for reasons that do not seem entirely rational but that reflect powerful commitments to symbols, ideals, or other intangible, emotionally laden considerations. So, although we should take heart that the world has done a relatively good job of wrestling the problem of interstate war to the ground, we should be wary of declaring victory over the problem, particularly because a number of countries that have ongoing serious disputes have nuclear weapons.
With a population of more than 77 million people (behind only Egypt and Turkey in the region) and a land mass second only to Saudi Arabia, Iran is naturally a country of consequence, and it could potentially become the most powerful country in the Middle East.
First, Iran is poised strategically along the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf and dominates the narrow Strait of Hormuz, through which all sea traffic in and out of the gulf must pass. Second, it has massive proven oil reserves: 10 percent of the world's total, behind only Saudi Arabia and Canada. Third, Iran has an energetic ballistic missile program and is in principle now capable of striking targets virtually anywhere in the Middle East. Fourth, Iran now has a significant nuclear infrastructure that its leaders insist is for peaceful, civilian power-generation purposes, but that states wary of Iran — Israel and Saudi Arabia in particular —suspect is intended to give Iran independent nuclear capability.
We saw above that external powers were sometimes involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, but most often participating not directly and officially. Although the United States backed Israel and the Soviet Union assisted Arab states during the Cold War, they stopped short of getting immediately entangled in the hostilities for two reasons.
First, neither superpower was willing to get drawn into a conflict that might have ended in nuclear war. Second, the United States was reluctant to wage a major war abroad because memories of Vietnam had not yet faded. Similarly, the Soviet Union had already been fighting a costly war in Afghanistan since the late 1970s. With the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, however, major military involvement in the Middle East became a new pattern, and the main scene of action was Iraq.
One thing Iran has done repeatedly, however, is declare its implacable hostility to Israel (because of Israel's treatment of Palestinians and occupation of sites holy to Islam).
For example, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the incoming hardline Iranian president, was famously reported to have said in 2005 that Israel "must be wiped off the map." Iranian leaders have also been vocal in their condemnation of what they consider corrupt, heretical, or Western-puppet regimes, such as the Sunni monarchs of Saudi Arabia. Hostile statements, rather than hostile actions, largely explain fears of Iran.
Toward a Partition of Palestine
His Majesty's Government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing, non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. — The Balfour Declaration, November 2, 1917
The second Arab-Israeli war occurred in 1956.
In 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser and other young nationalist officers overthrew King Farouk of Egypt and seized power. They soon received arms from the Soviet Union and maneuvered to gain control of the Suez Canal, a vital commercial shipping channel linking Europe and Asia. Egypt harassed Israel with a series of guerrilla attacks. As mentioned in Chapter 6, Britain and France, angry about the canal and worried about Nasser dominating the Middle East, colluded with Israel to attack Egypt. The United States refused to help Britain, however, and the war was stopped by a UN resolution and peacekeeping force that was inserted to keep the sides apart. But there was still no peace treaty.
The fourth war, the War of Attrition, was a more modest affair.
In 1969-1970, Nasser, with support from the Soviet Union, organized crossings of the Suez Canal and other harassments. These moves provoked an air war in which Israeli and Egyptian pilots fought a number of air battles. Eventually, the air war tapered off into a stalemate.
At that point, the superpowers stepped in to press the two sides to accept a cease-fire.
In November 1967, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242, which said that Israel should withdraw from occupied lands in exchange for peace and recognition. But Resolution 242 contained some deliberate ambiguities. Some of the several language versions of the resolution said just "territories," not all territories, implying that some land might not have to be returned. It was also ambiguous about the status of the Palestinians, who were not recognized as a nation but were described as refugees. Again, the basic issue was not settled.
Both sides have valid points.
In World War I, the area that is now Palestine was ruled by the Turks, and the Ottoman Empire was allied with Germany. After Turkey's defeat, its empire was dismembered, and its Arab territories became mandates under the League of Nations. France governed Syria and Lebanon; Britain called the area it controlled between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean "Palestine," and it called the area it governed across the Jordan River "Trans-Jordan."
The Near East and Middle East have been the scenes for some of the world's most notorious regional conflicts.
In contrast to post-Cold War relations between Russia and the West, in which constructivism holds the key to explaining what has happened, much of what has happened in the Near East and Middle East can understood fairly well through a realist lens (although nationalism and religion also play an important role, as do international law and organization).
One way of making realism fit is to argue that Russia has bandwagoned with China against the United States. Superficially, there are indications of increased cooperation between China and Russia on important matters such as energy and military security.
In particular, Russia and China are increasingly actively promoting regional security cooperation through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and through bilateral security cooperation, as illustrated by joint naval exercises in the Mediterranean and the Pacific in 2015. But no formal alliance binds China and Russia, and the timing of Chinese-Russian cooperation suggests that it was a response to Russia's deteriorating relations with the West rather than a cause of it. Something else was driving that deterioration in the first place.
Interstate war is not equally likely everywhere. Many would consider it virtually impossible in the "islands of peace" known as security communities that we discussed in Chapter 2: Western Europe, Scandinavia, North America, and Australia/New Zealand/Japan.
In still other parts of the world, such as parts of sub-Saharan Africa, states are so weak, fractured, or racked with intrastate violence already that interstate war is hardly a pressing problem. Interstate war remains acutely dangerous in the various "flashpoints" where well-armed states with longstanding grievances confront each other and where international crises have the potential to escalate to nuclear war. For reasons that are not entirely clear, these flashpoints are concentrated along a giant arc sweeping from western Russia to the Indian subcontinent and up to Northeast Asia. How dangerous are these flashpoints? Is each one unique, or do they share important characteristics? How can theory and history help us answer these questions?
The Second Indo-Pakistani War, also fought over Kashmir, broke out in 1965.
In this instance, India's tepid military response to Pakistani incursions in a disputed portion of the Indian state of Gujarat encouraged the Pakistani military to believe that it could wrest control of Indian-occupied Kashmir. Pakistan overplayed its hand, however, and India responded forcefully, even going as far as to launch military operations into Pakistani territory in the Punjab. After the UN Security Council called for a ceasefire, hostilities ended, and the two countries agreed to meet to negotiate a settlement to the conflict, but ultimately failed to do so.
What makes the conflict between India and Pakistan so dangerous today is that both countries now have nuclear arsenals.
India developed nuclear weapons first, successfully conducting a "peaceful nuclear explosion" in 1974 intended primarily as a deterrent signal to China, with whom India had ongoing, if stable, territorial disputes. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did not "weaponize" India's nuclear capability at the time, however. Pakistan began its nuclear weapons program in 1972 in response to its defeat in the Third Indo-Pakistani War, but it did not acquire the capability to build a nuclear weapon until the late 1980s. It received help from China, which had not yet become firm in its nonproliferation policies.
In addition, Iraq was angry with Kuwait over Kuwait's oil policy.
Iraq argued that Kuwait ignored guidelines for oil production set by the Organization for Petroleum Exporting States, or OPEC, and that every dollar reduction in the price of a barrel of oil cost Iraq $1 billion per year. Moreover, Iraq believed that Kuwait was pumping too much oil from a particular field that straddled the border. Capturing Kuwait not only looked like a solution to Iraq's economic problems, but it would have gratified Saddam's sense of grievance.
After this pair of miscalculations, the war bogged down into a long, drawn-out affair instead of the short, profitable war that Saddam had intended.
Iraq decided that it wanted to withdraw, but Iran refused to let go. Having been attacked, it was not going to let Iraq decide when to quit. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran, said that Iran would not end the war until the downfall of Saddam. For most of the decade, the rest of the world looked on. Conservative Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan supported Iraq against Iran because they were more afraid of Iranian revolutionary power. But Arab Syria, a secular and radical regime in many ways similar to Iraq, supported Iran for balance-of-power reasons. Damascus was more worried about a rising neighbor, Iraq, than a more distant Iran.
The first Persian Gulf crisis started on August 2, 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
Iraq had always claimed that Kuwait was an artificial creation of the colonial era and should not be a separate state. In 1961, it tried to take over Kuwait but was deterred by Britain. As we have seen above, the idea that colonial boundaries are meaningless promised to create enormous havoc in other regions of the postcolonial world, which may explain why so many countries in the United Nations rejected Iraq's reasoning.
In any case, there were deeper economic and political reasons.
Iraq had been economically devastated by its eight-year war with Iran. It had an $80 billion debt, which was increasing at the rate of $10 billion every year. At the same time, Iraq sat next to a proverbial gold mine—Kuwait—with enormous oil surpluses and a small population.
What would it take to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict?
Israel craves above all recognition of its right to exist behind secure borders as a Jewish state (de facto, if not de jure; Israel has no formal constitution, and its basic laws nowhere actually define Israel as a Jewish state). Exactly what borders would be acceptable is a matter of great internal debate. Israel also insists on retaining Jerusalem as its capital, with full control of the sites in the Old City that are holy to Judaism. Palestinians claim at a minimum a right of return for the descendants and remaining first-generation refugees forced to flee their homes and villages as a result of the 1948 and 1967 wars and insist that Je- Jerusalem should be the capital of Palestine. They also insist on full control of the Old City's sites that are holy to Islam, some of which directly abut Jewish holy sites. Creative solutions may well be possible for issues such as Jerusalem and the holy sites, such as shared or overlapping sovereignty (in effect transforming private goods into jointly managed common goods), but only if moderates on both sides prevail.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, Hamas, or the "Islamic Resistance Movement," refused to recognize Israel's right to exist, challenged the PLO's authority, infiltrated fighters to mount attacks into Israel proper, and began launching rocket barrages just as Hezbollah had done in the north.
Israel has responded militarily repeatedly, most notably in 2008 (Operation Cast Lead), 2012 (Operation Pillar of Defense), and 2014 (Operation Protective Edge).
What did the Gulf War achieve?
It briefly revived the doctrine of UN collective security, but one can reasonably question how typical this regional conflict was. The cease-fire set a precedent whereby UN inspectors visited Iraq and destroyed its known nuclear and chemical facilities, but it left Saddam Hussein in place. President George H. W. Bush decided not to occupy Baghdad because he thought that Saddam might be removed by his own people, and he was concerned that neither the American public nor the UN coalition would tolerate a costly occupation. Many believed that this restraint left unfinished business in view of Saddam's hegemonic regional ambitions, his demonstrated willingness to attack his neighbors, the eagerness with which he had sought weapons of mass destruction, and his obvious antipathy to Israel.
Perhaps the most disturbing feature of the Ukraine crisis, from a larger international politics perspective, is Russia's opportunistic annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol—sovereign Ukrainian territory—following a hastily arranged sham referendum on March 16, 2014.
It is now known that the annexation was planned in Moscow and preceded by a well-executed infiltration by Russian forces. Most countries of the world have refused to recognize it. By a vote of 100 to 11, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed it illegal and declared that Crimea and Sevastopol remain sovereign Ukrainian territory. What is particularly disturbing about the annexation is not merely that it violated Russia's own commitment to recognize and defend Ukrainian territorial integrity under the terms of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, but that it violated one of the most important and hitherto most robust norms of the postwar order: namely, the norm against unilaterally attempting to change international borders.
To the extent that it was a "threat" at all, it was because the Iranian Revolution demonstrated that seemingly strong and secure secular authoritarian leaders were vulnerable to religiously inspired mass rebellion.
Many countries in the Near East and Middle East had secular authoritarian leaders and large numbers of impoverished, disenfranchised, or outright oppressed believers, and it was for this reason, rather than any growth in Iranian power and the fear that it would cause in others, that Iran was treated as a pariah (you will recall from Chapter 3 that conservative monarchs in nineteenth-century Europe saw liberalism and nationalism as threats for precisely the same reason). But Iran is no longer weak, and realist balance-of-power considerations can largely explain regional wariness.
A key element of being treated with respect, from the Russian perspective, was that the West keep its commitments and take Russia's basic security interests into account.
Memories of NATO's hostility were still fresh in Russian minds, and although the Warsaw Pact disbanded in 1991, NATO did not. According to Soviet officials involved in negotiations concerning the reunification of Germany in 1990 (i.e., after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the collapse of the Soviet Union), Western officials made clear commitments that if the Soviet Union did not object to reunification, NATO would agree not to expand eastward. The last thing the Soviet Union (and, shortly thereafter, Russia) wanted was NATO right on its border. Some Western officials insist that no such formal commitment was made, but in any case, the damage was done when Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999 and when Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined in 2009. That the last three countries joined—former Soviet republics, no less—added insult to injury. Russia believed that it was misled, betrayed, and disrespected. To Russian eyes, NATO enlargement unambiguously demonstrated the West's hostility to Russia, as did many other things; examples are NATO's "humanitarian" air campaign in support of Kosovo separatists against Russia's traditional Balkan client Serbia in 1998 and U.S. plans in 2002 to establish missile-defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, ostensibly to defend against Iranian missiles, but seen by Moscow as a threat to Russia's nuclear deterrent.
The disruptions that mobilize people for new identities can come from internal or external forces.
Modern nationalism was greatly stimulated by the French Revolution. The rise of the middle class disrupted traditional political and social patterns. Rising political groups no longer wanted the state of France to be defined by the king but instead to be defined in terms of the nation, all the people. And externally, as Napoleon's armies marched across Europe, they disrupted society and mobilized nationalist feelings among German-speaking peoples and other groups. By the middle of the century, there was widening support for the idea that each nation should have a state. This ideal culminated in the unifications of Germany and Italy. Ironically, as we saw in Chapter 2, Otto von Bismarck was a conservative who did not try to unite all German speakers, only those he could control for the Prussian crown. He nonetheless harnessed nationalism for his purposes, and the unifications of Germany and Italy became models of success.
Fragmentation and Ferment in the Near East and Middle East
Moving south and east, the next set of flashpoints we encounter are in the Near East and Middle East. These terms have an imprecise geographic denotation, but Figure 7.6 indicates the countries we include under these labels for present purposes.
Why did Saddam not back down?
Partly, it seems, as a result of a miscalculation. As he told the U.S. ambassador to Iraq in August 1990, he believed that the United States had no stomach for high casualties and would not commit itself to a long, drawn-out war. In that sense, he was a victim of the Vietnam analogy. Partly, too, Saddam was driven by pride and his unwillingness to accept the humiliating loss of face that withdrawal would have entailed.
The third war, the Six-Day War of June 1967, was the most important because it resulted in the primary current territorial issue.
Nasser and the Palestinians continued to harass the Israelis with guerrilla attacks, and Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran, which cut off Israeli shipping from the Red Sea. Nasser was not quite ready for war, but he saw the prospect of a Syrian-Israeli war looming and thought that he would do well to join. Nasser asked the United Nations to remove its peacekeeping forces from his border. Israel, watching Nasser prepare for war, decided not to wait, but instead to preempt Egypt's likely attack. The Israelis caught the Egyptian air force on the ground and went on to capture not only the whole Sinai Peninsula, but also the Golan Heights from Syria and the West Bank from Jordan.
How does nationalism cause war?
Nationalism is not merely a descriptive term, it is also prescriptive. When words are both descriptive and prescriptive, they become political words used in struggles for power. Nationalism has become a crucial source of state legitimacy in the modern world on the principle that nations have a right to self-determination, which, as we saw in Chapter 2, they often express in a demand for statehood. If a people can get others to accept its claim to be a nation, it can claim national rights and use such claims as weapons against others.
During the bipolar Cold War era, the wars between Israel and its neighbors tended to be short, in part because the superpower role was so prominent.
On the one hand, each superpower supported its clients, but when it looked as if the clients might pull the superpowers toward the nuclear brink, they pulled their clients back. The pressures for ceasefires came from outside. In 1956, the pressure came from the United States via the United Nations; in 1967, the United States and the Soviet Union used their hotline to arrange a cease-fire; in 1973, the United States and the Soviet Union stepped in; and in 1982, the United States pressed Israel to draw back from Lebanon. Although in many instances the Cold War exacerbated regional conflicts, it also placed a safety net underneath them.
Saddam was wrong. A series of UN resolutions applied the doctrine of collective security against Iraq. Why did the United States and others respond as they did?
One argument is that it was all for oil. Oil exports to the United States and other leading Western industrialized nations made the Persian Gulf an abnormally important region, but there was more to the 1990 crisis than oil. For example, Britain was deeply involved in the war, but Britain did not import any Persian Gulf oil. There was also concern about collective security and echoes of the failure to stand up to German aggression in the 1930s. There was also a third dimension: preventive war. Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction. He had a nuclear weapons program with covertly imported materials, he had chemical weapons, and he was developing biological weapons. If in addition he were to have the revenues that came from Kuwait's oil, the world would face a larger, stronger, more devastating Iraq later in the decade. Some reasoned that if there were to be a war, it was better to have it now than later.
Several additional factors render the ongoing Indo-Pakistani rivalry particularly worrisome. What is one?
One is that the two countries have a long history of misperceptions and misjudgments leading to conflict. In one case, the 1999 Kargil confrontation, the two countries found themselves in direct conflict even after their nuclear tests. In this instance, in other words, Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons proved to be of little deterrent value.
The Middle East has often seen appeals to pan-Arabism and odd situations in which countries suddenly announce that they are forming a union, as Egypt and Syria did in forming the United Arab Republic in 1958.
Over time, however, the forces of the state have prevailed over these pan-nationalist movements. But the gradual process is far from complete. Much of the postcolonial world saw enormous disruption of the normal patterns of life because of economic change and modern communications. Political leaders tried to control this postcolonial discontent. Some used national appeals, some used pan-Arab appeals, and others used fundamentalist religious appeals, all contributing to the complexity of the forces that create conflict in regions such as the Near East and Middle East. The failure of states in the region to modernize effectively explains why some of their citizens turned toward fundamentalism or terrorism.
When Britain withdrew from South Asia in 1947, it divided the territory it had governed into two states.
Predominantly Hindu areas were to become India, and predominantly Muslim areas were to become Pakistan (East Pakistan in the area of the Ganges River delta, West Pakistan in the Indus River watershed between Afghanistan and Iran on the West and India on the east). The criteria for partition were less than fully clear, however, and certain territories became subjects of dispute. Chief among them was Kashmir, a "princely state" in the remote mountainous northwest of the Indian subcontinent.
This leaves realism and constructivism as the main sources of possible insight into the causes of what is increasingly looking like a new, if milder, "Cold War."
Recall that for realists, the dominant drive is fear, and in a Hobbesian anarchy such as the Westphalian system of sovereign states, self-help tends to lead to balancing behavior. (According to realism, weak states might sometimes bandwagon, but great powers tend to balance.) In this view, a new Cold War of sorts might well have been inevitable. As great powers, Russia and the United States were bound to view each other with suspicion and to err on the side of caution when providing for their own security. Trust would be hard to come by. This stance would lead to competition not only in arms, but in allies and influence. Perhaps what we have seen of relations between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War is simply the result of realist dynamics at work.
Arguably, both sides oversold an optimistic vision of the future. All countries have conflicts of interest, and it was unrealistic to herald a golden age of universal understanding.
Russia had always had tense relations with many of its neighbors, too, including (perhaps primarily!) with some of its former Warsaw Pact allies who all too easily remembered Russia's tendency to dominate and feared a future relapse. Democratic and capitalist transitions in Russia and Eastern Europe were bound to be somewhat painful with occasional steps backward as well as forward, but was the deterioration in relations that we have witnessed inevitable?
In a speech in Amman, Jordan, in February 1990, Saddam said that the Soviet Union was in decline and could no longer counter the Americans and the Israelis.
Saddam believed that he would have to do it himself. He undertook a number of actions designed to test the United States. Ironically, the United States was trying to appease Saddam, to bring him back into the community of responsible states, and to use Iraq as an effective balance to Iranian power in the region. The inconsistency of U.S. policy misled Saddam, and he believed that he could get away with the invasion of Kuwait without suffering serious reprisals.
The problem, however, was that both the moral case and the international-legal case for war were weak.
Saddam did not pose the kind of imminent threat that would have satisfied the "just cause" requirement of jus ad bellum that we introduced in Chapter 1. The United States and its (few) coalition partners — most notably Britain, whose prime minister, Tony Blair, was just as keen to remove Saddam as was Bush ("But the man's uniquely evil, isn't he?" Blair said of Saddam to a group of Middle East experts assembled at 10 Downing Street in November 2002) —described military action against Iraq as "preemptive."
The one hard-power measure on which Russia fares extremely well is nuclear weapons (Figure 7.5).
Seen through this lens, the world is indeed very bipolar, and Russia and the United States are clearly at the poles. But it cuts two ways. On the one hand, although the nuclear balance can explain why Russia and the United States might see each other as their primary security threat, they have always had the lion's share of nuclear weaponry, which from a realist point of view would make it hard to explain how it was that they had any post-Cold War "honeymoon" at all. On the other hand, as we saw in Chapter 2, nuclear weapons are hopelessly muscle-bound. It is hard to imagine the foreign policy goal that would ever justify their use. That undermines their utility as a hard-power resource and makes nuclear weapons a threat not only to others but to the very states that possess them. One could argue that U.S. and Russian leaders today would do well to heed the lessons learned by John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis: that nuclear weapons are a problem, not a solution, and that there is little more important in great power politics than cooperating to reduce the danger of their use.
The Third Indo-Pakistani War (1971) was the deadliest.
Some 9,000 Pakistani soldiers were killed, as well as 2,500 Indians. In contrast to the first two, however, it was not fought over Kashmir. It began as a domestic Pakistani dispute and ultimately resulted in East Pakistan seceding to become the state of Bangladesh.
Pakistan first tested nuclear weapons in 1998 immediately following a series of Indian nuclear tests, the motivation for which remains somewhat unclear: Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee may have been attempting to send a deterrent signal to both China (at that time undergoing a nuclear modernization program) and Pakistan (whose nuclear ambitions were known and which had recently successfully tested a long-range missile), he may have been keen to develop some useful payload for India's own long- range missiles, or he may simply have sought to assert India's claim to great power status.
Some combination of motivations is entirely plausible as well. Pakistan's response was very clearly deterrent in nature. Its tests were hasty and unimpressive.
Outsiders also took sides.
The United States, worried about the growth of Iranian power, provided covert assistance to Iraq. Israel secretly shipped U.S.-built weapons to Iran, even though fundamentalists in Iran were calling for the destruction of Israel. Israel's covert weapons assistance can be explained by balance-of-power considerations. Israel feared both Iraq and Iran, but Iraq was a closer threat, and on the principle of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," Israel provided assistance to Iran. So a war that started from miscalculations rooted in religion, nationalism, and ambition was expanded by balance-of- power concerns into an intractable, nearly decade-long conflict.
The intractability of the Arab-Israeli conflict is largely a function of it being a conflict over a private good: namely, territory.
Sovereignty, you will recall from Chapter 2, is an absolute concept, and territoriality is an essential characteristic of a sovereign state. Although some states (and many nonstate actors, such as Hamas) do not recognize Israel's right to exist, most states do, and Israel is a full member of the United Nations. As of yet, however, there is no Palestinian equivalent, although on November 29, 2012, the UN General Assembly passed resolution 67/19 elevating Palestine from an "observer entity" to a "non-member observer state," and at present, more than two-thirds of full UN members have formally recognized Palestine as a state. As time goes by, more and more people arrive at the conclusion that the only prospect for lasting peace lies in a "two- state" solution.
Uneasy Standoff: India and Pakistan
Still further east is the site of a hotly contested territorial dispute over Kashmir. There are three main protagonists—India, Pakistan, and China—but the most dangerous axis of conflict is between the former two.
As you can see, the Near East and Middle East are politically complex places.
That complexity, in combination with various other factors such as inequality, poverty, and population and resource pressures, no doubt contributes to its volatility. We will now have a look at some of the more significant theaters of conflict in these highly complex regions.
In 1947, the United Nations recommended a partition of Palestine. Ironically, it would have been better for the Arabs if they had accepted the UN partition plan, but instead they rejected it.
That led to outbreaks of local fighting. In May 1948, Israel declared itself independent, and Israel's Arab neighbors attacked to try to reverse the partition. The first war lasted for eight months of on-and-off fighting. Even though the Arabs outnumbered the Israelis 40 to 1, they were poorly organized and hampered by disunity. After a cease-fire and UN mediation, Jordan controlled the area called the West Bank and Egypt controlled Gaza, but most of the rest of the Palestinian mandate was controlled by the Israelis, more than they would have had if the Arabs had accepted the 1947 UN plan.
The war produced a flood of Palestinian refugees, a sense of humiliation among many Arabs, and broad resistance to any idea of permanent peace.
The Arabs did not want to accept the outcome of the war because they did not want to legitimize Israel. They believed time was on their side. Arab leaders fostered pan-Arab feelings and the belief that they could destroy Israel in another war. King Abdullah of Jordan was assassinated when he tried to sign a separate peace treaty with Israel in 1951, further decreasing the likelihood of a peaceful settlement between the Arab states and the new Israeli government.
Previously semiautonomous, Kashmir was reluctant to accede to either state.
The First Indo-Pakistani War (1947-1948) was fought over control of Kashmir, but left India and Pakistan each in possession of only part of it. China controlled a portion as well: the high, remote, virtually unpopulated Aksai Chin, over which China and India fought a brief war in 1962 that resulted in a decisive Indian defeat.
The Arab-Israeli conflict has produced five interstate wars and almost nonstop low-level conflict (occasionally leading to large-scale military operations) between two groups of people asserting different national identities, but claiming the same small piece of land.
The Israeli claim dates to biblical times when the area was controlled by Jews before the Romans asserted their authority in the first century bce. In modern historical times, Israelis have pointed to several events tied to World Wars I and II to justify the existence of Israel. During World War I, the British issued the Balfour Declaration, a letter written by the British government to Lord Rothschild of the British Zionist Federation promising that the British government would work for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. After World War II, Israelis argue, the horrors of Adolf Hitler's Holocaust proved the need for a Jewish state. In 1948, Jewish settlers were willing to accept a partition of Palestine, but the Arab people in the area were not. The United Nations recognized the new Jewish state, but the Israelis had to fight to preserve it from concerted Arab attack. That, the Israelis say, is the historical origin and justification of the state of Israel.
Here again, dominant narratives conflict.
The Russian story is that the West opportunistically engineered an illegal coup d'état against a duly elected president, with the help, and effectively doing the bidding, of fascists such as the far-right group Svoboda. The Western story is that Vladimir Putin strong-armed Yanukovych into betraying the democratic will of the people of Ukraine so as to keep the country in Russia's orbit and under Russia's thumb. At any rate, the result was civil war in the eastern Donbass region between ethnic Russian separatists, heavily armed and supported (covertly) by regular Russian forces, and the ill-equipped and ill-trained Ukrainian army, openly but only modestly supported by Western governments. Several ceasefires and deescalation agreements have been negotiated and ignored, and at present, matters have settled into an uncertain stalemate. The precise human cost to date is unknown, but the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs puts the number at more than 6,000, with nearly 2 million either internally displaced or having fled the country. Among the great tragedies of the conflict was the accidental shooting down of a civilian airliner, Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 bound for Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam, over Donetsk on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people aboard. Although the precise details of the tragedy remain unclear, there is little doubt that the plane was brought down by a mobile Russian surface-to-air missile. The only question is whether Russian separatists or regular Russian forces pulled the trigger.
President George W. Bush made a deal with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in March 2006 granting India an exemption from U.S. laws prohibiting the sale of U.S. nuclear technology to nonsignatories of the NPT in return for India's agreement to open up its civilian nuclear facilities to international inspection.
The United States has lavished Pakistan with military and economic aid intended to shore up its secular democracy and help it fight Islamic insurgents.
The barrier, which Israelis often refer to as "the security fence" and which Palestinians often refer to as "the Apartheid Wall," was effective in stemming suicide attacks, but it caused enormous hardship for Palestinians who travel back and forth between their homes on one side and their jobs on the other.
The barrier is controversial as well because it does not always follow the 1949 armistice line, or "Green Line," considered by most of the international community to demarcate Israel's legitimate border: Roughly 12 percent of the West Bank falls on the Israeli side.
But others argued that the war was unnecessary because economic sanctions could force Iraq to withdraw its troops from Kuwait.
The counterfactual is hard to prove, but historically, sanctions have rarely achieved their intended effect in a short time frame. As U.S. and coalition troops poured into the region, it looked more and more as though Iraq could not win.
Eastern Europe: A New Cold War?
The end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union gave Russia and the West an opportunity to end their historic rivalry and embark on a new era of mutual prosperity and security. The collapse of communism meant that the Cold War's defining ideological division ceased to exist. Democracy began to take root in Russia and Eastern Europe. Command economies began transitioning to liberal capitalist economies. The adversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members, the Warsaw Pact, disbanded. The Iron Curtain gave way to an increasingly thick web of trade, investment, and personal contacts. Almost miraculously, newly independent former Soviet republics such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan negotiated the peaceful transfer back to Russia of Soviet nuclear weapons deployed or stored on their soil, and the United States helped secure them through an ambitious program of nuclear safety technology transfer. Before long, the United States and the Soviet Union began reducing their nuclear arsenals. Fissile material from dismantled Soviet nuclear weapons even found its way into U.S. civilian nuclear power plants, where today, coupled with material recovered from decommissioned U.S. nuclear weapons, it accounts for roughly 10 percent of the electricity generated in the United States.
Important events in international politics often resemble the plot in Akira Kurosawa's famous film Rashomon, in which eyewitnesses give entirely different accounts of what has happened.
The end of the Cold War is no exception. Western leaders had little or no overt hostility toward Russia, and they genuinely sought to move forward in a true spirit of cooperation, but they believed that the West had won the Cold War and had earned the right to take the lead in shaping the post-Cold War era. Russia's insistence on being treated as a full equal seemed both unrealistic and undeserved. Not least importantly, it was profoundly irritating. Initiatives such as the Partnership for Peace (1994), the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (1997), and the Russia-NATO Council (2002) were sincere attempts to engage Russia in cooperative security and address Russia concerns that seemed increasingly unappreciated and unreciprocated as Russia's anti-NATO rhetoric ramped up. Russia seemed increasingly to reject the West's hand of friendship and to retreat into a bombastic nationalistic shell. As Europhiles left office in Russia or were thrown out in favor of nationalists and Eurasianists, relations cooled, and Western governments began to lose hope or interest in turning things around.
These events, and that there are two conflicting narratives about virtually every aspect of them, demonstrate the power of constructivism in this case.
The end of the Cold War truly did represent an opportunity for Russia and the West to embark on a new path, one that potentially stood to benefit both. But fundamental disagreements on whether the Cold War had a "winner" and a "loser" and on whether Russia was being treated with the respect and consideration it deserved, coupled with latent (and quickly activated) oppositional national identities, resulted in a vicious spiral of misunderstanding, mistrust, and ultimately hostility. Just as constructivists would expect, here we see interests and identities evolving through interaction over time. Liberals are probably correct in thinking that it would not have happened if Russia had been more quickly and more completely integrated institutionally and economically and if its nascent democracy not been hijacked by oligarchs, kleptocrats, and authoritarians; realists are surely correct to describe relations between Russia and the West today as characterized by fear, mistrust, and old-fashioned power politics, but only constructivists can tell a compelling story about why that is so. One can only hope that enlightened leaders on both sides will find a way of halting any further slide into hostility. The last thing the world needs is another long Cold War, with all of the attendant risks of turning hot.
The Bush administration had not planned for enough troops to manage the looting that followed the collapse of Saddam's regime or for the insurgency that followed the invasion.
The ensuing violence slowed reconstruction efforts that could have helped generate popular support and soft power. Additionally, the failure to obtain a second UN resolution meant that many countries believed that the invasion lacked legitimacy. As a result, their participation in the reconstruction effort was limited.
To this day, Iraq is still riven by sectarian violence, and the central government has limited reach and limited capacity to deliver basic public goods.
The largely self-governing Kurdish region of northern Iraq is peaceful and prosperous for the most part, but large swaths of the country, particularly north and west of Baghdad and along Iraq's border with Syria, are either controlled by extremists or contested by rival militias, increasingly with international backers. According to IraqBodyCount.org, upwards of 200,000 Iraqis have died in sectarian conflict since the Iraq War began.
In the Arab-Israeli conflict, we see the same pattern that we can observe on a global scale: a shift over time from interstate to intrastate war, from regular military combat to irregular (insurgency and counterinsurgency) combat.
The last major war between the Israel armed forces and the armed forces of a neighboring state took place in 1973, but there has been no true peace since. In 2014 alone, 2,314 Palestinians and 87 Israelis were killed in the occupied Palestinian territories, mostly as a result of Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, which caused half a million Palestinians and 28,000 Israelis to flee their homes.
World War II weakened the European colonial empires, and decolonization was one of the major movements in Asia and Africa over the next three decades.
The metropolitan societies had been weakened by the war itself, and elites in the colonized areas began to use the idea of nationalism against the crumbling European empires. But if the nineteenth-century model of states based on language and ethnicity had been used to organize the postcolonial world, it would have led to thousands of ministates in Africa and many parts of Asia. Instead, the postcolonial elites asserted the right of the state to make a nation, just the opposite of the nineteenth-century pattern. The local leaders argued that they needed to use the state machinery that the colonists had established—the budget, the police, the civil service—to shape a nation out of smaller tribal groups. The same ideology of nationalism came to be used to justify two things that are almost the opposite of each other—nation makes state or state makes nation—because nationalism is a political word with an instrumental use. In that sense, national identities are socially constructed. (Even in the seemingly classic "nation makes state" case of France, the state used education and police to bring laggard re- gions such as Brittany into line.)
Israel's subsequent large-scale military operations have all been against nonstate actors, not sovereign states.
The scene of the first was Lebanon. Once a well-functioning pluralist state, Lebanon's latent sectarian tensions finally flared into civil war in 1975, and the country became a sanctuary for groups dedicated to the destruction of Israel, such as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Hezbollah ("Party of God"), backed by Syria and Iran. In 1982, Israel launched Operation Peace for Galilee to clear these sanctuaries, ultimately advancing all the way to Beirut. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) withdrew from most of Lebanon in 1985 and from a small buffer zone in the south in 2000.
As UN inspectors asked for more time to complete their work, Bush and Blair believed that time was running out.
The weather was getting hot, and the forces they had deployed would have to be unleashed on Saddam or brought back home. After failing to obtain a second Security Council resolution authorizing an attack against Iraq, Bush and Blair insisted that earlier UN resolutions provided all the legal basis for action that they needed. The attack began just before dawn on March 20, 2003. Within three and a half weeks, Baghdad fell, and Saddam had fled.
For example, in the 1970s, the Arab states successfully lobbied in the UN General Assembly to pass a resolution that labeled Zionism— the belief that Jews were entitled to a state of their own in the biblical lands—as racism.
Their intent was to deprive Israel of legitimacy by undermining Jewish nationalism. To be a nation is good; to be a racist is bad. The analytic problem with the argument was that religion can be a basis of national identity. It is also true that a religious basis can make it more difficult for minorities outside the religion to share the national identity. Life can be more difficult for Muslims in Israel than for Jews, just as daily life can be more trying for Hindus in Pakistan than for Muslims. But there is nothing inherently racist about a people using religion as a basis for national self-determination. The UN General Assembly finally annulled the resolution by a second vote in 1991.
The sheer size of a country's economy, of course, does not give a clear indication of how sophisticated it is or how well it functions.
These measures can be very important considerations when attempting to assess a state's power because they tell us how effectively a country can mobilize its resources or innovate to address security challenges. Per capita GDP and life expectancy at birth are more relevant indicators here. Per capita GDP gives us an indication of how much surplus wealth is in the system and how far along the development/modernization curve a country is at any given time. Life expectancy at birth gives us an indication of the ability of a state to deliver key goods such as public health, a clean environment, and workplace safety. As Figures 7.3 and 7.4 indicate, neither Russia nor China fares particularly well on these measures, only further casting doubt on a realist balance-of-power interpretation.
Several additional factors render the ongoing Indo-Pakistani rivalry particularly worrisome. What is a third?
Third, Pakistan does not have a culture or a history of responsible nuclear stewardship. Pakistan's chief nuclear scientist, A. Q. Khan, was at the hub of a major international proliferation network linking Pakistan to Libya, Iran, and North Korea, and he may well have done more harm to the global cause of nonproliferation than any individual on the planet.
Class Notes
Three Current Flashpoints Today 1. 7.1 Russia/Ukraine War: A. Russian Perspective - REALISM - Russia humiliated -- U.S. Triumphalism - Autocracy: Gorbachev + Yeltsin aberrations - Western commitments... not kept - Russia not treated as equal with respect - Sphere of Influence -- Hobbesian Anarchic World - Security Dilemma -- fear of enlivenment B. Western Perspective - LIBERALISM - Spreading liberal democracy - Defending Ukraine's sovereignty + territorial integrity - West won Cold War ---> earned the right to shape postwar order - West advancing its influence - Western Arms + LNG ? C. Ukrainian Perspective - Constructivism ---> Multiethnic, multilingual nation - Liberalism ---> Liberal democratic state - Realism ---> Ethnic Ukrainians dragging recalcitrant ---> Ethnic Russian Ukrainians Westwards D. Constructivism - based Hypotheticals 1. Jean Monnet/Robert Schumann type magnanimons institutional + economic outreach to Gorbachev "Common European Home" 2. Self-determination: Crimea & Russian-speaking oblasts 3. Cynical Play ---> Krushchev
That left the third cause: the hope that removing Saddam's brutal dictatorship would lead to a democratic Iraq, which would begin a democratic transformation of the Middle East.
Three rounds of national elections were successfully held in Iraq in 2005, but elections are not sufficient to produce a liberal democracy where societies are divided along ethnic and religious lines, institutions are weak, and there is little sense of overarching community that makes minorities willing to acquiesce in the rule of the majority.
We have already touched on Iran and its historical role in regional conflict, and in particular on the Iran-Iraq War. In that instance, Iran was the victim.
Today, many of Iran's neighbors, and many people in the United States as well, worry about Iran as a potential aggressor or at least as an aspiring regional hegemon. Following the Iranian Revolution and the fall of the shah, Iran was weak and could not possibly have threatened to dominate.
The honeymoon, however, was short-lived. Within a few years, goodwill on both sides began to erode, and hostility and suspicion began to reemerge.
Today, relations between Washington and Moscow are in a virtual deep-freeze, thanks to Russian actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine (which we will discuss below) and the painful Western economic sanctions they triggered. Arms control has stalled. Both sides are bolstering their defenses through modernization, procurement, and redeployment. In scenes reminiscent of the height of the Cold War, Russian and NATO aircraft are once again playing cat and mouse over international waters. What went wrong?
The costs of the war for U.S. soft power were compounded when inspectors failed to find any weapons of mass destruction afterward.
Two of the three reasons given for the war before the invasion — Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and an alleged connection between Saddam and the events of 9/11 — turned out to be based on false intelligence and political exaggeration.
Once again, the superpowers stepped in and called for a ceasefire.
U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger flew to Moscow, but while he was there, the Israelis surrounded the Egyptian armies. The Soviets thought that they had been cheated. They mobilized their forces in the southern part of the Soviet Union and sent the United States a letter suggesting that the superpowers introduce their own forces directly. The United States responded by raising its level of nuclear alert. Intended as a show of resolve, the alert, we now know, merely confused the Soviets, but in any case, the Soviets dropped their demand. The Israelis also backed down under U.S. pressure and released the noose around the Egyptian army.
The war was followed by a series of diplomatic maneuvers in which the United States negotiated a partial pullback by Israel.
UN observers were placed in the Sinai and on the Golan Heights. The most dramatic result of the war, however, was delayed. In 1977, Sadat went to Israel and announced that Egypt was ready to negotiate a separate peace. In 1978 and 1979, with President Jimmy Carter's mediation, Israel and Egypt negotiated the Camp David Accords, which returned the Sinai to Egypt and provided for talks about local autonomy in the West Bank. The Camp David Accords meant that the largest Arab state had quit the coalition confronting Israel. Egyptian nationalism had prevailed over pan-Arabism. Sadat broke the pan-Arab coalition, but he was assassinated a few years later by religious extremists who objected to his policy.
Seen in one light, fear of Iran is puzzling.
Unlike Iraq, Iran has never invaded a neighboring country or openly espoused regional hegemonic ambitions. The most it has done is support like-minded armed groups overseas, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria. Recently, it has also stepped up cyberattacks against Western and pro-Western targets. But Iranians describe these activities as defensive, not offensive, citing, for example, Western support for the shah, U.S. hostility to the Iranian Revolution, and so forth.
Recall the four competing paradigms we discussed in Chapter 2: realism, liberalism, Marxism, and constructivism.
We can rule out Marxism as a potential source of insight in this case, because the tensions we have witnessed are not class tensions. The worrying turn in the direction of a new Cold War has not pitted workers against capitalists, but Russians against Americans and East Europeans. It is very hard to tell a story that makes sense of post-Cold War years in terms of concepts that Marxism emphasizes, such as greed and exploitation.
A constructivist account of the deterioration in relations between Russia and the West would put identities front and center, and the story would go roughly as follows.
When the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia sought to shed its communist past but retained its sense of national pride and, in particular, its understanding of itself as a great power. Post-Soviet elites in Russia, including key players such as President Boris Yeltsin and Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, looked westward for opportunity, inspiration, and even a degree of help as the country reengineered its politics and its economy. They were willing, as Sanjoy Banerjee puts it, to accept for a time "a structure of cooperative but asymmetric interaction." But they expected Russia to be treated as an equal and with the respect they believed that it deserved. Moreover, they did not think that they had "lost" the Cold War. They believed that they had transcended it.
The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) offers a good example.
Why did Iraq invade its larger neighbor? One reason was the Islamic revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. Under the shah, Iran had claimed the whole Shatt al-Arab waterway between Iran and Iraq. But after the 1979 Iranian Revolution deposed the shah, Iran was torn apart by domestic strife, and Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, saw an opportune time to attack. Moreover, revolutionary Iran was causing problems inside Iraq. Iraqi Muslims were divided between Sunnis and Shi'ites, and Saddam was a secular head of state. The Shi'ite fundamentalists in Iran urged the Iraqi Shi'ites to rise up against Saddam. This transnational religious appeal failed when Saddam killed many Iraqi Shi'ite leaders. But Iraq also miscalculated. Iranians are not Arabs, and there was a large Arabic-speaking minority in the part of Iran adjacent to Iraq. Iraqis thought that they would be welcomed as liberators in the Arabic- speaking part of Iran, but that was not the case. Instead, Iraq's attack helped unite the Iranians.
