Wednesday, August 28, 2013

The Syrian Dilemma

Einstein once observed that "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." The present situation in Syria is also essentially insoluble within the current system of international relations. The main reasons for this stem from past failures to reform critical institutions of global governance that, had they been made, may have prevented the civil war in Syria from escalating in the way it has. Having missed the opportunity for reform, and also having missed the opportunity for earlier preventive intervention under the current set of institutional arrangements, the international community, and the United States and its allies, are faced with a set of options that range from very bad to even worse.

In a different world it would not have taken 100,000 deaths and a chemical weapon attack on civilians to galvanize the international community to intervene in the Syrian conflict. It would have happened more than two years ago, after the first signs that the Assad government was willing to employ lethal violence to quash peaceful protests against him. Rather than debating ad nauseum in the UN Security Council, as presently constituted, a decision to deploy an armed rapid response force to Syria would have been made early on, during the pre-conflict phase where the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect [R2P] is most useful. But this could only have happened had the attempt to reform the make-up and voting powers of the UN Security Council  that was on the table in 2006 had succeeded. The plan put forward by then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan would have expanded permanent membership in the Security Council from the present five to nine or eleven, including important nations such as India, Germany, Japan, and Brazil, and perhaps Nigeria or South Africa or Indonesia. One formula that gained some traction at the time was to select those countries that are largest in terms of population and in terms of the size of their economies. On this basis, India, Japan, Germany, and Brazil would have gotten permanent seats.

More significantly, the proposed reform would have removed the veto power of permanent members, replacing it with the requirement that there be a super majority of two-thirds of permanent members and rotating members needed to authorize any intervention under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter. This was a wise and needed reform of a system that was created in the shadow of WWII and which proved itself incapable of dealing with the changing geopolitical balance of power as early as 1949, when the Cold War began. The reform of the UN Security Council was long overdue by 2006, but it never happened. Why not?

The short answer is that the P-5, led by the United States and China, did not want to dilute their own power. China was adamant in wishing to deny both India and Japan permanent seats on the Security Council, and was also against giving up their veto. Russia also wanted to keep its veto power. Britain and France were somewhat more willing to consider the reform proposals, but the coup de grace to the whole reform effort was administered by the United States in the person of John Bolton, the younger Bush's appointed hatchet man dispatched to kill any meaningful reform at the UN. A task at which he succeeded admirably.

While it is difficult to predict how the Syrian civil war would have played out had these reforms been enacted, it seems clear that the reformed SC could not have been stymied only by the vetoes of Syria's Russian and Chinese allies. There would have been an opening to gaining legitimacy for forceful intervention, rather than the current situation in which the US and its allies know that they cannot hope to do that as long as Russia and China are able to wield their vetoes.

The other major reform of international governance that should have taken place was the creation of a standing Rapid Reaction Force under the control of the UN Security Council. Having such a resource at the disposal of the international community would enable it to avoid mixing great power and domestic politics with international humanitarian rescue. Under the present broken system, each nation must decide whether or not to deploy its own armed forces to any humanitarian intervention, whether consensual or not. Making this decision requires thinking about the issue mainly through the lens of national interests and domestic politics, and these factors generally work against impartial humanitarianism. There were several proposals for creating just such a Rapid Reaction Force in the latter half of the 1990s following the Rwandan genocide and the Bosnia war. Canada and Denmark both presented plans, as did several think tanks. But, again, these proposals never came to anything mainly because of the lack of political will on the parts of the major powers. There was also some popular anxiety about creating a UN army, mainly coming from those on the American political right who have long feared that UN's black helicopters would be coming to take away their guns.

Having missed these opportunities to reform and build institutions of international governance to better meet the challenges of the multipolar world of the early twenty-first century, policy makers in leading nation states are left with very poor choices about how to deal with civil conflicts that turn into humanitarian nightmares. None of the current military options open to those who favor protecting civilians from more deadly gas attacks are good ones.  They risk escalating the conflict even further and spreading it to other countries. The opportunity to intervene decisively without encountering these risks was missed two years ago.   

As Edward N. Luttwak argued in a recent editorial in the New York Times, from a realistic US national interest point of view, US foreign policy should favor a victory for neither side of the conflict. If we support the rebellion the likely result is a take-over by radical Sunni Islamists allied with Al Qaeda, while if we support the Assad regime, we sanction mass killing and strengthen the hands of Shiite Iran and Hezbollah. In his view, our best option is a stalemate between these opposing forces. Let them fight each other, seems to be his advice. But this leaves the humanitarian concern out of the calculation entirely, which is precisely what happens when one tries to deal with such problems using the same level of global governance that created them. How many more civilians will have to die before the world learns this lesson?