Out Of Control.

Fear the worst, hope for the best.

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Imagine if you will media reports of widespread political unrest and violence in a small country in Asia which is not well known in the West. Confused reports of fighting, massacres and atrocities are spreading in the international media, and it appears that “government“and “rebel” forces are fighting each other. Some accounts see the hand of the United States, China or Russia behind either the rebels or the government. After several weeks of confused and contradictory information, the first calls are heard for political or even military intervention to control the crisis. Let us assume that the foreign minister of a medium sized western state is interviewed by a television programme. Imagine further, if you will, that for once the conversation went something like this:

Question: what are you going to do about the suffering in this country?

Answer: to be honest we know very little about what is going on there. Our Embassy is trying to find out more and we are consulting with our allies, but the situation is extremely unclear and we must wait until more information becomes available before doing anything.

Question: but surely we must intervene now to save lives?

Answer, I repeat that we don’t really know what the situation is. It is too early to make decisions about intervention,

Question: but what about the reports we are getting of massacres conducted by government security forces?

Answer: as far as I know, there is only one such allegation, in a tweet by an NGO outside the country. We are obviously following the situation closely.

Question: but surely we should intervene militarily now to stop more people dying?

Answer in the present situation any kind of intervention could be disastrous. There is nothing worse than rushing in when you have no idea what the situation is. There are plenty of bad examples.

Question so you’re going to do nothing then, and just let them die?

This is, pretty much, what any sensible government would want to say in such a situation. There is, indeed, nothing worse than rushing into a situation that you do not understand and where you are much more likely to do harm than good. But no government can say these things, and any foreign minister who spoke in that way would not keep the job for very long. The reason for this is that any medium to large state cannot admit publicly that does it not know what to do, that perhaps nothing useful can be done, or indeed that action of any kind may turn out—as often—to be more dangerous than inaction. In turn, this attitude arises from the belief that ultimately all crises can be managed, that the best people to manage these crises are external powers, usually western. Yet the reality is that almost all attempts at intervention in the crises of other states fail, and that almost all such crises get out of control sooner or later.

This may seem surprising to hear, given the amount of effort devoted over decades now to “crisis management”. If you have nothing else to do and a week to waste, you can sign up for a course on crisis management organised by the United Nations or one of a number of donor countries and organisations. You will learn a great deal about the theory of how crises come to exist and how they can—again in theory—be resolved. What you will not learn is the lessons from any particular crisis of the last generation also which has been resolved, and this is because there are few or no examples of this actually happening.

This approach comes ultimately from the hope and expectation of a degree of rationality and order in the world. We understand that things might occasionally go wrong, we understand that countries we do not like may meddle in the affairs of others, but we like to believe that it is possible to explain as rational behaviour, not simply the origin of crises, but also their evolution and development. The last point is important, because one of the most fundamental characteristics of almost any crisis of sufficient complexity is that it rapidly escapes anyone’s control, and correspondingly becomes much more difficult to resolve.

So far, I have chosen not to write about the crisis in the Middle East, partly because, whilst I know the area somewhat I do not consider myself an expert, and partly because it is a good way to destroy the comments section with hundreds of incendiary exchanges on the wider aspects of the issue. ( I do not wish that to happen this time, and I will delete comments that seem to me to be irrelevant or abusive.) Nonetheless, anyone who has spent any time in government, and anyone who has lived through a real crisis, can see that the situation in the Middle East is now, indeed, out of control. I do not mean that nobody can influence it (because clearly all sorts of actions by all sorts of states can influence it) but that no-one is in control of more than a fraction of the issue, and no single actor can determine its outcome. Thus, the United States could theoretically cut off supplies of weapons to Israel: that would drastically affect the evolution of the crisis but we have little idea what would actually happen next. Likewise, as often when a crisis degenerates, no-one is acting in a way that they would optimally wish to. I have been reading variously that “the United States is trying to push Israel to attack Iran“ and also that “Israel is trying to push the United States to attack Iran,” which not only demonstrates the confusion of the situation (and the analysts) but also presents “Israel” and “The United States” as being unitary actors for this purpose, when they clearly are not. (Nor is there any easy distinction between tail and dog.) But for such analysts, the crisis as a whole is seen as having some kind of rational origin, to have developed rationally, and to still have some kind of a rational solution if only we can find it.

The reality is, as is evident from the body language of the political leaderships concerned and the rather empty and puerile defiance of their statements, that the situation has now reached a point where national leaders are carried along by events and no longer really know what they are doing or why. But this is, in fact, entirely typical of the way in which crises evolve. When I was a very young civil servant I remember a saying tacked to the wall of somebody’s office which went approximately “when you are up to your neck in alligators, it’s hard to remember that originally you wanted to drain the swamp.“ You have probably seen something similar, and in any event, in any sufficiently complicated problem, in any sufficiently large organisation or context, this is what happens. Essentially, this is because crises exist at several levels, only one of which is ordinarily visible in public, but all of which influence each other. There is the crisis itself, therefore, and the efforts being made, among and outside those involved, to resolve it, or in some cases exacerbate it. There is also the way the crisis evolves, often in unexpected and unpredictable ways. But below these first-order issues are a whole range of second- and even third-order ones. Relations between the states involved, sympathy for one or the other sides, tensions within and between regional organisations, dealing with the media and political opponents, dealing with humanitarian lobbyists, even tensions and disagreements between different parts of the political system are just a few of these lower-order effects. And it’s common for these effects to combine, so that humanitarian and media lobbies may jointly put pressure on a government, and some parts of that government may be more amenable to such pressures than others.

So in the imaginary case above, the first priority of many governments and organisations would be to stop someone else trying to resolve the crisis. The EU, ASEAN, the Chinese, the US, perhaps even NATO would all rush in. Attempts to put any intervention under a UN flag would probably be resisted by countries in the region. The Indians would protest about Chinese involvement, and the Chinese would accuse the Indians of meddling. Nobody would be paying much attention to the underlying issues.

Let’s take an actual example from history which illustrates what I mean: it may surprise you. The Spanish Civil War is usually seen as a Great Cause, and as a wasted opportunity to “stop Hitler.” That’s not an entirely false judgement, but the popular image (Franco leads rebellion against elected government, Germany and Italy send forces to support rebels, Russia sends limited support to government forces, Britain and France dither, Franco wins, The End), is not how it looked at the time in the capitals of Europe. Indeed if you study some of the papers of the time and the detailed diplomatic histories, you find that what the British and French governments thought they were doing, and what they actually spent much of their time doing, and why, was very different.

The French were in a quandary. The new Popular Front coalition government of Socialists and Republicans, under the great Léon Blum, would have liked to send military support to their homologues in Madrid. They did not want a right-wing conservative military dictatorship on their southern frontier. But they were also increasingly worried about Nazi Germany, and had begun a rearmament programme. They needed allies, and thus had to keep the British on side. In addition, whilst the Communists were not part of the government, they did vote with them. This was a stunning reversal by Stalin of fifteen years of bitter hostility since the Congress of Tours in 1920 when the Socialists had split, and Communist parties throughout Europe had been instructed to treat the Socialists as at least as bad if not worse, than the Right, since they were class traitors. (“Social democratic vomit” was one of the milder terms Moscow recommended its acolytes to deploy.) This sudden and violent 180-degree turn did not convince everybody, and the French were aware that Russian influence was being exerted on the ground to purge and sometimes destroy non-Marxist elements on the Republican side.

The British were also confused. They did not have the same visceral identification with the Republicans as the French, but they were equally concerned about the Nazis, and had started their own rearmament programme. They were worried about the results of the war: a right-wing victory might put their entire Mediterranean force structure for a future war with Germany in jeopardy: a Communist victory would certainly do so. Most of all, the British were haunted by the possibility of another major European war. Virtually all the decision-makers and opinion-makers in Britain at the time had either fought in the First World War or lost family members, or both. Anything seemed preferable to a repetition, and the British were worried that if the French eventually wound up sending military aid to the Republicans, a general European war could erupt, and Britain could not avoid being drawn in on the French side. (The decision-makers of the day were not as cool with the idea of tens of millions of deaths and a Europe destroyed to “stop Hitler” as we are today.)

The British put pressure on the French not, as they saw it, to make the situation worse, and instead managed to set up a Non-Intervention Committee, which met regularly, and required enormous diplomatic efforts, but achieved nothing, really. Thus the daily life of diplomats at the time was largely consumed not by the crisis itself, but with the management of second- and third-order issues of domestic and international politics (and I’ve left out a lot of the detail.) And in the end perhaps it was all for nothing: Hitler would not have been “stopped” because the nature of the Nazi regime itself demanded constant war, and Stalin didn’t want the Republicans to win because that would have created a Socialist state over which he had no control. Poor Spain.

But if that seems a long time ago, consider a more recent example: the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The place to start is the list of problems with which the governments of the West were trying to deal with in 1991. A non-definitive list would include: the end of the Cold War, the unification of Germany and its consequences, the end of the Warsaw Pact and the disappearance of one of its members, the implementation of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty which had brought the Cold War to a dignified end, and now had to somehow be adapted to take account of the fact that one of the parties had changed sides, restructuring of national forces for an uncertain future, the break-up of the Soviet Union and its consequences, the future of ex-Soviet nuclear weapons in Belarus and Ukraine, the Gulf War in Iraq and its aftermath, relations with the new Russia, relations with the former non-Soviet members of the Warsaw Pact and their relations with each other, the future (if any) of NATO, the parallel discussions about a “separable but separate” security capability for Europe and the fraught negotiations over European treaties on Political and Monetary Union. (I’ve probably forgotten a few.) Inevitably, all of these problems were mixed up with each other, and resulted in completely unexpected consequences: Germany had now acquired a security guarantee against an independent Poland and Czechoslovakia, for example. Likewise, new security problems were seen in very different ways in different places: Portugal and Italy weren’t greatly concerned about the delineation of the German-Polish border. And much of the western decision-making class was still in a state of shock anyway .

In the circumstances, adding another seemingly-intractable problem did not seem a good idea. But the dissolution of Yugoslavia, like some carelessly driven articulated lorry, came from nowhere and backed into the existing traffic jam of complex and probably insoluble issues, which between them required forty-eight hours per day of the time of decision-makers. Yugoslavia was a country in which the West had taken little interest: even major capitals had only a handful of experts on the country and the language, and most nations had none at all. Yugoslavia was vaguely seen as “on our side,” or at least not on theirs, and its federal structure struck many as being basically like the Warsaw Pact. So if it wanted to dissolve itself there was nothing much to worry about. Accordingly, the West had no collective heuristic for deciding who to support. A few countries, led by Germany, saw Catholic solidarity as critical: in Germany, the Bavarian-based Christian Social Union looked like disappearing under the 5% threshold and so losing its seats in the upcoming elections. Pressure from Bonn to appease its traditionalist Catholic voter base led German diplomats to effectively force the recognition of an independent Croatia: an episode that remained very controversial for a long time.

But this was, in fact, typical of the way the crisis was dealt with. In itself, it was insoluble, at least after the independence of Bosnia, and the West’s acceptance of it. Rather,  it was obvious from the beginning that this was a war no-one could win (no-one had really sought it anyway) and it would end only when the combatants were exhausted, which indeed proved to be the case. But in the light of the developments above, nations felt obliged to take positions on second- and third-order issues. There was little enthusiasm for NATO involvement, especially when it became clear that the US expected to command the operation, but would not contribute any troops. On the other hand, there were no European headquarters outside the NATO structure. (Typically, people started debating the leadership and composition of a peacekeeping force before asking whether it was in fact possible or useful.) The only structure that could oversee a peacekeeping force was the UN, but that enabled members of the Security Council  (including non-permanent members) to dictate the terms of the operation when they were not contributing troops. Few people in New York were interested in conditions on the ground, and even fewer bothered to find out what was going on. As the war dragged on and became ever more complex, the Force Commander’s mandate became ever more baroque, as new missions and new limitations were added depending on the balance of forces in the Security Council and generally unrelated to the situation or indeed even to what was possible. After all, not only had the mission effectively been imposed on the Bosnians (who showed little enthusiasm for it, except to see how it could be exploited), there was, as was endlessly repeated by the military involved, “no peace to keep.” But never mind, Something had been Done, and the West was able to fool itself it was having an influence on the crisis, if not actually controlling it.

So western states became lost in internal complexities. The crisis was immediately subsumed into, and vastly complicated, all the arguments about the future of NATO and independent European military structures, as well as the negotiations about the Political Union Treaty. Individual nations suddenly found themselves confronted with completely unexpected problems: the Danes got themselves an opt-out from some of the security clauses because public opinion became frightened that Danish conscripts might be sent to fight in Bosnia. The French referendum on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which the government had expected to win easily, suddenly encountered massive opposition, and the French pleaded for some initiative that would show Europe in a good light over Bosnia. In Washington, the Bush administration was succeeded by that of Clinton, which had a large domestic political debt to to repay to NGOs and was also heavily influenced by the media, and was desperate for some military action that didn’t involve risk to US forces. An entirely unnecessary naval operation was set up in the Adriatic to give NATO something to do, and eventually a few bombs were dropped when the war was effectively over.

At no point in the war was the West or the UN in control, or even particularly influential. The fighting effectively ended when the factions realised they were more likely to achieve what they wanted through politics (and indeed they negotiated with each other throughout the War, something the West only belatedly realised.) Various attempts by the Troika of Foreign Ministers of the nascent EU to negotiate ceasefires fell apart once the planes were in the air again: the factions were happy to sign anything just as a way of getting rid of them. By the time of the Kosovo crisis in 1998-9, western governments had somehow become so obsessed with the idea of bringing down Slobodan Milosevic, whom they considered the main obstacle to their peace plans in the region, and finding a role for NATO, that they allowed themselves to be completely manipulated by the Kosovar Albanians: “NATO is the KLA’s airforce” was not an unfair jibe. It had been a long road since 1991, and more than one veteran of the era wiped their brow, asking themselves, “how on earth did we get here?” The answer, as always, was step by step, overwhelmed with the second and third-order problems of the hour, as the situation itself followed its own internal logic beyond anyone’s control.

I could go on, but I think you get the point, and I want to move on to a number of general issues that I think help to account for (if not necessarily fully explain) some of the current chaos in the world. As will be evident, perhaps, from these examples, any crisis of importance necessarily contains so many different factors, and involves so many wider implications at different levels, that it rapidly escapes the capability of any actor (including the originator or originators) to control it. And as the number of actors and would-be actors multiplies, so their interactions and internal divisions rapidly produce a situation where simply keeping everything together becomes a challenge. What we think of as “crisis management’ is often primarily concerned with attempts to manage attempts to manage a crisis, or even attempts to manage those attempts themselves. (For a decade during and after the war in Bosnia, for example, US domestic politics were a major influence on how the “international community” tried to manage the crisis.) Perhaps the best metaphor is from the theatre: there are plays of Shakespeare (Macbeth is a good example) where the protagonist rapidly becomes enmeshed in a kind of dreadful machine of their own construction: as Macbeth says at one point, why not carry on killing when you have done so much already? Quite early in the play he simply loses any positive control over events. At the other end of the artistic spectrum are farces like those of Ben Jonson or Feydeau, where the main characters try desperately to control an ever-expanding series of complexities resulting from a single mistake or failed plan. At the end—as in Jonson’s play The Alchemist—the complexities reach a point where plot explodes: literally in that case.

None of this, of course, means that internal and external actors don’t try to influence events, nor that they don’t succeed to a degree from time to time. Some players are more effective than others (and not necessarily the largest and most powerful either) and some begin with more advantages than others anyway. I don’t doubt that as I write this (checks watch) there will be a meeting somewhere in a packed stuffy room in Washington, where perhaps two dozen representatives of different government departments will be arguing about how to deal with the current crisis in the Middle East in a way that promotes their own position and the position of the organisation they represent. And I expect that some of them, anyway, genuinely believe that the United States is in a position to decisively influence, if not end, the conflict. But they will not be talking philosophy and geopolitics. They’ll be arguing about paragraphs in draft documents, about who will accompany whom on what visit where, about the detail of weapons packages, about what so-and-so should say on television the next day, and about details of coordination with other interested states.

And outside government there is a whole parasitic economy of journalists, pundits and think-tankers who will take leaks and hints from such meetings and spin them into discussions of third- or even fourth-order issues, such as the effects on the US Presidential election, or the potential loss of support among Muslim voters in certain areas. Even the sternest critics of US policy in the region are, in effect, part of the same mindset, in that they too begin from the conviction that the US is fundamental to the resolution (or not) of the crisis there. It’s ironic, to say the least, that those who are most critical of the failures of US domestic policy (Covid, healthcare, gun violence for example) nonetheless believe that the US can manage the affairs of other countries much more effectively than it can manage its own. And likewise, those who never tire of telling us how little government can do domestically, because markets or whatever, have no compunction about setting out to completely reshape the politics and economies of other countries.

One consequence of this way of thinking is that those issues that we think we can understand and hope to control, become by their very familiarity those that we think are most important. To take an obvious example, the increasing influence of the extreme Right in Israel, both Zionist and religious, is hardly news to anyone who was paying attention over the last twenty years or so. But it is not a subject that is easy to explain to western audiences, nor is there anything much the West can actually hope to do about it. It has therefore received relatively little publicity, and the declarations and actions of some of the extremists therefore seem all the more surprising and even shocking. By contrast, the supply of US weapons to Israel is something everyone can understand. yet cutting off the supply of those weapons, even if it were possible, will not solve the extremist problem: indeed, it might well make it worse, and create a civil war of some kind.

In the end, Marx said it a great deal better than I could in his famous comment in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in 1852:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

There are worse mottoes to stick on the wall in every foreign ministry, think tank, NGO and media office in the West.

Likewise, I don’t want to confuse this issue with arguments about “conspiracy theories,” which is quite a separate point. Briefly, conspiracy theories, as the name implies, posit the existence of hidden conspiracies behind past or present events. Rather than the normally accepted version found in history books, we are to believe that major moments in history (in the past, the French and Russian Revolutions, these days events such as the Apollo Moon landings, the Kennedy assassination and the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 or the Covid epidemic) should be reinterpreted as the result of hidden conspiracies. Such theories have their own psychological and political origins and purposes, and are only distantly related to this discussion.

The illusion and discourse of control persist because they suit the interests of many groups. The most obvious beneficiaries are major states themselves. In the last year or so we’ve seen politicians and pundits from major western nations solemnly negotiating with each other about what concessions the West might demand of Russia to end the fighting, in return for not sending the final package of small-arms ammunition and winter socks to Ukraine, as though their views had any importance. I would imagine that, in another stuffy room in Washington, fierce debates are taking place about the conditions that the US “will accept” to bring an end to the fighting. (I’m irresistibly reminded of the story related by William James, author of the Variety of Religious Experience, wherein the American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller announced to all that she had “accepted the Universe,” to which the English historian Thomas Carlyle is said to have retorted, “Gad, Sir, she’d better!”) No doubt there are detailed arguments going on even now between different parts of the Pentagon, different parts of the State Department and the Intelligence Agencies about how and where US personnel will be stationed in what will, I suppose, be christened Free Ukraine, and who will take charge of the delivery of new equipment if and when it is eventually manufactured. But then it’s always easier to negotiate with yourself than with others, and it gives you a comforting sense of control, in the short term at least.

It suits the media as well. If you believe (to pursue the example) that all important decisions about Ukraine are made in Washington, then all you need to do is to make a few phone calls to some of the people at these meetings, and you have your story. “Sources” will then tell you what “the West” is likely to accept by way of concessions by Ukraine, and you can print it. You don’t need to know anything about the history, geography and politics of the region, about negotiations, treaties and international law, about military organisation, tactics and strategy, about the inner workings of NATO and the EU or even, at a pinch, about what the Russians and Ukrainians think. If your “sources” tell you that the war is basically a stalemate, then you don’t need to wrestle with these confusing situation maps, with their funny symbols and complicated unit designations.

It suits the punditocracy as well, who generally know even less about these things than the media, if that’s possible. Someone who has just been punditing about Brazil, or the US elections, just needs to glance through some of these stories, and can then produce an article explaining exactly how the war is going to end, complete with a wish-list of Russian concessions. The idea that there  may be other actors, other interests and other pressures does not enter into the discussion. Finally, it suits critics of the war as well. There are a number of military experts who have produced highly-informed critiques of the war and of western policies, but there are many more vanilla “peace activists” and the like who have no special knowledge of anything, and trade mostly in moral indignation. To have a single large target to direct your normative invective at is extremely helpful, and you can simply use the productions of the pro-Ukraine lobby with some of the words turned around.

Needless to say, the problem is that the world is a lot more complicated than that. The two examples I gave at the beginning of this essay—Spain and Yugoslavia—for all their complexity, were probably an order of magnitude less complex than the situations in Ukraine and the Middle East now, and we can be sure that both of those crises will have implications extending over decades that at the moment we can’t properly envision. But even in the short term both situations are going to be incredibly messy. Take Ukraine first. Let’s assume that the West duly “accepts” that Ukraine has lost and its own aspirations have failed (Gad, Sir, it had better!) That doesn’t solve anything (though it may open the route to certain solutions) rather, it signals the start of a new phase of arguments and crises that will last, at least, for some years.

I’ve discussed at length the problems of “negotiation” and how difficult it will be even to agree who will participate and what will be discussed. But off the top of my head, well, there’s the whole question of sanctions and banking and financial arrangements. There’s the question of how and in what way to restart political contacts with Russia, There’s the question of Ukrainian refugees in western Europe, including many who don’t want to go home, thank you, and can take their cases to the national and international courts, as well as the extradition (or not) of individuals the new government regards as criminals.  There’s the question of dealing with the Russian arrest warrants that will surely be forthcoming, as well as the messy  business of getting the ICC indictments of Russian leaders withdrawn. There’s the question of contracts for the supply of military equipment not yet delivered. There’s what to do with any foreign nationals who may have been taken prisoner by the Russians, and pressure for investigation of foreign nationals who died fighting for the Ukrainians. And above all, in the political wasteland that will follow the defeat there’s the question of what influence the West will have on a future government in Kiev, what happens if that government splits, what happens if the resulting government is firmly pro-Russian, what happens to invitations to join NATO and the EU, and what happens if the state collapses and large-scale violence results.

Now the key point here is that no-one is, or can be, “in control” of such issues. (And that’s only a small sample.) As in the Yugoslavia example, they will be intimately linked with each other, and almost all of them will divide western nations and NATO and the EU against themselves. For example, neighbouring states will be much more interested in some of the security-related questions than states on the periphery. Countries that buy raw materials from Russia, countries with lots of Ukrainian refugees, countries worried about receiving lots more refugees and about instability in Ukraine generally, countries with elections coming, countries with new governments, countries hoping to profit from the confusion … all these and many other issues will divide countries within themselves and against each other.

The same is true, I suggest, of the current crisis in the Middle East. It’s easy to become obsessed with the delivery of US weapons to Israel. Whilst that’s important, if it were to stop, or radically reduce, then the level of violence might go down overall, but none of the underlying problems would be solved. As I’ve pointed out, the extremist politicians in Israel wouldn’t simply disappear: they would look for other ways of implementing their agenda. (Airpower was only a small contributor to the civilian deaths in World War 2, after all.) But even if miraculously the fighting stopped tomorrow, the Palestinian question is now harder to solve than it was before, assuming for the sake of argument that a solution exists. And the Lebanese problem, which arguably has never had a solution, but just a series of Bandaid treatments punctuated by episodes of terrible violence, may actually be approaching its terminal phase. I hope not—it’s a country I am very fond of—but whatever the final result for Lebanon of the current carnage, then with no President or government and a collapsed economy already, it’s not hard to see this ghastly episode being the final turn of the screw. And that would be really bad news, so I hope I’m wrong.

The idea that there are problems that ultimately have no solution and can at best only be managed, is a reality that everyone with experience of politics recognises, but which it is considered bad manners to articulate. Diplomats get huffy and think you are questioning their professional skills. Journalists accuse you of cynicism and not caring. NGOs tell you that you are vicariously responsible for the deaths that will result from inaction (though they won’t accept vicarious responsibility for deaths resulting from action: nothing to do with us, mate.) But in the end, it does no good to pretend. The West has a very limited ability to affect the final outcome of the Ukraine crisis now, and even the US can only hope to affect some aspects of the outcome of the crisis in the Middle East. There are too many actors, too much history and too many complexities in each case. All we can do is fear the worst and hope for the best.