The Water Is Rising.

But slowly ...

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And thanks once more to those who continue to provide translations. Versions in Spanish are available here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is also posting some Italian translations, and has set up a dedicated website for them here.  I hope to post the next translation into French by Hubert Mulkens next week. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as  long as you credit the original and let me know. Now then:

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I had been out on an errand at lunchtime, and when I came back to the office people were clustered around one of the televisions, talking excitedly.

“Looks like a plane flew into a building in New York” somebody said.

And then just a few moments later, before our eyes, the iconic moment of another plane smashing into another building.

As it happened, I was travelling that day, and there was a funereal silence and a state of shock at the airport. The TV monitors gabbled incessantly about the attack, but there was little conversation among the people standing around. And at the other end, I saw cabin crew from one of the airlines in tears, trying to comfort each other.

For the next days and weeks, the media and pundits talked of little else. The world had fundamentally changed, they pundited. Nothing would ever be the same again, they insisted.

Was this really true, I wondered, as the time passed? Much of the world gave the event only a cursory glance: they had other things to worry about. Yes, at the everyday level things changed: the introduction of a surreal security theatre at every airport, for example, the sense of menace attached to flying that had never been as potent before. Yes, it was true as some suggested, this was the first time in history that the Third World had landed a blow on the First. Yes, it was also true that this incident could be considered the end of western impunity: for the first time the reaction to western politics elsewhere in the world had been visited by that same elsewhere on ordinary western cities. And yet …

Human beings naturally remember great events more than small ones, and naturally give them more importance. They remember one spectacular moment rather than a whole series of banal incidents. But what I want to suggest this week is that genuine “world-changing” moments exist scarcely, if at all, and divert us from noticing underlying patterns which actually serve to make these spectacular moments possible. In turn, that means that, rather than fearfully anticipate great and terrible events in the near future, and over-interpret events of the present day, it would be more useful to look at the deep patterns which are under way now, and try to see where they may go.

Thus, most people “know” that World War 1“began” with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in August 1914. Except it didn’t, in any real sense of “begin.” It takes a little effort, after all, to recall that the Hapsburg regime, and particularly Conrad the Chief of the Army, were looking for any excuse to beat up the Serbs, that the Russians would not allow this to happen, that the Germans would feel they had to support their allies, that if the Russians mobilised the Germans would have to attack France first, to secure their western flank, and that Britain, although reluctant, would finally be drawn into the war to prevent the Germans taking control of the channel ports. If any of these factors had turned out differently, the War might have started at a different time, or potentially not at all. For that matter, the assassination itself only succeeded because of a string of avoidable errors and coincidences. Which is to say that all the elements for a possible European war were in place, but there was no particular reason why it should break out then, or even at all. After all, the Austrians could easily have decided to be more reasonable, and then perhaps the crisis would have been averted.

But what we can say, on the other hand, is that after several decades of preparation, certain elements of a future war in Europe were effectively fixed. It would be a war of alliances, since these already existed. It would be a war involving massive forces, because all continental European powers had instituted military service. It would be a war of massive artillery bombardments because the guns and the shells were already being produced. It would be a war where it was very hard to control large forces or even see what they were doing, because of the state of development of communications technology. It would be a war which was capable of ending quickly, but, if not, would inevitably become a war of attrition and production, where population size and industrial capacity mattered a lot. It would be a war where the defection or defeat of a major ally would be disastrous. And so forth. It would therefore be wrong to say that the Battle of the Somme, or the Battle of Verdun “changed” anything: they just demonstrated that these new factors were now operating.

In many ways, the spectacular events of modern times are rather like Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914. They are less agents of change themselves, than indications that things have changed already, and events might turn out differently. Take the war in Ukraine, for example. Does it “change” anything? Arguably not, it’s easier to understand it as a marker of the degree to which things have already changed. Let me count the ways. The West can no longer ignore Russian demands and perceptions of its security interests. Russian military technology is generally very good, and in some cases has developed in areas the West has not itself pursued. The Russians have retained military service and the intellectual and technical capability to fight sustained high-intensity wars. They have also retained a large defence industry capable of surge production. For its part, the West has moved to small conventional forces, has largely been involved in small conflicts outside the NATO area, has allowed its defence industry to deteriorate, has tended towards small numbers of highly-expensive platforms, and has massively economised on logistics. Although there have been qualitative changes, largely favouring the Russians, this set of factors was as applicable five or seven years ago, and will remain applicable for the foreseeable future.

Thus, no-one should have been surprised about Russians sensitivities and demands, since they were telegraphed so clearly. No-one should have been surprised that the Russians made quick work of the NATO-trained Ukrainian forces, nor that subsequent forces, trained but this time also equipped by NATO, should have come to grief so quickly. Likewise, the outcome of any serious military clash between Russia and NATO is now easy to forecast and, for reasons, that I have discussed on numerous occasions, it is hard to see how this can be expected to change. More generally, Russia will be the dominant military power in Europe for the foreseeable future, and the West will have to find a way of dealing with that.

This argument applies to a degree to the technologies involved as well, no matter how exciting they may seem to be, as I’ve discussed elsewhere. But few of them are actually new. Drones have been around for a generation, and all that is “new” is their widespread tactical use in high-intensity conflicts in conjunction with real-time command and control networks, and the ability to deliver precise attacks against small targets. But the drone has not “changed everything;” indeed, anti-drone measures already exist, and more are on the way. All military technology development amounts to a dialectic between attack and defence, and that dialectic is consistently changing. Likewise, the misadventures of western navies in the Red Sea don’t particularly show that things have “changed” at the technological level, since ships in confined areas have always been vulnerable to attack from the shore. Soon no doubt, we will see ships in such deployments provide with armoured protection and anti-drone and anti-missile swarm technologies. Once more, what all these developments show is that there have been technological changes going on for some time, whose consequences are now becoming more obvious. They also suggest something about the way the future will unfold at the political and strategic levels, which I will return to in the second half of this essay.

First, though, I want to glance back at some of the alleged and anticipated changes in the way the world works, against the background of complex systems that, by their very nature, are bound to change slowly. This may seem strange, because pundits assure us that the world is changing at bewildering speed: how can this be? Well, it is essentially the difference between the visible and the less visible: I like to use the image of an area of an estuary with shifting sandbanks: it’s only when a ship gets stuck that you realise that the sandbanks must have shifted to a new configuration.

The international system is conservative, in the sense that it carries a great deal of inertia. It will therefore continue to operate as it does now, until sufficient pressure is brought upon it to act differently. But that requires another option to be available, and to be supported or imposed with enough force, or the existing situation will continue. To talk about the decline of the West or of the United States is reasonable enough, so long as we understand that, for that decline  to produce the kind of results that some people want and anticipate, some power or combination of powers must be able and willing to fill the vacuum created.

Moreover, at the end of the day, all power is relative: indeed, I’d suggest that there is really no such thing as “power” in the abstract, only power to do things in specific circumstances. For example, the United States has a powerful Navy, but that Navy has been unable to intervene successfully, in the Ukraine conflict, largely for reasons of geography. Likewise, it cannot intervene successfully in the Red Sea, for the reasons discussed above. On the other hand, Russia has a much smaller Navy, but for geographical reasons, it can use its ships to launch missiles (which the West does not have, and against which there is no effective defence) against targets in Ukraine. So rather than talk about “decline” it is more useful to talk about a declining capability to do certain things better than others, or indeed at all. This may be because others are now competing to carry out the same task, or just because that task has become impossible for anyone to achieve.

“Power” is also dependent on context. Just as battles are won by the side that makes the fewest mistakes, so power (or influence at least) is often exercised by the country that is least weak. Taken in the abstract, Nigeria’s military forces are not among the world’s most powerful. But Nigeria is nonetheless the regional military superpower in West Africa. Likewise, Brazil is the dominant military and strategic power in Latin America, even though its military capability looks modest on paper. However, power (in the sense of “capability”) is not mechanistic or zero-sum. It is perfectly possible for one country to lose a capability without another country automatically picking it up. In the days of apartheid, South Africa had a considerable capability to project forces into the region. It gave up that capability after 1994, but no other country has since acquired it, not even Angola. Today, the fact that the West has pretty much lost its capability to intervene in the Red Sea and the Gulf does not mean that other powers can now do so. It is not that the West has become objectively “weak,” so much as that technological developments now make it risky to operate relatively fragile and expensive high technology vessels anywhere within range of land-based missiles and drones. However, in the absence of a Houthi Navy, this does not give anyone else the ability to operate in those waters either. In effect, ships and projected forces have been taken out of the equation, so the fighting in Yemen will now be decided by ground combat, unless the Saudis and their allies decide to step up their involvement with airpower again.

This means that powers in relative “decline” often retain their status for some time, because there is no other country able to take that status away from them. This applies especially in the “soft” security areas, where inherited experience and expertise counts for a lot. There are a limited number of nations in the world with the experience, capability and interest to work at managing international security problems, and they are not necessarily the largest, nor the most objectively “powerful.”

Consider a realistic example. Let us suppose that the United Nations has persuaded the two sides in the Myanmar conflict to accept a ceasefire and UN intervention. But a whole series of decisions now need to be taken about the structure, duration and mandate of any mission, whether it should have a military component, what its relationship should be to regional organisations such as ASEAN, etcetera. A typical procedure would be to set up an ad hoc informal working group to thrash out ideas, and produce something which could be given to the Security Council. But who to invite? Few of the neighbouring states (Bangladesh, Thailand) have a history of involvement in wider security problems. The Chinese will probably have to be included (they could reasonably object if they were not) but that country is only slowly developing the skills to operate in the international security area. The United States will demand to be included. The Russians will not be interested. But who else to invite? Because you don’t want a group of nations each pushing for their national objectives, but rather a group with experience of crises and peace operations and of trying to resolve internal conflicts, and with the skills and depth of capability to make useful contributions.

In reality, you will probably fall back on the same cast of characters: the British and the French, possibly the Australians and the Canadians, and maybe another couple of European nations such as the Swedes or the Germans if they are interested. Yes, this does seem very western-centric, yes the British and French are not as powerful and capable in this area as they were even a decade ago. But who else are you going to ask? You want nations with a long experience of operating internationally, experience of working in multinational fora, experience of conducting military operations abroad, and able to distinguish between simple pursuit of national objectives and actually solving the problem. So who? Argentina? Egypt? Indonesia? You see the problem. Once again, it’s not a question of objective, but of relative, strength and capability. Unless and until a new group of capable, interested nations appears on the international scene, the inbuilt inertia of the international system will keep things largely as they are.

The international system is also conservative and inertia-based precisely because of the weight of the past. One thing that frequently surprises new and would-be radical governments is how hard it is to change inherited foreign policies. Such policies are often deeply rooted in the past, and contain layers upon layers of agreements, disagreements, compromises, victories, defeats, unspoken agreements and many other things. As Marx memorably pointed out, and as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, history is made by a kind of dialectic between the weight of the past and the initiatives of the present, and the past itself—the inertia from decades or even centuries of events—is a bit like a supertanker, where, even if the crew could decide to change course, there’s no agreement on what that course would be. A classic example is the permanent membership of the Security Council, which amounts to the victors of World War 2. Fair enough, it’s an anachronism, but what’s the articulated agreed alternative? There isn’t one. All of the current P5 members are against changes, because once you start changing the system anything is possible. There is no mechanism by which the composition of the P5 could be modified or expanded, and in any case there is no agreement among other countries about what changes they want. In the circumstances, the Security Council will operate as it always has done, until some cataclysmic event or some improbably overwhelming alliance of forces arrives to change it.

Much the same is true of the world economic order. There are very important underlying changes taking place, but the visible institutional arrangements  will change much more slowly. I’ve seen more articles than I can count trumpeting the end of the Dollar as the principal international reserve currency. (Yves Smith at the indispensable Naked Capitalism site has been pouring much-needed cold water on this idea for some time.) But US economic weakness, and the wish of other nations to be less economically vulnerable, do not by themselves magically produce an alternative reserve currency. As Wolf Richter pointed out in a recent article, the dollar has slowly been losing ground as a global currency recently, and is now at its weakest since 1995, But there is no other single currency challenging it, and the Euro seems to be stuck with a persistently minor share. And even at the more mundane level of daily life, the Dollar will still be the dominant alternative purchasing currency everywhere in the world. There are local exceptions, of course (the Saudi Riyal is accepted everywhere in the Gulf, and the Deutschmark and then the Euro have for a long time been accepted in Bosnia, leading to allegations that the price of Bosnian politicians had gone up in real terms when the Euro was introduced.) But when you can, as I did several times, draw Dollars out of a cash machine in Beirut and spend the surplus a few weeks later in Addis Ababa, it’s hard to see another currency taking the dollar’s place. Likewise, English will continue to be everybody’s second language, because a Mexican an Indonesian and a Turk have no alternative if they are to communicate with each other. And for the same reasons, institutions like the IMF and the World Bank will have less influence than they do now, but they are unlikely to be replaced by any other new institutions.

Indeed, the international system, whatever you think of it, turns out to be more resilient that most people thought, or hoped. After all, Al Qaeda never managed to pull off another high-casualty attack on the West, although they would like to have done so. Far from the events of September 2001 serving to decapitate the United States and bring the restoration of the Caliphate closer, they simply angered the US and much of the western world, brought about large-scale military operations against AQ, and alienated parts of Muslim opinion who believed that it was wrong to target civilians. Far from driving the West out of the Middle East it increased the western presence there, just as it strengthened, rather than weakened, ties between the Gulf States and the West. Indeed, a decade afterwards, many of AQ’s leaders were dead or in hiding and Bin Laden’s ideas of attacking and defeating the “distant enemy” were shown to be seriously lacking. True, the United States became enmeshed in hopeless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they did not seem to bring the Caliphate any closer. Indeed, AQ’s more intellectual, long-term, Leninist vanguard approach was increasingly replaced by a much more violent, populist direct action approach favoured, for example, by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, a leading figure of the jihad in Iraq against the US occupation, but who also targeted the Shia community. Before his death in 2006, he had drawn together various Islamist groups onto what was then re-named the Islamic State.

Yet the wider cause of international jihad cannot really claim much success either. It has essentially prospered in conditions of chaos and the absence of government control, but has not been able to stand up to organised opposition. The collapse of the Iraqi Army and the consequent looting of its vehicle and equipment stocks, and the ability to profit from the chaos of the Syrian civil war and attract thousands of foreign fighters, gave a misleading impression of its strength. The Islamic State was able to capture Mosul and Raqqa in 2014, but not to hold them against determined assault by conventional forces. In general, militant Islam has been able to destroy, and to overthrow weak regimes, but not to hold territory or build a strong state. Likewise, the mass casualty attacks in Europe in 2015-16 created terror and havoc, but they essentially ceased after the fall of Raqqa in 2017, and attacks since then have been by radicalised individualIs, not directed from abroad. The sheer violence and brutality of the Islamic State and its franchises, and its habit of treating Shia Muslims as its deadliest opponents, have alienated much of its potential support. Indeed, the greatest success of militant Islam has ironically been in Europe, with the increasing radicalisation of Muslim communities there, but that is a separate issue, and not something that anybody foresaw in 2001.

So if we accept that there is a great deal of inertia in the international system, that decline in one area does not inevitably means a compensating rise elsewhere, and that apparent “turning points” in history may only be superficial manifestations of deeper underlying trends, can we nonetheless say anything useful about the likely shape of the future? I would suggest three tentative projections that could be made. All of them relate to general trend only: I don’t do predictions because I don’t think they are useful.

The first concerns political reactions to the increasing distribution of power which is for the moment still unduly concentrated in the hands of the West and in institutions dating from the end of the Second World War. Now note that whilst the outward form of organisations may be slow to change, what really matters is the extent to which their members find them useful and devote time and effort to them. For example, the Western European Union, established by the 1948 Brussels Treaty and originally directed against potentially resurgent Germany, was put in cold storage by the Washington Treaty establishing NATO the following year. But it was revived in the late 1980s, as European states wanted to have a forum of their own for discussing security issues, and enjoyed a high political profile in the years after the end of the Cold War. As its functions were increasingly absorbed into the European Union, only fringe elements, like the Parliamentary Assembly, survived, and all of it has now been closed down since it is no longer useful. Likewise, the United Nations was a niche organisation for western powers during the Cold War, but suddenly assumed great importance after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and during the long years of crisis in the Balkans, before somewhat subsiding again. More generally, a rash of new and ambitious peacekeeping operations since UNPROFOR in Bosnia now seems to have exhausted its interest for both funders and troop contributors.

So the real argument is not the “future of NATO” for example, in any simple sense. Rather, it is the extent to which important events happen there, the degree of interest and support nations give to it, and the degree of influence it has in the world. Actually closing down NATO would be a huge political step which would be bitterly controversial, and probably bring no advantages to its members. Moreover, it would simply re-open the can of worms that is the difficult political and historical relations between the former non-Soviet members of the Warsaw Pact, which was in itself one of the reasons why they and NATO began the enlargement process in the 1990s. But what really matters is whether the complex formal structures of NATO (and they are likely to proliferate still further) actually correspond any longer to the underlying patterns of power, both within the organisation and in the world as a whole. Increasingly, I think they will cease to do this and NATO, for all its likely furious bureaucratic activity, will become less and less useful and relevant to its members, and less and less influential in the world.

Beyond chest-thumping, idle threats and sulking, there is actually not a lot that NATO can do. The Russians are not interested in threatening NATO territory as such, and the kind of intimidation that they will be able to practice, using long-range hypersonic missiles for example, has no obvious counter. NATO will continue no doubt to scrape together forces of a few tens of thousands of soldiers, deployed to some area such as Sweden or the Baltics, to demonstrate “resolve,” but the gesture will be an empty one, because there is nothing much behind them, and the Russians know this. Moreover, the gap between western and Russian military capability is likely to continue to increase with time. And then there will come a point where Russia and NATO will confront each other, and NATO will blink. This may happen soon, it may not happen for five years or even ten, but when it happens, it will provoke shocked commentary and demands to “do something.” “Why did nobody tell us?” the pundits and politicians will ask, to which of course the traditional reply is: “we did, and you didn’t ****ing listen.” They never do.

European states are going to have to reset their relations with Russia, and these relations will be different for each state. There will be little chance of doing this collectively: European states will be suspicious of each other trying to carve out a more advantageous relationship, and all will be worried about some kind of US-Russian deal agreed over their heads. Pressure for a detachable European defence capability is going to increase, not to fight the Russians, but to make sure that if the United States just lets Europe go, there will be at least some decision-making structures that they don’t control.

But the question, of course, is whether today’s generation of political children given control of daddy’s car are able to understand this. When you have spent your entire professional life assuming that anything you want, anywhere, can be ordered from Amazon, that jobs can always be filled by snapping your fingers, that everything except financial legedermain can be outsourced, and most of all that what the West wants, it gets, the experience of not getting what you want for once is likely to be devastating, I doubt if there will be any such thing as “a” reaction: probably a whole series of different ones, from hysterical anger to catatonic withdrawal. I can’t immediately think of a historical example anything like this, not least because there are no grown-ups ready to take charge again.

Secondly, I think we shall also see—at least temporarily—a rebalancing of the capability and effectiveness of force used outside the West. A long time ago, George Orwell divided weapons into “democratic” and “tyrannical ones” The former were weapons like rifles, that ordinary people could learn to use relatively quickly. The latter were capabilities like cavalry, where the soldier required years of practice to become proficient. Things have moved on, but it’s reasonable to argue that in certain areas, there has been a relative “democratisation” of modern warfare. Thus, armoured formations now find it very difficult to take and hold terrain against defending forces armed with drones and anti-tank missiles. It’s not that these weapons are all-conquering, but rather that, with enough of them, a level of casualties can be inflicted on an invader that is out of proportion to any potential benefits. Now again, we must not run away with the idea that there’s a fundamental change in warfare here, and Hezbollah, for example, has not been able to do anything about Israeli airpower, which is intended to blast a way through for the armoured units. But it is clear that the balance is slowly moving against large, powerful, expensive platforms, which are few in number and take a long time to manufacture.

This also means that third parties can introduce weapons into the conflict that can substantially change the outcome. Gone are the days when the Soviet Union and China flooded Africa with AK-47s, mines and mortars. These days, Iranian supplies of quite sophisticated weapons to Hezbollah and the Houthi have substantially upset the historic military balance. Again, this doesn’t mean that they will necessarily ”win” in simplistic terms, so much as that the terms of lethal trade are turning against those—largely the West—who hope to intervene in areas of crisis. In all probability we will see the slow dawning of a realisation that western states really can’t continue to behave as they did in the past any more, and that even the more general question of power projection is looking somewhat fragile. In turn, this will move the development and management of crises back much more to the local and regional level.

Thirdly, I think we’ll also see a relative democratisation of  international decision-making mechanisms. Now once more, this process will, indeed, be relative and quite slow. But quite quickly now, we are going to find ourselves in a position where not all of the major decisions about the world are taken in western-dominated fora, and where, indeed, international players and actors may be in competition with each other. Some states may be members of competing organisations, and may in any case prefer bilateral contacts to multilateral ones. In a decade’s time, for example it may no longer be possible to write about the “international community’s response to the crisis in X” because there will be several. What this means in the shorter term is that large, complex, expensive UN Missions constructed on western Liberal State principles, will not be as popular: although this will be as as much for their history of failure, as because they no longer correspond to dominant political trends.

It’s also interesting to speculate how countries and organisations outside the West will handle such a situation. The African Union, for example, was set up twenty-odd years ago, in explicit homage to the EU, which largely funds it. But the kindest thing one can say is that it hasn’t lived up to expectations, which doesn’t surprise those of us who thought at the time that trying to build a strong organisation from weak states was a dubious idea. Individual states might also find that the advantages of placing themselves in the “western” camp may not be so obvious as they once were. No-one takes “ties of historic friendship” seriously: the issue is what advantages small states can access, and the perception of these advantages might well now start to decline. The West still has an enormous network of patronage at its disposal: foundations, development ministries, educational institutions, training teams, training offered abroad and so on, which is not going to disappear all at once. And historical inertia strikes again: with the British or the French you know what you are getting if you want command and staff training That’s not necessarily the case with the Chinese. So again, we will see a slow shift against the current dominance of the West, rather than anything swift and dramatic.

Well, that was exciting, wasn’t it? Somehow I don’t think Hollywood producers will be queueing up to make films about slow shifts in the tectonic plates. But this is how international politics actually works. The warning signs are now visible, like damp in a house, fatigue in a bridge, or inundation of low-lying areas. Some totemic event will happen, and people will be astonished as they always are, because they ignored warnings that the water is rising.