The Year of Failing To Understand.

Not your usual end-of-year review.

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Somewhere, maybe hidden in Substack’s conditions of use, is the injunction to write some kind of end-of year-summing up each end of the year, and I see we’re approaching that point now. This will be my last essay in 2024.

Looking back, I see that last year and the year before I attempted something a bit philosophical. This year, though, I’m travelling and very busy, and this will be a shorter essay than usual, written in bits in hotel rooms and airport lounges as I can. I hope the joins won’t show too obviously. Now this year, I’ve written about 250,000 words (which is more than Moby Dick and Crime and Punishment if that’s the kind of thing you find interesting.) but like everybody who writes with any frequency, I tend to address the same subjects from time to time. So I thought that I would I would revisit some of the major topics I covered, but in one particular context and according to one overarching theme. (I’m not infesting this essay with too many links, which I personally find unattractive, but I will provide a few.)

You may remember that in David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece, years are all given (sponsored) names, rather than conventional dates. That set me thinking, and I would like to nominate 2024 as the Year of Failing to Understand, at least from the point of view of the West. This failure may be deliberately willed, it may be an incapacity, it is probably a mixture of the two. But however you look at it, the defining feature of 2024 has been the West’s failure to understand what’s happening in the world and why it has happened. It’s more than a series of errors, in my view: it’s a developing structural incapacity to understand, which is being continually reinforced as the western elite becomes ever more interchangeably faceless, ever more ideologically homogeneous, and ever more resistant to mere facts, as they subside into a fantasy world of their own creation. If I have to read one more story about how western governments and pundits were “surprised” by this or that development, I swear I’ll scream. But it all comes ultimately from a refusal or inability to understand, mixed with an arrogant certainty that we have understood, and that what we think is not only right, but objectively important. Let me begin with a simple case and work on from there.

We’ll start with recent events in Syria, and the organisation currently known as Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham, of which hardly anyone had heard until a few weeks ago, when it surprisingly began to advance on Aleppo, but which is now being pundited about everywhere. But because we don’t understand HTS and where it comes from, the topic being eagerly debated is whether it is a “terrorist” organisation or not, and therefore how “we” should deal with it. Now this isn’t an entirely stupid question, because there are a number of political issues that arise from it, but it’s a long way from being the most important. It’s really just a question we can understand, and whose answer ensures a ready-made role for the West.

In fact, there are two much more important questions that arise immediately, both referring to other things we don’t understand. HTS is a political and paramilitary jihadist organisation, that’s clear. But such organisations come in different flavours. Hezbollah, for example, has joined the political mainstream and has had Ministers in the Lebanese Cabinet, although it doesn’t hide the fact that its preference would be for an Islamic state similar to that in Iran. At the other extreme, the Islamic State of fond memory, to everyone’s surprise, decided that a secular state and secular code of laws were unnecessary, and introduced an extreme theocratic state instead. A large part of Syria’s future will depend on the choice HTS makes, and whether they can carry others with them. The other question is whether, as its name implies, HTS will limit its ambitions to Syria, or whether, as with Al Qaeda and the IS, its goal is worldwide Islamic revolution, or at least the restoration of the Caliphate and the liberation of Jerusalem. The symbolic destruction of the frontier posts between Iraq and Syria by the IS was misunderstood in the West as a simple protest against western-designed boundaries. But it was much more than that, because for the ideologues of jihad, all national boundaries and all natural states are abominations: the only reality should be the Umma, the community of believers. So if HTS, or any of the groups that went to make it up follow this route, they will seek to export their revolution, initially perhaps to Lebanon, but perhaps also to Europe once more. And at that point, the question of whether HTS is a “terrorist” organisation in the literal sense of the word becomes relevant: will HTS seek to spread its power and ideology by acts of “terror” as the IS avowedly did?

These misunderstandings arise because in the West, with our Liberal ideology, we do not understand how other parts of the world understand religion. Liberalism has always had an awkward relationship with religion, and many of its earliest figures were atheists, or at best Deists. For the West these days, religion is an essentially cultural phenomenon, perhaps with a few moralistic accoutrements, and voluntarily chosen social and ethnic marker. In the West, the Church has run so far away from its traditional role in society that it is no longer visible, and its leaders now espouse a kind of nineteenth-century scientism, a gutless materialism with some fashionable social theory thrown in. The Church itself cannot understand how, further East, its counterparts often play a major role in society, and how religion can provide a defining structure for entire societies. And if even the Church cannot understand religion, what hope is there for the rest of the western ruling class?

But even less can we understand religion as a force to kill and die for. The idea that many individuals in many societies consider that their religions are actually true simply fails to penetrate our Liberal norms. Surely, these are people who have been marginalised and persecuted aren’t they, who were unhappy when they were young? They don’t actually believe all this stuff, do they? Well, they do, and it’s easy to find people, even in our own countries, who actively seek martyrdom and paradise through dying in support of a virtuous cause. They understand this even if we do not, and they act accordingly: we fail to understand, and we drag out our stale Liberal remedies of “dialogue” and “inclusivity,” as I see is now starting to happen in the case of Syria.

Because we don’t understand this, we don’t understand the wider issue of which it is part: that people are prepared to kill and die for ideals, but also for their country, for their culture and their way of life. Nor do many cultures make the same binary distinction we do between “conflict” and “peace:” conflict being an interruption to the normal state of affairs, and peace something that you can recover quite quickly, especially with the help of foreign experts. The fact that many parts of the world exist in a state of continuous low-intensity violence, of crime, smuggling, inter-group conflict and occasional outright hostilities, that most adult males have a gun and that there is no real distinction between “combatants” and “civilians,” is something that we do not understand.

We do not understand that in such societies where violence is endemic, decisions about whether or not to fight may be practical and economic ones. If you are not paid, or you don’t respect your commanders, why should you fight? Groups can make and break alliances, fight against former allies and ally with former enemies, for reasons that are severely practical. Groups and leaders can be bought off (as apparently happened in Syria) without that being thought unusual. Most military forces (even state ones to some extent) consist of collections of groups and factions capable of independent action, and they can agree to stop fighting in return for political or financial inducements, as we saw in Afghanistan in 2021. Put like that, the collapse of the Syrian Army in just a few weeks no longer seems quite so hard to understand. Indeed, it joins that list of “inexplicable” military collapses of recent years, including the Iraqi Army in the face of the Islamic State, the FARDC in the face of the Rwandan-backed M-23 movement, the Malian Army in the face of the Islamists, and of course the Afghan National Army in 2021. In all of these cases, poorly-paid, poorly-led troops with no faith in their commanders simply did not see why they should sacrifice their lives pointlessly. The Armies they were part of essentially existed to keep their regimes in power, but this meant in turn that the regime itself was scared of them, and so ensured that the Armies were as weak as possible and under the control of loyal commanders, even if those commanders were incompetent. The rest followed pretty automatically thereafter.

Nor do we understand that in certain societies violence is essentially a form of communication: negotiation with guns. Violence is often organised on a clan or group level, and serves to achieve political objectives that cannot be achieved peacefully. When a political solution seems possible, the level of violence will be dialled down. When different actors believe that they have more to gain from peace than fighting, the fighting will stop. This is what is behind the current ceasefire in Lebanon: both Hezbollah and Israel know that they cannot achieve their objectives by violence, and that they have each suffered badly from the fighting. It therefore makes sense for both of them—as part of an unspoken compromise—to dial down the level of violence again, at least temporarily. If western negotiators want to call this a “ceasefire” and claim credit for it, then nobody is going to stop them, but that’s not the essential point. Most wars end, or at least pause, like this, and the detail of the “peace agreement” is much less important than the willingness to stop fighting. The fighting in Bosnia ended in 1995 essentially because the warring parties were exhausted and knew that they could not achieve their objectives militarily, and had been passing that message to each other. The Dayton Peace Agreement was simply a mechanism to enable this all to be written down. But we don’t understand any of this.

Which means we also don’t understand why wars start, and why they go on for as long as they do. Liberal theory sees wars as mistakes, to be rectified by inclusive peace agreements as soon as possible. Thus the complete incomprehension about the sheer length of the war in Ukraine. Surely the sides must be exhausted, surely there must be a negotiated solution which satisfies everyone, and which everyone would prefer instead of war? I suspect Mr Trump does actually believe this. But no, it’s not necessarily like that. Wars can be fought for existential objectives, for as long as it takes to achieve them. So the Russians have clearly decided that they are engaged in an existential war, and one which will determine the security architecture of Europe for the next generation or two. To achieve what they want, certain sacrifices will be necessary. Thus, inflation may rise, the economy may suffer, and growth may be lower than expected, which is unfortunate but it’s what happens when you fight an existential war. The West, with its ideology of short-term financial advantage, cannot begin to understand why the would even be possible.

If you believe, as the West largely does, that wars are normally about nothing much, and not worth making sacrifices for, then all this is very puzzling. So likewise, the war in Gaza has gone on much longer than anyone in the West expected, because for Israel this is the Big One, the chance to wipe out the Palestinians and seize control of the land to which they always thought they were entitled. Short term pain for long term gain: in twenty years who will remember the political and economic problems that the war caused? At that point, perhaps a national leader will say in exasperation, “who now talks of the extermination of the Palestinians?”

In turn, this helps to explain tolerance for casualties. The only marker the West has for war in modern times is Vietnam, where the number of American dead (about 60,000) is considered to have been a major factor in terminating the war. (The casualties among both North Vietnamese/Viet Cong and South Vietnamese forces were significantly greater.) True, this was an away match for the US, but nonetheless, by comparison, the time devoted and the willingness of the Vietnamese to sustain casualties was of another order. Liberalism holds that wars should be terminated as early as possible with the minimum of casualties, on our side at least, and thus the sheer duration of the wars in Ukraine, and in Gaza and Lebanon, and the tolerance for casualties of the Russians and Israelis (and for that matter the Ukrainians) has surprised everyone. Well, almost everyone.

This is linked to incomprehension about the nature of the wars, especially that in Gaza. Liberalism views wars as tidy organisational struggles, a bit like sport although somewhat rougher, but with rules nonetheless. International Humanitarian Law assumes that the goals of war are necessarily limited, that only regular combatants in uniform should really be involved, that civilians play no part in war (indeed, they are not mentioned explicitly) and that in the end a commander should agree to be defeated rather than employ illegal methods to win. No matter how normatively admirable these ideas may be, they have not reflected the reality of how war is waged for over a century now, and their relationship to what is going on in Gaza (and has been typical for conflict for the last generation or so) is purely coincidental. It is fatuous to describe non-combatant deaths as “collateral damage:” they are precisely the point. Destruction of schools, hospitals, mosques and churches is an important tactic in the destruction and expulsion of a community in order that yours can replace it.

We also fail to understand that way in which these wars are fought, and here, curiously, Ukraine and Gaza have lots of common features. One, I think, is the end of the obsession with the control of territory as an objective in itself. This is most obvious in the case of Ukraine, where the Russians have made it clear from the start that their objectives are to be achieved by the destruction of the Ukrainian forces, and thus of their capability to resist Russian demands. In a sense this is a reversion to the habits of warfare before the generalisation of nation-states, where permanent possession of territory was impossible because of the size of armies, but where in any event it was not considered necessary. The point, as discussed by Clausewitz, was to destroy the enemy’s army, and thus force the enemy to agree to your peace terms, which of course might include, and often did, territorial concessions. But not only a modern armies too small to physically control much territory, most situations don’t require them to anyway.

This is one reason for the misunderstanding after Israeli tactics in Gaza. They were not intended, except incidentally, to physically occupy and control terrain. Much of Gaza is urbanised, and the difficulty of controlling urbanised terrain is well known. Rather, the aim was to destroy Gaza as an entity, such that there was nothing left to defend. Thus, Hamas could and did survive the initial assault, and has been able to operate behind the Israeli “lines” insofar as that term has meaning. But they have increasingly less and less to fight for, as more and more of Gaza has been destroyed and more of its citizens killed.

Much the same logic applies with Hezbollah, where it was mistakenly assumed that an Israeli invasion would be a repeat of 2006, when the Israeli forces tried to advance quickly and to cut off and defeat their enemy as far South as possible. This didn’t work, and would not have worked now. Indeed, the very limited advances that the IDF actually made, caused quite a few pundits to declare that Hezbollah had won again (which is the official Hezbollah position by the way.) But that’s to fall into the same error as with Gaza. The Israeli objective was to destroy Hezbollah as a fighting force, and as a deterrent and an obstacle to Israel doing what it liked in Lebanon, and force them to end the bombardments. This was achieved by targeting the command structure and the support infrastructure of Hezbollah, through precision attacks and assassinations. Now it is true that commanders can be replaced, but it is also true that no military organisation can cope indefinitely with losing its senior commanders repeatedly, without being able to strike back in kind. And the ability of the Israelis to precisely target meetings of senior commanders has inevitably raised suspicions of infiltration and treason in the ranks. The result has been to destroy Hezbollah’s capability to resist to the point where that organisation has backed down and tacitly agreed to stop attacking Israel even while the killing in Gaza continues, and Israel violates the ceasefire daily. And because everything is connected, it is probably fair to say that Hezbollah itself failed to understand Israeli tactics, assuming a re-run of 2006.

So it is likely that we will see an entirely new model of war now, with large conventional armies fighting over substantial areas, but operating at very low tactical level on the ground. In all the videos of Russian attacks, for example, I have never seen one of more than company strength. This has come as a surprise to everyone, not just the West, but there is no sense that western experts have yet begun to understand what modern warfare will increasingly be like.

All of this (and if I had time I could test your patience with more examples) shows, I believe that the West is less and less able to understand what is going on in the world and why. Perhaps it has always been like this to a degree, but it was partially disguised by the ability of the West to actually impose itself on problems, and to largely control the way that those problems were conceptualised and reported. Neither is as true as it used to be. But both derived ultimately from the conviction that only what the West did was important, and that all other actors were just bit-players, to be defeated, manipulated or simply ignored. This is why the West has failed to understand the role of Turkey in Syria. The history, of even the existence, of the Ottoman Empire is all but ignored in western policy-making, as though the influence of centuries of occupation, influence and empire from the Balkans to Algeria simply did not matter. (The Lebanese elite spoke French, but their current political system is based on Ottoman patterns of political management.) I’ve even heard it suggested that in Syria Turkey is simply carrying out a role assigned to it by NATO and the US. Yet of course the re-establishment of Turkish power in areas of traditional interest and the creation of an Ottoman Empire 2,0 have been expressed ambitions of Erdogan for some time. Ironically, in unleashing HTS and their allies to expand the area of Turkish control in Syria, the Turks themselves failed to understand the parlous state of the Syrian Army and how quickly it would fall apart. The failure to understand in 2024 feels pretty general.

Nonetheless, I think the Western problem is of another order of severity, because it amounts to relentlessly imposing this inappropriate conceptual framework built of dreams and illusions onto complicated situations, demanding that others subscribe to it, and then being surprised when it doesn’t yield the correct understandings. The problem is therefore systemic, and as time passes it gets worse as heretics are purged or not recruited, and an embattled political class circles the wagons and spends all its time reassuring each desperately other that they are right and everything will work out. .

That said, we may be reaching the point where changes will be so profound that even the West cannot ignore them. There is a good chance that the current crises in Ukraine and in the Middle East will reach a conclusion over the next year, or at least a point where the conclusion seems inevitable to all. The world is being remade not necessarily to the West’s advantage, and there will come a time when that can no longer be realistically ignored, because its effects will be everywhere visible. In that sense, I am, if not optimistic, at least hopeful for 2025, because I think the long agony of the recent years, of denial and resistance, may finally be coming to an end, and history may be becoming unstuck again. Needless to say there is danger, but there is also opportunity. And on that note of highly qualified optimism, a very happy Christmas and New Year to all. I’ll see you the other side of the door marked 2025, whatever we may find there.