Shlomo Ben-Ami: China’s Afghan Game Plan

MADRID – In his latest book, On China, Henry Kissinger uses the traditional intellectual games favored by China and the West – weiqi and chess – as a way to reveal their differing attitudes toward international power politics. Chess is about total victory, a Clausewitzian battle for the “center of gravity” and the eventual elimination of the enemy, whereas weiqi is a quest for relative advantage through a strategy of encirclement that avoids direct conflict.

This cultural contrast is a useful guide to the way that China manages its current competition with the West. China’s Afghan policy is a case in point, but it also is a formidable challenge to the weiqi way. As the United States prepares to withdraw its troops from the country, China must deal with an uncertain post-war scenario.

Afghanistan is of vital strategic interest to China, yet it never crossed its leaders’ minds to defend those interests through war. A vital security zone to China’s west, Afghanistan is also an important corridor through which it can secure its interests in Pakistan (a traditional ally in China’s competition with India), and ensure its access to vital natural resources in the region. Moreover, China’s already restless Muslim-majority province of Xinjiang, which borders on Afghanistan, might be dangerously affected by a Taliban takeover there, or by the country’s dismemberment.

The US fought its longest-ever war in Afghanistan, at a cost (so far) of more than $555 billion, not to mention tens of thousands of Afghan civilian casualties and close to 3,100 US troops killed. But China’s strategy in the country was mostly focused on business development, and on satiating its vast appetite for energy and minerals. The US Defense Department has valued Afghanistan’s untapped mineral deposits at $1 trillion. But it is China that is now poised to exploit much of these resources.

Indeed, China’s development of the Aynak Copper Mine was the largest single foreign direct investment in Afghanistan’s history. China was also engaged in constructing a $500 million electric plant and railway link between Tajikistan and Pakistan. Last December, China’s state-owned National Petroleum Corporation signed a deal with the Afghan authorities that would make it the first foreign company to exploit Afghanistan’s oil and natural-gas reserves.
Once China’s enormous economic and security interests in Afghanistan are left without America’s military shield, the Chinese are bound to play an even larger role there, one that Afghans hope will reach “strategic levels.” China would prefer to accomplish this the Chinese way – that is, essentially through a display of soft power – or, as the Chinese government put it on the occasion of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s official visit to Beijing in early June, through “non-traditional security areas.”

Judging by China’s behavior in other parts of the world, any military cooperation is likely to be extremely modest and cautious. China has already made it clear it will not contribute to the $4.1 billion multilateral fund to sustain Afghan national security forces.

Rather, the two countries’ recently signed bilateral cooperation agreement is about “safeguarding Afghanistan’s national stability” through social and economic development. China is especially keen on combating drug trafficking, as Badakhshan, the Afghan province bordering on Xinjiang, has become the main transit route for Afghan opium. But preventing the spillover into Xinjiang of Taliban-inspired religious extremism remains a high priority as well.
China went to great lengths to present the recent summit in Beijing of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes China, Russia, and major Central Asian countries, as an attempt to create a fair balance of interests among regional stakeholders.  Moreover, the SCO sought a consensus on how, in Chinese President Hu Jintao’s words, to guard the region “against shocks from turbulence outside the region.”

Yet, however focused it is on soft-power projection in Afghanistan, China will likely find it difficult not to be drawn into the role of policeman in an extremely complex and historically conflict-ridden region. China’s regional outreach, moreover, clashes with that of other regional powers, such as Russia and India. Nor is its own ally, Pakistan, particularly eager to confront terrorist groups that threaten the security of its neighbors, China among them.

Pakistan might find it extremely difficult to reconcile the security of its Chinese ally with its de facto proxy war with India. China might then be forced to bolster its military presence in Pakistan and in tribal areas along the Afghan border in order to counter terrorist groups such as the Pakistan-based East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which the Chinese believe is responsible for attacks in Xinjiang.

The preferred Chinese way would be that of cooptation and dialogue. Indeed, Chinese diplomacy has been busy lately in trilateral talks with Pakistan and Afghanistan aimed at achieving reconciliation with the Taliban. Nor is China interested in stirring up the conflict between its Pakistani allies and its Indian rivals. On the contrary, China has argued for years that the main problem affecting Afghanistan’s stability is the India-Pakistan proxy fighting, and that peace in Kashmir is therefore the key to peace in Afghanistan.

The task of defending its interests in Afghanistan after US withdrawal is a truly formidable challenge for Chinese diplomacy. It is inconceivable, though, that the Chinese would enter into the kind of massive US-style military intervention to which the world has grown accustomed in recent years. For China, the Afghan contest will most likely turn out to be a very measured combination of chess and weiqi.

Shlomo Ben-Ami is the Israeli foreign minister who came closest to devising a viable peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. A renowned historian of fascism and a seasoned diplomat, he served as Israel’s ambassador to Spain before being elected to the Knesset, where he was a member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and of the Subcommittee on Foreign Service. Before becoming Foreign Minister in 2000, he was Minister of Internal Security. He is the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy.

Shlomo Ben-Ami: The Triumph of Politics in Europe

MADRID – Economics, particularly economic theories, always yield in the end to political imperatives. That is why Europe’s fast-changing political landscape, reshaped by electoral insurrections in France and Greece against German-backed fiscal austerity, is bound to affect Europe’s economic policies as well.

Such an imperative has been at work throughout Europe’s postwar history. Indeed, Europe’s shift from the modest customs union of the European Economic Community to the single market and common currency of today’s European Monetary Union was itself a fundamentally political move, one with strategic implications, of course. France wanted to tame German power by harnessing it to the European project, and Germany was prepared to sacrifice the Deutsche Mark for the sake of France’s acceptance of a united Germany, the nightmare of Europe’s recent past.

An economically robust Germany is, without doubt, vital to the European project, if only because history has shown how dangerous an unhappy Germany can be. Indeed, it was thanks to the euro – and the captive European market that goes with it – that Germany today is the world’s second-leading exporter (China surpassed it in 2009).

Europe, however, has always found it difficult to come to terms with an over-confident, let alone arrogant, Germany. The current political turmoil in Europe shows that, regardless of how sensible Chancellor Angela Merkel’s austerity prescriptions for debt-ridden peripheral Europe might be in the abstract, they resemble a German Diktat. The concern for many is not just Europe’s historic “German problem,” but also that Germany could end up exporting to the rest of Europe the same ghosts of radical politics and violent nationalism that its economic success has transcended at home.

Once the crisis became a sad daily reality for millions of unemployed – particularly for what appears to be a lost generation of young, jobless Europeans – EU institutions also became a target of popular rage. Their inadequacies – embodied in a cumbersome system of governance, and in endless, inconclusive summitry – and their lack of democratic legitimacy are being repudiated by millions of voters throughout the continent.

Europe’s experience has shown that the subordination of society to economic theories is politically untenable. Social vulnerability and frustration at the political system’s failure to provide solutions are the grounds upon which radical movements have always emerged to offer facile solutions.

A concomitant of such Kurzschluss between mainstream leaders and voters has always been the politics of accentuated ethnic identity, ultra-nationalism, and outright bigotry. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy ended up trying desperately to appeal to those very sentiments in his last-ditch effort to avert his political demise.

What we have seen across Europe of late is a rebellion of voters against mainstream politics. In the first round of French presidential elections, the extreme right and left received more than 30% of the vote, with Martine Le Pen’s anti-EU National Front threatening to supplant the center-right Union for a Popular Movement as the country’s new mainstream rightist party. In Greece, the party system’s dangerous fragmentation into a range of smaller groups, combined with the robust emergence of a new anti-austerity left, Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza, and a neo-Nazi right, has plunged governance into to a state of total paralysis.

Ironically, what the civilized protests of mainstream parties in peripheral Europe failed to achieve – a relaxation of the dogma of austerity – might come about as a result of the politics of brinkmanship proposed by the Greek radical left. By its blatant rebellion against German-dictated austerity, and by making Greek withdrawal from the euro a credible possibility, Syriza is bringing closer than ever the euro’s chaotic collapse in Europe’s periphery, if not beyond. By insisting that the choice is between new terms for the Greek bailout or a Doomsday scenario, Syriza could be creating the possibility for a quasi-Keynesian resolution of the European crisis.

Tsipras might be “impetuous,” as his mainstream adversaries from the center-left Pasok and the center-right New Democracy would say, but he is not irrational. His is a rather sober reading of reality: the austerity plan has become a highway to social hell for his countrymen, and would likely condemn Greece to long years of ruinous depression within a permanent debt trap, and possibly to a breakdown of democracy.

Merkel’s now legendary obstinacy eventually might have to succumb to the imperatives of politics. It is one thing to ignore European Commission President José Manuel Barroso’s call for a more flexible economic policy, and quite another to dismiss out of hand the powerful message coming from French and Greek voters.

Nor is it a minor political headache for Merkel to have to face an anti-austerity alliance of Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and the new French president, François Hollande. Spain’s capacity to withstand an austerity “cure” that only sinks it deeper into recession must also have its limits.

So now Germany’s finance ministry, the guardian of fiscal rectitude, is considering measures such as using the European Investment Bank to foster growth, issuing EU “project bonds” to finance infrastructure investment, and allowing wages in Germany to rise at a faster pace than in the rest of Europe. The imminent – indeed, inevitable – victory of politics over recalcitrant economics may well be at hand.

Shlomo Ben-Ami is the Israeli foreign minister who came closest to devising a viable peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. A renowned historian of fascism and a seasoned diplomat, he served as Israel’s ambassador to Spain before being elected to the Knesset, where he was a member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and of the Subcommittee on Foreign Service. Before becoming Foreign Minister in 2000, he was Minister of Internal Security. He is the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy.

Shlomo Ben-Ami: Syria’s Agony

MADRID – The English author and priest William Ralph Inge once said that “A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.” Syria’s Assad dynasty, however, seems to believe that it can defy that dictum.

Historically, few autocrats have understood that change produced peacefully by government is the most viable conservative solution to popular demands, and the best way to avoid violent revolution. This is the wisdom that Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi, Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh all failed to learn. It is the central lesson of the Arab Spring, and one that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has bloodily ignored.

A country whose weight in Middle East politics has stemmed more from its role as an engine of the Arab-Israeli conflict than from its objective military or economic power, Syria under the Assads always feared that abandoning ideological confrontation with the Zionist enemy would undermine the regime. Indeed, pundits explained Syria’s initial immunity to the Arab Spring by pointing to the regime’s staunch defense of Arab dignity, reflected in its resolute hostility towards Israel.

But, as the younger Assad has been forced to recognize, times have changed. The new Arab generation’s quest for dignity is rooted in a yearning for decent government and civil rights that was long denied under the pretext of conflict with the “Zionist crusaders.”

One of the most secular regimes in the Arab world – Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was another – the Syrian Baath system, based on a trinity of party, army, and ethnic loyalty, has now drawn the country into a sectarian war between its Sunni majority and the small Shia-Alawite minority that has ruled for the last 45 years. Since the rebel Free Syria Army, which is mostly Sunni, split from the regular army, Assad has used the Alawite core of his forces and the shabeeha – a notorious Alawite paramilitary group – to conduct his ruthless campaign for survival.

The regime is now facing its moment of truth. The disintegration of Assad’s iron rule into a bloody civil war shows once again that the disorderly collapse of dictatorships, such as Josip Broz Tito’s in Yugoslavia, or Hussein’s in Iraq, tends to foment inter-ethnic war and national dismemberment.

Other minorities in Syria, such as Christians, Druze, and Kurds, have reason to dread a change for the worse. The Christians, in particular, who were protected by Assad, now fear that if the Baath regime is overthrown, they will suffer the same consequences as Christians in Iraq. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rightly warned the opposition recently that, thus far, they have been unable to unite the minorities behind them precisely because it is unclear to these groups that they will fare better without Assad than with him.

The Sunni al-Qaeda flourishes in conditions of mayhem. Denied their Iraqi and Afghan bases by Western intervention, al-Qaeda militants are now flocking into Syria from Libya and Iraq, and are probably responsible for some of the recent terrorist atrocities in Aleppo and Homs. Al-Qaeda’s move to the Levant also threatens to spark a momentous confrontation between Sunni radicals – some of whom have recently taken control of part of the Syrian-Lebanese border – and the Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon. Assad would welcome extending the conflict to Lebanon as a distraction.

Indeed, as in Iraq, Syria’s sectarian strife looks increasingly like a jihadist religious war. Sunni clerics in Syria and throughout the Arab world are issuing fatwas to give the Free Syria Army the halo of holy warriors fighting the Alawite infidels who have denied Syria its true Sunni identity. Conspicuously, whole battalions of this splinter Sunni army are being named after early Muslim heroes, such as Khalid bin al-Walid, the companion to the prophet Muhammad who conquered the Levant; Saladin, who recaptured Palestine from the Crusaders; and Moawiyah Bin Abi Sufian, Muhammad’s brother-in-law.

Shielded by China and Russia from foreign intervention, Assad now has license to pursue his goals with no mercy for his opponents. Both China and Russia feel betrayed by the West’s behavior in Libya, where it clearly transcended the United Nations mandate by toppling the Qaddafi regime. And, given their own potentially explosive political and ethnic tensions at home, neither is inclined to support foreign intervention.

Moreover, Russia, still traumatized by its Cold War defeat, wants to maintain the Syria-Iran axis as a key bargaining chip in its difficult relations with the West, while both it and China are simply weary of the West’s naiveté. As they see it, the immediate choices in the Arab world are not between dictatorship and democracy, but between malevolent stability and apocalyptic mayhem.

And yet the West is also hesitant to act, owing to fears of a repeat of the Iraq debacle. Transforming Syria’s Baath regime into a workable democracy is practically impossible, just as it was in the case of Hussein’s Baathist regime in Iraq. But the prospect of a jihadist-style ethnic war that extends throughout the Levant is not especially attractive, either. For Russia and China, too, that cannot be a happy prospect.

Shlomo Ben Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister who now serves as the vice president of the Toledo International Center for Peace, is the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy.

Shlomo Ben-Ami: The Decline of the West Revisited

MADRID – Since the publication in 1918 of the first volume of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, prophecies about the inexorable doom of what he called the “Faustian Civilization” have been a recurrent topic for thinkers and public intellectuals. The current crises in the United States and Europe – the result primarily of US capitalism’s inherent ethical failures, and to Europe’s dysfunction – might be seen as lending credibility to Spengler’s view of democracy’s inadequacy, and to his dismissal of Western civilization as essentially being driven by a corrupting lust for money.

 
There can be no doubt that the West’s military mastery and economic edge have been severely diminished recently. In 2000, America’s GDP was eight times larger than China’s; today it is only twice as large. Worse, appalling income inequalities, a squeezed middle class, and evidence of widespread ethical lapses and impunity are fueling a dangerous disenchantment with democracy and a growing loss of trust in a system that has betrayed the American dream of constant progress and improvement.

This would not be, however, the first time that America’s values prevailed over the threat of populism in times of economic crisis. A variation of the fascist agenda once appeared in America, with Father Charles Coughlin’s populist onslaught in the 1930’s on Franklin Roosevelt´s “alliance with the bankers.” Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice, whose membership ran into the millions, was eventually defeated by the American system’s powerful democratic antibodies.

As for Europe, the eurozone crisis has exposed democracy’s weaknesses in dealing with major economic emergencies, as well as the flaws in the European Union’s design. In Greece and Italy, technocratic governments have taken over from failing politicians. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has pressed for an authoritarian “re-establishment of the state.” Such cases seem to point to the return of a European past in which democracy’s failures gave way to more “expedient” forms of government.

And yet, while Europe remains a question mark, economic growth and job creation, however fragile, are back in America. Moreover, even if China becomes the world’s largest economy in, say, 2018, Americans would still be far richer than Chinese, with per capita GDP in America four times higher than in China.

To be sure, income inequality and social injustice are a concomitant of capitalist culture throughout the West. But challengers like China and India are in no position to preach. Compared to Indian capitalism, capitalism’s ethical failures elsewhere look especially benign. A hundred oligarchs in India hold assets equivalent to 25% of GDP, while 800 million of their compatriots survive on less than a dollar a day. Politicians and judges are bought, and natural resources worth trillions of dollars are sold to powerful corporations for a pittance.

Having the largest economy is vital for a power aspiring to maintain military superiority and the ability to define the international order. Hence, the receding power of the West means a tougher fight to uphold the relevance of key components of its value system, such as democracy and universal rights.

Europe, with its almost post-historical mentality, has long abandoned the pretension of being a military power. The same cannot be said of the US. But, rather than reflecting a decline in its military superiority, America’s setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan are the result of wrongheaded policies that sought to use hard power to solve conflicts that were simply not amenable to it.

The recent massive cuts to the US military budget need not signal decline; they can launch an age of smarter defense, one that relies on innovative ideas, strong alliances, and building partners’ capacity. The shift of US military priorities to the Asia-Pacific region is an understandable strategic rebalancing, given America’s excessive focus on the Middle East and its maintenance of an unnecessary military presence in Europe.

Tempered by the US public’s fatigue with overseas adventures, America’s missionary zeal to save the world from the wickedness of faraway autocrats will be reduced substantially. But this does not necessarily mean that China will automatically take over ground from which America withdraws. Despite the recent cuts, America’s defense budget is still five times higher than China’s. More importantly, China’s long-term strategy requires that it focus in the short term on satisfying its vast appetite for energy and raw materials.

Make no mistake: Euro-centrism and Western hubris have been dealt severe blows in recent years. But, for those in the West overtaken by fatalism and self-doubt, a message of hope is now emanating from the Arab Spring, and from the resumption in Russia of the unfinished revolution that ended communism. Nor has the inconsistency between China’s capitalism and its lack of civil liberties been resolved yet. A Chinese Spring cannot be ruled out.

The West faces serious challenges – as it always has. But the values of human freedom and dignity that drive Western civilization remain the dream of the vast majority of humanity.

Shlomo Ben Ami is a former Israeli foreign minister who now serves as the vice-president of the Toledo International Centre for Peace. He is the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy.

Shlomo Ben-Ami:The Lasting Damage of Iraq

MADRID – The folding of the American flag in Iraq amid a collapse of public security and a severe crisis in the country’s fragile political order seals a tragic chapter in the history of the United States. It marked the denouement of one of the clearest cases ever of the imperial overreach that former US Senator William Fulbright called the “arrogance of power.”

Violently torn by religious and ethnic rivalries, Iraq is in no condition to play its part in America’s vision of an Arab wall of containment of Iran. Unless the Iranian regime is terminally humbled in the course of its showdown with the West over its nuclear program, the more plausible scenario is that Shia-dominated Iraq moves closer to Iran’s strategic orbit rather than become part of America's regional designs.

After ten years of war, more than a hundred thousand casualties, mostly Iraqis, and an astronomical cost of almost $1 trillion, the US leaves behind an Iraq that is neither more secure nor especially democratic. It is, however, one of the most corrupt countries (175th out of 178, according to Transparency International). The war that was supposed to be a central pillar in a drive to restructure the Middle East under America’s guidance ended up marking the decline of its influence there.

The Middle East sucked America’s resources and energies, but the results are desperately meager. Turkey, with its “dangerous foreign minister” (as Ahmet Davutoğlu was portrayed in a US cable released by WikiLeaks), is defining its regional policies in a way that frequently clashes with US designs. Israel rebuffed US President Barack Obama’s peace initiatives, and even refused to extend a freeze on settlement construction for a mere three months, despite a lavish offer of strategic compensation. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas defiantly disregards the US threat to stop aid if Palestine persists in its bid for United Nations membership. And Arab leaders ridicule Obama’s naïve trust in negotiations as a way to cut short Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The “Arab awakening” is about homegrown democratic change; it is therefore a repudiation of both US complicity with local autocrats and the American paradigm, so evident in Iraq, of “democracy” imported on the wings of F-16s.

The future remains uncertain, but the assumption that Arabs’ demands for fair governments and civil dignity can still be repressed, like a genie squeezed back into the bottle, is a self-serving fantasy of irremediable autocrats – and of some in the West. Arab governments’ policies will become more reflective of their peoples’ wishes, even when these are represented, as we now see, by Islamist majorities.

America was taught the hard way that it can live with Islamists; after all, it leaves behind a Shia-led government in Baghdad that has close ties to Iran, and is engaging the Taliban in Afghanistan as a last-resort strategy to exit an unwinnable war. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis in Egypt, al-Nahda in Tunisia, and the Party of Justice and Development in Morocco are now the West’s interlocutors.

Israel’s diplomacy, however, is a particularly startling example of cognitive dissonance. It persists in ruling out Hamas as an interlocutor while engaging Egypt’s Islamist democratic majority.

Neither dominating the politics of the region nor truly leading it, the US is a spectator in the unfolding Arab drama. The integrity of Iraqi statehood remains uncertain, as is the outcome of the Egyptian revolution. Saudi power and US acquiescence managed to stifle democratic agitation in the Gulf, but the region’s dynasties cannot expect to slip history’s noose once and for all.

Meanwhile, US weakness has opened the door to Russia’s resumption of Cold War practices in the region. Russia’s diplomatic protection of Syria’s brutal regime from the ire of the international community, and of Iran from the West’s drive to cripple its economy, stems from its conviction that ten years of costly and inconclusive wars have seriously diminished America’s global standing.

The Kremlin’s defiance of the US extends to southwest Asia as well. Russia's ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, threatened recently that his country might shut down the US supply line to Afghanistan.

America, in short, faces a time of reckoning that should usher in a period of comprehensive strategic rebalancing. The legacy of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, like that of the Vietnam War before them, is bound to teach the US caution in the use of military might. It should also counsel a greater emphasis on international legitimacy and multilateral alliances in dealing with hostile regimes.

Most fundamentally, America’s excessive focus on the Middle East will now need to be tempered by a shift to other regions of vital national interest. This should lead to healthy economic competition with a rising China, alongside protection of US interests in the Pacific Rim now threatened by China’s expanding influence. It might also mean engaging Russia in the hope that its emerging civil society will give rise to a more truly democratic regime, one that might be ready to supersede the traumas of the Cold War and be drawn to closer cooperation with the West.

At the same time, the dismissive attitude towards Europe that one senses in America is unjustified and self-defeating. Intimate ties with a revitalized European Union remain vital to the global projection of Western values and interests.

Sterile isolationism runs counter to America’s self-conception as a nation with a global mission. But the dire legacy of its two recent wars calls for a focus on internal improvement. Enhancing America’s soft power, safeguarding its supremacy as a hub of unparalleled innovation, upgrading its decaying infrastructure and faltering educational system, and ridding itself of its addiction to foreign credit might do more to secure America’s global leadership than the most successful of wars.


Shlomo Ben Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister, now serves as Vice President of the Toledo international Center for Peace. He is the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy.