The West Is Weak Where It Matters And In Ways That It Cannot Fix

aurelian |   These problems are coming together, to some extent, with the widespread diffusion of automatic weapons, and the spread of ethnic organised crime groups in the suburbs of major European cities. Together with the increasing hold of organised Islamic fundamentalism on the local communities, this has created a series of areas where governments no longer wish to send the security forces, because of the fear of violent confrontation, and where these groups exert an effective monopoly of violence themselves. Again, it’s not clear what current military or paramilitary capabilities would be of any real use in dealing with such situations, and there is the risk of other, non-state, actors intervening instead.  (It’s worth adding that we are not talking about “civil war” here, which is a quite different issue)

So the existing force-structures of western states are going to have problems coping with the likely domestic security threats of the near future. Most western militaries are simply too small, too highly specialised and too technological to deal with situations where the basic tool of military force is required: large numbers of trained and disciplined personnel, able to provide and maintain a secure environment, and enforce the monopoly of legitimate violence. Paramilitary forces can only help to a certain extent. The potential political consequences of that failure could be enormous. The most basic political question, after all, is not Carl Schmitt’s infamous “who is my enemy?” but rather “who will protect me?” If modern states, themselves lacking capability, but also with security forces that are too small and poorly adapted, cannot protect the population, what then? Experience elsewhere suggests that, if the only people who can protect you are Islamic extremists and drug traffickers, you are pretty much obliged to give your loyalty to them, or if not, to some equally strong non-state force that opposes them.

In a perverse kind of way, the same issues of respect and capability also arise at the international level. I’ve already written several times about the parlous state of conventional western forces today, and the impossibility of restoring them to something like Cold War levels. Here, I just want to finish by talking about some of the less obvious political consequences of that weakness.

At its simplest, relative military effectiveness influences how you view your neighbours and how they view you. This can involve threats and fear, but it doesn’t have to. It means, for example, that the perception of what regional security problems are, and how to deal with them, is going to be disproportionately influenced by the concerns of more capable states. (Thus the influential position enjoyed by Nigeria in West Africa, for example). This isn’t necessarily from a crude measure of size of forces either: in the old NATO, the Netherlands probably had more influence than Turkey, though its forces were much smaller. Within international groupings—formal alliances or not—some states tend to lead and others to follow, depending on perceptions of experience and capability.

Internationally—in the UN for example—countries like Britain and France, together with Sweden, Canada, Australia, India, and a few others, were influential because they had capable militaries, effective government systems and, most importantly, experience of conducting operations away from home. So if you were the Secretary-General of the UN, and you were putting together a small group to look at the possibilities for a peace mission in Myanmar, who would you invite? The Argentinians? The Congolese? The Algerians? The Mexicans? You would invite some nations from the region, certainly, but you would mainly focus on capable nations with a proven track record. But in quite complex and subtle ways, patterns of influence, both at the practical and conceptual level, are changing. The current vision even of what security is, and how it should be pursued, is currently western-dominated. That will be much less the case in the future.

This decline in influence will also apply to the United States. Its most powerful and expensive weapons—nuclear missiles, nuclear submarines, carrier battle groups, high performance air-superiority fighters — are either not usable, or simply not relevant, to most of the security problems of today. We do not know the precise numbers and effectiveness of Chinese land-based anti-shipping missiles for example, but it’s clear that sending US surface ships anywhere within their range is going to be too great a risk for any US government to take. And since the Chinese know this, the subtle nuances of power relations between the two countries are altered. Again, the US has found itself unable to actually influence the outcome of a major war in Europe, because it does not have the forces to intervene directly, and the weapons it has been able to send are too few and in many cases of the wrong kind. The Russians are obviously aware of this, but it is the kind of thing that other states notice as well, and then has consequences.

Finally, there is the question of the future relationship between weak European states in a continent where the US has ceased to be an important player. As I’ve pointed out before, NATO has continued as long as it has because it has all sorts of unacknowledged practical advantages for different nations, even if some of these advantages are actually mutually exclusive. But it’s not obvious that such a state of affairs will continue. No European nation, nor any reasonable coalition of them, is going to have the military power to match that of Russia, and the US has long been incapable of making up the difference. On the other hand, this is not the Cold War, where Soviet troops were stationed a few hundred kilometres from major western capitals. There will actually be nothing really to fight about, and no obvious place to do the fighting. What there will be is a relationship of dominance and inferiority such as Europe has never really known before, and the end of such shaky consensus as remains on what the military, and security forces in general, are actually for. I suspect, but it’s no more than that, that we are going to see a turning inward, as states try to deal with problems within their borders and on them. Ironically, the greatest protection against major conflicts may be the inability of most European states, these days, to conduct them. Weakness can also have its virtues.