Perspectives

The dangers arising from disputes involving major powers palpably increased in the year to mid-2014. In Eastern Europe and in East Asia, the world's most powerful countries engaged in a series of actions and reactions, testing each other out as they jostled for position in a shifting global order. International affairs appeared to have moved into new territory, an era of heightened strategic change.

In Ukraine, a revolution was provoked by the government's hesitation to integrate more closely with the European Union. Russian President Vladimir Putin, taking this as a severe blow to Moscow's interests, called it a fascist coup and annexed the Crimean Peninsula. He then fomented an insurgency in eastern areas of Ukraine heavily populated by ethnic Russians. Putin's tactics of infiltration with soldiers, intelligence agents and weapons, while denying responsibility, left Western governments unsure how to respond. Moscow's actions confounded wishful assumptions made by the West about Russia since the end of the Cold War, and altered threat perceptions. German Chancellor Angela Merkel commented: ‘First in Georgia back in 2008 and now in the heart of Europe, in Ukraine … we are witnessing a conflict about spheres of influence and territorial claims, such as those we know from the 19th and 20th centuries, but thought we had put behind us. It is very evident … that this is not the case.’

Meanwhile, China's nationalistic assertiveness went up a notch as President Xi Jinping sought to impose his will as a still-new leader, and to emphasise his country's status as a great power. China declared an Air Defence Identification Zone that covered islands disputed with Japan, and sent a large oil rig into waters contested with Vietnam. Xi's aim, like Putin's, seemed to be to achieve a recalibration of his country in the minds of leaders both of regional rivals and other global powers. Combined with the revisionist approach of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who sought to revive the status of Japan both economically and militarily, this made for a rise in regional tension that carried the risk of escalation. Again, it was significant that large global powers, both in terms of economic size and military capabilities, were at odds with each other.

There was one area, however, in which the largest powers managed to act together, and that was in combating nuclear proliferation. The major achievement of the year was an interim agreement with Iran that set temporary limits on its nuclear programme while granting partial relief from economic sanctions (although it unsettled some of Iran's neighbours). A further, unforeseen success was a Moscow-brokered agreement with the Syrian regime to dismantle and remove its chemical-weapons arsenal. But this followed the use of these weapons near Damascus, an atrocity that killed more than 1,400 people. And Syrians continued to suffer terribly from a civil war that became increasingly fragmented: conflict between and among the original rebel groups and Islamic-extremist militants actually strengthened the position of President Bashar al-Assad, who kept control of some parts of the country (see Strategic Geography, p. XII).

The Syrian war was the bloodiest legacy of the Arab Spring, which began in December 2010 with the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor, who set in motion a wave of rebellions against entrenched, corrupt and sclerotic regimes. The largest and most dramatic revolution occurred in Egypt, and was followed by political turmoil and the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood, even though the group had not been a prime mover in the popular protests against President Hosni Mubarak. However, less than two-and-a-half years later, Egypt came full circle. The Brotherhood's Muhammad Morsi, the elected president, faced a clamour of renewed popular protest and was toppled by the army. Thus, the eventual replacement for Mubarak, a former air-force chief, was Field Marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who took off his army uniform and was elected president with 96% of the vote.

The Arab Spring had other after effects over the year. It contributed to continuing insurgent violence in the Sahel region of Africa, while in Libya, the tenuous governmental system that had replaced the regime of Muammar Gadhafi all but collapsed, leaving an uncertain future. And there were other legacies of the conflicts that had arisen since 9/11. While al-Qaeda's central leadership, presumed to be in Pakistan, was still kept in check, its powerful recruiting message had spread to numerous off-shoots and continued to attract young people, mostly men, in many countries. The causes espoused by these newer jihadists were local, such as the marginalisation of Sunnis in Iraqi politics, the complex conflict in Syria, the chronic disputes in Somalia and Yemen, separatism in Mali, or the presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan. But the thousands of locals and foreigners drawn to take part in such extremism still shared the kind of common cause that meant that the global threat of terrorism remained important.

In the year to mid-2014, however, it was the renewal of major-power tensions that caught the eye. This seemed to be the most important new driver of strategic change. In Strategic Survey 2014: The Annual Review of World Affairs, we seek this year to introduce a more transparent assessment of strategic risk. The approach is explained in an essay (see pp. 45–52). It does not mean that the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) is getting into the forecasting business. The book is what it says it is: an annual review of world affairs. But, in making our assessment of the 12 months from mid-year to mid-year, we try to identify the developments, themes and trends that strike us, at this first-draft-of-history stage, as driving and shaping strategic change around the world. We have done this by region, and in each regional chapter can be found a graphic listing the drivers in bullet-point form – drawn out more fully in each chapter's introductory text and succeeding sections. This opening chapter does not make so bold as to attempt a formal listing of global drivers of strategic change. But it does seek to identify some cross-cutting factors that seem important in shaping world events.

The first of these has already been identified: the increase in major-power tensions. This underlines the growing need for constructive diplomacy. Unfortunately, however, many world leaders and establishments are focused inwards. Their preoccupation with domestic politics is partly a result of weariness with the constant series of post-Cold War conflicts in the Balkans, Afghanistan and the Middle East. It also reflects continuing attention to securing economic recovery, and to applying fiscal discipline following the 2008 financial crisis and the eurozone's subsequent debt problems. It may also be partly because many people, especially those in the world of business, tend to believe that old-style global confrontations are confined to the past because of advances in communications and business practices that – they hope – transcend national borders.

Other important drivers of change remain those that we have analysed for years in this book and other IISS publications: the multi-theatre conflicts of the Middle East, now acquiring a new cross-border dimension as militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham claim territory in both Syria and Iraq. The longest-standing conflict, between Israelis and Palestinians, moved no closer to resolution, despite renewed American efforts over the past year. Gulf states were increasingly divided. And mixed up in these conflicts was, as mentioned above, Islamic-extremist violence and the threat of terrorism. Meanwhile, the future of Afghanistan rested in the balance as the outcome of the presidential election was disputed and the shape of future NATO and US military, non-combat missions remained undefined.

A further enduring strategic risk was the still-fragile state of the global economy following the 2008 crisis. Western governments continued to shore up banking systems and restore their finances, and saw growth rates that ranged from moderately healthy to worryingly slow. But the success of the ‘Abenomics’ effort to jump-start Japan's economy remained unproven, and China's slowed but strong growth rate was vulnerable to the high level of debt in its economy. On China's growth depended that of many economies in Latin America and Africa.

Beyond these familiar uncertainties, many further aspects of global change are detailed in the chapters of this book – in particular the rivalries between East Asian powers, analysed in the Asia-Pacific chapter (see pp. 309–378). But two particular issues are selected for further comment below: the position of the US, for so long the anchor of global security; and the dilemmas raised by the developments in Ukraine during the past year.

At the heart of the many conflicts and arguments afflicting global affairs was the altered approach of the US. Since taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama had been determined to end what he saw as a period of military adventurism that followed the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, which killed 3,000 people and dealt the most severe shock to the US since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The American response to the al-Qaeda attacks was to heavily engage the world's most powerful military in Afghanistan and Iraq. This achieved, at best, mixed results: al-Qaeda has lost most of the leadership and organisation that enabled the 9/11 attacks, but the world's vulnerability to Islamist extremism has hardly been removed; meanwhile, less than three years after US occupation of Iraq ended, the country's political system is weak, chaotic and discriminatory; and the extent to which Taliban fighters will shape the future of Afghanistan, in the absence of NATO combat troops, will begin to be seen in 2015. Regardless of whether these campaigns were successful, Obama's moves to disengage the military were in tune with the wishes of Americans across the political spectrum, and of many other governments.

The ‘war on terror’ had not, however, set the US dangerously at odds with the other largest powers. While some objected to the apparent legitimisation of regime change that was involved, it did not directly threaten their most important interests or bring them into conflict with Washington. The only real question was to what extent European allies supported the military missions: there were popular misgivings in most European countries, and outright opposition to the invasion of Iraq to the extent that some nations did not participate in it. But, in general, since all countries faced a threat of terrorism, the intent to stifle it was something on which most could find common cause with Washington – and, for almost all countries, the relationship with the US remained very important.

As events unfolded in the year to mid-2014, however, the problem of defining America's post-Afghanistan posture came much more sharply into view. If Washington's response to new episodes of instability was not going to be a hard-security one, what exactly was the nature of its stance? What should emerging, rival powers expect from the US, and how should they calibrate its responses to their actions? Could Washington's friends still count on it? What kind of leadership and security guarantees would it offer to allies in Europe, Asia and the Gulf? At the extreme, had the unipolar period that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union been replaced by a security vacuum?

Clearly, the transition was not, in reality, such a sharp one. American military might was still evident around the world, acting as a deterrent in various theatres – especially the Asia-Pacific, to which Obama announced a strategic ‘rebalancing’ in 2009, one of his most important foreign-policy shifts. But two examples over the past year, one stemming from an atrocity and the other from a diplomatic success, exemplified the reasons why the new approach of the US was problematic for many. The first was the August 2013 use of chemical weapons on Syrian citizens by the Assad regime. While Obama had theretofore refused to become directly involved in the civil war, he had said that the use of chemical weapons would be a ‘red line’. Air-strikes involving the US and several allies were rapidly readied. However, after the British Parliament vetoed the United Kingdom's participation, Obama chose to refer the decision on US intervention to Congress. Only the deal brokered by Russia to dismantle and remove Assad's chemical arsenal saved Obama the potential embarrassment of having a proposal for military action defeated by Congress. But the most striking development was that an American president had opted to hand off such a decision.

The second example was the agreement reached in November 2013 between Iran and six global powers – on this occasion, all acting together – that exchanged temporary limits on Tehran's nuclear programme for partial sanctions relief. The prospects that this interim arrangement would be converted into a comprehensive long-term agreement were not promising, as negotiating positions remained a large distance apart. Nevertheless, this was progress down a path on which Obama had deliberately embarked, from his first inauguration address onwards. It followed secret talks between American and Iranian officials, with mediation by the sultan of Oman. From an objective point of view, steps towards rapprochement between Washington and Tehran could only be welcome: they have had no formal relations since the November 1979 occupation of the American Embassy in Tehran by Iranian students, who subsequently held 52 Americans as hostages for 444 days. An improvement in relations could be helpful to global and nuclear security. So, for Obama, the interim nuclear deal was a major diplomatic success, emblematic of his approach. However, the knee-jerk response of some Republican opponents was to demand tougher sanctions on Iran. Gulf states, disturbed in 2011 when Washington abandoned Mubarak, were again concerned that Obama might no longer be a strong protector, as he tilted towards their regional rival, Iran. The agreement met with profound opposition from Israel: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a ‘historic mistake’. In making this diplomatic advance, therefore, Obama left close allies wondering whether they could still depend on Washington as their ultimate guarantor of security.

To some extent, these reactions were inevitable: forging an agreement with an adversary will always cause those on your side to fear for their positions in the new dispensation. But the misgivings felt by Washington's friends were more profound. This was because Obama suffered from several impediments as he sought to alter the nature of American global engagement. Firstly, he inherited from his predecessor, George W. Bush, the loss of American credibility and clout that stemmed from the decision to invade Iraq. Secondly, he inherited a financial and fiscal crisis that had caused a visible reduction of the American military footprint – albeit from very high levels of spending and deployment. Thirdly, his appeals to end domestic partisan gridlock had fallen on the deaf ears of a fragmenting Republican Party, and his every move provoked implacable opposition from the Republicans, who controlled the House of Representatives from January 2011 onwards. Even his signature domestic success, universal health care, threatened to become a political millstone. A president who is increasingly cast as weak and ineffective at home will find it difficult to exude authority on the global stage.

This was not to say that Obama's revision of foreign policy was wrong-headed. In fact, it was carefully thought out and practicable. After the international opprobrium that was heaped on Bush, it was entirely reasonable to look for alternatives to sending troops. For example, direct military intervention to aid the Syrian rebellion that began in 2011 would have invited another Iraq-like scenario – or worse, given that Russia and Iran were on the side of the Syrian regime. As Obama noted to journalists during a visit to the Philippines in April 2014:

The point is that for some reason many who were proponents of what I consider to be a disastrous decision to go into Iraq haven't really learned the lesson of the last decade, and they keep on just playing the same note over and over again. Why? I don't know. But my job as Commander-in-Chief is to look at what is it that is going to advance our security interests over the long term, to keep our military in reserve for where we absolutely need it. There are going to be times where there are disasters and difficulties and challenges all around the world, and not all of those are going to be immediately solvable by us.

In his May 2014 address to the graduating class at West Point military academy, Obama sought to flesh out this doctrine more constructively. America, he said, ‘must always lead on the world stage. If we don't, no one else will.’ He argued that the greatest direct threat to the US continued to be terrorism, and that the best means to counter it was ‘to more effectively partner with countries where terrorist networks seek a foot-hold’. And he spelled out how the US would devote resources to training and building the capacities of security forces in, for example, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Mali. He also argued for more effective use of international institutions such as the United Nations and NATO.

These were strong points. Terrorism remained a threat to the US and a global problem – indeed, it was a spreading threat in developing countries as part of the growing phenomenon of hybrid conflict (see essay pp. 53–64). However, it could be argued that this doctrine continued to view American security too much through the prism of terrorism. While Washington had viewed the world from this 9/11-induced perspective, more traditional major-power tensions had been emerging, and the American approach to dealing with such issues seemed to lack authority. It was true that, under Bush, the US had been too prone to military adventurism. But foreign policy was not a matter of a binary choice: to send in the military or not. The theatres in which confrontation emerged in the year to mid-2014 required a subtler, broader range of options, which needed to be wrapped in a more comprehensive and strategic policy expression.

As Merkel noted, developments in Ukraine were a reminder that traditional rivalries over spheres of influence had not gone away. But, after Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovich was toppled, European leaders were perhaps disingenuous in their expression of surprise at Russia's reaction. In fact, such rivalries were intrinsic to Ukraine's revolution, particularly as it was the EU's effort to expand its sphere of influence that triggered the past year's sequence of events. The five-year-old Eastern Partnership initiative is an explicit effort to spread the EU's values, trade practices and liberalised visa regulations to six countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. According to the website of the EU External Action Service, ‘the Eastern Partnership is the reply of the EU to the challenges and aspirations of the partner countries as the EU has a vital interest in seeing further economic development, greater democratic governance and increased stability in the Eastern neighbourhood’. While this was said to be not directed against Russia, it was easy to see how Moscow might have viewed the programme as a challenge to its interests. Russia had chosen to counter it on essentially parallel terms, building a Eurasian Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan, with a view to attracting a broader range of countries into a new Eurasian Economic Union along the lines of the EU. It was not until the autumn of 2013 that these tracks collided, in a raw contest between Moscow and Brussels to obtain signatures.

Ukraine was an important prize, and its economy was in terrible shape. As he faced the competing bids, it was small wonder that the Russia-leaning Yanukovich teetered between them. Heading a government formed mainly of representatives from the east of his country, it was also unsurprising that, when it came to the crunch in November 2013, he opted to postpone signing the EU Association Agreement. It was this decision that prompted the protests that eventually led to his departure in February. While Brussels bureaucrats like to cast the document and the linked Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement as primarily technical in nature, the response to Yanukovich's refusal to sign was overtly political. European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said the era of ‘limited sovereignty’ was over and that the idea that a third country could have a veto over a bilateral agreement was ‘contrary to all principles of international law’. But the EU, whose clout lay principally in the economic and trade arena, and in the inclusive, integrating impact of its acquis communautaire – and whose defence role was highly circumscribed, designed for use on a very small scale – had lost out to a heavily armed power that had a naval fleet based in Ukraine's southern peninsula of Crimea and was closely tied to Ukraine in many other ways.

Putin's reaction to the revolution was swift. Troops in uniforms without insignia seized the main buildings in Crimea and encircled Ukrainian bases, and, within a month, the territory was part of Russia. In his 18 March speech justifying the annexation, Putin said:

We have already heard declarations from Kiev about Ukraine soon joining NATO. What would this have meant for Crimea and Sevastopol in the future? It would have meant that NATO's navy would be right there in this city of Russia's military glory, and this would create not an illusory but a perfectly real threat to the whole of southern Russia.

Although the US and the EU protested and imposed targeted sanctions on selected Russians and Ukrainians – while even Russia's close friends expressed unease – there seemed no doubt that the annexation was irreversible. The more important issue for the future was how far Russia's defence of its interests would extend. In theory, any country with a significant ethnic Russian minority – such as three Baltic states that were already members of NATO – was under threat. But, in practice, there was no real sign of heightened Russian aggression there. Also in question were Russian interests in states with ‘frozen’ conflicts, such as Moldova and the South Caucasus. Again, there were no significant developments, and in fact Georgia and Moldova, as well as the new government in Ukraine, went on to sign EU Association Agreements. This left the two eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, each with ethnic-Russian majorities, where fragmented and badly organised groups of pro-Russian separatists, supported by Russian manpower, intelligence and weapons, were in conflict with Ukrainian government forces. At mid-2014, despite Ukrainian government forces' efforts to defeat the rebels, this threatened to turn into a new ‘frozen’ conflict, which could be ratcheted up or down at Putin's will.

The West did respond to Russia's actions. Measures were taken by a broad Western coalition of countries and institutions, led by the US, to isolate Moscow, as well as to support the new Ukrainian government. Even more effective as a potential constraint on Putin were the erosion of investors' interest in Russia, substantial flight of capital and the weakening of Russia's economy, which was overdependent on energy revenues. But there was no doubt that the re-emergence of an assertive Russia, which spent more on defence and was ready to protect its interests through military means and without scruple, remained an unwelcome development for the West on several levels.

Firstly, it challenged the assumptions on which Western defence policies had been constructed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. True, there was never a loss of awareness that Russia remained a heavily nuclear-armed power. But Washington and Western European capitals liked to believe it was no longer a threat to European security. This assumption had not been fundamentally shaken by Russia's military intervention in Georgia in 2008, nor its de facto annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Such calmness about Moscow's intentions had not been mirrored in the European countries closer to Russia's borders, for whom joining NATO was a very important step. Those states found themselves unhappily vindicated in their beliefs. In defence establishments all over Europe, threat assessments were being revised. But European defence spending was falling fast, and the events in Ukraine did not bring forth promises from the largest spenders that they would reverse the trend. As in the US, there was absolutely no appetite for new military ventures beyond the limited missions under way in some African trouble spots.

Secondly, developments in Ukraine threatened important commercial interests, especially in Germany and the UK. There was already considerable interdependence between Europe and Russia in the energy field, with the former reliant on Russian gas and Moscow in need of the revenues it generated. Russian ‘oligarchs’ were major investors in UK property, and were major clients of financial firms in the UK and elsewhere. These interests were a constraining factor, as European countries debated their responses.

Thirdly and more broadly, events in Ukraine undermined the belief that Russia was a partner in building a modern, interconnected and globalised world in which national borders would matter less. In truth, there were plenty of signs that such a world was not in fact emerging – especially in the area of cyber security, in which the extensive activities of the US government had been exposed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden (see essay, pp. 31–44), and offensive cyber operations originating in both Russia and China were frequently detected. More broadly, crisis-driven global cooperation on economic and financial matters, seen in the G20 meetings of 2008 and 2009, had long since dissipated.

The West therefore needed to re-examine the threats it faced, and how to confront them. Responding to such challenges was not a matter of war or no war. It required a revival of thinking about deterrence, of greater subtlety and gradated approaches. In fact, this was already being practised, to some extent, with the dispatch of combat aircraft to bolster defences in Baltic and Eastern European NATO member countries, and in the targeted economic sanctions on Russia. But these were immediate responses. A more carefully thought out and clearly expressed strategy with a longer-term impact would be required. As a NATO summit approached in September 2014, many diplomats would find their summer holidays curtailed. New plans for military deployments, rapid-reaction capabilities and bases were being prepared. This would perhaps be the first step towards a new era in European defence, and towards new roles for the Alliance. However, the failure of past initiatives to strengthen and coordinate Europe's capabilities left plenty of scope for doubt. And, as Europe showed increasing reluctance to embrace the concept of ‘ever closer union’ foreseen in EU treaties, there were also questions about the ability to muster the requisite communal political will.

As the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War was marked, there was an acute awareness, especially in Europe, of how acts of localised violence could rapidly escalate into global conflict. Nevertheless, what seemed in store was a period in which, in Ukraine and around tiny islands in the East and South China seas, the world's great powers would test how far they could go, and how their rivals would react.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/04597230.2014.954371#.VHGqUYuUfb4