So this is what the Syrian war suggests about future conflicts: They will be intricately complex; they will involve conflict-specific configurations of participants; there will be no humanitarian intervention to stop them; and the United Nations will be a nonfactor. But that isn’t all. It gets even worse. Next week’s column will explain how.
Week by week, month by month, the horrific war in Syria grinds on, killing combatants from many countries and, most tragic of all, Syrian civilians—the unintended or, in many cases, intended victims of the warring parties. As Liz Sly and Loveday Morris wrote recentlyin The Washington Post, “A war that began with peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad is rapidly descending into a global scramble for control over what remains of the broken country of Syria, risking a wider conflict. Under skies crowded by the warplanes of half a dozen countries, an assortment of factions backed by rival powers are battling one another in a dizzying array of combinations.”
It’s easy to look at the Syrian war as uniquely horrible, the catastrophic result of geography, Assad’s craven brutality, the spread of jihadism and its malignant ideology, and foreign intervention. But in reality Syria is emblematic, a frightening window into the future of war.
Security experts have worked for years to understand the changing character of war, recognizing that only by understanding it can the world find solutions, or at least ways to mitigate violence. Inspired by the complex conflicts in the Balkans that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, British academic Mary Kaldor, for instance, described what she called the “new wars” that she believed would dominate the post-Cold War security environment. These conflicts, Kaldor argued, would be fought by shifting combinations of states and nonstate actors. They would be based on identity factors like ethnicity or religion, rather than political ideology. The combatants would use fear and terror to control the population. And the combatants would finance their efforts through predation and crime, leading to “war economies” that give the combatants a vested interest in keeping the violence going.
Kaldor drew criticism from some other scholars of war who argued that what she was depicting was nothing new but the historical norm for internal strife. While this criticism was largely true, Kaldor was onto something about the character of post-Cold War conflicts. Whether new or not, after the Balkan violence burned out, something like it broke out from Iraq to Libya to Sudan. In many ways, Syria today is simply a more destructive mutation of Kaldor’s new wars. It is also a frightening preview of what the coming decades may bring.
It’s easy to look at the Syrian war as uniquely horrible. But in reality, it is emblematic.
If, in fact, Syria is the model, future wars are likely to have several defining characteristics. This column will sketch out four of the most striking. Next week, I will dig deeper and explore the broader strategic characteristics of the future wars that Syria signals, including the implications for the United States.
The first and perhaps most defining characteristic of the Syrian war is its intricate and deadly complexity. Rather than two nations or alliances pitted against each other, multiple interconnected fights occupy the same space and time. Colin Kahl, a former Obama administration official who is now a professor at Georgetown, recently tweeted that there are now five major conflicts axes in Syria: the United States and the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces versus the Islamic State; the United States and the Syrian Democratic Forces versus the Assad regime; Turkey versus the Syrian Democratic Forces and its allied Kurdish YPG militia; the Assad regime and its external allies—Russia, Iran and Hezbollah—versus a range of Syrian opposition groups; and now Israel versus Iran, playing out across the Golan Heights.
This propels the violence in unpredictable directions. Assad, for instance, quietly helps Syrian Kurds against Turkey, while pro-regime forces attack Kurdish militias. The complexity of the Syrian war muddles any resolution since each component has a different cause and different participants, and hence a different endgame.
Second, the Syrian war suggests that future conflicts will involve a situation-specific configuration of forces, rather than enduring alliances. In one sense the Syrian war is old-fashioned: Russia and Iran have backed the Assad dynasty for years. But now the United States and Turkey—two longstanding NATO allies that have often fought together—are on different sides and could stumble into direct conflict. That is only one of the strange, even bizarre alliances and antagonisms in Syria today. The list goes on and on.
Third, the Syrian conflict shows that despite the massive and well-publicized human costs of contemporary wars, the international community has lost its stomach for humanitarian intervention. There was a growing interest in humanitarian intervention after the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the failure to stop the 1994 Rwandan genocide, but the fiasco that followed the 2011 NATO-led military intervention in Libya sucked the life out of it. Today, there are ongoing humanitarian disasters not only in Syria but also in Yemen, South Sudan and Myanmar. But there is no interest in peacemaking by the powerful nations of the world. This unwillingness to stop humanitarian disasters or even outright genocide is likely to continue.
Fourth, Syria demonstrates something that has been evident for decades: The United Nations is unsuited to play a major role in complex, modern wars, particularly when permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, each with a veto over its actions, are involved. But there is also no chance that any other multinational organization with the possible exception of NATO might serve as a platform for collective action to stop a war. And after Libya, even NATO is unlikely to do that outside Europe.
So this is what the Syrian war suggests about future conflicts: They will be intricately complex; they will involve conflict-specific configurations of participants; there will be no humanitarian intervention to stop them; and the United Nations will be a nonfactor. But that isn’t all. It gets even worse. Next week’s column will explain how.
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