Still Ours to Lead: America, Rising Powers, and the Tension between Rivalry and Restraint

Chapter Six: Muddling Through and Missed Opportunities: Crises and Intervention

chapter six muddling through and missed opportunities Crises and Intervention 126 There is another instance of the emerging and established powers cooperating on the high seas, and it is off the coast of Lebanon. There, in the eastern Mediterranean, the Turkish, Indonesian, and Brazilian navies copatrol alongside those of France, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands, monitoring the boundary between Israeli and Lebanese waters.1 But in Lebanon, cooperation between these powers is not limited to the seas; it extends to land as well—troops from Brazil, China, Turkey , India, and Indonesia form part of a peacekeeping force alongside troops from France, Germany, and Spain, among others. These troops were deployed under an unusual arrangement put in place by the United Nations in August 2006 to help stabilize Lebanon after a thirty-four-day war between Israel and Hezbollah. One of the sharpest claims of the “coming disorder” and the decline of the American-led world is that the emergence of new powers will erode the ability of the Western-led order to manage crises—or at least that signs of this phenomenon are becoming evident.2 When crises raise the prospect that one or more of the major powers may intervene in the conflict, they pull on the most sensitive trip wires in international politics, the issues of sovereignty and the use of force. The further risk is a return to proxy wars that characterized the U.S.-Soviet entanglement in the Middle East, South Asia, and other parts of the developing world during the cold war. Proxy wars risk direct U.S.-Russian or perhaps U.S.China confrontation, to say nothing of tremendous human suffering. 06-2512-1 chap6.indd 126 1/8/14 3:50 PM Muddling Through and Missed Opportunities 127 Russian and Chinese intransigence over potential UN action in Syria, and that country’s descent into a hybrid internal, regional, and proxy war, is a case in point.3 Indeed, Syria has become a kind of perverse poster child for deadlock in the international system and the collapse of American leadership.4 Consider the following. A ruthless government with a strong and effective army is attacking civilians, using every weapon in its arsenal. An opposition is fighting back, but the violence has already produced tens of thousands of deaths and the outflow of hundreds of thousands of refugees. The UN Security Council, deadlocked over forceful action, is limiting itself to expressions of “grave concern.” It agrees only to deploy an unarmed civilian monitoring team, which will, later, have to retreat under fire. Russia is leading the opposition to the more forceful UN intervention. The United States is contemplating intervention through NATO but is hesitant. It continues to pursue diplomacy with Russia to see whether a peaceful resolution can be found. Is this Syria at the onset of American decline? No, it is Kosovo in the fall of 1998, at the peak of American power. To point to past tragedies is not to downplay the significance of new ones, but the past does serve to remind us to use a reasonable yardstick in assessing the current landscape. And the fact is, in the contemporary moment, Syria is an exception, not the rule. There is little in this landscape to indicate a decisive shift to international deadlock and proxy war. Different crises elicit different behavior, and across the range of cases we see repeated instances of joint action and cooperation, as in Lebanon. Only one type of crisis—authoritarian crackdowns on a civilian population—divides the powers. And even then there are important divides among the emerging powers; some of them—notably Brazil and India—are on the fence about issues of intervention. The United States has missed important opportunities to pull these states into broader political coalitions in support of crisis action. Fixing that is essential to effective international crisis management. If deadlock between the Western and the authoritarian powers over the crisis in Syria were symptomatic of a broader breakdown, then we should already be seeing signs of a breakdown of efforts through the UN Security Council to respond to internal wars, both to protect the state and to protect citizens. But the opposite is true. 06-2512-1 chap6.indd 127 1/8/14 3:50 PM 128 Of Rivalry and Restraint Internal Wars and Threats to the State Coordinated international responses to internal wars have not always been a feature of...