#BTColumn – Deceptions of international relations

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by Dr. Peter Laurie

Two current international issues have caused me, after a long career in diplomacy, to think again about how we understand and interpret the nature of international relations.
One was the recent American withdrawal from Afghanistan. The other is the perceived growing rivalry between the US and China.

The US withdrawal from Afghanistan after a twenty-year presence has thrown the American foreign policy establishment into a tizzy. Apart from their criticism of the evacuation, which was messy but frankly could not have been otherwise, they interpret the withdrawal as either the US withdrawing from the world, or the US being humiliated in yet another long war.

Some have reacted angrily to the fact that the US cooperated with the Taliban in the evacuation. What else should they have done? That was smart diplomacy.

Years from now, when the dust has settled, the sheer scale of the Kabul evacuation will be compared to that other historic heroic evacuation, Dunkirk, 1940, when the British successfully withdrew their soldiers from the encircling German forces across the Channel on the coast of France.

Yes, the allies lost that battle, but they won the war.

The foreign policy analysts are agonising over whether the US will still be able to project force across the world if they were defeated by the Taliban, a relatively small insurgent force. Reality check: they were not defeated; they did not lose the ‘war’. The Taliban was routed within a couple of years of the American invasion.

Biden simply acknowledged the fact that the subsequent American attempt at nation-building in Afghanistan was a colossal expensive failure that could no longer be sustained. I understand that it’s hard to admit that all that blood and treasure was a wasted sacrifice, but that’s the way it is.

The problem is that 9/11 has, understandably, traumatised the American foreign policy establishment into a mind-set of having the US wage a never-ending ‘war on terror’. Of course, you can and should respond to specific terrorist actions or threats, but waging a ‘war on terror’ is a nebulous goal that is a stupid and futile undertaking that can easily get you engaged unnecessarily in trouble spots all over the world.

Segue to China. The American foreign policy establishment has for some time now been talking up the rise and expansion of China’s influence across the globe (the so-called Belt and Road Initiative of Chinese investment in other countries’ infrastructure) as an existential threat to the US. And when they say ‘existential’ they mean it. Literally.

They see China’s inevitable rise to be the largest economy in the world (after all their entrepreneurial population is almost 1.5 billion compared to the US$331 million (a population that will only be truly creative and even more innovative when the forces of white supremacy and neo-liberal Republicanism have been defeated), along with the biggest military, as having the inevitable consequence of isolating and possibly invading and conquering the US. Of course, both countries might take the course of mutual assured destruction in an all-out nuclear war, which, sad to say, for some would be a better alternative to the US ceasing to be no.1.

The foreign policy arguments derive partly from American hubris, but are also the result of a fatuous analysis of international relations based on false premises and one that still persists, despite many new perspectives, in diplomacy.

International relations theory is grounded in the history of Europe from the 17th century (the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the Thirty Years War) to the Second World War.

The traditional theory of how states actually behave — and should behave — is based on the almost permanent state of war between the ‘Great Powers’ of Europe. Peace was merely the absence of war in which European states, suspicious of each other, shifted alliances and prepared for war.

Next to nothing was discussed about the inter-relationships within civilisations like China, India, the Muslim caliphates, the Americas before the European invasions, nor, of course, Africa prior to the European conquests. Very little account was also taken of the human catastrophe that was colonialism, other than to see colonies as extensions of the power of the European states.

The point is that traditional international relations, based on this historical euro-centric model, is essentially about ‘great powers’ constantly jockeying for power, eyeing each other with suspicion and preparing for war in what can be fairly called a zero-sum game.
Even where alliances are made they tend to be seen as pacts of temporary convenience.

As Henry Kissinger, mimicking Lord Palmerston before him, said, “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests”. As an extension of the analysis, we read about ‘spheres of influence’, ‘theatres of conflict’ and so on.

In this traditional analysis of relations between states, small states are absent except as client states, or states perceived as hostile to one or another great power, or as passive pawns in a game of ‘five-dimensional chess’ a favourite phrase of the traditional analysts.

The problem with this traditional approach to the interpretation of international relations is that it leads to self-fulfilling prophecies. It is axiomatic in the traditional view that the rise of one great power automatically threatens another power, hence the extraordinary focus on the US vs China rivalry.

There is absolutely no reason why the two countries cannot co-exist and compete peacefully in today’s world Apart from the appalling prospect of an unintended war between the two, there are negative consequences for small states like those in the Caribbean, which is seen by these analysts as simply a prominent ‘theatre of conflict’, as if human beings with their own lives and dreams don’t live here.

What the traditional analysts misperceive even more is the gradual but steady decline in the significance for global peace and prosperity of sovereign states and their multilateral institutions. For example, governments seem incapable of coming together to effectively manage the global COVID-19 pandemic or the devastating threat of climate change, not to mention massive refugee flows. Instead, we depend more on NGOs, faith groups, private foundations, scientists, young activists and groups like Doctors Without Borders.

Increasingly, it is these philanthropic agents of global civil society who now carry the burden of human responsibility, while governments still dismiss, if only privately, the idea that people outside their sovereignties are fully human: ‘globaloney’, as the Trumpist right openly calls it.

What we are witnessing, spurred on by the digital revolution and social media, is the gradual crumbling of national sovereignty, like a rusting infrastructure, and the emergence of a new framework — I hesitate to use the word ‘governance’ — for global human relationships.

The multilateral intergovernmental institutions created in the wake of the Second World War are also creaking at the seams, not ‘fit for purpose’ in the face of the global problems that humanity now confronts.

No doubt the state will always be with us. At the same time, it is under pressure from within. Citizens across the world, who feel ignored and neglected, are demanding a bigger and continuous say in their governance.

Unless governments can provide a way to integrate new forms of citizen participation into systems of representative democracy, the result will be the rise of fascist populist movements, manipulated by scoundrels like Trump.

Of course, hard-nosed traditional analysts of international relations will scoff at all this. Power, like poverty, they will sniff snidely, will always be with us, as they drift on their disintegrating raft down the river of irrelevance to the waterfall of nowhere.
Sorry. I got carried away on my own raft of metaphor.

Dr. Peter Laurie is a retired permanent secretary and head of the Foreign Service who once served as Barbados’ Ambassador to the United States.