Month: April 2010

With the‭ ‬end‭ ‬of the great military confrontation in Central Europe,‭ ‬world wars are unlikely to recur.‭ ‬In the heteropolar world order which is arising, tensions will be generated and sparks will fly, but major powers will find non-violent ways to resolve their differences.

They must, if the catastrophic consequences associated with the failure to accommodate power shifts in the 20th century – two world wars and the Cold War – are not to be repeated.

State failure in secondary areas, on the other hand, can be managed – so to speak – mainly through denial, an averted gaze or, not infrequently, wilful blindness.

Among the residual conflicts that remain in the age of globalization, small-scale,‭ ‬irregular wars,‭ ‬ ‬such as those being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq,‭ ‬and asymmetrical wars,‭ ‬such as the Global War on Terror,‭ ‬ have moved to centre stage. Essentially discretionary in nature, these somewhat exotic, episodic contests have pitted regular militaries against an unconventional opposition, at best with mixed results.‭

Such types of conflict are often conflated, and are becoming more common. Yet success‭ ‬-‭ ‬as expressed through greater security‭ ‬-‭ ‬has not been achieved.‭

Foreign ministries, among others, have not been pre-occupied with assessing the meaning of these sorts of shifts, or the impact on how they conduct their operations abroad.

Not so, however, with the departments of defence. In‭ ‬1989,‭ ‬a group of serving and former members of the US military,‭ ‬mainly marines,‭ ‬put forth a very focused discussion of insurgency in a paper entitled‭ ‬Fourth Generation Warfare‭ (‬4GW‭).

The authors maintain that the essence of warfare has evolved from massed manpower,‭ ‬to massed firepower,‭ ‬to manoeuvre,‭ ‬and now to a fourth stage characterized by asymmetry.‭ ‬The old linear,‭ ‬hierarchic and orderly doctrines and practices must therefore be replaced by an appreciation of the unpredictable,‭ ‬loosely networked and disorderly conditions so prevalent in battle today,‭ ‬particularly in the often remote and turbulent areas where most of contemporary conflict occurs.

The ever-evolving nature of war has been captured especially eloquently by retired British general Sir Rupert Smith in‭ ‬The Utility of Force.‭ ‬Smith maintains that the all-out struggles of the‭ ‬20th century,‭ ‬epic trials of strength which he terms‭ “‬industrial war,‭” ‬have been made obsolete by nuclear weapons,‭ ‬and been replaced by a battle of wills,‭ ‬or‭ “‬war amongst the people,‭” ‬whose outcomes must ultimately be settled by political rather than military means.‭ ‬This was the case for conflicts in Northern Ireland,‭ ‬Cyprus,‭ ‬Algeria and Vietnam. A related lesson was painfully re-learned in Iraq,  and the need to find a negotiated end to NATO’s engagement in Afghanistan will almost certainly become the received wisdom  there.

The sad experience with the initially inept, uncoordinated response of the international community to the recent earthquake in Haiti provides a different angle on this observation. Decades of military intervention by a variety of outside forces,‭ ‬followed sometimes by internationally supervised elections,‭ ‬has not proven a successful substitute for the wholesale failure of development.

In any event…Irregular warfare ‬has‭ ‬become the new normal in global conflict. Its prevalence has given rise to innovative approaches to conflict management,‭ ‬such as the‭ “‬Three Block War‭”‬,‭ and Canada’s ‬3D (defence, development, diplomacy) approach to international intervention.‭ In 2006 the US Department of Defense released a new counterinsurgency strategy and strategic studies scholars are moving to organize and codify the various new approaches.

Some see all of this amounting to a‭ “‬revolution in military affairs‭”‬,‭ ‬a theory which originated in the USA and proved very popular with the Bush administration. Adherents suggest that changes in technology and organization have transformed the ways in which wars can and should be fought.‭

This‭ “‬revolution,‭” ‬moreover,‭ ‬has not produced the results its proponents predicted.‭ ‬Instead,‭ ‬it has prompted observations that:‭

• the technologically strong cannot necessarily or always defeat the militarily weak,‭ ‬especially if the latter have the support of the local population‭

• insurgent forces can inflict‭ (‬politically‭) ‬significant casualties against a much better armed opposition‭; ‬vulnerability has become mutual‭

• when organized militaries,‭ ‬regardless of their notional capacities,  pursue irregular militants, victory can by no means be assured and blowback is likely

• tactical,‭ ‬real time intelligence plus precision munitions cannot replace boots on the ground‭

‭All of this is fine, but an even larger message  seems to have been missed.

‭If counterinsurgency is 80% political, then why ask the military to take the lead in the first place? Their resources have attracted such taskings, yet this is – or should be – a job for diplomats.

‭That said, p‬olicy planning units in foreign ministries have for the most part not been engaged in thinking through the implications.

This is regrettable, because political officers and public diplomacy should have a central role in addressing the drivers of contemporary conflict.

In my recent travels down under, I was struck repeatedly by the sense in which New Zealand and Australia seem for a Canadian at once remote yet accessible, exotic yet familiar.

They are in, but not of the Global South.

I was even more impressed by the extent to which the necessity of adapting to the reality of power shift – notably from the North Atlantic to the Asia Pacific – has registered at both the official level and among the population writ large in both countries.

As Anglophone outliers on the fringe of a former empire, this strategic and historical re-orientation is in many respects understandable, especially given the stunning rise of China and India, the steady progress of integration in Southeast Asia, and the extant economic accomplishments of Japan and Korea. Still, and certainly more so than countries in Europe or the Americas, they are doing what they can to position themselves to advantage.

As I travelled around, field testing the Guerrilla Diplomacy message – namely that the time is ripe for a revolution in diplomatic affairs and the adoption of an alternative understanding of security,‭ ‬development,‭ ‬and international relations in globalization age – the main lines of argument seemed to resonate.

Kiwis and Aussies didn’t need much convincing that if they are going to prosper in the Pacific Century, then they will have to make the most of their diplomatic assets in an increasingly heteropolar world.

For them – as for Canada – hard power coercion is simply not an option. And even if people are not shouting from the rooftops that grand strategy is urgently required, most of those whom I encountered were far less quiescent about their place in the world than your average North American.

Many of those I spoke with even agreed that diplomacy does, or at least should matter.

Nonetheless,‭ in the Antipodes as elsewhere, diplomacy ‬has been marginalized,‭ ‬sidelined,‭ ‬and is in crisis. It is suffering from the same “triple whammy” which has exacted such a devastating toll just about everywhere:‭

• the continuing militarization of international affairs, through which policy has become an instrument of war,‭ ‬rather than reverse, and as a result of which foreign ministries find themselves severely under-resourced

• the substantial failure‭ of diplomatic institutions to ‬adapt their practices to exigencies of globalization, resulting in structures that remain far too risk averse, hierarchic and authoritarian, and largely without the capacity to manage the emerging suite of transnational issues which are rooted in science and driven by technology‭

• the debilitating image, if I may paraphrase the London cabbies whom I focus tested last fall, of diplomacy as synonymous with weakness and appeasement, and diplomats as dithering dandies, hopelessly lost in haze of irrelevance somewhere between protocol and alcohol.‭

Today,‭ then, diplomacy is suffering from grave problems of both image and substance. It is not delivering results for governments or for citizens. To make matters worse, that performance gap is exacerbated by an environment in which the‬ demand for diplomacy vastly outstrips its supply.‭

Evidence of this yawning diplomatic deficit is found not only in the rising tide of suffering,‭ ‬inequality,‭ and ‬unaddressed threats which beset us, but also in the ongoing socialization of globalization’s costs and‭ ‬the privatization of its benefits. The resulting polarization, coupled with the abject failure of diplomacy to engage remedially, in my view constitutes a peril far greater than ‭than any kind of terrorism, political extremism or religious violence.

So. If you don’t want to live in some variation of a of surveillance driven, razor wire encrusted green zone, with security provided by Blackwater and sanitation by KBR, what to do? How to break from this vicious cycle, to get from the unenviable place where we are to somewhere better?

Voyages down under have brought me back to first principles.

In the first instance, the art of international political communication through dialogue, negotiation and compromise needs a new,‭ more ‬contemporary narrative which goes well beyond the current discourse on either traditional or public diplomacy.

There are signs that this project is underway.

Secondly, analysts require a whirled view, a model of global order which extends well beyond the obsolete and territorially distinct notions of first, second and third worlds.

This, too, may be in train.

Finally, a radical and comprehensive reconstruction of mainstream thinking about the essential nature of international relations is long overdue.

Evidence of that enterprise remains scant.

On this climate change challenged, pandemic disease ridden, chronically resource scarce planet we live on, governments desperately need to find a better way forward, one without the enormous human and financial costs associated with the use of armed force.  I would suggest that they start by investing in the creation of a cadre of diplomatic professionals adept at knowledge-based problem solving, and able to apply complex balancing skills among and between sharply competing values, policies and interests.

Defence departments have the money, but this isn’t a job for soldiers.

And aspiring international policy bureaucrats –  those who now dominate diplomatic services and who favour life “in the bubble” to that in the street and prefer chatting with colleagues about what might be going on outside to finding out for themselves – need not apply.

It is time to hold on dispatching the legionnaires and instead to invest in the development of guerrilla diplomacy