Charles W. King

On April 13th, 2018, the Trump administration bombed a number sites in Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in the ongoing Syrian Civil War. In the aftermath much has been made of the fact that the United States warned the Russian government that the strikes were incoming. In the current political climate in the U.S. this kind of coordination with Russia is being characterized in some quarters as further evidence in support of the allegations that the Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russia. Regardless of these allegations, the act of warning the Russian government of the April 13th strikes is not unusual. De-escalation procedures like this are common, and are a specific strategic choice that the United States and other have made in the past for good reason.

Throughout the Korean War and the Vietnam War both North Korean and North Vietnamese forces received substantial aid from the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. Both sides maintained that American forces were not engaged with, killing, and being killed by Chinese and Russian forces. This was a fiction agreed upon by all sides, particularly in the air wars over Korea and Vietnam. Many of the pilots were Russian or Chinese, as were the crews and officers of much of North Korea’s and North Vietnam’s air defenses. The American, Chinese, and Soviet governments understood that if they admitted that their pilots were regularly engaged with forces of the opposing super-powers the conflicts would escalate from regional one to global, and likely nuclear, wars. Despite the intense competition between the world powers, this kind of escalation was not something they desired, and the mutually agreed upon fiction allowed that. A famous example of this is illustrated in the theatrical depiction of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Roger Donaldson’s Thirteen Days. An American pilot returns from taking pictures of missile sites in Cuba with what are clearly bullet holes in his aircraft, but having received instructions from the White House he jokingly tells his ground crew that he, “Ran into a flock of sparrows.” Admitting he had taken anti-aircraft fire would have precipitated a response that would have escalated the conflict just as the United States and Soviet Union were attempting to reign it in.

Warning rivals or even the targets of incoming attacks is also a long standing de-escalation practice, though not always a successful one. On July 22, 1946, the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed. The southern wing of the hotel housed the central offices of the government of the British Mandate of Palestine, the target of the bombing. The attack was carried out by the Irgun, a right-wing militant zionist organization. Attempts were made by the Irgun to warn the British, but what happened remains controversial. What is for certain is that the hotel was not evacuated and ninety-one people were killed. The attempted warnings are nonetheless important for understanding the Irgun’s objectives. The bombing would doubtless be an escalation, but the target was the hotel, a symbol of British rule, rather than the people. By trying to mitigate the loss of life the Irgun attempted to escalate the conflict, but not too much. The destruction of building and other capital expenditures without killing the people who work there remains an important, if difficult practice in the conduct of warfare.

The decisions to inform the Russian government of incoming strikes against chemical weapons facilities in Syria is in keeping with a long-standing practice of de-escalation. Preventing the direct engagement between forces of two global powers in a warzone where they both possess a military presence is difficult but essential. The use of warnings to ensure that attacks destroy capital investments in things like weapons programs without loss of life is a feature of modern warfare along with precisions weapons and advanced surveillance. Warning the Russians of this particular attack demonstrates its limited objectives and the desire to prevent escalation to a conflict between the United States and the Russian Federation.

Charles W. King

As Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies prepare to seize the port of Hodeidah in Yemen, the World Health Organization and the United Nations are reporting a rising death toll from cholera. They forecast 150,000 new cases in the next month. A faction of the Hadi government has split off, without the southern leaders the government is in peril.

Across the Gulf of Aden Somalia is suffering from increasing drought. Al Shabaab is capitalizing on the inability of the government in Mogadishu to provide the humanitarian relief. Instead of barring aid organizations as they did in 2011, Al Shabaab is taking responsibility for providing food and water to Somalis where the Somali Federal Government cannot.

In Egypt the government of President Adbel Fattah el-Sisi has passed legislation requiring 47,000 local and 100 foreign non-governmental aid organizations to get approval from a new regulatory body. That body has not yet been established, aid organizations predict that it will be more of a roadblock than a regulator

On June 1st the Economist reported on Mohieddine Manfoush, a Syrian dairy farmer who provides dairy to Damascus and dry goods to cities besieged by government forces. Small entrepreneurs who could not afford to flee the Syrian conflict are filling the gaps left by those who could.

Meanwhile the United States is increasing its military support for Kurdish and Iraqi forces, both through military aid and the increasing deployment of American Special Forces and support troops, including artillery batteries. In a recent statement Emmanuel Macron, the recently elected President of France, pledged French intervention in the event of the use of chemical weapons in Syria. While the West is focusing on guns, many of the states and non-state actors in the Middle East are focused on butter.

Islamic State’s rapid growth was fueled not only by foreign fighters, but by its enthusiasm for replicating the functions of the state. As it expanded across Syria and Iraq Islamic State repaired infrastructure, instituted and enforced law, and sought to reinforce its claim to the Caliphate not only through religious dogma but by mimicking state institutions. The entrenchment of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon owe more to their willingness to provide governance and humanitarian relief than their military effectiveness.

The recognition that legitimacy derives not only from military force but also from the ability to protect and provide for the welfare of the people is not a recent innovation. The People’s Republic of China is acutely aware of how its declining economic growth may affect its legitimacy with the Chinese people. In the nineteenth century Germany and the Ottoman Empire instituted widespread reforms to strengthen state institutions and quiet domestic unrest. Providing health and prosperity engenders stability and suppot.

In Yemen cholera cases are rising and a longer conflict looms. Al Shabaab is positioning itself as a reliable source of governance and aid in rural Somalia. The el-Sisi government is increasing its control of aid organizations in Egypt. The government of Bashar al-Assad has recognized the need control over the flow of vital goods including food in the Syrian civil war. As these humanitarians crises in the Middle East worsen, the United States and the West remain fixated on killing jihadists and preventing the use of chemical weapons, and are providing guns and missiles to that end. Middle Eastern governments and insurgents alike have recognized the importance of providing milk, water, and wheat.

Charles W. King

Today much of the Western public and many Western policy-makers and diplomats have a dangerous conception of world history. In this popular version history Western liberal democracy is the inevitable result of hundreds of years of unbroken prosperity and progress towards ever greater suffrage and markets, and the collapse of Eastern empires in Russia, China and the Middle East in the twentieth century was a death rattle of a disease that lasted just as long. This is a profound misunderstanding of history and leads to an erroneous perception of Eastern nations being not only behind, but centuries behind the West. Acting on this incorrect conception of history demonstrates massive hubris, and makes it difficult to understand foreign perspectives and formulate good strategies and foreign policy.

The free market is one of the hallmarks of Western liberalism. Some historians and pundits have drawn a direct line from modern free trade back five hundred years to rudimentary markets in European towns and villages. This connection demonstrates a failure to understand how different medieval market trade and modern capitalism are. The former was not unique to Europe and the latter is a much more recent and dramatic change than this version of events would indicate. Stock exchanges may have existed for more than a hundred years when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, but Britain would remain a mercantilist empire for another hundred years.

The point at which Europe set foot on the path would lead to its dominance in the twentieth century is possibly the most controversial ongoing debate in academic history. The problematic connection of medieval markets to industrial capitalism represents a small set of historians and others who have gone looking to find that divergence as far back as possible. There is much more convincing evidence to suggest that the divergence between Europe, Asia and the Middle East happened much later than many people believe.

Another major milestone of Western liberalism is the commoditization of land. In feudal systems land was ruled by lords, held in common, and rights to use a given plot of land were not inheritable. Enclosure and the Doctrine of Improvement in English Common Law changed this. As a commodity land could be traded, as something owned privately investment in increased productivity was worthwhile. The commoditization of land in Western Europe was an essential innovation that provided the agricultural output needed to fuel empire, or so the story goes. Except commoditization of land was not unique to England at the time, or even unique to Europe. Ottoman tax records from Palestine, Iraq, and Anatolia show that land was being traded as a commodity there too, independent of similar innovation in Europe. The failure of the Ottoman Empire’s Tanzimat reforms in the nineteenth century are frequently used as evidence of the empire’s status as ‘The Sick Man of Europe’ but this ignores the fact that the Empire was implementing these reforms not decades after its European counterparts but in the same time frame and its efforts, while not as successful as either the UK or Germany, were more successful than Spanish or Austro-Hungarian reforms. Treating the Ottoman Empire and the states that descend from it as backwards is a serious error.

That Western empires and their resulting liberal democracies have had a dominant position on the world state recently is not arguable. But this has not always been the case, and it is important that historians and policy makers avoid conceptions of history that emphasize how, and for how long Europe has been dominant. It leads to erroneous conclusions and poses significant problems for policy-making and the conducting of diplomacy. It makes it difficult to apprehend and understand the perspective of nations in Asia and the Middle East, and it prevents good policy-making by treating liberal democracy deterministically.

Further Reading

Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasats in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Pres: 1995).

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).