The U.S. Enabled Turkey to Invade Syria: Absent the U.N.

Turkey invaded Syria on October 9, 2019 “to flush Kurds allied with the US out of northeastern Syria.”[1] Strategically, Turkey wanted to distance the Kurds from Turkey so they could not aid Kurdish separatists in Turkey should the latter rise up in attempting to establish Kurdistan. U.S. President Don Trump, who had just cleared American troops from northeastern Syria, had advanced knowledge from Turkish President Recep Erdogan that he planned to invade the area once the American troops were out. A rare bipartisan unity in Congress criticized the removal of American troops and the president’s acquiescence on Turkey’s plan to attach the Kurds, an American ally—a plan that could possibly give ISIS a toehold in the region. Both the Congress and the president had their respective rationales, yet neither side looked past the apparent dichotomy to arrive at a solution consistent with the points made by both sides.

Backing up the arguments made by the bipartisan critics in Congress, “Pentagon and State Department officials had advised Trump against making the move, arguing a US presence is needed to counter ISIS and keep Iran and Russia, both influential inside Syria, in check.”[2] Rep. Ro Khanna asked why the president would not at least have asked for a concession from Turkey. That the U.S. was turning its back on “allies who [had] died fighting for a US cause” was also objectionable.[3] Certainly some erosion of trust could be expected. Help the Americans on one of their causes and the next administration may turn on you anyway. To put friends in harm’s way and disavow any responsibility that goes with having received help points to a deep character flaw. While less obvious than is the mentality in preemptively invading another state, the U.S. President’s treatment of the Kurds was also culpable (and the U.S. Government had also preemptively invaded another state—Iraq).

President Trump’s rationale stemmed from his opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the long, senseless war that ensued. He pointed, moreover, to the eight trillion dollars spent by the U.S. and all the dead and wounded American soldiers “fighting and policing in the Middle East.”[4] He had campaigned on getting out of such long, senseless wars whose benefits to the U.S. do not justify the costs in lives and money. His solution in gradually pulling out American forces involved leaving a power-void that could be exploited or filled by adversaries. For example, ISIS could establish more of a presence in northeastern Syria under Turkish occupation. The Syrian Democratic Forces wrote that they were suspending military operations against ISIS in northern Syria following the “Turkish aggression.”[5]

I submit that both the concerns of the Congressional critics and President Trump could have been obviated had the U.S., a major financial contributor to the United Nations, sponsored a resolution in the Security Council for U.N. peacekeeping troops to replace the American forces in northeastern Syria. A contingent coalition could have been put together should Turkey have invaded anyway. American geopolitical interests would have favored a peace-keeping force over a force that could enable the spread of ISIS (like Turkey).

In general terms, the more the world organization of countries can step into troubled areas in peace-keeping roles, the less the world will have to rely on self-interested large countries, such as the U.S., to act as a global policeman. A conflict of interest exists in having one of the state-actors to be such a policeman because the temptation will be to put the state-actor’s own strategic interests above peace-keeping. I contend elsewhere that even if the state does not indulge such a temptation, the conflict-of-interest arrangement, which includes such temptation, is inherently unethical because of the existence of the temptation, given human nature.[6] In northeastern Syria, the U.S. was oriented to rooting out (and preventing) ISIS more than keeping the peace. Even if the official American objective had been peace-keeping, the U.S. would have been tempted to attack new ISIS outposts. Especially in political realism (but also in neorealism), to assume that a state would not act in its own strategic interests is naive. 

Had the U.S. pursued the U.N. option, the tension between the Congressional critics and the administration could have been avoided. This type of problem-resolution—a third way—is particularly beneficial in cases in which both sides to a dispute have good points. I suspect the human mind, whether from nature or nurture, goes to either-or dichotomies too readily. The back-and-forth in a debate is supposed to come to the better answer, but what if a third is even better?

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[1] Nicole Gaouette, “Republican Anger at Trump Grows as Turkey Launches ‘Sickening’ Attack on US Allies,” CNN.com, October 9, 2019 (accessed same day).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Skip Worden, Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available at Amazon. 

International Response to a Chemical Attack in Syria: Beyond the U.N.

In the wake of the chemical-weapons attack in Syria on March 4, 2017, Russia blocked a condemnation and investigation into the source by vetoing the U.N. Security Council resolution. Meanwhile, the American administration’s view of the Syrian government was shifting. President Trump told reporters, “my attitude toward Syria and Assad . . . has changed very much.”[1] Cleverly, the American president would not disclose whether the United States would respond against the Syrian government. The question of whether an empire like the U.S. or an international organization like the U.N. should respond hinged on the question of whether the latter was institutionally hamstrung on account of the power of national sovereignty in the organization. In short, if the U.N. was impotent, then the moral imperative could shift to the major powers in the world, such as China, Russia, the E.U., and the U.S.

 U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley presenting evidence of the chemical attack in Syria.

(Source: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

President Trump said the images of children dying from the chemical attack “crosses many lines.”[2] It had not been the first time that such an attack had occurred during the tenure of the Assad regime. Trump noted that to draw a line in the sand and sit by as it is crossed as if with impunity would be weak. It could be added that such a self-imposed impotence is immoral, given the likelihood of future suffering in Syria if the status quo were to continue.

Naturally, the world looked to the U.N. to condemn the attack and confirm that the Assad regime had been behind the attack. For an ally of Assad, namely Russia, to block even an investigation suggests that the veto-power itself on the Security Council is problematic. In fact, it could be argued that the power relegates the U.N. and opens up a power-void into which governments critical of the chemical attack could legitimately fill. “Time and time again Russia uses the same false narrative to deflect attention from their allies in Damascus. How many more children have to die before Russia cares?” Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., said.[3] The moral imperative was clear. “When the United Nations consistently fails in its duty to act collectively, there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to take our own action.”[4] The U.N.’s failure to reform itself such that its Security Council can act essentially relegates the institution, such that global powers may find themselves morally obliged to step in and essentially do the U.N.’s job in enforcing its rules on a recalcitrant member—Syria being a member of the U.N.

In the early 1990s, the United States effectively led a “coalition of the willing” to undo the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The legitimacy of this reaction on behalf of international law was in part due to the failure of the U.N. to act even to enforce its own rules. It is telling that the proposed resolution on the Syrian chemical attack “expresses its determination that those responsible must be held accountable” but provides “no concrete measures to do so.”[5] Sadly, even if the resolution would have passed, its impact would likely have been nugatory. Why then go through the motions if not just for the PR? Is that what international law is to be—an avenue for good PR? It is not surprising that members have flaunted U.N. rules, clearly being aware in advance of the impunity that would result from violating them. The U.N.’s approach to its own rules and resolutions detracts from a culture internationally in which international law is regarded as law rather than something like a preference or window-dressing.

Given the dangers from countries having nuclear weapons, and the danger facing the species itself from climate change, it can be argued that even coming to depend on coalitions of the willing would be insufficient. In other words, given the gravity of the modern problems facing our species, some compromise on national sovereignty makes sense. That even such a compromise may be too difficult suggests in turn that our species may not be up to handling the most serious threats to our very survival. The real blockage may be in the human mind—specifically, the stubborn refusal to admit even the possibility of being wrong and thus needed to change. This would explain why the U.N. has perpetuated its own impotence.

 

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[1] Michael D. Shear and Peter Baker, “Trump’s View of Syria and Assad Altered After ‘Unacceptable’ Chemical Attack,” The New York Times, April 5, 2017.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Somini Sengupta and Rick Gladstone, “Nikki Haley Says U.S. May ‘Take Our Own Action’ on Syrian Chemical Attack,” The New York Times,  April 5, 2017.

China and Russia Protect Syria’s Assad on Chemical Weapons: A Matter of Priorities

All bets are off when it comes to regulating war. Such a condition is virtually by definition beyond the confines of law. Even international law is but an impotent dwarf next to the raw force of a governmental regime at war—whether with its own citizens or another country. To be sure, the International Criminal Court had by 2017 made a dent in holding some perpetrators of atrocities such as genocide accountable for their deeds. Such efforts were still the exception, unfortunately, when Russia, China, and Bolivia vetoes a resolution in the U.N. Security Council that would have penalize Syria’s Issad regime for having used chemical weapons on Syrians. The reasons for the vetoes—and the fact that Egypt, Ethiopia, and Kazakhstan all obstained—implies that holding perpetrators accountable by international means had not yet become a priority at the international level.

Russia’s envoy, Vladimir Safronkov, defended the veto by calling the resolution “politically biased.” He asserted, “This is railroading the draft by the Western troika.”[1] In other words, the Russian government put its rivalry with the West above holding a friend accountable. Only months earlier, the U.S. Government had refused to veto a resolution condemning its friend, Israel, for retroactively legalizing illegal Jewish settlements on private Palestinian land. So it was with some clout that the American ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley, accused Russia and China of putting “their friends in the Assad regime ahead of our global security. . . . It is a sad day for the Security Council when members make excuses for other [members] killing their own people.”[2] What may not be noticed prime facie is the implication that a regime killing its own people is deprioritized when government officials prioritize friendly governments who commit such acts.

What would it take for the world as a whole to attach more importance in terms of other priorities to stopping and preventing crimes against humanity? Even intent to protect the precedent of national sovereignty—something China’s government has made a priority at the U.N.—is a deprioritizing of the crimes that a government commits against its own people and other peoples. The message is that such acts are normal, or at least tolerable. Perhaps it would take only a massive occurrence for the world as a whole to stop and admit that the usual international relations are themselves no longer viable because they are insufficient, given the priority suddenly put on the crimes themselves.  

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[1] Somini Sengupta, “Russia and China Veto Penalties on Syria Over Use of Chemical Arms,” The New York Times, February 28, 2017.

[2] Ibid.

Russia’s Putin on National Sovereignty: Political Realism Undone?

On February 28, 2014, Ukraine’s UN Ambassador Yurly Sergeyev informed the Security Council that Russia had invaded the Crimean Peninsula, a semi-autonomous region of the sovereign state. Heretofore, in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons, Russia had agreed in a treaty to respect the territorial borders of the Soviet Union’s former republic. After briefly discussing whether Putin’s land-grab should have come as a surprise to the world, I take a critical look at the Russian president’s rationale for invasion. I argue that political realism (i.e., strategic interests of particular states being the signature feature of international relations) undergirds Putin’s geo-political view. This foundation is problematic as evinced by Putin’s inconsistencies on national sovereignty.

Coming on the heels of the Olympic games meant to showcase Russia to the world, Putin’s show of force must have come as a complete surprise to the world.[1] After all, on the day before the obviously-planned invasion, Vitally Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations had dismissed with a burst of haughty laughter a journalist’s question on whether Russia was suddenly conducting its “military exercises” near Crimea as a cloaked precursor to invasion. Indeed, the diplomat even conveyed a sense of having been insulted by the very question! We, the rest of the world, were being played like a sleepy fiddle.

A day or two before the invasion, unmarked Russians brought in by bus (members of Putin’s favorite biker group being among them) took over the provincial legislature. Once the Russian thugs were in control there, the pro-Russian Crimean leader, Sergey Aksyonov, somehow found himself installed as the region’s ruler. He “returned the favor” by asking Putin for help in maintaining peace.[2] The two-step dance by the emperor and his aspiring governor-to-be resulted in a sham referendum quickly followed by a hasty annexation of Crimea as a region of Russia. The sheer speed of these events belied the veracity of the Russian narrative, a mere gloss for the de facto power of possession.

Speaking with U.S. President Barak Obama on the first day of the invasion, Putin stressed “the presence of real dangers to the lives and health of Russians who are currently present in the Ukrainian territory.” Putin stressed that Russia reserves the right to defend its interests and the Russian-speaking people who live in Ukraine.[3] Indeed, the Russian president claimed that Russia’s parliament had explicitly given him the right to intervene in Ukraine militarily. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s acting President Oleksadr Turchynov insisted that any reports of Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens in the Crimean region being at all threatened were pure fiction, and thus merely a Russian front or subterfuge for raw military aggression.

Surely international law does not confer Russia, or any other sovereign country for that matter, with the right to invade (not to mention annex) other sovereign states simply because its ex-patriots may find their ethnicity is not fully protected; strategic geo-political interests of a state runs up against the doctrine of national sovereignty. Of course, this doctrine can give way, as a natural rather than state-sourced (and thus delimited!) right arguably exists to intervene across national boundaries if the systematic harm to inhabitants is sufficiently grave (e.g., the Nazi holocaust). As a likely subterfuge for taking the entire eastern half of Ukraine after having conquered Crimea, Putin attempted just this rationale. “If the Kiev government is using the army against its own people this is clearly a grave crime,” he said.[4] It would indeed be, were Ukraine’s government turning against ethnic Russians as Assad’s Syrian government had turned on protesters. Yet ironically Putin had vetoed efforts by the UN Security Council to sanction efforts to intervene in Syria, which unlike Ukraine could enjoy the absolutist variant of national sovereignty. Putin’s inconsistency on national sovereignty undercuts not only his credibility, but also that of his political theory of choice, political realism.

Being based on the primacy of a state’s power-interests, political realism implies a semi-permeable rather than absolutist rendering of national sovereignty. In his seventeenth-century masterpiece, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argues that a sovereign ruler should be given the power to do whatever he wants if peace is the aim. A century earlier, Jean Bodin also held an absolutist view of sovereignty, though unlike Hobbes, the sovereign is bounded by divine law while still ruling rather than only in divine judgment in the afterlife. So even within the absolutist camp, discernable differences exist (albeit premised on the belief in divine punishment—which held considerable sway in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries).

Whereas the state that subscribes to political realism (i.e., the primacy of the country’s own interests) regards its national sovereignty as absolute (i.e., being invaded is not in the state’s geo-political interests), the story is quite otherwise with respect to the sovereignty of other countries (i.e., being invaded may be in the realist state’s interests). This inconsistency with respect to national sovereignty points to a fault-line running through political realism itself. 

At least in Russia's case, the absolutist interpretation is only to be selectively defended (i.e., when violating it is contrary Russia’s geo-political national interests), and with it the right to intervene in another country’s internal affairs. The oxymoron of a state-designated right being somehow valid beyond that state’s borders is itself indicative of the sheer incredulity of Putin’s stance. Perhaps the truly perplexing question bears on why the ruler of a modern empire would suppose that such logical problems can safely be dismissed. Perhaps the answer is that the world is all too willing to comply, being still too comfortable with antiquated ideas and ways.

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[i] See “The 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia: ‘Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire.”

[ii] Chelsea Carter, Diana Magnay, and Ingrid Formanek, “Obama, Putin Discuss Growing Ukraine Crisis,” CNN, March 1, 2014.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Jacob Resneck and Olga Rudenko, “Putin Issues New Threat,” USA Today, April 25, 2014.