Tag Archives: force

Thinking Through Ukraine

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(via The DailyKos)

I was at NATO when Russia invaded its neighbor, Georgia, in August 2008. The action caught anyone not paying attention by surprise. The experts knew it was long in coming. I’m sure the same is for the unfurling crisis in Ukraine, which nonetheless doesn’t help us steer a course away from general war on the Black Sea, the doorstep of the European Union.

At the time of that short, brutal war I remember there were many calls for NATO to intervene and a tremendous amount of frustration that the Allies did not. But a French colleague pointed out to those of us assembled in my division — we were short-staffed during the August holidays — that NATO’s contribution at that point was not to inflame the situation but to defuse it. The European Union, led by French President Nicholas Sarkozy, led the political charge to end the war within a week.

I remember a little-noted post scriptum to that war — NATO’s inadvertent (I think) contribution — that may be useful to keep in mind in this crisis. That was the introduction of the NATO Standing Maritime Group 1 into the Black Sea after fighting had ended. SMG1 entered the Black Sea on a planned and routine patrol — either it was deliberately allowed into this highly primed theater or nobody thought to turn it back — and the Russian reaction was hysterical. After the Russians sank the small Georgian fleet and basically did what they wanted across the country, SMG1 fundamentally altered the force dynamic in the theater. SMG1 really got the Russians’ attention, and it suggests to me that Moscow will never pick a fight with an equal or superior adversary if it can avoid it.

It’s probably obvious, but an excellent commentary by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty noted that the territorial grab in Crimea is not an isolated action but opens a second political front for Moscow. The revolution in Kiev was a green light to similarly minded activists in Moscow that thuggish regimes have their weaknesses, especially if the military can be sidelined. By mobilizing the armed forces against Ukraine, Russia both moved to crush the nascent west-leaning government in Kiev and communicated clearly to the domestic Russian opposition what consequences would follow for attempting to duplicate what happened there in Moscow.

This action also plays into the Kremlin’s interests by forcing our eyes off of other crises where it has waning influence, like Syria and Iran. Moscow can continue to back its client state and Damascus can destroy its internal opposition and rebellion (and weaken its neighbors with refugees) while we are diverted by Ukraine and Crimea. But we are powerful enough not to be distracted and must continue to pressure Syria and Iran while also resolving the crisis in Ukraine.

While Russia may look strong at the moment, it’s important to recognize that the country is acting from a position of weakness — and that the country’s action in Crimea is a fundamental and tremendous risk. If the Kremlin fails in Crimea or Ukraine, the weakness of the regime will be virtually impossible to ignore. No amount of propaganda about fighting fascists and the intransigent enemies of Russia will be able to cover for a failure of this kind. And with this failure, the domestic Russian opposition to the Kremlin will feel emboldened to move against the regime just as the opposition did in Kiev. So instead of being in a position of strength, in reality the Kremlin is extremely exposed. When Vladimir Putin fails, he will lose everything. So he can’t afford to fail, which is what makes this crisis so particularly dangerous.

Another reality I learned from the war with Georgia was the entangling nature of Russia’s relationship with the West. I think we were far more worried about this state of affairs than the Kremlin, but it was important and interesting (if not a little infuriating) to stop and deliberate on all the ways that NATO (and more broadly, the United States and the European Union) cooperated with Russia on issues and initiatives of mutual interest. We on the NATO staff literally cataloged all the ways we were working together with Russia, which still has a diplomatic mission on the same compound at NATO Headquarters. At that time, we were working together on overflight rights for resupply to to Afghanistan, nuclear disarmament (both START and the more concrete aspects of securing fissile material), ballistic missile defense, anti-piracy, anti-terrorism, energy security, and the High North. We’re still working with Russia on all those things, more or less — not least or more recent of which was the successful execution of a safe and secure Winter Olympics. All of these issues of mutual interest (and undoubtedly more) are on the table if we escalate this crisis.

It’s important to consider that the political situation in Ukraine may not be as polarized or volatile as it appears. Consider the map at the top of this post. Much as been made about how the country is split between western Ukrainian speakers and eastern Russian speakers. But a view of a linguistic map (and the CIA World Factbook) demonstrates the picture is far more complex than that. First, Ukrainian-speakers and Russian-speakers blend fairly evenly throughout most of the country, especially in Kiev. The exceptions are the extreme west and extreme east. Second, Ukrainian-speakers are the outright majority in the entire country. Only in the south and the far east do Russian-speakers hold something close to an absolute majority, which explains in part why the Kremlin seized Crimea (which includes Sevastopol, home of the Black Sea Fleet), first.

So the larger lesson is: don’t take the linguistic or ethnic divide as concrete or immutable. Nobody has polled the Ukrainians about this situation. Nobody knows how much Ukrainian-speakers and Russian-speakers have intermingled and inter-married. Nobody has even bothered to ask them much about what’s going on in their country. Only the most radical elements are speaking out. Do we want to make decisions about war and peace and secession and rebellion based on what we see on television or have read on the Internet just in the last few days?

What can we do? Other observers, not least of which include individual Allies, have been maddened by the endless emergency sessions of the UN, OSCE, EU and NATO, which have issued a stream of statements but taken no tangible action. Here is what we could do, almost immediately, for Ukraine in its time of need that doesn’t involve military provocation:

  • Deliver $15 billion in loan guarantees to secure the country financially.
  • Grant Ukraine and Georgia Membership Action Plan (MAP) status, fast-tracking the countries for NATO membership.
  • Finalize the Eastern Partnership with the European Union.
  • Prepare to ship LNG to Ukraine (and Romania and Bulgaria).
  • Prepare to airlift humanitarian, medical and food supplies to Ukraine.
  • Impose sanctions on Russia’s leadership.
  • Prepare to close off European trade with Russia.

It’s important to know that the force differential favors Ukraine in the East-West face-off. While Ukraine may be at a disadvantage right now facing Russia, Ukrainians are fighting on their own territory and with the support of the West. A variety of military options are available to NATO and Ukraine’s European backers. I hesitate to offer them here because I am not an operational or regional expert. But suffice to say NATO controls access to the Black Sea and the North Atlantic, and could control at will the airspace over the Black Sea. The Russian Black Sea Fleet is made up mostly of anti-submarine ships, which are vulnerable to surface combatants and aircraft, and as one observer noted, “The Italian navy alone could easily destroy it.” Any action taken by NATO or even by any individual Ally would fundamentally alter the military balance in this nascent conflict to Russia’s detriment.

But getting to a point I made earlier, that’s what makes this conflict so potentially dangerous. Putin can’t afford to lose. And the escalation ladder goes right up to the nuclear trigger. While I think cooler heads will prevail, and I think it’s possible for everyone to fight without drawing in that option, those are the stakes involved. Indeed, that has to be in the back of everyone’s mind, if for no other reason than that was how one proxy war was brought to a close. The 1973 Yom Kippur War ended when the United States put its nuclear weapons on worldwide alert following a Soviet resupply to the embattled Arab armies. The alert got Moscow’s attention, and, not willing to escalate the crisis, both superpowers forced their proxies to the negotiation table. But in this situation, can we be sure the bluff won’t be called?

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Plenums and Power (Power v. Force III)

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A plenum convened in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on February 9, 2014 (via Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso)

The past two weeks have been astounding to witness in Ukraine and Bosnia- Herzegovina. While I haven’t been able to follow quite as intimately what has happened in Ukraine, media reporting from that country has been very good. In Bosnia I have several friends, and I heard my colleague and friend Jasmin Mujanovic, a New York-based academic (and apparently inexhaustible tweeter), speak on a panel yesterday to a packed house at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs about the dynamic events in that country.

It’s been very interesting to note the similarities, as Jasmin’s co-panelist Janusz Bugajski did yesterday, between the two countries. In both countries, citizens took to the streets to protest a sclerotic and unresponsive political system, widespread and petty corruption, and a sluggish economy. In Ukraine and Bosnia, people want closer ties to Europe and the West (if not necessarily the European Union).  I would note, as Gene Sharp has noted, that initial protests were sparked — or helped organizers to consolidate demonstrations — around a singular provocative event. In Ukraine, it was President Viktor Yanukovich’s refusal to proceed with closer ties with the European Union that brought thousands of people onto the street. In Bosnia, it was the federal parliament’s inability to issue identity papers and passports, effectively rendering a new generation of children identityless, that brought thousands of mothers out to demonstrate.

And critically, in both countries peaceful demonstrations were set upon by overreactive security services to which the protesters reacted violently. In Bosnia, protesters attacked municipal buildings in almost every major city in the country. In Ukraine, protesters stood their ground and fought back against the security services. In both cases, there were echoes of the first response against Egyptian security in Tahrir Square, when the people had just enough power to counter the force of the government to prevail. This is an important, if unsettling, development. Because in both cases, the government may still have the monopoly of force. It depends entirely on whether the military will side with the government or stay off the domestic battlefield.

But here the two countries diverge. In Bosnia, the initial violence almost immediately abated. It’s clear from those I’ve heard from that seeing the burning buildings reminded too many of the war from 20 years ago and peace was quickly restored. This is an extraordinary development. The Bosnian army or, for that matter, the small European Union force contingent in the country, was never called up.

In Ukraine, it appears that Western pressure — public calls by US civilian and military officials and their counterparts in the European Union and NATO, all of which have worked diligently during the past 20 years to build strong institutional and personal relationships with Ukraine’s military establishment — paid off by keeping the Ukrainian army (for now) out of the political power struggle. That kept bloodshed to a minimum, at least, and avoided the precedent we’ve seen in Egypt of making the military establishment a political kingmaker or outright ruler in the country.

Unfortunately, while the Ukrainians figured out a way to counter the initially violent response of the state, and in such a dramatic way, this essentially means there is no rulebook for the way forward in the country. The opposition, now in control of Kiev and, presumably, the western part of the country, could reach out to the Russian-leaning east  and Crimea. But if divisions in the country become acute there is no precedent for the peaceful sharing of power across the entire country. If Crimea wants to join Russia or parts of the country want to break away or become autonomous, it may require the army to enforce union. And why not? Kiev was defended with force and won fairly the same way — that is to say, violently.

But in Bosnia something more astonishing took place and continues to take place. People have abandoned violence entirely to assemble spontaneously in municipal “plenums” and issue collective demands to their own local authorities. This has led to the resignation of at least five cantonal governments. Bosnia’s “federal” government structure, imposed by the Dayton peace accords, is Byzantine and bloated to an extreme. Exhausted and exasperated by this internationally imposed, ethnically dominated, and thoroughly corrupt system, Bosnians are now asserting their own, direct, democratic axis of power to demand that their government respond to them and their needs.

It is important to note, particularly in the context of the regional and linguistic divide in Ukraine, that the protests in Bosnia have asserted themselves as Bosnian rather than ethnic, religious or linguistic. This is a critical development. While limited to the Federation, Bosniaks and Croats have reached out to Serbs in the Republika Serpska and have been rewarded by several individuals and organizations rallying to them in reaction to a political system that helps none of them and punishes all of them equally. While I’m sure there are some who are trying to make the same argument in Ukraine, I think the dividing line is far more stark in that country.

While the concept of the assembly is as old as democracy, it is amazing that the Bosnian plenum is so fresh and new to this wave of popular uprisings against thuggish and sclerotic regimes. De Tocqueville wrote admiringly of American civil society and our town hall culture. Hannah Arendt wrote about citizens’ assemblies (she unfortunately wrote about the early “soviets”) as a unique expression of democratic power and direct governance. She also wrote about the concept of politics as an open space where people could gather to discuss issues of common concern — the more open, the more free and dynamic a political space is. That is exactly what we are witnessing in the Bosnian plenums.

What makes them more extraordinary is that the plenums themselves are opening a political space between the people and their own, nominally democratic and elected governments. The Dayton constitution, exacerbated by ethnic chauvinism and sheer political myopia, had simply closed off politics to most Bosnians. The plenums have very effectively crowbarred open the political space again. Where once we saw Solidarity seated on one side of the round table from the Communist Party in Warsaw — forcing the political space open between the people and their government — today we see the Bosnian plenums assembling down the street from the governments that purport to represent them in Sarajevo, Tuzla,  Zenica and elsewhere.

As a result, I am more optimistic about events in Bosnia than I am in Ukraine. I am not fatalistic about what will happen on the Black Sea, but I am concerned that the recourse to violence there will beget more violence. The protesters in Bosnia recognize their power in the plenum.  That is an extraordinary, unique and genuine contribution to political and democratic development that, if successful, should be a model for us all to emulate.

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A Centenary’s Legacy Beneath Our Feet

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The battlefield at Verdun, France (Wikimedia Commons)

The new year brings the centenary commemoration of World War I in Europe, whose legacy reverberates through our history, policy and literature. From the peace experiments of the European Union, NATO and the United Nations to the tendentious borders of southeastern Europe and the Middle East, World War One continues to affect us in our every day. In its fratricidal horror it has become, in some sense, Europe’s civil war. To me its sound down the decades makes William Faulkner’s adage — “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” — all the more resonant and poignant.

While living in Belgium I was immediately struck how the legacy of the combat from that war, and the wars that followed, continued to lurk just beneath the topsoil.  I visited Verdun, the site of a year-long Franco-German engagement in 1916 resulting in a million deaths. (Such casualty figures are almost impossible to imagine today, but just look at the Congo.) To achieve this death toll, the belligerents fired at least as many artillery rounds, and probably many more. The result is still plain on the battlefield, etched by communication trenches (see picture above): the landscape looks like a snapshot of the ocean during a storm, roiled by waves. The churned earth, now smooth, conceals the bodies of the dead and untold number of unexploded artillery rounds. Visitors are strongly advised to keep to the cleared and marked trails.

The village of Fleury-devant-Douamont was completely destroyed during the fighting. The cliche of wiping something “off the map” is too often bandied about in global affairs today. But in the case of Fleury and for many French communities during World War One, it is important to remember that the map is the only physical record left of them.

Back in Brussels, a bomb from World War II was excavated during the construction of the new NATO Headquarters complex across Boulevard Leopold III. (We were instructed to remain indoors while the bomb was detonated.) This was alarming but hardly surprising. The entire area had been commandeered by the Nazis as a military airfield during the war, so unexploded ordnance (UXO) — Allied and German — were bound to be left behind.

In fact, Belgium and Germany have some of the most active UXO disposal teams in the world working on their own soil. I’ve seen reported Belgium responds to more than 3,000 reported UXO cases a year. Germany has had four deaths in recent years trying to clear UXO from World War II. Japan is also very active disposing of UXO from the Pacific campaign. This is an awful legacy of both world wars just among our Allies. UXO from more recent conflicts, or conflicts among belligerents involving our proxies, or among countries that don’t involve us at all, implicate a far greater legacy.

I am deliberately avoiding the subject of landmines, which has attracted its own attention for all the appropriate reasons. I’ve also written previously about the legacy of chemical weapons dumped at sea. It seems to me, in the centenary of World War I — in a vastly changed world, with all the belligerents from that conflicts now partners, Allies and friends — that there is something important to be understood about the century-long legacy of that conflict, which is buried right at our feet. And that is: we shouldn’t have to cope with the same legacy, with our new friends, more than one hundred years hence.

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The Corrections

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Graphic of hand-corrected manuscript of 1984 by George Orwell, via GeorgeOrwellNovels.com.

I found an error in Table 7.2 on page 124 relating to languages spoken in the United States. All of the numbers are from the U.S. Census Bureau and are accurate. But French (including dialects) at 1,358,816 inexplicably appears as the sixth-most spoken language in the United States after English. It should be fourth after Tagalog. (Jan. 1, 2014)

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From a friend working for an independent observer mission in Tblisi, Georgia, come the first corrections to my book The United States and the Challenge of Public Diplomacy.

She notes on page 147 that during the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia Russia sent forces into South Ossetia, not North Ossetia, and Carl Bildt is the Foreign Minister of Sweden, not Finland (apologies to Mr. Bildt!).

I am very happy to make factual corrections such as these as well as engage in debate about the more subjective policy proposals in the book and on this site. Feel free to contact me here. (Dec. 31, 2013)

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In Egypt, Force v. Power (II)

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(KHALED DESOUKI AFP/Getty Images via Globalpost.com)

It’s been sickening listening to usually sensible and decent people try to justify the ugly ouster of Egypt’s first democratically elected head of state. Watch David Brooks, for example, speaking on PBS’ Newshour, contort himself into a principle for the outcome of a wholly unprincipled thing happening to somebody he hates:

I used to think, if we just have elections, that the elections will have a moderating effect on governments.

Even if you take radicals, especially throughout the Middle East, you take radicals, they have to pay attention to public opinion. They have to pick up the trash. They have to fix the potholes. The act of governing will moderate them. And, therefore, we just should insist on election after election and we should respect the results of every election.

I think the evidence from the Muslim Brotherhood, at least, is that if you have got a group which is really a radical, almost religious totalitarian group, the elections will not have a moderating influence. They will take advantage of elections in essence to end democracy.

And I think that is what they were slowly doing. They were undermining democracy to make democracy impossible. It was a self-negating election. And so I think what the coup people did was legitimate. And what all those millions of people on the street did is legitimate.

A friend of mine, Jeffrey Goldberg, had a good line. May be bad short term for democracy, good long term for progress.

I quote him at length to avoid any reductionism. Brooks sounds peculiarly like an early agitator for Communism, from which many of his friends on the neoconservative right crawled, placing any violent or repressive means at the disposition of the all-important End. Who cares if democracy is harmed, when progress – Communism’s ultimate end for all humanity! – is achieved? (To make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs!) And what good is democracy, anyway, if elections are “self-negating”? (Can’t we just throw the people out and elect a new one?)

It only gets worse. Jeremy Pressman writes that a military government may be better at “protecting minority rights, creating space for genuine and lasting political competition, and, more broadly, helping Egypt move forward.” Progress again! Couldn’t the army and police do that under a democratically elected president? Never mind that the army ultimately chooses whose rights, whose space, and which direction forward, because it controls the state. There is no real politics without moral choice, because there is no real choice out of the barrel of a gun. The concept of the benign dictatorship is a venal lie that refuses to die in the craniums of people smart enough to know better.

Joshua Keating and Ozan Varol seriously consider a “democratic coup d’etat,” as if that makes a lick of sense. Can you have an “authoritarian election”? “Totalitarian freedoms”? “Transparent censorship”?

It doesn’t take much to see all these observers’ frightening lack of faith in, and understanding of, politics and political process independent of democratic mechanisms. Even taking Brooks’ argument at face value – that Morsi was dismantling the very democracy that had elevated him to power – the protests against his rule indicated Egypt was a midpoint of the drama, not at its climax. And for anyone who would argue against this point, and to say that Egypt is better off now under military rule, we need look no farther than Turkey, where a political opposition movement has flourished against a similarly pugnacious president. The difference there is the army has, after 100 years, finally removed itself to the sidelines. While contentious and occasionally violent, Turkey’s protests have left far fewer people dead as a result. And Turkey’s democracy is still intact.

It is incredible that Brooks failed to acknowledge the inseparable actions of the Egyptian army in the coup. It was not the “people” who deposed the president, but the armed forces. Morsi is still being held incommunicado, now charged with espionage and murder. It is compelling indeed that hundreds of thousands of people took to Tahrir Square in Cairo and elsewhere to protest against the President and the ruling Muslim Brotherhood. This is as it should be in an open, free and political society. Of course we and President Morsi should take a petition signed by 22 million seriously. But now that movement and those millions have been denied their right to rein in the president on their own, by their own power, because the army has subsumed them by brute force.

Worse for the future of Egypt, this establishes a very ominous precedent, one Turkey took nearly a century to overcome: the ultimate arbiter of political rule is now the army. Having sat out the 2011 revolution and then forcefully deposed Morsi early this month, the army is effectively Egypt’s Pharaoh-maker. This is indisputably bad for Egyptian democracy and Egyptian politics, because the army may always have its metal-jacketed finger on the country’s political balance.

And it demonstrates to the Muslim Brotherhood – those whom Brooks despises so much – what they and their allies must do now. No longer content to build a true political power base in Egypt’s neighborhoods and quartiers and mosques and prisons and schools, they realize they must infiltrate the army, too. All over the Middle East, the like-minded are taking their lesson.

This is a terrible development. Because after decades of preaching the benefits of democracy, which includes the rule of law and democratic control of the armed forces, Egypt – with the tacit consent of the West – has cynically conceded that force can trump power. But that only means as long as those men with guns hold the future of political control in their hands along with their weapons, politics will be inseparably defined with violence, and bloodshed, and heartache.

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An Assault on Joseph Nye, Part Two: “Power and Violence are Opposites”

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“Down with Milosevic!”, Belgrade, 1999 (via BBC)

In a previous discussion, I attacked Joseph Nye’s “soft power/hard power” theory at the level of language, effectively calling his terms unclear and mealy-mouthed substitutes for clearer, more precise terms we can use like force and coercion, sanctions or diplomacy. Nye has made international relations theory less clear and transparent for the application of his two terms and I tried to reverse that trend with my own replacements.

At the same time, Nye’s ideas don’t work as theory, either. Nye has offered a Hobson’s Dichotomy, a false choice that doesn’t exist in the real world. A Hobson’s Dichotomy poses us with two falsely opposed choices that may not offer a solution to the problem set. That is what soft and hard power effectively presents us. It is a trick of language that also gives us an untrue sense of mastering reality. The reality of international politics is far too complex for that. To put this simply: as a Hobson’s Dichotomy, Nye’s idea is a narrows that squeezes out rather than includes alternative or opposing means to achieve political change.

In political reality, decision-makers don’t choose from one quiver labeled “soft power” and another labeled “hard power” when taking action. If their judgment is keen, they look for the best tools available to them to achieve the most desirable outcome. If they are lucky, and their country is truly powerful (like ours), they will have a wide variety of means available to apply to what will be a unique, complicated, and dynamically evolving situation and environment.

Nye’s theoretical failure goes beyond the toolkit available to decision-makers. “Soft power” fails to take into account civil society, international movements, and faith groups. For Nye, there is nothing like the Roman Catholic Church, Islam, or Buddhism.  For Nye, there is nothing like the Freeze, or the Civil Rights Movement, or the Color Revolutions, or the Arab Spring.  Each of these has had profound international political effects – in other words, by his own definition they are powerful — but they simply can’t be accounted for by Nye’s political theory.

What makes these movements all the more interesting – and possible – is the flow of information, inspiration and support across borders. There would have been no revolution against Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia without Solidarity, and there would have been no uprising in Tunisia without Serbia, and no Cairo without Tunisia. To Nye, this does not account for soft power, or any kind of power for that matter, because it is not enabled by a state — even though these movements peacefully changed the means of government and the norms for governing in more than a dozen countries.

Boston, April 15 (via The Telegraph)

Nye’s theory also fails to account for terrorism. He dispenses with terrorism as “depending on soft power” (my emphasis) without defining terrorism per se as either hard (force) or soft (as I have defined it before, power qua power). Reading between the lines, then, Nye’s theory cannot really accommodate terrorism: it simply does not belong in Nye’s universe.

If we take most observers’ understanding that terrorism is a tool of the weak – a meansof  the un-powerful – even if they are state-sponsored — then terrorism falls away from this discussion entirely. Nye may get partial credit for recognizing terrorism requires other tools to succeed, but it is not a tool of power or the powerful in and of itself. Nye’s theory of two “buckets” does not have enough room for either political movements or terrorism — which pretty much defines the political dynamism of the previous decade.

An effective theory of power will take into account terrorism and the power wielded by ordinary people through collective action, whether in faith groups, civil society, or international movements. Power, in the end, is mass, and mass can really be found in the minds of millions or billions of individual human beings. Only military theorists really understand the importance of this collective mind in political affairs, and even then the American military tradition has been slow or loath to understand the relationship of the public to the political.

Clausewitz for example wrote about the “moral forces” in war affecting public opinion as “among the most important”. T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) wrote about “the crowd in action,” dating the phenomenon back to ancient Greek warfare. David Galula, writing about insurgency, noted that the guerrilla could “still win” with “no positive policy” but “good propaganda” — that is, directly influencing the population. David Petraeus, drawing off all these shrewd observations, argued that military communications could be the “decisive logical line of operation” by communicating directly with the public in counterinsurgency operations.

We still struggle to understand the motivations and goals of terrorism. The attack on the Boston Marathon is the most recent expression of this ambivalence, but almost daily bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan should remind us of the continuing struggle as well. Theoretically we wrestle to understand whether terrorism is an effective political weapon.

Nonetheless as a theoretical matter it should be clear terrorism is violence, not force, and  as a practical measure it should be clear that terrorism is a tool of the weak, that it leverages political entities that are not as powerful when measured against the mass movements outlined above. Hannah Arendt has written precisely that “power and violence are opposites”. This is probably the most mordant indictment of Nye’s theory, since it quite simply excludes terrorism from any consideration by Nye. It fully supports my contention that Nye’s theory constitutes not an expansive analysis of power but an exclusive narrows.

The real pain extracted from bombings or mass attacks can mitigate that inherent weakness. Violence can, on a macabre balance sheet, equate to political power but only if state authorities or the public mind are willing to allow it. Still, as violence, terrorism is only relegated to simply another tool – like economic sanctions, or diplomacy – which states or non-state actors use to affect international affairs.  This by no means justifies terrorism, but it does account for the practice. So far, that is more than what Joseph Nye can do.

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An Intellectual Assault on Joseph Nye: Part One

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Joseph Nye’s theory and advocacy of “soft power,” articulated in the early 1990s and developed during the last 15 years, have been a touchstone for virtually anyone studying or writing about international relations. It’s been impossible, particularly, to write about public diplomacy without having to throw it obligatorily into the custom-made “soft power” box that Nye built. In summary, Nye believes the fundamental aspects of effective power are changing; that this has become more “soft” in recent decades; and for the United States to remain dominant in global affairs it must adapt to wielding this “soft power” more effectively.

I’ve long found Nye’s theory troublesome but it took me some time to understand why. I don’t think he understands power, force and coercion and the nuance of their employment in foreign affairs. The strange dichotomy of “soft power” versus “hard power” long bothered me because it seemed to try to articulate something very complex by using mutually complementary contrasts, like trying to describe a Picasso using only “light blue” and “dark blue”.

What follows is the first in a series of assaults on Nye’s theory. By assault I mean I intend to take territory and to replace what I hope to destroy in the process.

I’ll start from a position of strength: Nye’s theory fails at the level of language. Briefly put, the “soft power/hard power” paradigm clutters more than it clarifies. In an attempt to provide a simple differentiating factor between aspects of national power, Nye has only blurred important distinctions beyond measure.

The absurdity of Nye’s apparent dichotomy is inherent in the words he applies, which pairs opposing modifiers to the same underlying object; specifically, he discusses power which may be “hard” or “soft”. To give a sense of what I mean, we may as well be using “More Power” and “Not-Power” or “Less Power” for all the additional clarity his distinction brings. There is a whiff of Orwellian Newspeak to this. Orwell’s 1984 philologist Syme would have liked “soft power”: Why try to articulate or describe this in more precise language when “power” and a modifier (“smart” comes to mind) serve the purpose just as well? The result, as Orwell has argued elsewhere, defeats complex thought.

This is no post-modern critique. It demonstrates at a practical level the problem of the language involved. What should bring more clarity makes this subject more obscure because it begs the question of what, exactly, power is (a specific point I hope to bring up in a later post). And in this case – which damns Nye the most in my eyes – he is willing to acknowledge that “hard power” is the equivalent of force but then won’t simply use the term, which is much more precise and accurate. But also inconvenient. When is hard power not force? When it’s paired with soft power. Which in turn is what, exactly?

In short, Nye’s language obfuscates. It refuses to name what we are really talking about, which is power and force. When we use language like this, it is far more clear what we are discussing. True power is not attractive, as Nye posits, it is conductive, and can for example include a wide array of (painful) economic and diplomatic tools. The full array of national power includes the organized, destructive and denying tools of military and paramilitary violence. Force can be coercive, punitive and destructive – aspects Nye strangely ignores in his description of power.

And that explains the false comfort we find in “soft power,” which as we will see here is not very soft at all. Nye makes quite a case for attracting and convincing countries, but that is simply another way of talking about diplomacy. Nations talking to one another can come to agreements based on mutual interests or previously unknown commonalities. In addition to forgetting this plain fact of international political history, Nye ignores the nuanced realities of foreign relations, which can also resemble parliamentary “horse-trading” — the barter in trade of deals that have been the staple of international diplomacy for centuries. (Most countries today see America’s ability to give away something for nothing as idiocy, not benevolence. The rest of the world simply can’t afford that kind of charity without an explicit quid pro quo.)

But beyond that we are talking about coercive if nominally peaceful means, non-violent tools that are powerful nonetheless. Coercion short of force can be almost as destructive as warfare and certainly as disruptive. We need look no further than the collapsing economies of the European Union and the power of the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund (for some) and the stronger economies (Germany foremost) have to wield over them to reform. This is simple power and there is nothing soft about it for the people living under it.

Nye has carved out an advantage for himself, of course, by wrapping up virtually every non-military aspect of national power in the non-threatening mien of “soft power”. But enlarging the basket and giving it an anodyne label should make us all the more suspicious. Because it is the difference among the tools in the various baskets, and the consequences of using them – or not using them – that has real effects for real people. And perhaps Nye, as well as his defenders and detractors, have forgotten that those real people are the ultimate source of power in political life.

I would replace Nye’s soft power language with this: there is only power – the full combined measure of a nation to act on the world — and force is a subset of national power; we have alternative tools of national power that are no less coercive but less destructive such as trade barriers, economic countermeasures, and sanctions. These are rightly labeled power because some countries have greater power (and more tools) than others. We have means to induce, cajole and convince without coercion and these are called diplomacy, public diplomacy, communications and (sometimes) propaganda.

There is nothing to be gainsaid from simplifying to the point of simple-mindedness. That is what, in part, Nye has done. We can use language to describe, accurately and with precision, exactly what power and force are and can do among nations.

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In Syria, Power vs. Force

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Sen. John McCain speaks to France 24  April 12. (France 24)

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has been a vociferous advocate for action against the Syrian regime’s brutality against its opposition, as his recent interview with French national television amply demonstrates. To his credit, McCain has been a consistent voice for measured, forceful intervention, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Libya and Syria. He has become an extraordinary voice for the obligation to protect (O2P), comparing the moral imperative facing the international community in Syria to the examples of Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda. While a cease-fire appears to be holding, opposition demonstrations are ongoing and the regime of Bashar al-Assad has demonstrated extraordinary willingness to wield violence in order to maintain control over the country.

McCain recently returned from Turkey where he visited camps filled with Syrian refugees fleeing the regime’s repression. This is perhaps an important reminder of the necessity for finer judgment in these matters, as similar camps filled up after the invasion of Iraq and refugees poured into Syria and Jordan fleeing the violence and chaos of sectarian anarchy in the wake of invasion. The Syrian regime’s collapse would no doubt benefit American interests in the region, depriving Iran of a proxy and Hezbollah and Hamas of a paymaster. But it’s much harder to anticipate the unforeseen outcomes of centrifugal forces cut loose  in the event of the regime’s demise.

Nonetheless, McCain’s intriguing and clearly genuine and heartfelt appeal not to allow al-Assad his waltz of death over a yearning opposition reveals the tensions inherent to an age-old theoretical question, particularly in the wake of a series of violent and non-violent, successful and unsuccessful revolutions in the Islamic world. I am writing about the relationship between power and force, which for too long have been roughly and lazily equated.

The point of departure is McCain’s insistence that a multinational intervention against the Syrian regime, likely led by NATO, could effectively level the tools of force between the opposition and the government.  This is quite a practical assessment. The regime retains the monopoly of force, McCain notes, with heavy weapons, including tanks and helicopter gunships. The Free Syrian Army is fighting mostly with firearms and video cameras. “Right now it’s artillery and tanks against Kalashnikovs,” McCain told France 24. “This is not a fair fight.”

Libya serves as the model in McCain’s thinking. There, NATO aircraft leveled the fight by eliminating the Libyan air force and “tank plinking” — a practice derided over Kosovo — destroying Libyan armor with precision strike.  I’m not an operator so I hesitate to assert that the NATO campaign was carried out easily and with few civilian casualties. But by eliminating the monopoly of force, the Libyan army was put on the same footing as the armed Libyan opposition forces, making it “a fair fight”.

Perhaps most importantly in Libya — and this more closely serves my point — once heavy armor and attack aircraft were swept away, the full power of the population was liberated.  Whole cities rose up against the regime and the regime found itself outmatched. Guns are little use against the masses, especially when fear is no longer a factor.

McCain didn’t allude to this, but it must have informed his thinking.  Armor and aircraft make repression and killing a distant, impersonal, impervious thing. Civilians and fighters alike flee in terror from the rumble of tanks and the roar of jet engines and rotor wash. It is much harder — although the Iranian regime did its level best — to instill that kind of fear over a mass of human beings from the end of a gun.

Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians jam Tahrir Square to bring down the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, early 2011 (Getty Images via The Guardian)

The armed revolution aside, we saw precisely this triumph of power over force in Egypt and Tunisia. Masses of people cowed and then overthrew their dictatorships. In Tunisia, the revolution moved too quickly for the regime to react, but in Egypt the important factor was the neutrality of the Army. The people could face down the relatively lightly armed police and internal security forces. Confronted with a million people in Tahrir Square in Cairo (and hundreds of thousands gathered in other cities), the security forces — used to dealing with individuals or dozens of people at most — no longer could assert authority in any meaningful way.  It was only a matter of time before the regime would collapse.

This was in large strokes a replay of actions that took place in Central Europe during the Velvet Revolution.  Poland lived for 10 years under martial law — the rule of armor in the streets — but even this was no match for the growing power of the Polish people. Once the rest of the enslaved states of Central Europe were unable or unwilling to roll down their people as they began to march en masse — and the Center in Moscow importantly renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine of intervention as it had in Czechoslovakia and Hungary to put down popular rebellion — the state revealed itself to be made of matchwood. The power of the powerless was let loose on the world.

So power and force are not the same thing. I should emphasize that force can trump power, as we have seen in Iran and elsewhere. And power can dissipate, as we saw in Ukraine. But this does not alter the fundamental difference between them.  Power is a moral concept and that is why it is inherent to politics. As a moral concept, power resides exclusively in the mind of men and women. Power is infinitely scalable, as we saw mobilizing by the millions across middle Europe and the Mahgreb.

Hannah Arendt wrote very clearly in On Violence that violence and power were not one and the same but opposites.  She also wrote that war (that is, applied force) was not the result of some primal human urge toward self-destruction but, finally, the ultimate means to resolve dispute. To illuminate her insight more, I would argue that force and power are not opposites but opposing means to the same end: to change political behavior. Force is mobilized by a state (or quasi-state); power requires mobilization by something other than the state for legitimacy (although in many societies state structures are regularly put to work creating those non-state mobilizations). Force is legitimate when it is wielded by the accepted state (or quasi-state) authority; power is legitimate when it is given freely and without coercion.

The Syrian regime has learned well from the examples of both its neighbors and from history.  As seen in Homs and Hama, force can trump power. Murder dismembers the political opposition.  Guns and Tanks terrorize the ordinary and the innocent. But I also know that this is only a temporary terror. Whether the horror in Syria continues is a prediction someone better informed can make. Real power ultimately prevails because it is found in the minds and morals of millions of men and women.  The leaders in Damascus, Moscow, and Minsk, and in Pyongyang, Tehran, Beijing, and Havana must know this.

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