Opinion Sur
In general, wars and the reconfiguration of forces they involve have miscalculation as common causes.
History is often made by those who think they were doing something else. The result is known afterwards, when it is already too late to undo the unforeseen results. Usually, geopolitical wisdom is a retrospective art. Hegel wanted to say something like this when he argued, in a sibylline manner, that “the Owl of Minerva takes flight when dusk is falling.” Every so often, gauchos say “the gunshot came out from the back,” a popular expression that means that something backfires, the result is not what was expected or just the opposite as expected.
When I was a boy I used to go to the countryside. Local old ladies were my babysitters. One of them, who I fondly called “Pacha mama” (“Mother Earth” in the quechua language), taught me two sayings from the local lore. They remained forever engraved in my mind. “Look my son: God breeds them and they find each other” (equivalent of “birds of a feather flock together”), she said; and sometimes she added: “For someone who is unstitched there is always someone who is broken” (equivalent of “for every rip, there is a patch; for every man there is a woman”).
In the geopolitical field, it is common to talk about interests, relations, and strategies—everything seemingly coherent and clean. It is rarer to find references to mistakes, abuses, and disasters. Nevertheless, these happen as much as or with more frequency than be best designed plans.
Fortunately, exceptions abound in the literature. Historian Niall Ferguson, in a heady tome on The Great War (afterwards called World War I), declares that the conflict—which cost at least 10 million deaths among the soldiers and 7 million deaths among civilians—was worse than tragic, it was “piteous”: “Nothing less than the greatest error of modern history” (Ferguson, The Pity of War, pp. 447, 462).
If the Great War was a mistake, then it could have been avoided. At this point we enter the domain of an imagined and counterfactual history, of what could have happened and did not. Most historians are reluctant to engage in such exercise of imagination as, by definition, there are no documents to verify. However, one might say that there are other proofs. These do not come from dusty archives, but from an analysis of the field of relationships, the social structure, and its tendencies. In the field of comparative, historical sociology, such practice is legitimate and has impeccable precedents. Max Weber practiced it in reference to the real and possible consequences of the classic battle of Marathon. In the battle of Marathon the Greeks prevailed over the Persians and repelled their invasion. According to Weber, understanding the significance of this event, based on available knowledge, requires posing the objective possibility of how actions could have developed if the Persian Empire had won.
Consider other situations, much closer than the 25 centuries separate us from ancient times. What would have happened if two American presidents (Kennedy and Johnson) had adopted the advice of General De Gaulle regarding Indochina? De Gaulle rightly claimed that the reunification campaign of Vietnam by Ho Chi Minh was more than the advance of “international communism.” It was primarily a nationalistic and anti-colonial fight by a country that traditionally was more hostile towards China than to the United States. They could have avoided a highly expensive and disastrous war that ended up—after large sufferings on both sides—with the victory of North Vietnam and with an alliance between Vietnam and its archrival China. A geopolitical misreading—manipulated by spurious interests—resulted in the union of opposites and in an internal as well as international dismal sequel for American interests.
What would have been the destiny of Southeast Asia without the Vietnam War? We can multiply questions like these and design several counterfactual scenarios. It would be a never ending exercise that could reach a dizzying extreme. In this article, I will limit myself only to one example—the Middle East, nowadays on the source of instability and violence—and just to one of the various possible conclusions; that is, “the union of opposites”, or in gaucho language, the union of “the broken with the unstitched.”
Something similar happened with the American intervention in Iraq. The failure of this adventure caused the strategic reinforcement of Iran and, furthermore, the current emergence of the Islamic State (ISI, ISIS, ISIL or DAESH, among other denominations), that today upsets the balance within a whole region, tin its search of an outmoded caliphate. A rather small contingent of extremists was capable of seizing considerable territory within Syria and Iraq at record-breaking speed because the Sunni population considers them an effective vehicle for reviving Sunni nationalism and resist Shiite oppression. For the time being, the perverse result is a tactical alliance between United States and the Syrian and Iranian regimes, which until yesterday were its enemies. What a huge mistake, especially in a moment of retraction of the American ability to impose its will as surviving superpower on the world stage!
Nowadays, the chances for recomposing resetting the geopolitical dashboard are more remote than on the eve of the 2003 American invasion. In this case, two mistakes were combined. As a consequence of that sum of errors anarchic forces are recomposing the map for that region. To follow on the rural expression from the beginning of this article, the United States find themselves awkwardly situated and disoriented as “as a dog in a bowling alley”, to quote the gauchos again.
The corollary is clear: there is no fire power, however great, capable of remedying a serious strategic error. Consequently, today’s responsibility for paying for the broken plates rests on the shoulders of local actors, each of whom has insurmountable weaknesses, though in the short run they could profit from the chaos. To follow on our rural sayings “It’s good fishing in troubled waters.” However, each of those “fishermen” (Russia, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, just to name a few) is itself rather battered and with a significant deficit of legitimacy. “Broken and unstitched” they fight each other, or get into circumstantial and spurious alliances. It will take long, if ever, for a more equitable and fair order to be born.
Meanwhile, in the Far East, a new configuration of planetary power is rising, that is slowly but doubtlessly asserting itself, as it can already be seen by those with a clearer view, such as the ageing but always clear-headed Henry Kissinger in his last book World Order. All that we can say now, as a gaucho would, is “Hold on mate; we are going to ride hard.”
