by Parag Khanna
A World of Complexes
When Russian tanks rolled into the tiny republic of Georgia in the summer of 2008, multilateral diplomacy was an afterthought. Just a decade prior, diplomats from fifty-four countries had gathered at a grand ceremony in Istanbul to sign the new security charter of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Between the NATO-Russia Council, the UN Security Council, and the OSCE, the United States, Europe, and Russia had abundant opportunities to talk about moving from suspicious spheres of influence to shared spaces. But when national pride is at stake, charters are cheap. To slow Russia’s armored advance toward Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, French president Nicolas Sarkozy jumped in to mediate behind the scenes with his newly installed counterpart Dmitry Medvedev of Russia. Meanwhile, President Bush scowled during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics with Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, sitting smugly right behind him.
Several years on from the Russia-Georgia conflict, the names “Georgia” and “Kosovo” are shorthand for very different interpretations of how to manage flare-ups in dusty corners of the world. For America and Europe, NATO’s 1999 bombardment of Serbia was a legitimate if legally unsound action to protect the ethnic-Albanian Kosovars. For Russia, it became a preview of the arbitrary American imperialism that later came to be embodied in the George W. Bush administration. For the West, “Georgia” today represents Russia’s cantankerous neo-imperialism, while for Russia it stands for Western meddling in places it doesn’t understand and backing immature and pugnacious leaders such as Georgia’s Mikhail Saakhashvili. Teenagers around the world are not all reading the same textbooks.
Global security no longer has a dominant narrative to which everyone subscribes. At the high tables of diplomacy, the diplomats are mostly talking past one another. Local and regional concerns dominate, global norms matter little, and actions are justified on the fly. As American dominance fades region by region, upstart powers fill the gap. Today’s major emerging powers—Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, India, Brazil—are more focused on establishing primacy in their own neighborhoods than contributing to an ethereal global stability. At the same time, terms such as “alliance” and “partnership” are thrown around by countries that cooperate at best opportunistically: the United States and India, for example, or Russia and China, or the United States and Saudi Arabia. The difference between dalliance and alliance is just one letter.
The gap between global ideas and action couldn’t be wider. Former government officials and ambitious academics propose grand ideas, including a “Trans-Eurasian Security System,” a “GlobalSecurity Alliance,” and a set of “Global Authorities.” Yet no such scheme has ever made the leap from the op-ed page to reality. How would any of these deal with the collapse of North Korea or a Saudi-Iranian proxy war in Iraq?
The UN Security Council’s structure hasn’t changed in several decades despite the fundamental shifts in the world’s power balance. As a result, what the P-5 (the five permanent members, who have veto power) view as a club of special responsibility is viewed by the rest of the world as a club of abusers of privilege. The P-5 are the world’s five largest arms dealers, while three of them (the United States, Great Britain, and France) ignored the council in NATO’s 1999 attack on Serbia. Though the Security Council is supposed to be the only institution that can compel the international community to do something, it is increasingly illegitimate because its decisions are made on the basis of great power clientelism—such as China’s defense of Sudan, Russia’s of Iran, and America’s of Israel—and ineffective because it serves as a collective mask for individual failures, such as the lack of American and European leadership in intervening in Darfur. It presides over international law but hardly stands in the center of any nation’s moral compass.
Instead, each major regional center of gravity—for example, China, India, Brazil, Russia, and Nigeria—wants to be sheriff of its own neighborhood rather than follow the lead of any global policeman. Whether the Security Council backs a country’s decision legally or militarily is a secondary concern at best.
Each region of the world has thus become a complex unto itself, with its own rules and codes. The world is already structured as much by regions as by nations. For most countries—and most people—geography is still destiny. Their security depends much more on relations with their neighbors than with far-off nations. While global friction between great powers appears manageable, regional tensions are rife between China and India, or Saudi Arabia and Iran. There are no global solutions to better neighborly relations, only regional ones. From South America to sub-Saharan Africa to eastern Asia, regional trust building has been the main reason countries have chosen to dismantle or abandon nuclear weapons programs. Brazil has anointed itself leader of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is deepening its charter and building its own peacekeeping force in Southeast Asia, the European Union (EU) has undertaken close to a dozen stabilization operations of its own from the Balkans to Congo to Lebanon, and the African Union (AU) is authorizing its own missions as well. Furthermore, Asian-African, Asian-Arab, and Latin-African summits increasingly grab the economic headlines.
Rather than fight this tide of devolution in the name of some grand but toothless global architecture, we should encourage regional responsibility as much as possible. Indeed, regional security organizations should be stronger than global ones—if there is a fire next door, would you rather have the fire station close by or far away? A decade after America began to hand over leadership of Balkan security to Europe, each micro-state of southeastern Europe has some form of agreement with the European Union. Europe should, and finally will, guarantee their stability.
Where regional security organizations are strong, there is order; where they are weak, there is chaos. Not surprisingly, today the world’s two most unstable regions are the two most lacking in inclusive regional institutions: the Middle East and south-central Asia.
Over the past several centuries, Arab security has rarely been defined by Arabs, but rather by Britain, France, Ottoman Turkey, the United States, and more recently Israel and Iran. The Gulf Cooperation Council does not include Egypt, Jordan, Syria, or Iraq, and certainly has no regular security dialogue with Israel and Iran. And yet these Middle Eastern countries need above all else a common diplomatic mechanism through which to deepen economic cooperation and debate nuclear proliferation and energy, Iraq’s rehabilitation and reconstruction, and the contours of a new Palestinian state.
When the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988, the final paragraph of the UN resolution called for a Persian Gulf security conference that never happened. Instead, America tried dual containment and two invasions of Iraq. Meanwhile, Iran has acted as both arsonist and fireman. Yet the Arab world finally has competent diplomatic players such as Qatar—home to both U.S. Central Command and controversial satellite broadcaster Al-Jazeera—who are potentially ideal hosts for a permanent Middle Eastern security organization that would build mutual transparency. An Asian diplomat stationed in Doha calls Qatar “a geographical exclamation mark perched on the Persian Gulf, a maverick minnow maneuvering around the region’s geopolitical and sectarian fault-lines between Sunni giant Saudi Arabia and Shi’a colossus Iran.” In other words, Qatar is in the eye of the storm and wants to stay there. To broker any long-term nuclear détente between Israel and Iran, or negotiate the presence of Arab League peacekeepers to restore Palestinian unity, an all-inclusive Gulf security conference will be essential. But in the Mideast, there is no “resolution” to conflicts, only evolution. That is precisely why the region needs its own institution to mediate disputes rather than constant outside intervention.
Similarly, south-central Asia is caught in a geopolitical no-man’s-land among the Middle East, India, China, and the Turkic former Soviet republics. Here, too, a standing mechanism is needed to curb Taliban sanctuaries and drug trafficking across the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier, to promot
e cross-border pipelines, roads, power grids, and trade—and to remind NATO that victory needs to be defined in Afghan, not American, terms. The lack of a robust regional body has meant that the United States has had to bring together Afghan and Pakistani parliamentarians, cabinets, foreign ministers, intelligence chiefs, and even agricultural experts to get cooperation going on a variety of levels. If the United States and Mexico require joint military and police patrols to monitor drug and weapons trafficking across their long mutual border, then Afghanistan and Pakistan certainly do as well. Taliban mastermind Mullah Omar has called for Muslim peacekeepers to replace NATO in Afghanistan. Eventually, neighbors must mind their own fences.
The world desperately needs stronger regional security organizations to take their places alongside the EU, ASEAN, the AU, and other major groups as the lead arbiters of stability in their regions. Indeed these regional groups—not France and Britain—should even hold permanent seats in the UN Security Council. Together they can deliberate on the legality of interventions and loan troops and money to support one another, as the United States and European Union have done in donating more than $2 billion in aid and equipment to the African Union. Stronger regions helping weaker ones manage their own problems: This is the design for global security from the bottom up, not the top down.
Building better regional systems and a better global system are two sides of the same coin. Neither NATO’s presence in Afghanistan nor the creation of the U.S. African Command by the U.S. Defense Department can substitute for the long-term necessity of regional solutions for regional problems. The common lesson of all of America’s recent military adventures is that the only viable long-term strategy is to help others help themselves. This is more than strategy: It is statesmanship.
Can an Oxymoron Stop a War?
Carne Ross is as frenetic as a chain-smoker but has no time to smoke. He’s too busy—certainly more than he ever was as a senior British diplomat inside the closed box of foreign embassies and UN Security Council negotiations. That was a world of orderly illusions—a world Ross wants to turn on its head. State-to-state diplomacy suffers from the democratic deficit in spades: unrepresentative elites create plans out of sight from the noisy masses below. Instead of working with the “real” diplomats, who are sheltered on the “inside” by high walls and barbed wire, Ross now practices diplomacy from the outside, a position of grave disadvantage.
Ross’s organization, Independent Diplomat, is an intentional oxymoron—how can a diplomat not represent someone else? This is actually a perennial myth of diplomacy: that one is merely a messenger dispatched by a higher authority. But ever since the Renaissance, when ambassadors began to spend more time with one another than with their own national ministers, there have been diplomats who feel a higher calling in their duty to peace than to their prince. For Ross, being party to the contrived buildup to the Iraq war in 2002–3 presented such a conflict. He resigned and immediately launched Independent Diplomat—“a diplomatic service for those who need it most”—meaning stateless or unrecognized clients such as Kosovo, Western Sahara, and Somaliland, but also quite a few “normal” states that lack the diplomatic heft of great powers. Stripped of arbitrary cartographic simplifications, diplomacy fumbles. This is the gray area where Ross thrives—exposing but also exploiting the realities of improvised diplomacy.
Most new states are born of secessionism: seeking to rectify injustice by breaking free of their territorial master. Some secessionist movements and exile groups seek redress at the United Nations, believing that international law provides a sufficient moral foundation for their cases to be judged on their merits. They are still waiting. The United Nations is the repository of the guilty conscience of colonial powers who have mostly wiped their hands clean of messy withdrawals, such as Spain’s from Western Sahara, or Great Britain’s from Somaliland. These voiceless entities are a reminder that even “global” institutions aren’t yet universal. One of Independent Diplomat’s major advocacy platforms is therefore the “Universal Right of Address,” a proposal that all parties to a dispute be allowed to speak directly before the UN Security Council. Currently, 80 percent of disputes on the council’s agenda involve such stateless actors. Normally the United Nations sends a special representative to gather material and report back to the council, but why not cut out the middleman?
Independent Diplomat works hand in hand with its clients, becoming a part of their core teams. It provides legal and political guidance as well as the all-important press relations for a world in which perception is reality. Ross spends countless hours shuttling among fractious exiles, a staple irony of world politics. Whether anti-theocracy Iranians, aggrieved Uzbeks, or Miami’s Cubans, exile groups’ hatred for their home regimes is matched only by their own infighting. Independent Diplomat works with the democratically elected Burmese exile government to organize itself and generate an action plan for dialogue with the ruling junta on transitioning to democracy and protecting human rights, agricultural policy, and fair exploitation of the country’s large gas reserves. Since the organization brings together opposition groups under one umbrella, the military will eventually have to negotiate with a more formidable civilian force.
Ross and his team demonstrate that the best diplomats, like Sherpas, know a lot about a lot. They have, for example, provided detailed assistance for Croatia to retool its government for EU membership, accelerating a process that will surely bring the country hundreds of millions of dollars of foreign investment. They’ve coached the nascent quasi-state of Somaliland to move away from counting on former colonial master Great Britain to support its independence and instead focus on lobbying the African Union. They recently crafted a new strategy for the desert guerrilla Polisario movement of Western Sahara, pushing it beyond harping about self-determination to emphasizing the human rights obligations of Morocco. And one of their newest projects involves working with the sinking island nations of the Marshall Islands and the Maldives to boost their capacity at major climate change negotiations where Independent Diplomat staff members sit alongside their clients—nonprofit next to government—and face off against the heavy-hitting delegations of the United States and other major carbon-emitting nations.
For would-be mediators, Independent Diplomat represents a new style of negotiation: crowd sourcing. Rather than wait for information to trickle through official filters, its staff constantly receives live, on-the-ground updates and recruits academic and commercial legal pro bono experts to help with specific cases. It is also a new type of consultancy. To most of its clients, the organization charges minimal fees; it receives grants from foundations such as George Soros’s Open Society Institute. Yet still hundreds of seasoned diplomats from powerful nations apply unsolicited to work for Independent Diplomat, seeing it as a place to fight for the underdog.
The entrepreneurial role model for Independent Diplomat and similar outfits is the International Crisis Group (ICG), the NGO best known for having its finger on the pulse of conflict dynamics in every corner of the globe. It has been called on as a back-channel mediator in hotspots from Colombia to Indonesia to Liberia. ICG’s main funding boost originally came from governments that didn’t have embassies in far-flung places but needed access to the same quality of information as established powers. It has since become so well regarded that even China consults it to evaluate the country’s risk exposure in conflict-prone areas from Sudan to central Asia.
It’s easy to get overexcited about people-to-people diplomacy. Between all the “good offices,” “special envoys,” “quartets,” “troikas,” “contact groups,” and “Track II” dialogues, there appears to be more mediation of the world’s ongoing disputes than ever. Yet in so many conflicts, international law seems to be taken into consideration only after the militaries have had their way. Delegates at the UN General Assembly unite behind resolutions, while in their home countries people unite behind armies—against which UN resolutions seem equally useless. The United States, Israel, and
Ethiopia have been known to sidestep the laws of war in their invasions of Afghanistan/Iraq, Gaza, and Somalia, respectively. Gaza is so densely populated that Israel’s 2008 incursion to rout Hamas inevitably killed several hundred civilians, including many children. When Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa (who with his thick mustache resembles a Bollywood villain) felt victory was near in the country’s civil war against the Tamil Tigers, preventing a humanitarian nightmare was a distant second priority to “defeating a terrorist force” and “uniting the nation under the shade of the national flag.” He probably knew that the world would prefer to have one less civil war on its to-do list than gripe with him later on about how he did it.
The United States has dispatched special operations forces to help the Sri Lankan government crush the Tamil Tigers, to help Colombia corner the FARC, and to help the Philippines defeat the Abu Sayaf insurgency on the island of Mindanao. In all three cases, American support for military allies has trumped international mediation efforts. When the New York Philharmonic performed in Pyongyang in March 2008, it inspired even hard-nosed former defense secretary William Perry to claim that a “breakthrough” may be at hand. But Kim Jong Il didn’t show up for the concert, and in North Korea, it’s been his way or no way.
