contrary to those waxing nostalgic for Saddam or swooning over Egypt’s Sisi, perhaps next time we can recall that it is these dictators that have spawned the extremist opposition that now threatens Americans and Europeans at home. Isn’t the right answer a more robust form of autonomy and federalism, in which groups that aim for self government have some hope of achieving it? Isn’t the answer a group of federalized, representative governments that allocates shared resources justly, rather than on the basis of ethnic and sectarian cronyism?
She wrote that before the Paris attacks, but those reinforced her views. I see elements of wishful thinking there, but that is hard to avoid when coming up with an endgame for the Middle East that sounds positive.
Suppose that the people in the Middle East are not capable of moving to her preferred endgame at the moment. We might want to think through the pros and cons of a different endgame, or midgame: an American military protectorate in what are now the most disorderly parts of the region. Instead of providing asylum to refugees in the United States, we would provide asylum in place.
There would be no democracy under this protectorate. However, the American military rulers would respect individual rights, including property rights. The protectorate would be run using what I call the Basic Social Rule: reward cooperators, punish defectors. If you show that you want to live in peace and work for a living, you are a cooperator. Otherwise, you are not.
There is a joke that what Israel and the Palestinians need are three states: one for the Jews, one for the Palestinians, and one for the people who want to kill each other. The truth hidden in the joke is that the vast majority of people just want to live their lives. The goal of the protectorate is to protect such people from the militants who want to kill for their ideology. The latter would be killed or deported from the areas under the protectorate.
Pros:
–This would not impose unrealistic demands on the culture in these areas. Ethnic groups would not have to work in harmony. Locals would not have to establish governments free of corruption. People could not vote extremists into power.
–People who want to live their lives in peace would have safety. They could escape poverty and bloodshed. They would not have to migrate to countries that are foreign to them.
Cons:
–There would be violent resistance and blowback. It will take time and resources to establish control. American soldiers will die in the effort, and so will innocent local civilians.
–Other countries, including Russia, China, and Iran, might oppose such an effort, and they have the means to undermine it.
–Even if the long-term intended ends are libertarian, i.e., that people should enjoy peace and prosperity, the short-term means would not be libertarian. The means would involve foreign intervention and coercion, both of which are against libertarian principles.
–It violates the principle of national autonomy. It dispenses with democracy.
Note that from a libertarian perspective, both national autonomy and democracy are over-rated relative to peace and individual rights. How would you feel, say, if a Middle Eastern country threatened to impose a military dictatorship in the U.S. with a commitment to respecting individual rights and to making our economic policies at least as rational as those of Singapore? If you could trust such a commitment, you might say “bring it on.”
Overall:
Perhaps the protectorate approach would have the biggest upside and also the biggest downside. This makes it unattractive to me, because I am not a risk-taker.
Again, I think that whatever approach you advocate, for the endgame to work out well for both Americans and the people of Middle East requires wishful thinking. For example, for a strict hands-off policy of non-intervention to work well for America, you have to wish that the militants are not as bloodthirsty as the appear to be. And for such a policy to work well for people in the Middle East, you have to wish for. . .some sort of miracle.
I believe that the differences between progressives and conservatives, which seemed to shrink in the aftermath of 9/11, are going to widen following the Paris attacks. (I am thinking of U.S. politics. I am not familiar with politics in France or elsewhere.) I expect that progressives will blame President Bush for what happened in Paris, and conservatives will blame President Obama. I expect progressives will emphasize the need to fight prejudice and oppression against Muslims, and I expect conservatives will emphasize the need to fight barbarism. I expect progressives to reiterate that climate change is a more important problem than terrorism. [I actually wrote this post on Saturday night, before the Democratic Presidential debate.]
As I wrote two weeks ago, this is not a promising environment for libertarians. Do you think that Rand Paul, while still in the Presidential race, will emphasize the dangers of over-reacting to terrorism? [update: if he did, he would be aligned with Paul Krugman, although I doubt he would get Krugman’s vote. Also, he would be aligned with his father. My reaction to “you have nothing to fear but fear itself” is “tell that to European Jews in 1933, when, incidentally, the Germans still looked like a military junior varsity.” It’s not necessarily right to invoke that precedent, but it is something to consider.]
I suspect that the general public is currently more sympathetic to the conservative civilization vs. barbarism axis than it is toward the progressive world view. However, if the Republicans nominate someone as erratic as Trump or Carson, I could imagine a Democratic victory.
In terms of creating protectorates, I like the concept, but I worry you’d run into the same problems the US did in Iraq: namely that violent resistance is extensive, the draconian tactics necessary to deal with it simply aren’t on the table, politically, any proxies you try to enlist to help you are borderline worthless (ie, the Iraqi Army), and so you have to fall back on trying to bribe everybody into (kind of) doing what you want and the whole thing becomes a giant money pit. The domestic political situation is the limiting factor here, I think, and there is no fixing it. The only possible way around this that I could see is if maybe you could covertly supply a private enterprise like say Blackwater/Xe or whatever it’s called now to build a small private army in a failed state like Libya and establish a protectorate there around, say, a port city, that they could then run as they see fit, but that, I think, is quite a longshot.
To be honest, I fully expect half the Middle East to pick up and move to western countries over the next twenty years, virtually unimpeded. Attacks like those in Paris will become semi-regular virtually all across Europe and the US, with Muslims, Christians, and Jews all frequently amongst the dead, and so the bien pensants will be able to maintain the façade that this indiscriminate violence is not about religion or ethnicity or culture, it’s source is merely these neutral, nebulous words like “extremism” “radicalism,” “hatred,” “alienation,” etc., and any second-guessing of whether accepting all these migrants was a good idea will be waved away with a dismissive hand gesture. There will be an occasional backlash from some deranged right winger ala Anders Breivik which will enable these same folks to say “see, our homegrown conservatives are just as bad, anyway,” and serve to renew and intensify the calls for more integration, tolerance, cultural sensitivity, accommodation, etc. And gun control.
What happens from there, I cannot say. I suspect they’ll only continue to get more interesting.
Perhaps the protectorate already exists, it’s called Jordan. Also, there’s plenty of undeveloped room in Turkey which already accommodates millions of refugees.
Here’s my crackpot theory…
Not that long ago, Europe was no less tumultuous than the Middle East is now. But, the mechanisms for killing were considerably less effective and indiscriminate.
Why so violent? Because humans have some level of tendency toward violence. As long as high levels of aggression are positively correlated with number of offspring, humans continue to have a relatively high level of innate violence. The phrase is “rape, pillage and plunder” for a good reason.
Then, just as violence was reaching new heights of organized depravity in Europe, along comes the machine gun. With that little invention, one nerd in a fox hole with 1,000 rounds of ammunition can obliterate 100 of the most aggressive males who have scrambled out of their trench. Most aggressive attack first.
Twice within two generations, Europe turned that invention against it’s most aggressive males to significant effect, reducing the average tendency toward aggression and violence for the whole population. No more Nordic raiders. No more Roman legions.
But, the Arabs have never done that to themselves. Hence their current situation.
Just another crackpot theory.
The nuke is a data point that it may be have been more of a recalculation of the returns to violence as opposed to killing off violent individuals. In fact, we probably better hope it isn’t going to require a third world war.
So, about as many people were killed in Paris as were killed in car accidents that day in the US. Sure, we can extrapolate the same assumptions that never materialized since 2001 but why would we judge Rand Paul by irrational voters or Paul Krugman?
I think the problem with the idea is the fine line between “asylum in place” and “internment camp”. (Particularly once the political process got involved in the design of this protectorate).
The old Ottoman Millet system* was a form of “virtual federalism” that was more or less stable in the middle east for 500 years … didn’t en well, though.
From wikipedia “a millet was a separate legal court pertaining to “personal law” under which a confessional community (a group abiding by the laws of Muslim Sharia, Christian Canon law, or Jewish Halakha) was allowed to rule itself under its own system.” Given that confessional mobility was easy and simple, probably the first real world trial of something close to “virtual federalism”.
“recall that it is these dictators that have spawned the extremist opposition that now threatens Americans and Europeans at home.” Seriously? We should not “recall” things that are plainly not true. ISIS was not born of anything Saddam or Sisi did, but of the bungled aftermath of the Second Iraq War. Neocons’ blithe fantasies extend to the wholesale rewriting of history, apparently.
No, I think she has a point. The radical Islamism of revolutionary Iran was fueled in part by US sponsorship of the Shah’s brutality. Likewise, a number of the 9-11 hijackers had apparently spent time in Egyptian jails as political prisoners and were motivated by the US’ backing of Mubarak’s dictatorship.
Perhaps we put the cart before the horse with the democracy cram down project. The important aspect of democracy is the bloodless change of ruler and that hadn’t seemed to work out.
Yes. Apparently neocons can only be judged on intention, and intention makes up for all.
Leaving aside the question of whether such a protectorate would be desirable, you have to ask—would it “work”? There are historical precedents either way, and it’s not immediately clear what divides them. Failed protectorates, which bred cycles of intensifying violence that eventually led to their collapse, include the recent US stint in Iraq (already mentioned above), but also the British and French Mandates in Palestine and Syria. In a sense, every violently overthrown colonial regime (e.g., French Algeria or French Vietnam) falls into this category. Successful ones would be the post-WW2 Allied administrations of Japan and Germany, or even the Soviet administration of satellite Eastern European countries in the same period. The rare successful colonial regimes such as Hong Kong might also count.
I am not sufficiently well versed in the history of these enterprises to discuss the causes of success or failure, though as the Soviet example shows, neither the sympathy of the local population nor governing in their interest are prerequisites. (But as the French colonial misadventures show, the willingness to spill locals’ blood is not enough for success.)
The idea of an American protectorate in the ME is as silly as the single business GDP models Mr. K derides. The US has only done this after achieving victory over opponents in congressionally-declared wars. There is no political appetite for this among the US public, and few of the other nations of the world would favor it, especially if the US also claimed sovereignty over energy resources. It’s an interesting thought experiment, but belongs in the realm of fantasy.
I see the biggest problem is not all the Middle East is poor. And the terrorist organization raise most of their funds from our ‘Allies!’ Do we take over of Saudia Arabia is bombing the crap out of Yemen? Saudia Private citizens are the best source of funds and future terrorist. I tend to think the difference between the Middle East and Europe is Europeans experienced both WW1 and WW2,
In terms of Palestine, Isn’t simply time for Israel to call the people of the occuppied territory citizens?
Isn’t the answer a group of federalized, representative governments that allocates shared resources justly, rather than on the basis of ethnic and sectarian cronyism?
Of course, like the answer to being heavier than desired is to eat less and move more. Easy, peezy, lemon squeezy.
This sounds like you want the British Empire resurrected by the U.S.
I don’t see Hillary in the role of Queen Victoria but good luck anyway.
Doesn’t it seem apparent that both left and right extreme positions are facilitating the problem? We care about Parisians. The extremists are there because they were let in. Why did they come? Because their governments are unstable. Why are their governments unstable? At least in part because they killed a handful of ours so we killed a million of theirs.
Is there a way to facilitate getting from oppressive regimes to engaged democracy by skipping the trough in the J-curve with the complicating feature of the Islamic Worldwide Caliphate?
Aside from creating Elysium, which is just a version of the Three State punchline, I can’t think of any. Maybe if the protect in place area offered a lot of returns to peaceful cooperators so that they had the incentives to join the cosmopolitan world. That would be a long road that probably couldn’t be championed by The Great Satan.
Swiss canton confederation is best model to use, very limited top state, most gov’t power devolved to local cantons.
City state is the right size for a good little state.
the trouble is we’re not allied with any battle-ready civilization that dislikes the barbarians more than it dislikes Assad/Shia civilization
the blessing is that a nuclear power with a big, strong military is backing Assad’s civilization against the barbarians, and another is backing the Kurds against the barbarians. the US and Turkey claim to have designs on an Arab anti-ISIS startup near the Turkish border, too
the Republican position on Syria is brazenly left wing / revolutionary. they want to defeat the serious rebels and defeat Assad/Russia/Iran/Hezbollah, as well, to the end of arriving at a moderate Sunni regime tough enough to interrupt Iran’s corridor to Hezbollah but nice enough to sustain fraternite with the various minorities
Obama’s position is the conservative position. he fears costs and unintended consequences and the clumsiness of the warfare state. he’s also suspicious of security freeloaders in the surrounding countries