An Increasingly Grim Strategic Environment Ahead
Australia and Collectively Pushing Back Against Authoritarian Predators
(It was a great priviledge to co-write this article with Latika Bourke, author and journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Latika is based in London and you can follow her on Twitter/x at @LatikaMBourke)
One could be forgiven, given recent events in the global security environment, for wanting to disconnect from it all. It would be all too tempting, if one had the means, to seek out a remote island with no WiFi and escape into an information-free wilderness.
The events of the past several weeks have in many ways been overwhelming. This is not just because of the brutal, personal nature of the way Hamas targeted, slaughtered, and captured its Jewish victims, but because even the most disengaged understood that something fundamental about the world order had changed with Israel’s version of September 11.
While the Afghanistan withdrawal was bloody and messy, many probably hoped that it had drawn a curtain on the wars spawned by 9/11. And that it would give politicians time to draw breath and re-focus on domestic concerns, especially the increasingly troubling manifestations of climate change.
But hope, as the military says, is not a valid course of option.
Neither the 2020 Second Nagorno Karabakh War, the harbinger of the intense drone warfare now ubiquitous in Ukraine and beyond, nor the rapidly expanding (and growing aggression) nor the Chinese military against Taiwan, The Philippines and across the Indo-Pacific, was sufficient to shake most out of the post-Afghanistan lethargy.
The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, accompanied by the wanton destruction of cities, torture, rape and kidnapping of civilians and wholesale conduct of war crimes by the Russians, appalled many.
The Churchillian courage of President Zelenskyy and his brave citizens and soldiers held the West in thrall for a time and even served as a unifying and revitalising force for the West and some institutions, like the European Union and NATO, which have rediscovered their purpose.
Recently, the concern had been around the potential fraying of that Western support and how much endurance individual governments would have headed into 2024’s super-year of elections.
But with Hamas’ attack on Israel, it is not fraying but a rupturing that is the threat.
Like stress in individuals, disorder and fissures in the global security system are cumulative. The growing challenges to global security and prosperity are taking an accelerating toll on Western security budgets.
Putin’s’ relationship with Xi, Iran and North Korea’s military assistance to Russia, and frequent Hamas visits to Moscow are indicative of the systemic threat posed by multiple malign and predatory actors in the global environment. This will require a collective response from democracies to address.
Worryingly, whereas Ukraine was a rallying call for the West both at a political and societal level, the Israel conflict is the opposite. We have seen this play out on our own streets with the gleeful celebration of violence by protestors in Australia including those who chanted “Gas the Jews,” slogans we thought should have been consigned to history after the Holocaust were said aloud in Sydney.
The explosion of violence, the result of the Hamas assault on Israel on 7 October 2023, has shaken many out of their ability to turn away from, or ignore the growing challenges to the security of existing global order, and that of our own nation.
As Trotsky once said, we may not be interested in war, but it is interested in us.
Iran has made it clear that it may intervene in the growing Gaza conflict under certain conditions. Russia has stepped up its offensive operations in Ukraine, with a multiple attacks on Avdiivka in the past two weeks while the attention of the world was on Israel. China has continued its military expansion and large-scale military operations to coerce and bully its neighbours.
And while this is occurring, legislators in the United States Congress squabble over the scraps of the position of Speaker of the House. Senators arbitrarily block the appointments of civilian and military personnel critical to the leadership of national security establishments over religion and legislators have been unable to ensure a stable and timely budget for the US military for over a decade.
The ‘the shining city on the hill’, a term used repeatedly by President Ronald Reagan, has become a strategically incoherent, inwards-focused dumpster fire.
The dysfunctional superpower, a term used recently by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, is no longer a deterrent to those nations and non-state actors who wish to destroy, tear down or reshape the global system that emerged from the Second World War.
Indeed, it is a green light to authoritarians like Russia’s President Putin who serves as an inspiration to other predatory dictators eyeing off weaker neighbours.
The conflicts they are either directly waging, or that they are sponsoring, are being conducted by a mix of standing military institutions, paramilitary institutions (think China’s little blue men in the south China Sea) and proxy forces using old-style violence and brutally blended with new age information technologies, digital era propaganda and masses of drones.
The ideas that lay behind the brutal aggression of Russia, China, Iran and non-state actors like Hamas, Hezbollah, and others, is that any example of freedom and prosperity for those they rule and suppress must be squashed at all costs. Hamas had much to lose by Israel’s success in normalising relations with Arab states, particularly Saudi Arabia.
Ukrainians are fighting for their existence because the idea that people can practice democracy and speak Russian, both threatens and repulses Putin. Israel too fights for its very existence against nations such as Iran, and terrorist organisations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, whose base motivation (which they have stated continuously) is the eradication of a Jewish state (and by extension, the Jewish people).
This is no putsch of radicalism, like ISIS, that can be suppressed and quarantined in countries few Westerners choose to travel. It is a global contagion that is growing more difficult to contain, let alone suppress.
The most dire of strategic diagnoses may now be the most appropriate: we may now be in an era of not just permanent strategic competition but also of permanent conflict. Chaos in the global system, and its economic, political, informational, and societal elements, may be with us for years or even decades to come.
There is a reflex at times, for us to use Australia’s geography to hide from these challenges. It is entirely understandable. But this would be precisely the wrong response.
Our national prosperity is intimately linked to the global finance and trading system.
This in turn is underpinned by a system of global laws, conventions, and institutions. If we turn away from defending these, our security and our prosperity as a nation is undermined. Not to mention our values.
Resilience and enhanced deterrence, not retreat, is required. Flatlining defence spending, as the Australian government has done this year, will not suffice. Nor will an almost exclusive diplomatic focus on the south Pacific.
At the same time, we must reinforce in our own democracies and those of our friends, the ideas of open discourse, rule of law, facts-based debate, responsible consultation, compromise, and above all, transparency and accountability of governments. Protecting ourselves from the poison of polarisation is something each of us can do on a day-to-day basis.
All democracies, if they are to survive in this century and into the next, must collectively become the ‘shining city on a hill’, an example to all humans of enlightened governance and equality, while defending themselves and their weaker friends.
Australia and other democracies can, and must, play an expanded role in this. We cannot afford to look away.
Well said. You accurately describe the US situation and the interplay amongst those who would wish us ill. While I find little cheer in your analysis, there is little to be found.
Before Mr. Netanyahu came to power, Israel's great historical leaders, whatever their political sensibilities, were acutely aware of this vulnerability the Yom Kippur War made manifest.
Yitzhak Rabin, who had seen at close quarters the peril to the homeland, defended, with unparalleled conviction and political will, the idea that there would be no peace or serenity for Israel if the Palestinians were not also recognized as a free and sovereign state.
At Camp David, Menachem Begin, who came from the right of the right, courageously made the choice of peace with Israel's main enemy, post-Nasser Egypt.
Ariel Sharon, who had realized the powerlessness of force during his controversial intervention in Lebanon, had, on the eve of the health accident that was to strike him down, decided to lead his country to renounce its colonial ambitions in the West Bank.
These men had foreseen and fully recognized, for Yitzhak Rabin at least, that Israel would only find peace on condition that it established a balanced relationship with the Arab states around it, and with the men and women of Palestine, based on mutual respect and the sharing of the benefits of peace.
The break in Israeli policy introduced in recent years by Mr. Netanyahu's successive governments is certainly not the sole cause of the new situation, but it has contributed mightily to it.
The Israeli Prime Minister and his government - built in a break with the secular, liberal tradition that has dominated Israel's domestic history since its inception - have seemed oblivious to this structural vulnerability of the Hebrew state, and have acted as if the Palestinian problem belonged to the past, and that there was no longer any reason to take into account the expectations or fear the initiatives coming from a Palestinian community that is divided, disqualified and, in its most extreme forms - those of Hamas - quite simply bought off by its enemy.
On a technical level, it is clear that Mr. Netanyahu, who is without doubt the least well-versed in military affairs of all the heads of government who have preceeded him in office since the creation of Israel, has not been able to maintain, between the political authorities, the IDF and the intelligence services, the close solidarity necessary for the constant mobilization of the security apparatus on the right issues. In the short term, these shortcomings have had serious consequences.
However, the main issue is political. Mr. Netanyahu seemed to imagine that the establishment of peaceful and cooperative relations with Israel's Arab neighbors - an excellent ambition in itself, and one that will prove highly useful tomorrow in the necessary quest for appeasement - could have the indirect, but in his view precious, power to absolve Israel from seeking a balanced and respectful agreement with the Palestinians, respectful of their deepest expectations and aspirations.
What's more, with the Abraham Accords having enabled the Arab states to abandon the Palestinians to their sad fate, the Israeli government felt free to embark on a creeping but brutal and determined relaunch of its settlement policy in the West Bank.
Israel's policy has changed, but it would be unfair to attribute to the Hebrew state the monopoly of the new brutalization of the world from which the horror of October 7 emerged. Everywhere, the forces committed to moderation, cooperation and peace have been defeated. That the Palestinians have been increasingly and suicidally tempted to take refuge in a kind of political nihilism cannot, alas, surprise us. Could a population with no future, and therefore no hope, be tempted by moderate parties with nothing to offer?
The United States, too, bears its share of historical responsibility for arming the trap, having given little encouragement to European efforts in favor of a peace process based on the quest for a two-state solution, and having, at Donald Trump's instigation, swung over to the crime-pusher camp by breaking the Paris agreements with Iran and endorsing the transfer of its embassy to Jerusalem.
Europe, for its part, lacked neither lucidity nor imagination in its obstinacy to support the only model capable of transforming long-standing adversaries into partners, but it proved incapable of withstanding the shock when President Trump decided to sound the charge against any solution based on balance and common sense - strength of analysis, weakness of will.
How, in these conditions, can we fail to see that it is today the ideological heirs of the assassins of Anwar el-Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin who together hold the pen of the tragedy that is being written before our eyes?
What can we do to help peoples in distress chart the right course? In the short term, we must ensure that a legitimate counter-attack, aimed exclusively at destroying the aggressor's military means, avoids the two major pitfalls that everyone has clearly identified. Firstly, the risk of an uncontrolled escalation that could lead to a general conflagration. Behind Hamas, there is Hezbollah; behind Hezbollah, there is Iran; behind Iran, there are Russia and China.
In this respect, let us pay a fitting tribute to the composure and commitment of President Biden who, unlike his predecessor, is unquestionably putting the full weight of the United States behind moderation, de-escalation, the release of hostages and the right to life of civilian populations.
The second major risk is that of mass annihilation of civilian populations, used by some as human shields and by others as an outlet for the temptation of revenge, to use the worrying expression of the Israeli Prime Minister.
As the Prime Minister rightly pointed out, France is strongly committed to this essential issue. As well as issuing warnings, the European Union must shoulder all its responsibilities to work with humanitarian organizations to ensure the massive delivery of life-saving supplies to a civilian population in deep distress. Let's make these strong gestures the instrument for the return of the hostages.
There are times and places when it is criminal not to be there. Europe would never recover from remaining passive in such dramatic circumstances. All that remains is to build a future of peace. This is a daunting task, given the wall of distress and hatred that now separates Israelis and Palestinians. Today, it is both too late and too early to establish two states on Palestinian soil.
It is, however, time - indeed, high time - to start creating the conditions that will make this dual creation possible when the time comes. The first of these conditions is for Israel to put an end to its colonization policy and finally recognize that the solution to the Palestinian problem cannot be achieved by exporting Western Palestinians to Egypt and Eastern Palestinians to Jordan.
The second of these conditions is to recreate, notably with the support of the moderate states of the Abrahamic Pact, an active, respected Palestinian authority capable of taking over in Gaza from an ashen Hamas and negotiating a status that respects Palestinian rights. Beyond the Middle East, good will exists, like that of Brazil, whose draft resolution France was right to support at the UN. It's up to us to join their efforts.
I would like to conclude by mentioning the essential role that the European Union must play in the service of peace in this tormented but close region. Europe, shattered and ruined, has rebuilt itself on a simple and powerful idea, the one that guided the Franco-German reconciliation: we can only find peace with our long-standing adversaries if we take their legitimate needs into account. It's up to Europe to convince Palestinians and Israelis of the relevance of its reconciliation plan, and it's up to France to convince our partners to rise to this historic challenge.