America: Choose Your Enemies Wisely

April 22, 2014 Topic: Security Region: United States

America: Choose Your Enemies Wisely

"Getting it wrong can lead to serious, damaging consequences."

How should a nation identify its enemies? This is a serious question faced by every nation every day. No nation has a higher priority than the protection of its territory, its citizens and its way of life. Laxity in identifying enemies can be disastrous, as history amply demonstrates. But overzealousness can also have serious consequences.

Such musings may be propitious these days because the United States has been on a tear in recent years in declaring itself to be in adversarial positions vis-à-vis a host of nations or ruling regimes—Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iran, and Russia. China may be next, based on the evolving relationship between that rising Asian power and America. So some serious thinking on the topic may be in order.

Let’s begin with geography, the prime factor in generating hostile relationships among nations. If the map surrounding a nation renders that nation vulnerable to neighboring countries, then it must either change the map to rearrange the power balance or submit to the realities of the prevailing power disparity. Geography isn’t America’s problem. It sits upon the choicest lands of North America, stretching across the midsection of the continent, with abundant ports and harbors, a vast network of navigable rivers, and an ideal climate. Two vast oceans protect it, and its two neighbors, north and south, lack the population and resources to pose any serious threat.

But, even as a fledgling nation, the United States resolved it wouldn’t take any chances with geography. Hence James Monroe’s audacious 1823 Doctrine. In that day, only the European powers could pose a serious threat to the United States or to regional stability in the Americas. And the United States declared that entire vast territory off limits to those European nations. It was breathtaking in its scope, but somehow the defiant little nation got away with it. Most European powers, most of the time, accepted Monroe’s challenge as representing a definition of America’s sphere of influence. (At the time of the Monroe Doctrine, Mexico posed a theoretical future threat to U.S. interests, but President James Polk was to rectify that by adding some five hundred thousand square miles of U.S. territory, most of it from Mexico, through war and diplomacy.)

Thus, even today geography smiles benevolently upon America. It has no serious adversaries or enemies anywhere nearby. But if nations must always be surveying the scene for potential problems from outside forces, then the United States is probably foolhardy to ignore the long-term consequences of illegal immigration from Mexico and prospects that that nation, in the next decades, could become a sump of civic dysfunction captured from within by drug lords of immense wealth and geopolitical reach.

Already the United States has ceded its border with Mexico to immigration, much of it illegal. As geopolitical analyst George Friedman has written, “As populations shift, the border is increasingly seen [by Mexicans] as arbitrary or illegitimate, and migration from the poorer to the richer country takes place...the cultural border of Mexico shifts northward even though the political border remains static.” Friedman sees this trend accelerating in coming years, turning significant swaths of U.S. borderland territory into quasi-Mexican territory.

If this process collides with threats of a destabilized American society from drug-lord activity spilling over from the south, borderland tensions could generate broader tensions between the two nations. George Friedman discounts this possibility, seeing Mexico instead as a rising power poised to build upon its current foundation as a nation of 110 million people with an economy ranked fifteenth in the world. In this scenario, Mexico becomes positioned “to challenge the territorial integrity of the United States, and the entire balance of power of North America.” Thus, either way, Mexico poses a potential challenge to the United States of serious proportions within the next several decades.

But for now, while getting control of the border constitutes a serious long-term challenge of strategic significance, the geographical scene is serene.

Next we must consider cultural tensions. The late Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard famously suggested in 1993 that the post-Cold War era would be characterized by civilizational clashes. “The principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations,” he wrote. “The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.” These clashes will be driven by ethnic, religious and civilizational impulses, he predicted, and even within civilizations he foresaw spreading ethnic and religious conflict.

Many in the West rejected this notion, beguiled as they were by the idea that the great geopolitical drama of our time was the struggle of peoples throughout the world to replicate Western democratic structures. But events since the Cold War’s end have demonstrated a heightened sense of cultural identity in the world and a growing tendency for people to embrace violent means of defending or projecting their cultural identities. The 9/11 attacks on Americans upon their own soil back in 2001 certainly reflected this reality.

The enemy that identified itself on 9/11 was the cultural phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism, manifest most starkly in the rise of Al Qaeda and its affiliates. The Al Qaeda network now encompasses serious terrorist enterprises in Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula, the so-called Islamic Maghreb (focused largely on North Africa), Somalia and Syria, with associated groups emerging elsewhere in the Islamic world. These groups constitute a serious adversary animated by cultural ambition (to restore Islam to what they view as its rightful place in civic society) and cultural hatred (directed mostly at the West and America, viewed as agents of Islam’s thwarted dreams).

And the thinking that drives these terrorist groups is widely shared even by nonviolent people in the lands of Islam, particularly in its Middle Eastern core. Hence, radical Islamic fundamentalism represents a formidable threat to America. The key in dealing with this enemy is to keep these groups off balance while avoiding actions destined to inflame anti-Western passions in the world of Islam.

American policy since 9/11 has accomplished just the opposite. With ham-fisted military activity, it has enflamed Islamic sensibilities throughout Muslim lands and catalyzed an expansion of Al Qaeda affiliates and aligned entities. Much of this has resulted from confusion about who the true enemy was.

Much has been written, for example, about the false notions that led the United States to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—that the Iraqi leader held vast stores of weapons of mass destruction and that he was closely aligned with Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. We know now that those suppositions were faulty. But the larger point is that Saddam was not an Islamist fundamentalist. He was a thug who governed through fear and greed and who harbored no sympathy for religious radicals in his country. He also posed a counterweight to the fundamentalist regime next door in Iran, which did in fact pose a terrorist threat in the region and beyond.

This confusion about the identity of U.S. enemies truly exacerbated U.S. difficulties in the Middle East by stirring anti-Western passions throughout the region, destabilizing Iraq, ensuring close ties between Iraq and Iran, and unleashing false hopes for some kind of democratic emergence in a part of the world where no such phenomenon is part of the traditional culture. The result was spreading instability in places such as Egypt, Libya and Syria.

Another example was Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, certainly no enemy of the United States. He had developed an accommodation with America’s ally Israel, which he had administered in good faith for more than thirty years, and he had sought to control the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood in his country—both beneficial to U.S. interests. But, when he ran into difficulty with street protests in his country, Barack Obama’s America promptly turned on him as if he were an enemy.

Was Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi a U.S. enemy? Though a thuggish leader with a history of terrorist activity, he had promised to shut down his development of mass-destruction weapons and his terrorist activities if America would leave him alone. He kept his promise. But when he encountered anti-government street protests, America went to war against him, in the process unleashing a flow of his weapons into the hands of terrorist groups in Syria and Africa—again, more confusion about America’s true enemies.

Much of this confusion stems from the misguided view, widespread in both the Bush and Obama administrations, that America must help foster democratic movements in Islamic lands wherever possible. But none of these movements has spawned anything approaching genuine democracy, and the spreading chaos has generated more fertile territory for Al Qaeda expansion.

A third area of enemy definition stems from clashes of national ambition, either regional or global. Think Rome and Carthage. Only one could dominate the Mediterranean, but neither would cede dominance to the other. That meant that one had to be destroyed. Or consider Britain and Germany in the decades prior to World War I. Germany was edging closer and closer to the kind of continental dominance that Britain had vowed to prevent since the days of Cardinal Wolsey. And then the Germans embarked on a massive naval build-up designed to threaten Britain’s hegemony over the seas. In such circumstances war becomes nearly inevitable.

Does America, the world’s dominant power since 1945, face such challenges that define new enemies? Is Russia one? What about China?

Many neoconservative and Wilsonian thinkers in America today believe that Russia represents such a geopolitical threat, and if America doesn’t respond, the result will be a new Cold War reminiscent of the last one with the expansionist Soviet Union. This is ludicrous. It isn’t Russia that has been expanding its influence and reach to the west in provocative ways but rather America and the West, expanding to the east. As George Friedman has noted, St. Petersburg, the jewel of Russian culture, was a thousand miles away from NATO troops in 1989. Now it is just 100 miles away. In 1989, he adds, Moscow was some 1,200 miles away from the limits of Russian power. Now that distance has shrunk to 200 miles.

Writing in 2009, Friedman added, “Ukraine and Belarus are everything to the Russians. If they were to fall into an enemy’s hands—for example, join NATO—Russia would be in mortal danger….From the Russian point of view, NATO expanding into Ukraine threatens Russian interests in the same way as if the Warsaw Pact had moved into Mexico.”

Thus, we can see that Russia’s recent actions in the face of NATO’s eastward expansion have been largely defensive. Given its geopolitical position, vulnerable to land invasion, it feels it needs buffer zones for protection. Since its 1989 Cold War defeat and the Soviet collapse two years later, it has been losing buffer zones. Any restoration of amicable relations between Russia and the West will require Western assurances that its eastward push will cease.

This is not to say that Russia doesn’t pose any kind of potential threat to Western and American interests in the longer term. Its appetite for buffer zones is going to be voracious, given its intrinsic vulnerability, and Europe is going to have to buck up its defenses as a counterweight to Russian ambitions. Whether Europe is capable of pulling itself together sufficiently to do that remains an open question. But in the meantime, East-West stability is possible through recognition of the status quo and Western promises to refrain from further eastward expansion.

That is important not only from the standpoint of Europe’s energy needs, most of which are satisfied by Russia, but also in terms of America’s most serious threat to its global ambitions—namely, the rise of China. Here we have a situation that truly could develop into a major confrontation of the kind that embroiled Rome and Carthage in ancient times, and Britain and Germany in the twentieth century. America has enjoyed hegemonic status in East Asia since 1945. China seems resolved to challenge that status. By all appearances, it wants America pushed back to Hawaii. By all appearances, America has no intention of accepting that kind of geopolitical rollback.

If this drama unfolds as history suggests it might—with China an avowed and recognized enemy of the United States—then it will be important that Russia be a nonenemy. Just as President Richard Nixon brilliantly played China off against the Soviet Union in the 1970s, America would be wise to play Russia off against the Chinese in any future U.S.-Sino confrontation.

Thus, we see in stark relief the imperative that nations wisely and realistically identify their adversaries and enemies. Getting it wrong—either by ignoring the emergence of adversarial challenges or seeing dragons where none exist—can lead to serious, damaging consequences. The United States hasn’t been particularly adept here in recent decades, and the negative consequences are piling up.

Robert W. Merry is political editor of The National Interest and the author of books on American history and foreign policy. His most recent book is Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians.