2012: challenges of strategic flux
By
Dr Maleeha Lodhi
At many international conferences I attended last year a number of themes emerged about the challenges and opportunities presented by a world in strategic flux. These are instructive when looking at the year ahead to identify key trends and other signposts to the future.
Five issues in particular seemed to dominate the global discourse: 1) the growing threat to the global economy posed by the financial crisis unfolding in the West since 2008; 2) a continuing shift in the world’s economic centre of gravity to Asia and China’s global ascent; 3) the closing of an era of large-scale military intervention; 4) a widening gap between global problems and institutions of global governance and 5) the Arab awakening and shifting sands of regional geopolitics.
The economic crises that many Western countries have been wrestling with for the past three years have far reaching geopolitical implications. Strained sovereign balance sheets, a wrenching process of financial deleveraging and potential economic meltdowns pose serious threats to long-term global security.
The debt crisis in some of the world’s largest economies underscores the danger of a global slowdown. The euro zone crisis has also raised the spectre of contagion.
In this backdrop, more economic turmoil can be expected in 2012. Crisis-ridden western economies will struggle to avert double dip recession. As structural problems in advanced economies including the US will take years to resolve, another challenge will be to deal with the social consequences of economic dislocation. This is already exemplified by the ‘occupy Wall Street’ protests in America and street action elsewhere.
The economic crisis that began in 2008 has accelerated the shift – already underway – in economic and political power from the West to the East. China’s ascent as the world’s second largest economy and main creditor to the biggest economy (the US) is an obvious marker of this. 2012 will further consolidate this trend, as economic power continues to shift to Asia, even if China faces the prospect of an overheating economy and inflation.
This structural transformation of the global environment has occurred in a decade in which the US remained preoccupied with the ‘security wars’ it initiated in Afghanistan and then Iraq in the wake of 9/11. Over time this confronted the US with the consequences of these protracted conflicts in the form of debilitating financial crisis due in large part to the debts contracted during this decade.
Thus the most consequential change to emerge in the past several years occurred not in the theatre of war but in the global economy. In bringing about a redistribution of global power this produced a vastly transformed strategic picture and an America diminished by military overreach and internal economic stagnation.
2012 will see more of what has been underway – the US trying to adjust to the relative diminution in its power in an increasingly multipolar world with diverse centres and sources of power. Its economic troubles will also reinforce the need to give priority to ‘nation-building’ at home. As the Obama administration acknowledged in its 2010 National Security Strategy, only by reviving the economy would Washington be able to exercise influence and leadership abroad.
In recognition of this reality and in light of the chastening experience of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the era of large-scale military interventions may be coming to a close. The completion of the American military withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 affirmed this. The formal end to a conflict that began in 2003 came amid crumbling public support for foreign wars and sharp budget cuts – eroding any zeal for such engagements in the future.
2012 will reinforce this trend as the drawdown of “surge” forces gets underway in Afghanistan and is completed by year end ahead of the 2014 transition, when US and Nato combat forces are expected to pull out.
At several conferences there was consensus on the view that the West’s appetite for over-the-horizon military interventionism was exhausted making them less likely in the future. This was a function not just of their public’s disapproval but also of the inability to achieve desired outcomes.
The Libyan intervention in 2011 did not negate this ‘new imperative’. For from offering a template for externally aided regime-change, it underscored the constraints on the use of force. America’s reluctant, back-seat involvement, portrayed as ‘leading from behind’ reflected an unease with more military enterprises. The Libyan case showed that Nato nations did not in fact have the military, organisational, political or economic capability for effective intervention in states other than the weakest and where their regimes lacked regional support.
This does not rule out military intervention in the future. But its feasibility will rest on several risk and cost factors, calculation of a certain outcome, and only when the direct strategic interest of a major power is involved. This has implications for the ongoing US confrontation with Iran, which will remain a key issue in the coming year.
Another issue that figured prominently in the international debate last year was the growing inadequacy of existing institutions of global governance to deal with the complexity of international challenges. This means that the quest for appropriate policy responses and multilateral mechanisms will continue. In a world characterised by the decentralisation of power this will also involve finding a balance between multilateralism and minilateralism.
Impatience with the cumbersome, consensus-based multilateral process and lack of UN leadership has seen a greater resort to expedient devices especially informal ‘coalitions of the willing’. Understood as an approach that mobilises a core group of countries to solve a specific problem, minilateralism has already been utilised in the form of ad hoc groupings, commissions and contact groups including the G20 (comprising the world’s largest economies), the five plus one group on Iran, and the Quartet on the Middle East.
2012 and beyond will likely see a combination of the two approaches. But rule making by a powerful yet unrepresentative oligarchy will not offer lasting solutions if they are imposed on others with no voice in these decisions. The G20 is already seen by many as a ‘coalition of collusion’, whose legitimacy will continue to be questioned. The latest publication of the World Economic Forum, ‘Outlook on the Global Agenda 2012’, points out that “networks of actors, coalitions of like-minded but disparate forces and unexpected partnerships” may become more dominant.
The future of the ‘Arab spring’ and fate of uncertain transitions in countries undergoing popular upheaval was much debated in the preceding year. They will be key questions for 2012. The victory of Islamic parties in Tunisia and Egypt has shown that the Arab spring may well turn out to be a Muslim ‘awakening’ rather than the triumph of a secular order celebrated in early western media coverage.
The battle to determine the Arab future will intensify in 2012 with the outlook clouded by the danger of sectarian strife, civil war and disorder. The prospects for one of the most promising developments in recent Arab history also rests on their precarious economies being lifted from stagnation and on restoring social cohesion, eroded by political disruption and economic stress.
The momentous developments in the Arab world represent a global shift away from traditional balances associated with the last century. Among trends that will likely be reinforced in 2012 is the decline of America’s influence in the Middle East. From arbiter Washington became little more than a bystander in the popular protests that swept away the old order it had long supported. The task of managing the transition has fallen to the region, as it should, even if the outcome is far from clear.
With no clear leader in the world today a key question for 2012 is whether imperatives of global problem solving will yield collaboration or division in responding to emerging and enduring challenges in an environment of few certainties.
Source----The News