American foreign policy, the Ukraine Crisis and ISIS in Iraq: is nihilism the "new normal"?

Nature abhors a vacuum.

If you look through periods of history over the last two thousand years or so, every so often you see periods of time when the predominant power in a region loses its influence. This may be through internal dissent or strife, economic overstretch, or a lack of will to govern.

Historians often call these blips in history "periods of transition", between one state of affairs and another. This is when the "dialectic" of the time is in dispute, before another narrative appears that fuses together the old and the new.

A short history of nearly everything

Pretensions aside, history is full of these examples. Alexander The Great conquered the Middle East and beyond due as much to the relative weakness of other powers at the time as his own organisation. His Greek-speaking empire fragmented after his death, whose division of power bases lead in time to the rise of Rome.
Rome then became a victim of its own success, when it was financially overwhelmed by the inefficiency of its state and the many tribes that occupied the empire from the Eurasian steppe; what we call today "imperial over-stretch".
The result of this was the so-called "Dark Ages", when the remainder of the Roman Empire in the East morphed in the thousand-year Byzantine Empire, while the Western half of Europe became a patchwork of weak and fluid national entities until the largest and most stable part became, in time, the Holy Roman Empire.

The weakness and fluidity of the "Dark Ages" was one factor for the rise of Islam, which was fortunate to have a good sense of timing. Islam conquered the Middle East, North Africa and the Iberian peninsula due to the relative weakness of the other main powers at that time: in the Middle East and North Africa, the Byzantines were weakened from fighting a long war with Persia. The Muslim Arabs took full advantage. Pushing west, the Arabs crossed into Iberia and pushed north, over the Pyrenees until they were pushed back in the middle of France, and left to consolidate their position in modern-day Spin for the next five hundred years.

Skipping forward, the spread of the Mongol Empire (more about them here) was also due to key factors such as the relative weakness of their rivals at the time. The Mongols quickly overwhelmed the embryonic Russian state, and got as far as Eastern and Central Europe, devastating half of the continent and wiping out the armies put before it. Only the untimely (but for Europe, fortunate) death of the Mongol khan put a halt to the advance. With the death of the khan, the Mongols became pre-occupied with the battle for succession, and Europe was never again a serious priority for them. Instead, Asia and the Middle East bore the brunt of their attention.

In time, the Mongols also lost their pre-eminence. The story of the next five hundred years, from the end of Mongol rule in China towards the end of the 14th century (which coincided with the renaissance in Europe) to the end of the 19th century (which coincided with the rise of the modern democratic state), we see a common pattern. We see the rise and fall of imperial powers like waves in the sea. And we see the rise of new powers happening on the back of the weakness of others.

Stepping into the breach

When the influence of an imperial power (or state actor, to use a modern term) recedes like a wave, it leaves an empty space; a stretch of virgin beach, if you like, ready to be inhabited by a new set of occupiers. In 2014, the two events of the year so far have been the Ukraine Crisis and, more recently, the sudden rise to power of ISIS in the Middle East, an al-Qaeda-inspired extremist force.

The factors that led to the Ukraine Crisis include, as always, the relative weakness of the imperial actor, which is exploited by another (opportunistic) power. In the case of Ukraine, the "imperial actor" was jointly the USA and the EU; on an economic level the EU was driving for Ukraine to enter under its wing, while on a political and diplomatic level, the USA saw a chance to bring Ukraine closer to its orbit.
The problem here was the weakness of both the EU and the USA's position. They had misread (and underestimated) Russia's position (and therefore response). Due to the weakness of both the EU and the USA, they failed to back up their rhetoric with firm actions; relying on the power of threats alone, their actions turned out to be predictably toothless. Ukraine now has a weak central government supported by a toothless West.

It is the weakness of the EU and the USA that is responsible for Russia's response. Putin correctly calculated that the the West lacked the collective will to follow up its words with actions. The West is now at least partly to blame for encouraging the Ukrainian opposition into a position that requires a forceful Russian response.
Now Ukraine is divided in almost the same manner as the USA was back its Civil War, with a separatist region fighting against a government of the north. In this narrative, Kiev is the new Washington, with Donetsk acting as the "southern capital". By a ironic twist of fate, the southern separatists even have a flag that closely resembles that of the old Confederacy, and call their unified "state" the "Confederation of New Russia". This "CNR" is bankrolled and militarily supported by Russia, in the same way that France supported the Americans during the War of Independence. The old Confederacy never got the real support from Britain or others that would have given it a fighting chance during the civil war; the modern-day CNR, however, stands a much better chance of frustrating and wearing-down Kiev through sheer attrition and a mounting cost in blood and treasure, with the support of Russia. Kiev cannot afford a war in the long-term. Russia can.

In the war-zone of east Ukraine, it is the drip-drip of military casualties that may wear down Kiev over time. Moscow's support for the separatists is covert, but consistent. Moscow looks unlikely to back down from its covert military support as long as the West is weak. In the psychology of the Kremlin, if Ukraine is weak, then the West is weak. This gives Moscow all the reason to continue doing what it is doing; the weakness of Kiev demonstrates the strength of Moscow, with Russia stepping into the breach left behind by the West's geo-political weakness.

The army of Islam

The Arab Spring has had many consequences. The most worrying (yet predictable) is the increased power that Islamic extremism has across the the Middle East. The dictatorial states of the Middle East are generally awful, but brought (imposed) stability to the region, to the benefit of the West. In many cases, most of all Syria and Iraq, that stability is effectively destroyed.

The Syrian Civil War is now more than three years old. Few people predicted it would last this long, including this writer. There is now a kind of "unstable stability" with Syria, with the government controlling roughly the south, centre and the west, the pro-Western Sunni rebels controlling the north, and the Sunni Muslim extremists controlling the east. The war is now bogged-down into a stalemate of attrition, with neither side looking close to making any significant advances for the foreseeable future.

Except for the extremists. ISIS, an al-Qaeda-inspired militia, has now evolved from being a "mere" terror group into something like an army. The breakneck speed with which they took control of Mosul, Iraq's biggest city in the north, and a swathe of Sunni-inhabited territory across northern and western Iraq, seemed to come out of the blue. As a result of this, ISIS now control a "de facto" state encompassing eastern Syria, and northern and western Iraq, straddling both sides of the Euphrates valley for hundreds of miles.
One of the most stunning successes was looting Mosul's banks after they took the city; in what must surely be the biggest collective bank robbery in history, ISIS wiped Mosul's banks clean of half a billion dollars in gold and money.
This event compares historically with how the Bolsheviks financed their agenda with bank robberies and other means in the years before they came to power; the most famous was the 1907 Tbilisi robbery in broad daylight in what is now Freedom Square, orchestrated by Stalin (more on his early years here). That robbery was the largest ever at that time.

Their success in Iraq is due to the weakness of support for the government in Sunni-inhabited areas of Iraq. The USA military left Iraq more than two years ago, to be defended by an army comprised of Shias, for the government comprised of Shias. While Kurds more-or-less run their own affairs in their own territory in the north, the Sunni are left powerless, and at the whim of the Shia-led government. ISIS has now stepped into this breach, with evidence that former Baathist officers had done some kind of deal with ISIS, and may also account for the swelling of ISIS's ranks in Iraq. This would also explain why there was no resistance to ISIS taking control of many Sunni-inhabited cities. In other words, the Sunnis of Iraq now have an army of their own to match the "government" Shia army, and the Kurdish peshmergas.
The ingredients are all there for a full-blown civil war like in Syria.

Where does this leave American foreign policy? 

Obama's strategy after the reign of George W Bush had been to repair diplomacy and restore America's reputation as a "peacemaker" rather than a warmonger.
Ignoring the ratcheting-up of the "drone wars" under Obama's watch, it's hard for other "state actors" to ignore the impression that America has now become more consumed by internal politics and introspection (given the rise of The Tea Party - see here and here), and that Obama sees the USA's relative decline as inevitable given the rise of China.

Putting this into consideration, the result is a moral "free-for-all". The UN has become an open joke among the more belligerent powers of the world, to be used as a theatre more than a diplomatic space. With the relative isolationism of the USA under Obama's watch (and likely to continue under his successor, regardless of which party they are from), the world resembles those periods of transition in history gone by, where other powers race to fill in the space left behind by the receding imperial power.

On the evidence so far, Russia, China and Islamic extremists seem to be the beneficiaries of this.

China's domination is inevitable, but no reason to worry.

When pundits predicted China's rise to dominance twenty or thirty years ago, many were dismissive. No longer. But many of those recent converts to the new orthodoxy have gone to the other extreme; from once dismissing China, they've gone into hysterical paranoia about China putting the rest of the world in a virtual stranglehold.

This is misplaced, and ignorant. Certainly China is the pre-eminent economic and trading power in the world, but its military power still lags far behind that of the USA. The real question is to understand what the Chinese themselves want out of the world.
Western thinkers who spread threats of World War Three between China and the USA base this thinking on their own logic: Western powers spread their might over the the rest of the globe through war, colonisation and settling to other parts of the world over several centuries. They assume that China wants the same thing: dominance through control of territory. But China's methods and aims are more subtle. You only have to compare European and Chinese history to get an understanding of that.

A overview of how the West and China came to evolve over two thousand years to their current state of human evolution (eg. through advances in science and technology) is informative.

For a period of more than one thousand years (roughly between 300BC to 1300AD) China was consistently ahead of Europe in most areas of technology and scientific research.
 Europeans think that logic and philosophy are Greek inventions, but the Chinese had similar philosophical schools around the same time period, possibly even slightly earlier, known as the "School of Names". Inventions such as the abacus, the recording of comets, the first building of the Great Wall of China, and the crossbow, were all invented long before the birth of Christ. The ancient Greeks had also invented the crossbow, but this weapon quickly went out of use, and was not widely used again for more than one thousand years in Europe. The Chinese, however, continued to improve upon it. Also in the area of weaponry, the ancient Chinese invented a sort of early halberd (a spear that combines an axe with a dagger-head), that was not widely used in Europe till the Middle Ages.

These are just a few examples. There are then the so-called "Four Great Inventions" in early China, while Europe was experiencing the Dark Ages after the fall of Rome. These were the compass, paper, printing, and gunpowder. Although some of these inventions still needed time to improve, these were things completely unknown to Europe at the time. Gunpowder was used in China nearly a thousand years before Europe; the same for printing. From that, China built there own early version of the musket, centuries before Europeans, as well as cannons. The Chinese also created other military innovations such as Chinese lanterns for signalling and spying. There are then quasi-industrial inventions such as pistons, cast iron, propeller, sluice gates for canals, all a thousand years before their common use in Europe.

I could go on, but I don't want to labour the point, which is that by the time Europe had its Renaissance, China had had at least a five-hundred-year head start on technological innovation, and even China contemporaneous with the Roman Empire was probably still comfortably ahead technologically. The fall of Rome and the Dark Ages put Europe in a funk, and it was only by the Renaissance that they had somewhat caught up with the Chinese, though still a bit behind.

There is a phrase in Capitalism called "Creative Destruction" that goes some way to explaining why the Renaissance happened in Europe at all. The idea is that you have to cause a little anarchy, shaking up the system, in order to promote new ideas. By the time that the Renaissance started in Europe (in the 13th century), China had had more than a thousand years of "creative destruction": China had been at various times over the previous thousand years divided into competing states, or gone from one dynasty quickly being uprooted by the next. There is some credence in the thinking that, like with Europe's creative mess that provoked the Renaissance, this all kept the creative juices flowing in China, as competing powers were always trying to out-do the other in technological pursuits in order to gain an upper hand.

The other thing that was in Europe's favour in causing the Renaissance, was its geography. With the irregular landscape, mountain ranges and so on, it was nigh impossible for "stability" to be created in Europe. There would always be small states, like in Italy, where this continual to-and-fro would provoke ideas to gain the upper hand on political rivals.
China's geography was different, being essentially a large, relatively uniform landscape (about the same size of Europe, with a similar-sized population), dissected by two large rivers. This meant it was in theory easier for one dynasty to control for a longer period of time, given the right circumstances. I'll return to this point shortly.

The coming of the Renaissance in Europe in the 13th century coincided with the arrival of the Mongols onto the world scene. This would prove pivotal for world and Chinese history. The Mongols overran China, ruling from 1271 till 1368, and at the same time, over-running much of the rest of Asia and the Middle East, as far as Eastern Europe.
This would be pivotal for two reasons. First, the sheer scale of the Mongol Empire meant that, for the first time, Chinese trade and ideas could be much more easily transported to the West. The second reason relates to what happened when the Mongol rule of China was defeated in 1368, and a misconception that the West holds about the Mongols.
Mongol rule in China did not bring about a collapse of Chinese innovation; by contrast, it flourished, with further technological and scientific discoveries being made and put into good use. But when the new Chinese Emperor saw the array of technological contraptions in the former Mongol Emperor's palace, he dismissed it all as indicative of the indulgence of their foreign masters, and decreed them all destroyed, discouraging further research into such unnecessary pursuits. Although extensive trade with the Middle East and Africa continued unabated for a while, Chinese research and development never really held its previous high value, and in a matter of a few hundred years, the Chinese were relying on Western explorers' expertise for improving on their now-anachronistic technology.

And yet, paradoxically, the decline in Chinese innovation, happening at around the same time that Europeans' innovations were proliferating, did not adversely affect the lot of the average Chinese peasant compared to his European contemporary. In the four centuries after the restoration of Chinese sovereignty from the Mongols, the average life expectancy in China was roughly between five to ten years high than the Europeans'. The reason was this: China was never, except during occasional periods of political instability, poor in a real sense. The Chinese court was rich from European trade; China's previous extensive exploration and trade links as far as East Africa declined as the Chinese Empire's priorities changed. China, in other words, became complacent and generally content with its lot. It was rich; the West indulged it for China's richness of resources; it was not in imminent danger of invasion. The conditions suitable for "Creative Destruction" that had spurred its previous thousand years of innovation had dried up. As a result, during the 16th century it suffered from a weak, corrupt and long-lived rulers. The dynasty was eventually overthrown in the middle of the 17th century, but the same state of complacency was difficult to get rid of.

By the time of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, China, while economically stable and self-sufficient, its technology was centuries out-of-date compared to Europe due to lack of innovative curiosity. With the onset of Imperialism, the 19th century brought Europeans to China's territorial doorstep. From that point onwards, the decline and political collapse was just a matter of time. The first half of 20th century was arguably the most chaotic period in Chinese history for a thousand years, with civil war overlapping with Japanese invasion. Communism brought stability in 1949, but it was another thirty years before its leader, Deng Xiaoping, had the courage to make the reforms necessary to activate China's long-dormant, massive potential.

So that brings us up-to-date, and provides the necessary context to better understand China's position and where she sees herself in the world. In a nutshell, China seems to see herself primarily as a nation of producers and merchants. It is well-known that China is making significant inroads into Africa and South America, but mainly Africa; particularly Sub-Saharan Africa. Looking at the historical context, this seems to be simply putting its global reach of a thousand years ago into reset mode. It plans to create a so-called "String Of Pearls": a number of naval and commercial outposts that dot the Indian Ocean, from Burma and Bangladesh, west to Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and down the East African coast.

What will a world with a pre-eminent China look like? From what I can tell, China priorities are, in the following order, about: ensuring a stable supply of resources (from Africa etc.) to maintain the continued improvements in its population's quality of life; ensuring a stable trade with the West for the same purpose; and to maintain a suitably-sized military to protect those interests. Those priorities are nothing controversial or outlandish.
To be sure, there are other factors that the West has to pencil in: China is sensitive about having its values misunderstood and has no moral objections to using clandestine methods to make its points. Issues like human rights can provoke responses like the disabling of communications systems through hacking and sophisticated viruses. But this is no more than to expect from any wily merchant-civilisation carefully protecting its position. China does not want war: it is bad for business.

As we have seen from Chinese history, as a people and civilisation they are nothing if not endlessly-inventive and resourceful. The description I used as a "nation of merchants" puts me in mind of the Venetian Republic: a commercial power, industrious and innovative, that grew to be a world leader for a time.
The USA shares a similar outlook and mentality, albeit with a more assertive military and an over-confidence in its philosophical superiority over its rivals. These are long-term disadvantages to the American position in the world. China has a few important advantages over the USA in the long-term: China has a huge population; it has better productivity; its military budget is modest compared to its size; it is diplomatically-astute; in the West, it has a stable and reliable demand base, and its native population is expanding its purchasing power.

The future is China's, but don't panic; they've got everything under control.