Syria Again
The only people who will be
surprised (or scandalized) by the muddiness of American foreign policy in the
Syrian crisis are those who are unfamiliar with diplomatic history. Which is to
say that the only people who will be upset are the vast majority, at least the
vast majority of pundits. When people complain that nobody learns anything from
history, they usually have in mind some substantive lesson unlearned; but it
seems to me that what people don’t learn from history is something rather more
general. They don’t get the texture of how things happen. In particular they
don’t absorb two basic facts:
1. People have to live every hour, day, week, month, year,
decade, and century of human life. It isn’t that the longue duree is necessarily more important than histoire événementielle, but that the
periods between the famous events are sequences of events that aren’t
experienced as inconsequential by the participants even if they quickly disappear
from public consciousness. The fact we generally aren’t interested in the
parenchyma of history doesn’t mean you can get from Monday to Wednesday without
going through Tuesday. The
politicians, generals, and diplomats of the past could never be sure which of
their words and actions would matter and got gray hair and hypertension over
crises that even PhD candidates have long since forgotten. Of course every
happening hyped on the Huffington report is not the Defenestration of Prague or
the Assassination of the Archduke, but nobody can be sure about that at the
time and, anyhow, they still have to get up in the morning.
2. Relations between nations are mostly made up of trial
balloons, misunderstandings, kicking the can down the road, playing to the
newspapers, chest thumping, flattery, brag, bluff, and willful obfuscation.
Muddle is the métier of the diplomatic corps, always has been, always will be.
Or if somebody can point me to an important historical passage where one side
or the other had a definite plan and carried it out decisively without lots of
backing and filling, I’d be obliged if they’d tell me about it.* A couple of
squirrels taking turns chasing each other around a tree trunk is a pretty good
first order model of international relations, not surprisingly, after all,
because international relations are just mammalian behavior carried out on a
very large tree.
If you look at what happened over
the last couple of weeks as a typical diplomatic sequence, the administration’s
performance looks pretty good. I
wrote earlier that I didn’t think Obama wanted a war and it appears I was right. In this affair and also in Libya he
acted rather like any number of 19th Century statesmen who were
pushed towards intervening in some Balkan hellhole by the newspapers and the
hawks in the irresponsible domestic opposition. Success under these circumstances is damage limitation by
minimizing the scale of military action or, even better, resolving the issue through
great power negotiations.
That said, I don’t think for a
minute that John Kerry was playing 11-dimensional chess when he suggested that
Assad could avoid being attacked by agreeing to give up his chemical weapons.
He simply lucked out, lucked out, that is, assuming that the current stand-down
of tensions doesn’t turn into some other kind of debacle. It’s just that I
figure a skillful diplomat is rather like Maxwell’s demon, an agent who
exploits random fluctuations to achieve his goal, which, in this case, is to
avoid useless and destructive military action while limiting the freedom of
action of Syria’s government. One can only hope that the administration can
blunder into a similar happy outcome in its relations with Iran. Enough
mistakes and Obama may yet earn that Nobel Prize.
* The only candidate that comes to
mind is the Bush Administration’s single-minded determination to invade Iraq.
Chaney and company knew what they wanted and got it. Maybe the Austrian
ultimatum to Serbia in August 1914 also counts since it was designed to make
war inevitable and worked perfectly.