- As the West’s influence declines, accelerated by U.S. President Donald Trump’s contempt for traditional allies and Europe’s struggles with Brexit and nativism, leaders across the world are probing and prodding to see how far they can go.
- Many of those leaders embrace a noxious brew of nationalism and authoritarianism. The wind is in the sails of strongmen worldwide.
- Some of the areas to pay the most attention to in 2019 include Nigeria, Venezuela, Cameroon, Ukraine, and South Sudan.
- Additionally, it's important to watch Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, and the US-China, and US-Saudi Arabia-Iran relations.
In a world with fewer rules, the only truly effective one is knowing what you can get away with. The answer today, it turns out, is: quite a lot.
As the era of largely uncontested U.S. primacy fades, the international order has been thrown into turmoil. More leaders are tempted more often to test limits, jostle for power, and seek to bolster their influence—or diminish that of their rivals—by meddling in foreign conflicts.
Multilateralism and its constraints are under siege, challenged by more transactional, zero-sum politics. Instruments of collective action, such as the United Nations Security Council, are paralyzed; those of collective accountability, including the International Criminal Court, are ignored and disparaged.
Nostalgia can be deceptive. Too fond a portrayal of the era of Western hegemony would be misleading. Iraq’s chemical weapons use against Iran in the 1980s; the 1990s bloodletting in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia; the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; Sri Lanka’s brutal 2009 campaign against the Tamils; and the collapse of Libya and South Sudan: all these happened at a time of—in some cases because of—U.S. dominance and a reasonably coherent West.
A liberal and nominally rules-based order hardly stopped those setting the rules from discarding them when they saw fit. The erosion of Western influence, in short, looks different from Moscow, Beijing, and the developing world than it does from Brussels, London, or Washington.
Still, for better and for worse, U.S. power and alliances have for years shaped international affairs, set limits, and structured regional orders.
As the West’s influence declines, accelerated by U.S. President Donald Trump’s contempt for traditional allies and Europe’s struggles with Brexit and nativism, leaders across the world are probing and prodding to see how far they can go.
In their domestic policies, many of those leaders embrace a noxious brew of nationalism and authoritarianism.
The mix varies from place to place but typically entails rejection of international institutions and rules. There is little new in the critique of an unjust global order.
But if once that critique tended to be rooted in international solidarity, today it stems chiefly from an inward-looking populism that celebrates narrow social and political identity, vilifies minorities and migrants, assails the rule of law and independence of the press, and elevates national sovereignty above all else.
Trump may be the most visible of the genre, but he is far from the most extreme. The wind is in the sails of strongmen worldwide. They realize, at times perhaps to their surprise, that constraints are crumbling, and the behavior that results often fuels violence or crises.
Myanmar’s mass expulsion of 700,000 Rohingya, the Syrian regime’s brutal suppression of a popular uprising, the Cameroonian government’s apparent determination to crush an Anglophone insurgency rather than tackle the grievances fueling it, the Venezuelan government’s economic warfare against its own people, and the silencing of dissent in Turkey, Egypt, and elsewhere are but a few examples.
All are motivated in part by what leaders perceive as a yellow light where they used to see solid red.
Beyond their borders, these leaders test norms, too. Having annexed parts of Georgia and Crimea and stoked separatist violence in Ukraine’s Donbass region, Russia is now throwing its weight around in the Sea of Azov, poisoning dissidents in the United Kingdom, and subverting Western democracies with cyberwarfare.
China obstructs freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and arbitrarily detains Canadian citizens—including the International Crisis Group’s Michael Kovrig.
Saudi Arabia has pushed the envelope with the war in Yemen, the kidnapping of a Lebanese prime minister, and the gruesome murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its consulate in Istanbul. Iran plots attacks against dissidents on European soil.
Israel feels emboldened to undermine ever more systematically the foundations of a possible two-state solution.
Such actions are hardly new or equal in magnitude. But they are more brazen and overt.
They have this much in common: They start with the assumption that there will be few consequences for breaches of international norms.
The U.S. government has hardly been an innocent bystander.
Trump’s disdain for human rights and penchant for transactional diplomacy have set a strikingly negative tone. So too has his flouting of America’s international commitments: tearing up the Iran nuclear deal and, worse, threatening to impose economic punishment on those who choose to abide by it; hinting he will leave the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty if U.S. demands are not met rather than working within it to press Russia to comply; and signaling, through attacks on the International Criminal Court and chest-thumping speeches about U.S. sovereignty, that Washington regards its actions and those of its friends as beyond accountability.
The danger of today’s free-for-all goes beyond the violence already generated. The larger risk is of miscalculation.
Overreach by one leader convinced of his immunity may prompt an unexpected reaction by another; the ensuing tit for tat easily could escalate without the presence of a credible, willing outside power able to play the role of arbiter.
True, not everyone gets away with everything all the time. Bangladesh seemed poised to forcibly return some Rohingya refugees to Myanmar but stopped, almost certainly in response to international pressure. The feared Russian-backed reconquest of Idlib, the last rebel stronghold in Syria, has, for now, been averted, in no small measure due to Turkish, European, and U.S. objections.
The same is true (again: for the time being) when it comes to a potential Saudi-led offensive on the Yemeni port of Hodeidah, with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi largely deterred by warnings about the humanitarian impact and cost to their international standing.
Elsewhere, leaders anticipating impunity have been taken aback by the severity of the response: Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, by the stiff sanctions and show of united resolve that Western powers have maintained since Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and the killing of its former agent on British soil; Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman by the outrage that followed Khashoggi’s murder.
Overall, though, it is hard to escape the sense that these are exceptions that prove the absence of rules. The international order as we know it is unraveling, with no clear sense of what will come in its wake. The danger may well lie less in the ultimate destination than in the process of getting there. As the following list of 10 Conflicts to Watch in 2019 amply illustrates, that road will be bumpy, and it will be perilous.
1. Yemen
If one place has borne the brunt of international lawlessness over the past year it is Yemen.
The humanitarian crisis there—the world’s worst—could deteriorate further in 2019 if the key players do not seize the opportunity created over the past weeks by U.N. Special Envoy Martin Griffiths in achieving a partial cease-fire and encouraging a series of confidence-building steps.
After more than four years of war and a Saudi-led siege, almost 16 million Yemenis face “severe acute food insecurity,” according to the U.N.
That means one in two Yemenis doesn’t have enough to eat.
Fighting started in late 2014, after Houthi rebels expelled the internationally recognized government from the capital. It escalated the following March, when Saudi Arabia, together with the United Arab Emirates, began bombing and blockading Yemen, aiming to reverse the Houthis’ gains and reinstall the dislodged government. Western powers largely endorsed the Saudi-led campaign.
In late 2018, Yemeni militias backed by the United Arab Emirates surrounded Hodeidah, a Houthi-controlled port, through which aid for millions of starving Yemenis passes. The coalition appeared determined to move in, convinced that taking the port would crush the rebellion and make the Houthis more pliant.
But the consequences of such an offensive would be almost unimaginable. The top U.N. relief official, Mark Lowcock, has warned it could provoke a “great big famine.” That, and the fallout from Khashoggi’s murder, prompted Western powers to begin restraining the Gulf coalition. On Nov. 9, the United States announced it would no longer refuel coalition jets conducting air raids in Yemen.
A month later, Griffiths, with Washington’s help, reached the “Stockholm agreement” between the Houthis and the Yemeni government, including a fragile cease-fire around Hodeidah.
There are other glimmers of light. U.S. pressure to end the conflict could intensify in 2019. The Senate has already voted to consider legislation barring all U.S. involvement in the war.
Once the Democrats assume control of the House of Representatives in January 2019, they could move more aggressively in this direction.
That and more will be needed to end the Yemen war or at least avoid it taking another turn for the worse. All parties—the Houthis and their Yemeni adversaries, but also the Saudis and Emiratis—seem to believe that time is on their side. Only pressure from Europe, Oman, and Iran on the Houthis; from the United States on Saudi Arabia and the UAE; from those two Gulf countries on the Yemeni government; and from Congress on the U.S. administration stands a chance of making a difference.
2. Afghanistan
If Yemen is the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, Afghanistan suffers its deadliest fighting. In 2018, by one tally, the war killed more than 40,000 combatants and civilians.
Trump’s reported decision in mid-December that half of U.S. forces in Afghanistan would leave brought further unease.
In principle, Washington’s signal that it is ready to pull out could advance diplomatic efforts to end the war by focusing belligerents’ and regional actors’ minds. But the ad hoc nature of the decision—seemingly made without looping in top officials—and the specter it raises of the United States cutting and running could bode badly for the coming year.
In 2018, the war exacted a higher toll than at any time since the Taliban were ousted from Kabul more than 17 years ago.
A three-day cease-fire in June, which the Taliban and the government enforced and which prompted joyous celebration by fighters and civilians alike, offered a short respite, though fighting resumed immediately afterwards.
Taliban fighters now effectively control perhaps half the country, cutting off transport routes and laying siege to cities and towns.
A sharp uptick in U.S. airstrikes has not curbed their momentum.
In September, Washington appointed the veteran diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad as an envoy for peace talks—a welcome sign that it was prioritizing negotiations to end the war. Taliban leaders appear to be taking the talks seriously, though the process is stuck over their continued insistence that the United States commit to a timeline for full withdrawal of international forces as a precondition for a wider peace process involving other Afghan factions, a sequence that would be a win for the Taliban while saddling other Afghans with uncertainty.
Only days after Khalilzad’s latest talks with the Taliban came Trump’s bombshell. Withdrawing 7,000 troops in itself will probably not be militarily decisive. Indeed, there could be value to the United States making clear it is serious about bringing troops home.
All sides understand that a rapid pullout could provoke a major new civil war, an outcome nobody, including the Taliban, wants. With a U.S. drawdown in the cards, the Taliban’s suspicion about Washington’s motives might ease, propelling talks forward.
Neighboring countries and others involved in Afghanistan—notably Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and China—all want the Americans out eventually, but none of them wants a precipitous withdrawal. They may be more inclined to support U.S. diplomacy if they believe that Washington will eventually give up its strategic foothold in South Asia.
Trump’s announcement could therefore spur them to help end the war, but regional powers could just as easily increase their meddling by doubling down on Afghan proxies to hedge their bets.
Unfortunately, the rashness of Trump’s decision risks outweighing any potential silver lining. Its timing appeared to catch everyone—from Khalilzad and top U.S. military chiefs to the Afghan government—off guard. The fact that it was not coordinated with Khalilzad meant that the envoy could not extract any concessions from the Taliban in return for such a key pledge that partially addressed their core demand. In Kabul, the sense of betrayal was palpable.
A few days later, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani nominated two hard-line anti-Taliban officials as his defense and interior ministers, suggesting a move away from his compromising tone of the past year.
The festivities that greeted the June cease-fire revealed broad support for peace, and there are signs that the war’s core protagonists are open to a settlement. But that was always an uncertain bet. Trump’s decision has only added to the uncertainty.
3. U.S.-Chinese Tensions
The standoff between China and the United States is not a deadly conflict, no matter how bitter the trade war between Washington and Beijing has become.
Still, rhetoric between the two is increasingly bellicose. If relations, already at their lowest ebb since the Tiananmen protests almost three decades ago, continue to deteriorate, the rivalry could have graver geopolitical consequences than all of the other crises listed this year.
In a deeply divided Washington, one position that wins bipartisan consensus is that China is an adversary with which the United States is inexorably locked in strategic competition.
Most U.S. policymakers concur that Beijing has exploited institutions and rules to its own end—joining the World Trade Organization or signing up to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, for example, even as it acts inconsistently with the spirit of both. President Xi Jinping’s ending of term limits, rapid expansion of China’s military, and extension of the Communist Party’s control across state and society confirm to many in Washington the dangerous turn the country has taken under his stewardship.
The U.S. government’s 2018 National Defense Strategy cites 'inter-state strategic competition' as its primary concern, with China and Russia named as primary competitors, after many years in which terrorism took the top spot.
Heightening the sense of lawlessness is Beijing’s unjust detention of three Canadians—including one of my colleagues, the Northeast Asia expert Michael Kovrig—widely seen as a tit for tat for Canada’s arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, wanted for Iran sanctions violations by the United States, with which Canada has an extradition treaty.
In reality, China likely has no short-term desire to fundamentally challenge the world order. Nor will it match Washington’s global clout anytime soon, provided the Trump administration takes steps to stop hemorrhaging allies and credibility.
But Beijing is ever readier to throw its weight around in multilateral institutions and its region. In Asia, it expects a Chinese sphere in which neighbors are sovereign but deferential. U.S. policymakers mostly regard such an arrangement as inimical to U.S. alliances and interests.
Mounting U.S.-Chinese tension has implications for conflicts in Asia and beyond. For the two superpowers, pooling efforts to end crises has never been easy. An increasingly bitter rivalry would make it much harder. China would be less likely to back either tougher sanctions against North Korea, if stuttering talks between Washington and Pyongyang break down, or U.S. diplomatic efforts in Afghanistan.
Risks of direct conflict remain slim, but the South China Sea is a troubling flash point.
The past two decades have seen occasional run-ins between Chinese forces and U.S. planes. Beijing stakes claim to 90 percent of the South China Sea, stopping mere miles from the Vietnamese, Malaysian, and Philippine coastlines, and has aggressively built bases on strategic natural and man-made islands.
From Beijing’s perspective, such maneuvers are standard operating procedure for what Xi calls a “big country.”
China wants what the United States has: pliant neighbors, influence around its periphery, and the capacity to control its sea approaches and transport lanes.
Others, of course, see it differently. The smaller Southeast Asian nations object, and some look to Washington for protection.
Beijing and Washington could reach some form of trade deal in the months ahead, which would help ease tensions. But any respite is likely to be short-lived. On both sides, leaders believe a long-festering geopolitical and economic clash has reached a point of rupture.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider