Authoritarian States Are Failing–They Have Us Right Where They Want Us!
Posted on October 29th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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After Ralph Peters’ last laughable effort (the short version of which was “Obama might not save Bolivia from itself!”), we might just as easily ignore his new column, but it serves as a useful example of the adaptability of fearmongers. Once certain states have been put on the enemies’ list, they never come off, even when they have objectively ceased to pose much of a threat to anyone. When they are stronger but not particularly aggressive, it is because they are biding their time; when they become weak they are going to start lashing out as a distraction from their economic problems. At no point are these states treated as if they have their own self-interest that may not entail attacking or invading other states at all.
When the petro-states were flush with cash and seemed to be gaining ground on all fronts, we were hearing grim warnings about the reconstitution of the Soviet empire, Russian naval visits to Venezuela (which even Peters acknowledged to be a meaningless display) and the growing power of the Tehran-Caracas axis, sometimes as recently as early September of this year. Now that they are becoming weaker as oil prices drop in response to the global downturn, it is their bankruptcy and weakness that make them terrible threats to the world, even though the sudden change in their fortunes shows how limited and frail their ability to project power always was.
Here is one scenario Peters proposes: Russia starts going broke, and so has no incentive not to start invading other countries. No incentive, that is, except for the possibility of foreign investment and aid to shore up its slumping economy. Another scenario: Iran goes broke, but somehow has the resources to acquire a nuke, which it would naturally then launch on Israel. This makes as little sense as Iran committing national suicide in boom times. If Iran is going broke and suffering from the significant internal disorder that will accompany a worsening economy, doesn’t it seem more likely that it will have more pressing concerns than developing a nuclear weapon? Peters has to acknowledge that Venezuela is such a shambles that it cannot threaten anyone–but it might collapse in on itself in nasty ways! I suppose that has always been true, but it hardly fills the rest of the world with dread and it makes Santorum’s warnings against Venezuelan-Bolivian conquests in Latin America seem even more outlandish than they were at the time.
Economically weakened authoritarian governments have even less interest in and opportunity for aggressive actions outside their borders as they become increasingly preoccupied with internal dissent and upheaval and the basic problems of economic failure and excessive dependence on natural resource extraction. Ahmadinejad was elected on a platform of additional subsidies to the poor and some kind of solution to the chronically high unemployment Iran has, but now finds himself failing to control rampaging inflation (officially at 30%) and has fewer and fewer resources at his command as revenues shrink. Remember–this failure is the clown that filled interventionists with fear and became synonymous for them with the threat represented by Iran. We should never have been afraid of these people, and now that he is flailing and failing and the entire regime is suffering from the economic downturn we are supposed to be more afraid?
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
6 Responses to “Authoritarian States Are Failing–They Have Us Right Where They Want Us!”
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If anything, Peters has understated the case: he completely fails to consider that the recent banking/currency collapse in Iceland make that country the most dangerous regime on the planet today, if not in the Entire History of Human Civilization.
I doubt we’ll make it to the New Year without hordes of neo-Vikings pouring out of Reykjavik on a blood-thirsty campaign of world conquest and terror. After all, Prime Minister Haarde has to do something to distract the locals from the ongoing economic crisis…
“Russia starts going broke, and so has no incentive not to start invading other countries. No incentive, that is, except for the possibility of foreign investment and aid to shore up its slumping economy.”
Indeed, that has already happened.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/19/opinion/main4460640.shtml?source=RSSattr=Opinion_4460640
Apparently, Western bankers didn’t get the joke, because in August alone, over $20 billion of foreign investment made for the hills, $7 billion of it in the first two days of the war alone. Scared to do business with such a reckless, unpredictable partner, investors had been closing ranks all summer, and Georgia only locked up their formation. The risk premium has spiked to nine percent, foreign banks stopped lending money to Russian companies–suddenly in dire need of it because all that foreign capital had fled–and foreign issuance dropped by over 85 percent since June.
Venezuala and Iran are in even more dire straights: their sulfur-laden oil is difficult and expensive to extract and refine, and, as you mentioned, Both Chavez & Ahmadinejad have based their leadership on heavily funding social programs that were premised on expensive oil that looks unlikely in the short to medium term.
Well, we have always had to worry about the Icelandic regime–they’re socialists, you know.
One thing I don’t understand about people who still want to launch strikes on Iran (and Peters has actually been more level-headed about the extraordinary difficulties involved when it comes to doing this in recent months) is this: why would you want to create a situation in which the main supports for the Iranian regime’s strength and stability (i.e., the prices of oil and gas) are increased dramatically?
Speaking of fearmongering, if not outright fantasy (a lot of new agencies are on the way that I hadn’t heard about to listen to Mr. Newman!), check out this gem on the WSJ opinion page today:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122523927108878301.html
Crumbling regimes have caused wars in the past- Argentina’s military junta (Falklands) and the Papadopolous regime in Greece (Cyprus) come to mind. Nothing gets people to rally around a regime like a stoking nationalism through war. Still, I agree with the premise of your argument- these states weren’t dangerous to US security before and aren’t dangerous now.
Thanks for the comment. Certainly, there are cases where politically failing regimes can lash out (almost always unsuccessfully, as your examples remind us) as a way of shoring up support. This is one reason why I have never understood the impulse to confront rickety dictatorships by bombing and sanctioning them, since this does push the population into the embrace of the dictator and perpetuates the rule of the people our government wishes to end. I can imagine scenarios where economic crisis could empower a militaristic faction that later on starts a conflict, but on the whole states that are coping with weakening or collapsing economies are in no position to launch foreign adventures and take on additional costs and risk. Besides, the Russians are getting more out of their bailout loan to Iceland in terms of influence overseas than they would get from launching an invasion of one of their neighbors.
As we know, foreign wars are enormously expensive, and the more technologically advanced a military is the more expensive its wars tend to be. For most states wars are difficult to finance for prolonged periods of time without adverse economic consequences at home. Russia was able to afford a short, sharp war with a tiny neighbor, but I seriously doubt that it has the desire for a prolonged conflict in Ukraine even if Moscow wanted to control that territory directly, and aside from the hard-line nationalist fraction of the population I doubt this is a real objective of the Kremlin.
A rare and valid piece of logic.
The last time anyone used similar logic with respect to Russia was Bob Taft in 1951, as I detailed here:
http://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2008/09/both-sides-no.html
If we had listened to Taft then, our history would have been
quite different. If we listen to Larison now, we could also
avoid a lot of heartache.