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Iraq’s Centrality

I’ve always been partial to the Filipino analogy, but it’s worth remembering that the Phillipines [sic], like the Transvaal, was a distinctly peripheral theater in the early 1900s, which substantially reduced the war’s ripple effect on geopolitics; Iraq, on the other hand, is rather more centrally located, and sits athwart a region that matters a […]

I’ve always been partial to the Filipino analogy, but it’s worth remembering that the Phillipines [sic], like the Transvaal, was a distinctly peripheral theater in the early 1900s, which substantially reduced the war’s ripple effect on geopolitics; Iraq, on the other hand, is rather more centrally located, and sits athwart a region that matters a great deal to the global order (Edward Luttwak’s provocations aside), at least until its oil wells run dry. So there’s always a chance – albeit a small one, I think – that the Iraq War will prove a prelude to a larger conflagration of some kind, playing the Spanish Civil War to a Mesopotamian World War II. ~Ross Douthat

I take Ross’ points.  The comparison with the Filipino insurgency does make some sense and, if this is the right comparison, actually supports his second suggestion more than he has granted.  It is true that the Filipino war was peripheral to world politics at the time it was being fought, but a few decades later American possession of the Philippines would become a significant factor in the Japanese decision to attack the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor.  While it might not definitely be the case that the U.S. would not have been drawn into the Pacific War but for the possession of the Philippines, without U.S. annexation and control of the Philippines the Japanese would have had far less reason to fear direct American involvement in the war in East Asia and would have had that much less reason to provoke open war with the U.S.  So it is conceivable that the Iraq war could end up having similarly significant consequences if American forces remain there in large numbers to serve as a tripwire for a future, larger war with, say, the Moscow-Tehran-New Delhi bloc.  

Regional conflicts in the Balkans led to continental, even global, war because the great powers decided to make these local conflicts into a matter of their security, thus magnifying the conflict into a much larger one than it need be (with several of the powers destroying themselves in the process).  This has ever since given people an outsized impression of the strategic importance of the Balkans (such that the ridiculous Bubba cited 1914 as a reason to start a war against Serbia, just as the Austrians had done 85 years before), which Bismarck correctly noted were not worth the bones of one Prussian grenadier.  The strategic importance of such-and-such a place is usually something that has to be constructed and argued for by various interest groups, since initially this is often not self-evident to policymakers.  When we saw that some place is strategically important, this often means in practice that influential groups back home say that it is, because they have investments or goals tied up in that place.  Viewed rather more dispassionately, the Levant has almost no strategic significance for the United States, yet the preoccupations of our foreign policy thinkers are often focused on the conflicts consuming this very narrow band of territory, because various factors of domestic politics contribute to the creation of the view that these conflicts have vastly greater global significance than they, in fact, have. 

In the German example, Bismarckian realism gave way to the interests of Weltpolitik, the naval lobby and Anglophobe nationalists who believed that Germany’s natural enemy was Britain, and, as part of the Kaiser’s new push to become friendly with the Ottomans and Berlin’s foolish rebuff of the Russians (leading in due course to the Franco-Russian alliance), we see that Bismarckian common sense about the Balkans gave way to encouragements to the Austrians to meddle there and then there was no discouragement of the Austrian move to invade Serbia in 1914.  (The Kaiser famously wrote in the diplomatic correspondence before the Austrian declaration of war, after receiving word of the Serbian concessions, “Every cause for war falls to the ground,” but infamously failed to stop the Austrians from plunging ahead.)  Unpleasantness ensued.  Bad policy decisions in a number of European capitals, many of which were taken in pursuit of placating domestic political constituencies, contributed directly to making the Balkans the “powderkeg of Europe,” rather than there being anything necessarily inherently important about the conflicts in the Balkans as far as outsiders were concerned (obviously, they were inherently important for the people directly involved in the Balkan Wars).  Iraq and the Near East are “central” to the “global order” because a consensus has formed about the “global order” that makes the Near East its center, but there is no necessary reason to believe the consensus-makers when they say this.  

The Near East was somewhat important during the Cold War, but it had nothing like the importance of Europe, because Europe was the place where the two largest powers stood face to face, as it were, and where they were most likely to come into direct conflict.  CENTO withered away, and hardly anyone one noticed, and I think few shed tears for its demise.  NATO persists in the face of all the reasons why it should have dissolved a decade ago.  That seems slightly significant.  Iraq’s geopolitical centrality will be defined by whether or not outside powers choose to make it their field of competition–there is nothing, not even oil, intrinsic to Iraq that makes it so vital and significant.  Regions of the world tend to possess geopolitical significance because they become battlefields for the great powers, and not because of their inherent value or location.  I do wonder whether we think of the Near East as having great strategic importance because we have embarked on policies that make it seem tremendously important, when any other part of the world might be made to seem just as important if the attentions of the only superpower were focused on it.  

The idea that there is a place in the world that yields disproportionate strategic advantage because of where and what it is has a venerable tradition in geopolitical theory, but I am not at all sure that this idea is correct.  Ross says that Iraq is more “centrally located” than South Africa or the Philippines, which is true to the extent that we recognise that many of the centers of economic and political power rest in Europe and South and East Asia, but it is Luttawak’s point that no country in the Near and Middle East is itself one of these centers and these countries are, taken together, fairly peripheral.  I would go perhaps even further and say that the Near and Middle East fit the economic profile of colonial Africa: sources of raw materials needed by different metropolitan powers, but in themselves not necessarily terribly politically significant.

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