Asymmetric warfare and the great powers

I spoke last night at the Alexander Hamilton Society at Johns Hopkins’ Homewood campus. Here is what I said:

I have two points to make: the first concerns proxy forces, which are becoming the rule rather than the exception; the second concerns asymmetric or hybrid warfare, which is taking on new guises. But none of it is really new—warriors have always sought to strike an enemy where he is weak and to remove their own forces from danger.

Increased use of proxy military forces to enable great powers to duel with each other without engaging directly with their own military forces is already happening in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Ukraine. Iranian-trained and equipped militias, Turkey’s Turkoman and Islamist allies, America’s Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, Lebanese Hizbollah, the Houthis, Haftar’s forces, and Russia’s mercenaries and Ukrainian proxies are playing central roles in contests that the U.S. or its Gulf allies are engaged in, mostly as adversaries against Russia or Iran. 

In an era of great power competition, the inclination will be not to worry too much about our own proxies’ internal governance or abuse of human rights any more than we did during the Cold War. Realists and would-be autocrats will see that as idealistic claptrap. But governance matters to some of us. Let me remind you of what Alexander Hamilton said, in a strikingly different context, in the Federalist Papers:

Vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty.

It is hard to support Ukraine to win a military confrontation with Russia if Ukraine is a kleptocracy, which is why it was right for Joe Biden to back firing of a corrupt prosecutor and wrong for the Trump Administration to regret his firing, while still claiming to be against corruption. It is also hard to support UAE and Saudi forces that have committed crimes of war in Yemen, or switch to support Khalifa Haftar in Libya or Bashar al Assad in Syria. Domestic and international support for odious allies is difficult to muster. One of the reasons the Americans have backed the Syrian Democratic Forces is the Kurds’ relatively decent governance, but of course we ignore their PKK credentials and the PKK’s terrorist acts inside Turkey.

Let me turn to asymmetric warfare. Adversaries have agency. Asymmetric warfare is the product of their ingenuity. America is hard to fight on land or sea. Since the purpose of warfare is political, better to fight it where expensive armor and submarines count for less: among the people.

War amongst the people is taking on new meaning with the rise of geopolitical challengers. In Bosnia and Kosovo, we saw the use of human shields, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. We are now seeing the weaponizing of masses of people on a giant scale: Assad’s effort to drive one million IDPs from Idlib to the Turkish border and beyond with Russian backing is intended to rid his territory of people he thinks are opponents and break Turkey’s will in occupying parts of Syria. Human shields have become human spears. Turkey is using people as well, though in a less deadly way: by allowing refugees to cross into Greece, it is pressuring the Europe Union for more humanitarian assistance.

The Russian satellite states South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia as well as Luhansk and Donetsk in Ukraine likewise aim at political results: to make the parent states ungovernable and block their progress towards the West.

Hybrid warfare using other means other than population movements and puppet states is also on the rise. In the Balkans, the Russians are aiming at destabilization without spending much. They’ve tried assassination, cyberattacks, mass mobilization, illicit political financing, and social media. The U.S. is not above using all those tools as well. The assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Stuxnet, the color revolutions, financing of NGOs and political training, and the State Department’s more than 120 acknowledged Twitter accounts (not to mention the covert ones) may look to you and me like good causes, but they look like potent weapons to America’s adversaries.

We may not be headed into a Cold War with any single adversary, but we are certainly heading towards a geopolitical competition that will entail use of all the means available in an environment of shifting alliances and uncertain outcomes.

But in the end, it may not be state adversaries that bring us down via proxies, weaponizing people, and hybrid warfare. Something much smaller may put on display our own inadequate government services. It shouldn’t escape notice that Xi Jinping, Ali Khamenei, and Donald Trump are all at risk from the political and economic consequences of a virus. Defending populations from epidemics is not a new governance requirement, but rather a longstanding one. This, too, is war amongst the people, who might just demand some minimal competence and truthfulness in their governance.

Remember, again, Hamilton:

Vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty.