George Friedman - The Next Decade

Playing to America’s nuclear phobia, the Iranians have been working on nuclear technology for a decade, a program that has included crafting themselves in the image of North Korea, as unpredictable and dangerous. Like the North Koreans, they managed to maneuver themselves into a position where the permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, were trying to negotiate with them over the issue of whether or not they would negotiate.

The collapse of Iraq had left the United States in an extremely difficult situation with limited options. An air strike against Iranian nuclear targets would most likely spur a patriotic resurgence that would only strengthen the regime. And Iran had substantial counters, including the ability to further destabilize Iraq and to some extent Afghanistan. Iran could also unleash Hezbollah, a far more capable terrorist organization than al Qaeda. Or it could mine the Strait of Hormuz, creating economic chaos by blocking the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf.

Thus the violation of America’s long-standing policy of regional balances and limited engagement led to a geopolitical worst-case scenario. Iran was now the dominant native power in the Persian Gulf, and only the United States had the means to counterbalance it, which would further violate America’s basic strategic principles. Moreover, the unbalanced focus on this one region left the United States weak in other parts of the world, trapped off-balance, with no clear counter in sight.

This is the defining geopolitical problem that President Obama inherited and that he and all other presidents of the next decade will have to deal with. Iran has become the pivot on which the Middle East will turn. In many ways, it was always the pivot. But before the United States could deal with Iran, it had to do something definitive about Islamic terror. It devoted its resources to wars it saw as directed against terrorism, which effectively insulated Iran from the threat of American intervention and even enhanced its position in the region.

The economic and geopolitical events of the past decade were intertwined. They created a crisis of confidence in the American public as well as drawing American strategic thinking into a series of short-term, tactical solutions. The Iran question is tied up with fears that rising oil prices will crush the economic recovery, as well as with the impact of action on the jihadist war. September 11 and the events of 2008 have combined to create a trap for American strategic thinking. As the United States moves forward into the next decade, it must escape the trap. The economic problem will resolve itself in time. The geopolitical challenge of terrorism requires decisions.

President George W. Bush called his response to the al Qaeda attacks of September 11 the Global War on Terror. If he had called the response a war on radical Islam, he would have alienated allies in the Islamic world that the United States badly needed. If he had called it a war on al Qaeda, he would have precluded attacking terrorists who were not part of that specific group. Bush tried to finesse this problem with a semantic sleight of hand, but this left him open to political and strategic confusion.

President Obama dropped the term war on terror, and rightly so. Terrorism is not an enemy but a type of warfare that may or may not be adopted by an enemy. Imagine if, after Pearl Harbor, an attack that relied on aircraft carriers, President Roosevelt had declared a global war on naval aviation. By focusing on terrorism instead of al Qaeda or radical Islam, Bush elevated a specific kind of assault to a position that shaped American global strategy, which left the United States strategically off-balance.

Obama may have clarified the nomenclature, but he left in place a significant portion of the imbalance, which is an obsession with the threat of terrorist attacks. As we consider presidential options in the coming decade, it appears imperative that we clear up just how much of a threat terrorism actually presents and what that threat means for U.S. policy.

According to the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, war is a continuation of politics by other means. Victory in World War II did not consist of compelling Japan to stop using aircraft carriers. Victory meant destroying Japan’s ability to wage war, then imposing American will—a political end. If a president is to lead a nation into war, he must crisply designate both the enemy and the end being sought. If terror was the enemy after September 11, then everyone who could use terror was the enemy, which is an awfully long list. If for political reasons a president cannot clearly identify who is to be fought and why, then he must carefully reexamine whether he can win, and thus whether or not he should engage. If the cost of naming the enemy is diplomatically or politically unacceptable, then the war is not likely to go well.

Despite Bush’s decision to focus the war on terrorism, the Islamic world knew that the real enemy being targeted was radical Islam. This was the ground that al Qaeda had sprung from, and Bush was not going to fool anyone into thinking otherwise. When he could not truthfully and coherently explain his reason for invading Iraq, the strategy began to unravel.

Bush’s semantic and strategic confusion intensified when his war on terror expanded to include the effort to unseat the Iraqi government. Saddam Hussein, targeted by that effort, was a secular militarist rather than a religious Islamist, and he was no friend of al Qaeda. He had not been involved in al Qaeda terrorism prior to the invasion of Iraq, but he and al Qaeda did share a common enemy: the United States. For this reason, Bush felt that he could not discount the danger of an alliance of convenience between the state of Iraq and the stateless radicals, al Qaeda. His solution was to make a preemptive attack. Bush and his advisers reasoned that destroying Saddam’s regime and occupying Iraq would deny al Qaeda a potential base while gaining the United States a strategic base of operations of its own.

Nonetheless, inasmuch as the larger strategy had been identified as a war on terror and inasmuch as Saddam had not recently engaged in terrorism, the invasion of Iraq appeared unjustified. If the war had been more clearly focused on al Qaeda as the enemy, then the invasion would have appeared much more plausible, because a war against a specific group would have included hostility toward that group’s allies and even potential allies, which Saddam certainly was.

In a democracy, the foundation of public support is a clear picture of the enemy’s threat and of your own purpose in confronting that threat. Such clarity not only mobilizes the public, it provides a coherent framework for communicating with that public. Truman’s presidency never recovered from his use of the term police action to refer to the Korean War, a conflict in which more than thirty thousand Americans died. Roosevelt’s war against Germany, Japan, and Italy, on the other hand, survived endless subterfuges, attacks on the innocent, and alliances with the truly evil, because Roosevelt made it clear who the enemy was and why we had to fight and defeat it.

Terrorism is an act of violence whose primary purpose is to create fear and, through that, a political result. The bombing of London by Germany in World War II was a terror attack, in that the goal was not to cripple the British ability to wage war, but to generate a psychological and political atmosphere that might split the public from the government and force the government into negotiations. Palestinian terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, from assassination to hijacking aircraft, was designed to draw attention to their cause and maximize the appearance of Palestinian power. As I’ve tried to show, al Qaeda’s terrorism was also designed for a political end. The issue is simple: how much effort should be devoted to stopping terror and its consequences compared to other strategic tasks?