The border artillery battles between Syria and Turkey keep heating up, though Syria keeps making loud noises about wanting to end the violence. It’s not entirely clear whether this represents duplicity at the top or chaos on the ground; Syria’s central command may not be able to hold its local commanders on a tight leash.
Turkey is clearly doing its best to respond at the lowest possible level of violence; Turkey’s leaders need to avoid looking weak but they also hope to avoid what, for Turkey, would be an expensive, wrenching and open-ended conflict next door. Prime Minister Erdogan has a stormy relationship with the Kemalist officer corps anyway, particularly since many senior military officers have been convicted on evidence that most independent observers characterize as, at best, thin.
It’s always hard to tell what is happening in the heat of action, but one interpretation of the situation is that the Syrians know how reluctant the Turks are to widen the war, and figure they can take artillery potshots at rebel forces in or just over the border without any serious Turkish response.
Meanwhile, the bloodbath in Syria has now swollen into a full fledged river of blood and it’s abundantly clear that the “international community” — to use one of the cheapest and emptiest phrases in the handbook of diplomacy — is still not doing much of anything beyond wringing its hands and making pious remarks. Nor does it plan to, really. The “international community” likes to talk a big game about human rights, the duty to protect, the importance of international law and so on, but it is basically claptrap and flapdoodle, incense that politicians burn to disguise how badly the world really smells.
This is, in other words, business as usual in the global abattoir. We like to think that we live in a world of laws and stable institutions. Some of the world lives that way some of the time, but the great volcanoes that have produced so many titanic explosions in human history have not gone extinct. Religious and ethnic passion, ambition, jealousy, fear and greed: they are with us as much as ever and perhaps in some cases more. Individual human beings may be relatively harmless when things are going well, but as a species we aren’t peaceniks sitting around a global campfire singing Kumbayah as we barbecue smores.
Americans continually return to the hope that a new world order is just around the corner, but this optimism is more an artifact of our history than anything else. Things have gone reasonably well for us domestically and we’d like to think that progress and liberty will take root around the world.
Perhaps they will, someday, but today is not that day, and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow won’t be that day either.
In the meantime. even a rich and powerful country like the United States can’t impose peace and order everywhere. Nor does it lie in our power to create the kind of permanent peace that Woodrow Wilson dreamed of — not yet, and perhaps not ever. It is not just that we lack the power and the will to crack down on all bad guys everywhere; we lack the wisdom to know the consequences of our actions.
Whatever the United States does or does not do about the war in Syria (at Via Meadia we think helping the rebels win without entering the war ourselves is the best choice in a bad field), it’s important that the educated public reflects on the way this long and bloody civil war undermines so many of the key illusions that over and over again lead people to bad policy mistakes. No, the world is not on the cusp of an age of peace. No, it is extremely unlikely that the Arab world will be swept by a democratic wave. No, the Islamist fire is not being tamed by moderate forces in much of the Middle East and beyond. No, the United Nations is not going to be able to do much to make the world a safer, more peaceful place. No, the “international community” is not a potent force for good. No, getting nuclear weapons won’t make the Iranian mullahs any nicer or less reckless. No, the NATO alliance is not becoming stronger or more useful.
We can weep and wail and roll around on the ground in a fit of self pity about all these depressing realities, but really the situation today isn’t anything past generations haven’t faced. It is the natural condition of human societies to live and hopefully thrive in the face of danger and conflict, and while the turmoil of our time has its own unique features and challenges, we are only being tested as past generations have been. Civil War, industrial revolution, World War One, the Great Depression, World War Two, the Cold War: where exactly is it written that the bad old days are over and that Americans living today got a free pass from the trials and alarms of life in a fallen world?
The world is a mess and we can neither fix it nor tune it out. This is what they call the human condition, and nobody gets out of here alive.
This doesn’t mean that there is nothing we can or should do, and it certainly doesn’t mean we should retreat into an isolationist Fortress America while the world burns down around our ears. But our national tendency to think that global utopia is just around the corner often makes us stupider than we need to be. Both President Bush and President Obama had grand schemes to promote democracy across the Middle East and resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue once and for all. Maybe they would have gotten more done if they had thought about more about warding off dangers and less about building a dream palace.
Instead of thinking about universal solutions we might do better as a people to think about incremental steps. This is one of the things I like about America’s Asia policy. We aren’t talking about some kind of rapid transformation of Asia into a new EU. Instead we are talking about creating conditions that can favor the gradual, slow emergence of a system that is grounded in the real geopolitical and economic interests of the important players there. We have high goals for Asia — a peaceful and prosperous 21st century — but we are thinking about a slow, patient and cautious approach in which each step has to make sense on its own terms.
If we think about Syria the way some thought about Libya — as a test of our moral character and as a war to make the Middle East safe for democracy — we will probably go wrong. But if we think about the dangers we and the region face from a conflict that is all too likely to widen and that has a direct relationship on the potential for a much more dangerous conflict between the United States and Iran, we may find ourselves able to think more clearly about what to do.
Both President Bush and President Obama have talked a lot about the universality of American values and the desire of the world’s peoples to be free. Give the process enough time and I’m not going to dispute that things might turn out that way. I think that the core of western and American values do have something universal behind them. But it’s been almost 100 years since President Wilson went into World War One with the idea that America was about to remake the world and ring the curtain down on tyranny and war.
The world may blossom into utopia one of these days, but not on a policy relevant timetable. The American government must plan for and act in a world that still has its boots in the bloody, tangled swamps of conflict and history. We can hope to improve the human condition bit by bit, but we can’t let the light of that hope in our eyes blind us to the messy complexity — and the hideous dangers — that surround us.