On my second day in Belgium, the Atlantik-Brücke conference, a Canada-Germany conversation, got underway and was immediately quite interesting. The opening session had two speakers that provided broad surveys of the world’s crises, and I was struck that there seemed to be some comparisons that did not work for me. Why? Because some crises are harder than others and that we can focus on three dimensions of each crisis so that we can compare apples and oranges: the degree of difficulty of the actual policy problem, the stakes, and the level of consensus among the key players.
I recently argued that Russia is fundamentally an easier problem than the IS/ISIS/ISIL/Daesh challenge because we don’t have to do state/nation-building in the Baltics or in Poland/Romania. Indeed, one of the attendees recently visited a Baltic Republic and found that the Russian-speaking populations get it–that they are better off where they are now than in a potential frozen conflict or a Greater Russia. We can still do more to assuage/reassure/bribe the Russian-speakers to drain those three Baltic countries of any sea in which little green men-fish can swim (yes, mixing metaphors), but the problem then becomes mostly of improving the credibility of the NATO deterrent. Not easy, especially with German resistance, but not impossible.
But Russia involves higher stakes–nuclear war, existential threats and all that. IS/whatever is not those things.
Which, of course leads to a two-by-two:
I need to find a low, low case, but you get the idea. China is harder than anything else because there is greater complexity than Russia: economic entanglements, military growing, territorial challenges with many neighbors, Taiwan, etc. And the stakes are pretty high.
The consensus dimension is the only one that can change and the only one that can be changed via diplomacy and effort, but also shapes how hard this stuff can be. China is very difficult since getting the Japanese and South Koreans to work together can be quite difficult. Iraq and Syria is not as difficult right now–there is consensus among enough countries to get the cooperation that is needed. If Assad gains an upper hand in Syria, consensus might be difficult to maintain.
Anyhow, if you have any suggestions for comparing the various challenges facing the US/NATO/the world, comment below.
This is an insightful post that makes some good points. But I am a little confused by the example of China. Iraq/Syria and Russia are clearly active crisis situations, but China, not so much. Of course, there may very well be future crisis situations with China, but until we get there, it is hard to speculate how hard these will be.
The other thing about hard vs. easy is that it very much depends on what your own objectives or constraints are. Take the case of China, and imagine a possible future active crisis over the South China Sea. It is my guess that China is probably not interested in creating a real crisis over this, unless it appears necessary to them, and that they would prefer to instead slowly but steadily create facts on the ground (building islands etc). But it is also my view that the issue is not important enough for the US to risk any major confrontation, and that everybody (including in particular the Southeast Asian countries) will be better off slowly accepting the inevitable here. (I do not agree with the Chinese position here, but on a list of great injustices happening in the world, this one does not rank very high.)
These objectives or constraints are of course largely internal. Within China, the government could not easily give up what its own propaganda has described as Chinese territory. In the US, we have a very narrow range of acceptable foreign policy views, and an assumption that the US must always be able to militarily dominate most of the planet.
As far Russia being easy, that again depends on your objectives. If you insist on all of Ukraine “joining the West”, it is hardly easy, since that is not acceptable to Russia. if your main objective is to prevent spillover to other Eastern European countries while the Ukraine conflict is slowly moving towards some settlement that will likely not give the US all it wants, that is quite doable. Or basically, it gets easier if you are actually willing to compromise. It is hard if you assume your own constraints are set in stone and anyone else’s do not really count.
Russia is not easy–just easier than Iraq/Syria. That is the point of the exercise–relative comparisons. I also see the Russia issue these days not being about rolling back what Russia took, but protecting the Baltics and deterring Russia from more expansion.
China? Not a crisis? Um, how many times has China buzzed American, Japanese and other planes and ships lately? Creating islands to alter territorial claims? Oh, yes, we have a crisis with China.
Thanks for the reply. Agree on Russia then. For China, I think we definitely have China pushing things on a number of issues, in an attempt to slowly change the status quo, and they may continue to do so. But for it to become a real crisis, the US would have to take a strong stand and push back hard. Which might be a bad idea – maybe better to manage and slightly delay changes that will happen anyway. A crisis over those islands seems like a really bad idea.
Perhaps it would be better to avoid the word “easy” and say “relatively straightforward” vs.”complex.”
Could an example of a low stakes-low complexity case be the situation regarding the sovereignty of Gibraltar as discussed in this article? https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/articles/opinion/gibraltars-sovereignty-must-be-defended-madrids-bullying
Sounds good to me. thanks!