Conflict Prevention

On October 12, 2010, the Board of Directors of the EastWest Institute honored Her Highness Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak with the Values Based Leadership Award, which was presented by Margot Perot and received by Her Highness’s son and the minister of foreign affairs, H.H. Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed.

In honoring Her Highness with the award, EWI sought to draw attention to her leadership record, particularly her promotion of the cause of women in the United Arab Emirates.

In 1973, Sheikha Fatima established the first women’s organization in the UAE: the Abu Dhabi Society for the Awakening of Women. To counter a more than 75 per cent illiteracy rate in the UAE, she launched a nationwide campaign for the education of young girls.

In 1975, Sheikha Fatima helped found the UAE Women’s Federation to empower women, promote education and eliminate illiteracy among adult women. Sheikha Fatima campaigned for the women of the UAE to work in media and become members of the country’s parliamentary assembly, the Federal National Council (FNC). The current FNC includes nine women among its 40 members.

In his keynote speech presenting the award, EastWest Institute Co-Chairman Francis Finlay declared: “Her Highness’ continuous inspiration, guidance, commitment, and leadership form a tribute to all women and men of the region and indeed serve as a beacon to all humanity.  The EastWest Institute family is deeply honored to present Her Highness with the EastWest Institute Values-based Leadership Award.”

Fatima Awarded EWI’s Leadership Award, Khaleej Times, October 12, 2010

Fatima awarded EWI's Values Based Leadership Award, UAE Interact, October 13, 2010

In military strategy, the idea of “indirect approach” gained prominence in Europe only after the First World War in a book published in 1929. Many would say that it has been an enduring feature of the military strategies of Asian countries for much longer. What can we learn from this idea for transforming the Iran-Israel confrontation?

As the British strategist rightly observed in the preface to a later edition of his work, the principle of indirect approach has an application outside of military combat. It is, he said, a “key to practical achievement” where a “conflict of wills tends to spring from an underlying concern for interests”. He wrote that in such cases, the “direct assault of new ideas provokes a stubborn resistance”. Change, he suggested, is possible, and can happen rapidly, only “by unsuspected infiltration of a different idea or by an argument that turns the flank of instinctive opposition”.

If the Supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, accepts the reality of Israel’s existence as a state, and he does, then why can’t we start to think about a treaty between Iran and Israel. We know there are obstacles, the first being the need for Israel and Palestine to have recognized each other as states.  The second is President Ahmedinejad’s reliance on anti-Israel rhetoric for political purposes. There is an even chance that within five years, both obstacles will have disappeared.

One interesting question is whether promotion now of the idea of regional peace and prosperity underpinned by an Iran-Israel treaty could actually hasten the elimination of both obstacles.

It has to happen. States use treaties to end wars and promote mutual economic security. There will be a treaty, either in fifteen years or five years. Why not aim for the five year milestone?

The treaty will be important for the obvious benefits it can bring in terms of peace and military security. Its enduring importance will be its potential to serve as an engine for regional economic development, including the development of transport links, educational advance and technology transfer. While both Israel and Iran ban bilateral trade, it does occur at relatively low levels, sometimes unwittingly through third parties.
It might be convenient to dismiss the robust (if unofficial) relationship between Iran and Israel before 1978 as a weird outcome of another time, but there were some basic economic and human realities at play in that, including Iran’s (small) Jewish community and Israel’s community of Iranian Jews.

Once Iran and Israel have normalized political relations, the trade floodgates will open. Although little remarked, Iran is – according to the IMF and World Bank – among the top 20 economies in the world in terms of GDP (purchasing power parity estimates). Iran ranks higher than Saudi Arabia, which is a member of the G20 while Iran is not.

Iran’s re-integration into the global economy in a post-sanctions world will be a productive process (once Israel and Palestine are at peace and the disputes over Iran’s nuclear program are eliminated).

A little known fact is that Israel, Iran and Palestine are currently all parties to a 2002 treaty on regional economic and security cooperation. This is the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA). It has ambitious frameworks for building trust between its members. There is not much agreement between Iran and Israel in this forum, but their common membership in it – where Palestine is, it seems, treated as a state – is certainly worth noting. A Turkish diplomat referred to CICA as a “unique group of dis-similars”, and the forum is inevitably a politicized one. For now, it is the only regional organization bridging Israel, Palestine and Iran. Based on this precedent, a bilateral treaty between Iran and Israel within five years is not impossible – once the two obstacles are removed.  

“Last month, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s repugnant claim that the events of 9/11 were a U.S. conspiracy set an all-time low in this regard, triggering a walkout by the representatives of 33 countries—a new record,” writes Sidhu.

Sidhu argues that Washington DC’s and Tehran’s mutual misperceptions lie at the heart of this problematic relationship.  With Ahmadinejad’s pronouncements of the U.S.’s immoral political and economic system, and the U.S.’s belief that Iran is on the verge of collapse, neither country evaluates the other realistically.  Both countries’ assessments are too extreme.

Sidhu concludes that Iran made a serious mistake in choosing to attack the U.S. rather than communicate at this year’s UN General Assembly: “Clearly, both sides missed a ‘golden opportunity’ to negotiate their way out of the dangerous impasse on the sidelines of the UN.  In this instance, the blame lies squarely with Ahmadinejad.”

Click here to read Sidhu's piece on livemint.com.

On 23 April 2010, the New York Times referenced a meeting in March between US and Chinese officials as “the first time the Chinese labeled the South China Sea a core interest, on par with Taiwan and Tibet”. The report also said that a visit by a Chinese warship to Abu Dhabi in 2010 was the “first time the modern Chinese Navy made a port visit in the Middle East.”

Sorry, but the famous newspaper and its sources in this report have been misleading. Chinese naval ships have visited the Middle East before this year, with three ships visiting Egypt in 2002. A small Chinese naval flotilla has been on anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden beginning in 2008 – alongside NATO. By early 2010, these ships had reportedly made more than 16 visits to Oman. The New York Times might have said more correctly the “Persian Gulf”.

On the bigger issue, there is no stronger core interest for a state than sovereignty over territory. The two main island groups of the South China Sea (Paracel and Spratly) have been identified both by the Republic of China (ROC) since 1946 and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1951 as China’s vital national interest. In 1951, China demanded recognition of its sovereignty over the islands. Through various acts since, China has made clear its view of these islands as vital interests, most visibly in 1974 with the military eviction of South Vietnamese forces from the Paracel Islands, and then through successive shows of force around the Spratly Islands.

For almost five decades, both the PRC and ROC have drawn maps, using the so-called U-shaped line, showing almost the entirety of the South China Sea as within China’s domain. That line has no legal standing but the subsequent evolution of the Law of the Sea would, in the Chinese view and reasonable expectation, place large slices of the South China (though not even half of it) under Chinese jurisdiction for the exploitation of maritime resources.

According to a Pentagon report this year, China “has the largest force of principal combatants, submarines, and amphibious warfare ships in Asia”. The report notes that “China’s naval forces include some 75 principal combatants, more than 60 submarines, 55 medium and large amphibious ships, and roughly 85 missile-equipped patrol craft.” According to an August 2010 report of the United States Congressional Research Service, China has only commissioned around two new major surface combatants per year for the past twenty years. The CRS also obliquely criticized the Pentagon report, not least because “China’s navy includes significant numbers of older, obsolescent ships”. The Office of Naval Intelligence predicts a small decline in the number of major surface combatants by 2015 and a further small decline by 2020.

At the end of the day, the Pentagon statement that China has the “largest” naval force “in Asia” – though true – is misleading. It really needs to be qualified by clearer assessments of the technology levels compared with potential enemies, the age of the ships, procurement rates, China’s relative maritime military power in Asia, the capability of related air assets, the missions assigned the naval forces as part of national strategy, or even perhaps the amounts of maritime territory. Japan alone has around 50 principal combatants even if it has far fewer though more capable submarines and far fewer amphibious ships. If we add the capability of the US Pacific Forces and the political commitment of other Pacific allies to the strategic power of Japan, then PLA naval strength is not the game changer some are suggesting – even on its own door step.

The Pentagon report on China, like the misleading newspaper coverage of China, needs to be handled with care.

Greg Austin is the author of "China's Ocean Frontier."

EWI Vice President, Greg Austin, is quoted in a Reuters article about crisis response.

“An attack on Russia would be regarded as an attack on NATO!” In November 2013, ten months after being sworn in as President of the United States for a second term, this is President Obama’s declaration to the NATO summit.

The United States and NATO had provided a similar security guarantee to Japan for decades, which in the 1980s was often called the “sixteenth member” of NATO. In 1969, the United States gave a similar private assurance to the Soviet Union when Moscow was considering nuclear retaliation against an increasingly belligerent China in the grip of the Cultural Revolution.  

In 2009, under a new wave of military reforms instituted by President Medvedev, and backed by Prime Minister Putin, Russia began dismantling what was left of its capability for protracted conventional war. By 2012, Russia certainly needed NATO, and the latter needed reassurance that Russia’s almost exclusive reliance on nuclear weapons alone for its defence would not be called into play in potential conflicts in Northeast Asia.
The 2013 decision to align so closely with Russia grew out of three broad commitments in NATO’s 2010 security concept.

The first was affirmation that while NATO is a defensive regional military alliance, there were several “out of area” developments that directly brought into play its security interests. This had been evident even before 2010. In the 1987 war on shipping in the Persian Gulf, several NATO allies used the fig-leaf of the moribund 1948 Western European Union defence treaty to provide legal cover for a joint military operation to protect oil tankers “an ocean away” from NATO territory.  The direct security interests of NATO in remote areas had also been manifested in the acceptance by it in 2003 of the UN mandate to undertake defence of the Afghanistan government. As one diplomat put it prophetically in 2010, “Afghanistan changed NATO forever”.

In this vein, NATO came to understand that its explicit commit to “exporting security” was a deeper commitment than a temporary, “out of area” deployment of troops or the coordination of security sector reform in what were then called “partner” countries. In fact, the idea that NATO involvement in reforming the military establishment of distant countries was somehow apolitical had by 2012 become widely acknowledged as a big illusion. There is nothing more profoundly political and more potentially entangling in security terms that a commitment by one country to shore up the military establishment of another.  The second stream of policy development that contributed to the NATO decision to offer a security guarantee to Russia was the determination to respond positively to the growing demand from “out of area” countries for close ties that represented, as for Japan, de facto but non-voting membership of NATO. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia had been de facto members since 1990 when NATO forces joined those of many others in Operation “Desert Shield”, which a year later became the “Desert Storm” that liberated Kuwait. By 2012, other tiny and defenceless Arab states were all too willing to sign up as “partners”, and NATO’s heavy dependence on their oil and the value of their investment capital sealed the deal.

The third stream of NATO policy development that led to the security guarantee for Russia was not as explicit in the 2010 security review, but the seeds of it were there in several ways. The foundation was recognition of the treaty commitment of all NATO countries to finding security “with Russia”, not “against it”. If NATO was the cornerstone of European security and European security (including Russia) was “indivisible”, then NATO had to be at least one cornerstone of Russian security. But that was only a “legal” explanation. NATO extended the security guarantee to Russia in 2013 because of a shared sense of urgent need to protect common security interests in the Korean peninsula, Central and South Asia, the Red Sea hinterland – and cyber space.

In The Changing Political Utility of Nuclear Weapons: Nuclear Threats from 1970 to 2010, Samuel Black offers historical evidence against the idea that nuclear weapons are “weapons of peace”: first, there have been twice as many nuclear threats since the end of the Cold War than there were from 1970 to 1990; second, Pakistan, the U.S. and India were the leaders when it came to making those threats.

“One could quibble with the methodology of the study, yet there is no contesting the somber finding,” Sidhu writes. “States possessing nuclear weapons actually find the political utility of these deadly weapons increasing.” Sidhu points out that the nonchalance with which threats are issued can discredit the seriousness of a nuclear threat and allow more room for casual errors.

“While there is, clearly, a temptation to create the comforting legend of nuclear weapons as manna from heaven that will end the scourge of war for evermore, it is a dangerous delusion,” Sidhu concludes.  “The stark reality is that nuclear weapons by themselves cannot ensure peace.”

Click here to read Sidhu’s article on livemint.com

For Miller, the report reveals that “concern in the United States is not just focused on China’s remarkable economic rise, but also on the modernization and expansion of its military.” Miller highlights the report’s concerns over sophisticated new Chinese weaponry, the evolution of military thinking toward protecting China’s economic interests abroad, and China’s perceived lack of transparency. Although the report expresses the hope that China’s increased military capabilities could be used for peacekeeping or humanitarian efforts, Miller argues that “the unavoidable takeaway is that China’s military rise is harmful to U.S. strategic interests.” And while the report is not likely to greatly impact the bilateral relationship, it does little to advance the Obama administration’s ultimate challenge: to work with China while advancing America’s strategic interests.

Kok focuses her analysis on the report’s implications for United States-China military-to-military exchanges. Kok writes that the report, released in a period of heightened tensions, poses another challenge for bilateral military relations. While a section of the report touts the importance of military cooperation, this is undercut by “unflattering references” to China’s motivations for military exchanges: ”They include China’s presumed desire to gain ‘insights into potential U.S. vulnerabilities,” Kok writes, and “to drive a wedge between the United States, its allies, and its partners, including Taiwan.” Kok finds China’s response – a call for the United States to be objective and proactive in mending relations – to be unsatisfying. For relations to improve, Kok writes, both sides will have to replace “rhetoric and posturing” with an honest attempt to communicate. Preferably in time for the 2011 report.

Click here to read Jacqueline McLaren Miller's Piece (66.34K PDF).

Click here to read Piin-Fen Kok's piece (49.89K PDF).

“The news last week that China surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy (after the US) coincided with the annual report the US department of defense presents to the US Congress, on Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, 2010,” Sidhu writes.  “This happenstance reflects the direct correlation between China’s growing economic strength and its increasing military might and holds important lessons for many countries, notably India.”

While China’s growth is impressive, Sidhu points out the economic and military differences between the U.S. and China: “On the economic front, China’s annual GDP of around $5 trillion is still one-third of the US’ $14 trillion.” China’s defense budget is pegged at somewhere between $80 billion to $150 billion dollars: “Yet even this high figure dwarfs in comparison with the towering US defence budget of over $650 billion,” Sidhu explains.

China plans to expand its growth through new technologies with a focus on cyber warfare, missiles and space technology, and extended-range power projection capabilities.

Sidhu concludes with by looking at India’s progress and the challenges of its future economic and military growth. “Perhaps the most important lesson is to seek to create a cooperative security arrangement, particularly involving China, so that the prospect of war is eliminated,” he asserts. “This might prove to be the most ambitious challenge of them all.”

Click here to read Sidhu’s article on livemint.com