Drones are neither as cheap, targeted, or bloodless as advertised. They’re ripe for international arms control.

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – In the aftermath of the recent war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, drone warfare is being touted as the latest breakthrough in military technology, a “magic bullet” that makes armored vehicles obsolete, defeats sophisticated anti-aircraft systems, and routs entrenched infantry.

While there is some truth in the hype, one needs to be especially wary of military “game changers,” since there is always a seller at the end of the pitch.

In his examination of the two major books on drones — Christian Brose’s The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare, and Michael Boyle’s The Drone Age — analyst Andrew Cockburn points out that the victims of drones are mostly civilians, not soldiers.

While drones can take out military targets, they are more commonly used to assassinate people one doesn’t approve of. A case in point was former President Trump’s drone strike that killed Qasem Solemani, a top Iranian general, a country we are not at war with.

In just the first year of his administration, Trump killed more people — including 250 children — with drones in Yemen and Pakistan than President Barack Obama did in eight years. And Obama was no slouch in this department, increasing the use of drone attacks by a factor of 10 over the administration of George W. Bush.

Getting a handle on drone — their pluses and minuses and the moral issues such weapons of war raise — is essential if the world wants to hold off yet another round of massive military spending and the tensions and instabilities such a course will create.

There Are No Bloodless Wars

That drones have the power to alter a battlefield is a given, but they may not be all they are advertised. Azerbaijan’s drones — mostly Turkish Bayraktar TB2s and Israeli Harpys, Orbiter-1Ks, and Harops — did indeed make hash of Armenian tanks and armored vehicles and largely silenced anti-aircraft systems. They also helped Azeri artillery target Armenians positions. But the Azerbaijanis won the recent war by slugging it out on the ground, with heavy casualties on both sides.

As military historian and editor of the Small Wars Journal, Lt. Col Robert Bateman (ret.) points out, drones were effective because of the Armenians’ stunning incompetence in their use of armor, making no effort to spread their tanks out or camouflage them. Instead, they bunched them up in the open, making them sitting ducks for Turkish missile-firing drones and Israeli “suicide” drones. “While drones will be hailed as the straw that broke the camel’s back in this war,” he writes, “Azerbaijani success is also attributed to good ol’ fashioned mechanized infantry operations that took territory, one square kilometer at a time.”

Turkey has made widespread use of drones in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, and they again have played a role on the battlefield. But Turkish drones have mainly been used to assassinate Kurdish leaders in Iraq and Syria. Last April a Turkish drone killed two Iraqi generals in the Kurdish autonomous zone of northern Iraq.

In July 2020, Turkey deployed drones in Syria to block an offense by the Damascus government against Turkey’s allies in Idlib Province, but failed to stop President Bashar al-Assad’s forces from reclaiming large hunks of territory. In short, they are not always “game changers.”

The selling point for drones is that they are precise, cheap — or relatively so — and you don’t have a stream of body bags returning home. But drones are not all- seeing, unless they are flying at low altitudes, thus making it easier to shoot them down. The weather also needs to be clear, and the area smokeless.

Otherwise what drones see are vague images. In 2010 a U.S. drone took out what its operators thought was a caravan of Taliban trucks carrying weapons. But the trucks were filled with local peasants and the “weapons” were turkeys. The drones incinerated 23 civilians.

Nor do they always live up to their reputation for accuracy. In a 2012 test, the Air Force compared a photo of a base taken by the highly touted Gorgon Stare cameras mounted on a Predator drone and the one on Google Earth. The images were essentially identical, except Gorgon Stare cost half a trillion dollars and Google Earth was free. “In neither,” says Cockburn, “were humans distinguishable from bushes.”

Drones have killed insurgent leaders in Syria, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan — with virtually no effect on those wars. Indeed, in the case of Afghanistan, the assassination of first-tier Taliban leaders led to their replacement by far more radical elements. The widespread use of drones in the U.S. war on drugs has also been largely a failure. Drug cartels are bigger and more dangerous than ever, and there has been no reduction in the flow of drugs into the United States.

They do keep the body bag count down, but that raises an uncomfortable moral dilemma: If wars don’t produce casualties, except among the targeted, isn’t it more tempting to fight them?

Drone pilots in their air-conditioned trailers in southern Nevada will never go down with their aircraft, but the people on the receiving end will eventually figure out some way to strike back. As the attack on the World Trade towers and recent terrorist attacks in France demonstrate, that is not all that hard to do — and it is almost inevitable that the targets will be civilians.

Bloodless war is a dangerous illusion.

The Global Drones Arms Race

Drones certainly present problems for any military. For one thing, they are damned hard to spot. Most are composed of non-metallic substances, like Kevlar, and they have low heat signatures because their small motors run on batteries. Radar doesn’t pick them up and neither do infrared detectors. The Yemen-based Houthis drones that hit Saudi Arabian oil facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais in 2019 slipped right through the radar systems of three anti-aircraft networks: the U.S. Patriot system, the French-supplied Shashine surface-to-air-missile system, and the Swiss Oerlikon 35mm radar directed cannons.

Those drones were produced on a 3-D printer supplied to the Houthis by Iran.

Drones also raised havoc with Armenia’s far more capable Russian-made S-300 air defense system, plus several other short and medium range systems. Apparently the drones were not detected until they struck, essentially obilerating Armenia’s anti-aircraft system.

The Russians claim that they beat off drone attacks on their two bases in Syria, Khmeimim Air Base and the naval base at Tartus, with their Pantsir air defense system. But those drones were rather primitive. Some were even made of plywood. Pantsir systems were destroyed in Nagorno Karabakh, and Turkish drones apparently destroyed Pantsirs in Libya.

The problem is that even if you do detect them, a large number of drones — a so-called “swarming attack” similar to the one that struck the Saudis — will eventually exhaust your ammunition supply, leaving you vulnerable while reloading.

The U.S. is working on a way to counter drones with directed energy weapons, including the High Energy Laser Weapons System 2, and a microwave system. At a cost of $30 million, Raytheon is building prototypes of both. President Biden’s Defense Secretary, Gen. Lloyd Austin (ret.), formerly served on the company’s board of directors.

If drones rely on GPS systems to navigate, they can be jammed or hacked, as the Iranians successfully did to a large U.S. surveillance drone in 2010. Some drones rely on internal maps, like the one used in the U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile. It appears that the drones and cruises that hit Saudi Arabia were running on a guidance system similar to the Tomahawk.

Of course that makes your drone or cruise missile autonomous, something that raises its own moral dilemmas. The U.S. is currently working on weapons that use artificial intelligence and will essentially be able to “decide” on their own what to attack.

Maybe not “Terminator,” but headed in that direction.

We Need an International Convention

Drones are enormously useful for a range of tasks, from monitoring forest fires to finding lost hikers. They are cheap to run and commercial prices are coming down. Turning them into weapons, however, is not only destabilizing, it puts civilians at risk, raises serious moral issues about who bears the cost of war, and in the long run will be very expensive. Drones may be cheap, but anti-aircraft systems are not.

India and Pakistan are in the middle of a drone race. Germany is debating whether it should arm its drones. Mexican drug cartels are waging war against one another using drones.

An international convention on drone use should be on any future arms control agenda.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Featured Photo: Creative Commons, doctress neutopia, Predator Drone via Flickr.

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – President Joe Biden’s administration faces a host of difficult problems, but in foreign policy its thorniest will be its relations with the People’s Republic of China.

How the new administration handles issues of trade, security, and human rights will either allow both countries to hammer out a working relationship or pull the U.S. into an expensive — and unwinnable — cold war that will shelve existential threats like climate change and nuclear war.

The stakes could not be higher — and Washington may be off on the wrong foot.

The first hurdle will be the toxic atmosphere created by the Trump administration. By targeting the Chinese Communist Party as the U.S.’s major worldwide enemy, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo essentially called for regime change, which in diplomatic terms means a fight to the death. But while Trump exacerbated tensions between Washington and Beijing, many of the disputes go back more than 70 years. Recognizing that history will be essential if the parties are to reach some kind of detente.

This will not be easy. Polls in the two countries show a growing antagonism in both people’s views of one another and an increase of nationalism that may be difficult to control.

Most Chinese think the U.S. is determined to isolate their country, surround it with hostile allies, and prevent it from becoming a world power. Many Americans think China is an authoritarian bully that has robbed them of well-paying industrial jobs. There is a certain amount of truth in both viewpoints. The trick will be how to negotiate a way through some genuine differences.

Imperial Insecurities and the South China Sea

A good place to start is to walk a mile in the other country’s shoes.

For most of recorded human history, China was the world’s leading economy. But starting with the first Opium War in 1839, British, French, Japanese, German, and American colonial powers fought five major wars, and many minor ones, with China, seizing ports and imposing trade agreements. The Chinese have never forgotten those dark years, and any diplomatic approach that doesn’t take that history into account is likely to fail.

The most difficult — and dangerous — friction point today is the South China Sea, a 1.4 million square mile body of water that borders South China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Borneo, Brunei, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Besides being a major trade route, it is rich in natural resources.

Based on its imperial past, China claims ownership of much of the sea and, starting in 2014, began building military bases on island chains and reefs that dot the region. For countries that border the sea, those claims and bases threaten offshore resources and pose a potential security threat. Besides the locals, the Americans have been the dominant power in the region since the end of World War II and have no intention of relinquishing their hold.

While the South China Sea is international waters, it makes up a good deal of China’s southern border, and it has been a gateway for invaders in the past. The Chinese have never threatened to interdict trade in the region — a self-defeating action in any case, since much of the traffic is Chinese goods — but they are concerned about security.

They should be.

The U.S. has five major military bases in the Philippines, 40 bases in Japan and Korea, and its 7th Fleet — based in Yokosuka, Japan — is Washington’s largest naval force. The U.S. has also pulled together an alliance of Australia, Japan, and India — the “Quad” — that coordinates joint actions. These include the yearly Malabar war games that model interdicting China’s seaborn energy supplies by closing off the Malacca Straits between Malaysia and Indonesian island of Sumatra.

U.S. military strategy in the area, titled “Air Sea Battle,” aims to control China’s south coast, decapitate the country’s leadership, and take out its nuclear missile force. China’s counter move has been to seize islands and reefs to keep U.S. submarines and surface craft at arm’s length, a strategy called “Area Denial.”

It has also been mostly illegal. A 2016 ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration found China’s claims on the South China Sea have no merit. But to Beijing the sea is a vulnerable border. Think for a moment about how Washington would react if China held naval war games off Yokosuka, San Diego, or in the Gulf of Mexico. One person’s international waters are another’s home turf.

The Frayed Detente Over Taiwan

The tensions in the South China sea go back to the Chinese civil war between the communists and nationalists, in which the Americans backed the losing side. When the defeated nationalists retreated to Taiwan in 1949, the U.S. guaranteed the island’s defense, recognized Taiwan as China, and blocked the People’s Republic from UN membership.

After U.S. President Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, the two countries worked out some agreements on Taiwan. Washington would accept that Taiwan was part of China, but Beijing would refrain from using force to reunite the island with the mainland. The Americans also agreed not to have formal relations with Taipei or supply Taiwan with “significant” military weapons.

Over the years, however, those agreements have frayed, particularly during the administration of Bill Clinton.

In 1996 tensions between Taiwan and the mainland led to some saber rattling by Beijing, but the PRC did not have the capacity to invade the island, and all the parties involved knew that. But Clinton was trying to divert attention from his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky and a foreign crisis fit the bill, so the U.S. sent an aircraft carrier battle group through the Taiwan Straits. While the Straits are international waters, it was still a provocative move and one that convinced the PRC that it had to modernize its military if it was to defend its coasts.

There is a certain irony here. While the Americans claim that the modernization of the Chinese navy poses a threat, it was U.S. actions in the Taiwan Straits crisis that frightened the PRC into a crash program to construct that modern navy and adopt the strategy of Area Denial.

Trump certainly exacerbated the tensions. The U.S. dispatched high level Cabinet members to Taipei, recently sold the island 66 high performance F-16s fighter bombers, and now routinely sends warships through the Taiwan Straits,

In Beijing’s eyes all these actions violate the agreements regarding Taiwan and, in practice, abrogate China’s claim on the breakaway province.

It is a dangerous moment. The Chinese are convinced the U.S. intends to surround them with its military and the Quad alliance, although the former may not be up to the job, and the latter is a good deal shakier than it looks. While India has drawn closer to the Americans, China is its major trading partner and New Delhi is not about to go to war over Taiwan. Australia’s economy is also closely tied to China, as is Japan’s. Having trade relations between countries doesn’t preclude them going to war, but it is a deterrent.

As for the U.S. military: virtually all war games over Taiwan suggests the most likely outcome would be an American defeat.

No Option But Peace

Such a war, of course, would be catastrophic, deeply wounding the world’s two major economies and could even lead to the unthinkable — a nuclear exchange. Since China and the U.S. cannot “defeat” one another in any sense of that word, it seems a good idea to stand back and figure out what to do about the South China Sea and Taiwan.

The PRC has no legal claim to vast portions of the South China Sea, but it has legitimate security concerns. And judging from Biden’s choices for Secretary of State and National Security Advisor — Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, respectively — it has reason for those concerns. Both have been hawkish on China, and Sullivan believes that Beijing is “pursuing global dominance.”

There is no evidence for this. China is modernizing its military, but spends about one third of what the U.S. spends. Unlike the U.S., it is not building an alliance system — in general, China considers allies an encumbrance — and while it has an unpleasant authoritarian government, its actions are directed at areas Beijing has always considered part of historical China. The PRC has no designs on spreading its model to the rest of the world. Unlike the U.S.- Soviet Cold War, the differences are not ideological, but are those that arise when two different capitalist systems compete for markets.

China doesn’t want to rule the world, but it does want to be the dominant power in its region, and it wants to sell a lot of stuff, from electric cars to solar panels. That poses no military threat to the United States, unless Washington chooses to challenge China in its home waters, something Americans neither want nor can afford.

There are a number of moves both countries should make.

First, both countries should dial down the rhetoric and de-escalate their military deployments. Just as the U.S. has the right to security in the waters near its borders, so does China. Beijing, in turn, should give up its claims in the South China Sea and disarm the bases it has illegally established. Both of those moves would help create the atmosphere for a regional diplomatic solution to the overlapping claims of countries in the region.

The cost of not doing this is quite unthinkable. At a time when massive resources are needed to combat global warming, countries are larding their military budgets and threatening one another over islands and reefs that will soon be open sea if climate change does not become the world’s focus.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

SCMP Clips: “Biden calls China the ‘most serious competitor’ to the US, in his first foreign policy address”

Instead of wasting scarce funds on the Space Force, the Biden administration should deploy its diplomats to demilitarize space.

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – When President-elect Joe Biden takes office on January 21, he will be faced with some very expensive problems, from bailing out the COVID-19 economy to getting a handle on climate change. Vaccinating over 300 million people will not be cheap, and wrestling the U.S.’s hydrocarbon-based economy in the direction of renewable energies will come with a hefty price tag.

One place to find some of that money would be to respond to Russian, Chinese, and United Nations (UN) proposals to demilitarize space, heading off what will be an expensive — and destabilizing — arms race for the new high ground.

The Militarization of Space

Last December, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) created the Space Force, although a major push to increase the military’s presence in space dates back to the Obama administration.

In fact, space has always had a military aspect to it, and no country is more dependent on that dimension than the United States. A virtual cloud of surveillance satellites spy on adversaries, tap into communications, and monitor military maneuvers and weapons tests. It was a U.S. Vela Hotel satellite that caught the Israelis and the South Africans secretly testing a nuclear warhead in the southern Indian Ocean in 1979.

While other countries have similar platforms in space, the U.S. is the only country with a world-wide military presence, and it is increasingly dependent on satellites to enhance its armed forces. Such satellites allow drone operators to call in missile strikes from half a world away without risking the lives of pilots.

The U.S. is not the only country with armed drones. Turkish and Israeli drones demonstrated their effectiveness in the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and scores of countries produce armed drones. But no other country wages war from tens of thousands of miles away.

American drones stalk adversaries in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East piloted from air conditioned trailers in southern Nevada. “It’s only really the U.S. that needs to conduct military operations anywhere in the world all the time against anyone,” Brian Weeden of the Secure World Federation told Scientific American in the magazine’s November article, “Orbital Aggression: How do we prevent war in space?”

According to the DOD, it is the Russians and the Chinese who have taken the initiative to militarize space, although most of that is ancient news and a lot of it is based more on supposition than fact. Moscow, Beijing, and Washington have long had the ability to take out an opponent’s satellites, and have demonstrated that on a number of occasions. It takes no great skill to do so. Satellites generally have very predictable orbits and speeds. Astrophysicist Laura Greco of the Union of Concerned Scientists calls them “sitting ducks.”

Satellites do, however, have the capacity to maneuver. Indeed, it was a recent encounter between a Russian Cosmos “inspection” satellite and a U.S. spy satellite that kicked off the latest round of “the Russians are coming!” rhetoric from the Pentagon. The Americans accused the Cosmos of potentially threatening the American satellite by moving close to it, although many independent observers shrugged their shoulders. “That’s what an inspection satellite does,” says Weeden. “It is hard to see at this point why the U.S. is making it a big deal.”

The ‘Star Wars’ Lobby

One reason? Because blaster rattling loosens Congressional purse strings.

China’s military and civilian space budget is estimated to be $8.4 billion. Russia’s is a comparatively modest $3 billion. In contrast, the U.S. space budget is at $48 billion and climbing, and that figure doesn’t account for secret black budget items like the X-37B unmanned space plane.

The DOD points to the fact that the Chinese have launched more satellites in the past year than the U.S., but that is a reflection of the fact that the U.S. currently dominates space, both on the military and the civilian side. Other countries — like India and the European Union — are simply trying to catch up. Out of 3,200 live satellites currently in orbit, the U.S. controls 1,327.

Space is, indeed, essential for the modern world. Satellites don’t just spy or direct drones. They are central to communication systems, banking, weather predictions, and monitoring everything from climate change to tectonic plate movement. An actual war in space that destroyed the satellite networks would cause a worldwide blackout and likely lead to a ground war.

Which is why it is so important to sit down with Russia, China, and the UN and work out a way to keep space a realm for peace, not war. While there are treaties that cover weaponizing space, they are dated. The 1967 Treaty on Outer Space keeps nuclear weapons from being deployed, but it doesn’t cover ground-launched or space-launched anti-satellite weapons, or how close a satellite has to get to another country’s satellite to be considered a threat.

In 2008, and again in 2014, Moscow and Beijing proposed a Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space Treaty. So far, the U.S. has not formally responded, and rejected four resolutions proposed by the UN’s General Assembly on preventing the militarization of space. There have been informal talks between the Russians and Americans, but the last three U.S. administrations have essentially stonewalled serious discussions.

Of course, the U.S. currently holds most of the cards, but that is shortsighted thinking. Adversaries always figure out how to overcome their disadvantages. The U.S. was the first country to launch an anti-satellite weapon in 1959, but the Russians matched it four years later. China destroyed one of its old satellites in 2007, and India claims it has such a weapon as well.

But there is strong opposition to such an agreement in the Pentagon and the Congress, in part because of growing tensions between Russia, China, and the U.S., and in part because of the power of corporations. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics stand to reap billions in profits by supplying the hardware to dominate space. Added to the formidable lobbying power of the major arms corporations is another layer of up and comers like Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, and Blue Origin.

Hard Choices

The Space Force also has bipartisan support. Some 188 Democrats joined 189 Republicans to pass the National Defense Authorization Act for 2020.

The creation of the Space Force has not exactly been met with open arms by the other military services. Each of the services have their own space-based systems and the budgets that go along with that, and they jealously guard their turf. For the time being Space Force is under the Air Force’s wing, but its budget is separate, and few doubt that it will soon become a service in its own right.

At this point the outlay for the Force will be $200 billion over five years, but military budgets have a way of increasing geometrically. The initial outlay for the Reagan administration’s missile-intercepting “Star Wars” system was small, but it has eaten up over $200 billion to date and is still chugging along, in spite of the fact that it is characterized more for failure than success.

The Biden administration will have to make hard choices around the pandemic and climate change while continuing to spend close to $1 trillion a year on its military. Adding yet another military service when American states are reeling from the economic fallout of COVID-19 and the warming oceans are churning out superstorms is something neither the U.S. nor the world can afford.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

During the reign of the Emperor Justinian I (527-565 AD), a mysterious plague spread out of the Nile Valley to Constantinople and finished off the Roman Empire. Appearing first in China and North India, the “Black Death” (Yersinia pestis) radiated throughout the Mediterranean and into Northern Europe. It may well have killed close to half the world’s population, some 50 million people.

COVID-19 is not the Black Death, but its impact may be civilizational, weakening the mighty, raising up the modest, and rearranging axes of power across the globe.

The Middle East is a case in point. Since the end of World War II, the wealth of the Persian Gulf monarchies — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait and Qatar — has overturned the traditional centers of power that dominated the region for millennia: Turkey, Egypt, and Persia. While those civilizations were built on agriculture, industry, and trade, the monarchs were fabulously wealthy simply because they sat on a sea of oil.

The monarchies — Saudi Arabia in particular — have used that wealth to overthrow governments, silence internal dissent, and sponsor a version of Islam that has spawned terrorists from the Caucasus to the Philippines.

And now they are in trouble.

The Saudi owned oil company, Aramco, just saw its quarterly earnings fall from $24.7 billion to $6.6 billion, a more than 73 percent drop from a year ago.

Not all the slump is due to the pandemic recession. Over the past eight years, Arab oil producers have seen their annual revenues decline from $1 trillion to $300 billion, reflecting a gradual shift away from hydrocarbons toward renewable energy. But COVID-19 has greatly accelerated that trend.

For countries like Saudi Arabia, this is an existential problem. The country has a growing population, much of it unemployed and young — some 70 percent of Saudis are under 30. So far, the royalty has kept a lid on things by handing out cash and make-work jobs, but the drop in revenues is making that more difficult. The kingdom —as well as the UAE — has hefty financial reserves, but that money will not last forever.

In the Saudi case, a series of economic and political blunders have worsened the crisis.

Riyadh is locked into an expensive military stalemate in Yemen, while also trying to diversify the country’s economy. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is pushing a $500 billion Red Sea mega project to build a new city, Neom, that will supposedly attract industry, technology, and investment.

However, the plan has drawn little outside money, because investors are spooked by the Crown Prince’s aggressive foreign policy and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The Saudis are borrowing up to $12 billion just to pay Aramco dividends of $75 billion a year.

The oil crisis has spread to Middle Eastern countries that rely on the monarchs for investments, aid, and jobs for their young populations. Cairo sends some 2.5 million Egyptians to work in the Gulf states, and countries like Lebanon provide financial services and consumer goods.

Lebanon is now imploding, Egypt is piling up massive debts, and Iraq can’t pay its bills because oil is stuck at around $46 a barrel. Saudi Arabia needs a price of at least $95 a barrel to meet its budgetary needs — and to feed the appetites of its royals.

When the pandemic ends, oil prices will rise, but they are very unlikely to reach the levels they did in the early 2000s when they averaged $100 a barrel. Oil prices have been low ever since Saudi Arabia’s ill-conceived attempt to drive out smaller competitors and retake its former market share.

In 2014, Riyadh deliberately drove down the price of oil to hurt smaller competitors and throttle expensive arctic drilling projects. But when China’s economy slowed, demand for oil fell, and the price has never recovered.

Of the top 10 oil producers in the world, five are in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, the UAE, and Kuwait. All of them are in dire straits, although in Iran’s case this is exacerbated by U.S. sanctions. With the exception of Iraq — where massive demonstrations have shaken the country’s leadership — most of those countries have been politically quiet. In the case of the monarchies, of course, it is hard to judge the level of dissatisfaction because they do not tolerate dissent.

But how long will the royals be able to keep the lid on?

“It is a transformation that has speeded up by the corona virus cataclysm,” says Middle East expert Patrick Cockburn, “and will radically change the politics of the Middle East.”

There is no region untouched by the current crisis. With the exception of the presidents of Brazil and the U.S., most world leaders have concluded that climate change is a reality and that hydrocarbons are the major culprit. Even when the pandemic eases, oil use will continue to decline.

The virus has exposed the fault lines among the mighty. The United States has the largest economy in the world and is the greatest military power on the globe, and yet it simply collapsed in the face of COVID-19. With 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States accounts for 22 percent of the pandemic’s fatalities.

And the U.S. is not alone. The United Kingdom has more than 40,000 dead, and its economy has plummeted 9 percent. In contrast, Bangladesh, the world’s most crowded country, with twice Great Britain’s population, has around 4,000 deaths and its economy has contracted by only 1.9 percent.

“COVID-19 has blown away the myth about ‘First’ and ‘Third’ world competence,” says Steven Friedman, director of the Center for the Study of Democracy in Johannesburg.

Turkey, Vietnam, Cuba, and Nigeria all have far better records fighting the virus than Great Britain and the European Union.

Partly this is because Europe’s population is older. While Europe’s average age is 43, Africa’s is 19. Younger people infected with coronavirus generally have better outcomes than older people, but age doesn’t fully explain the differences.

While Turkey developed sophisticated tracking methods to monitor measles, and Nigeria did the same for Ebola, the U.S. and United Kingdom were systematically starving or dismantling public health programs. Instead of stockpiling supplies to deal with a pandemic, Europe and the U.S. relied on countries like China to quickly supply things like personal protection equipment on an “as needed” basis, because it was cheaper than producing their own or paying for storage and maintenance.

But “need” doesn’t work during a worldwide pandemic. China had its own health crisis to deal with. The lag time between the appearance of the virus and obtaining the tools to fight it is directly responsible for the wave of deaths among medical workers and first responders.

And while the Chinese economy has rebounded — enough to tick the price of oil slightly upwards — the U.S., Great Britain, and the EU are mired in what promises to be a painful recession.

The neoliberal model of low taxes, privatization of public resources, and reliance on the free market has demonstrated its incompetence in the face of a natural disaster. The relationship between wealth and favorable outcomes only works when that wealth is invested in the many, not the few.

The Plague of Justinian destroyed the Roman Empire. The pandemic is not likely to do that to the United States. But it has exposed the fault lines and structural weaknesses that wealth papers over — until something like COVID-19 comes along to shake the glitter off the system.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: Is this the end of the Middle East’s oil rush? | Counting the Cost

(Foreign Policy in Focus ) – From 1830 to 1895, the British and Russian empires schemed and plotted over control of Central and South Asia.

At the heart of the “Great Game” was the United Kingdom’s certainty that the Russians had designs on India. So wars were fought, borders drawn, and generations of young met death in desolate passes and lonely outposts.

In the end, it was all illusion.

Russia never planned to challenge British rule in India and the bloody wars settled nothing, although the arbitrary borders and ethnic tensions stoked by colonialism’s strategy of divide and conquer live on today. Thus China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nepal battle over lines drawn long ago in London, while Beijing, Tokyo, and Seoul vie for tiny uninhabited islands, remnants of Imperial Japan.

That history is important to keep in mind when one begins to unpack the rationales behind the increasingly dangerous standoff between China and the United States in the South China Sea.

A New Cold War

To the Americans, China is a fast rising competitor that doesn’t play by the rules and threatens one of the most important trade routes on the globe in a region long dominated by Washington. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has essentially called for regime change.

According to Ryan Hass, former China director on the National Security Council, the Trump administration is trying to “reorient the U.S.-China relationship toward an all-encompassing systemic rivalry that cannot be reversed” by administrations that follow. In short, a cold war not unlike that between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

To the Chinese, the last 200 years — and China’s leaders do tend to think in centuries, not decades — has been an anomaly in their long history. Once the richest country on the globe who introduced the world to everything from silk to gunpowder, 19th century China became a dumping ground for British opium, incapable of even controlling its own coastlines.

China has never forgotten those years of humiliation or the damage colonialism helped inflict on its people. Those memories are an ingredient in the current crisis.

But China is not the only country with memories.

The U.S. has dominated the Pacific Ocean — sometimes called an “American lake” — since the end of World War II. Suddenly Americans have a competitor, although it is a rivalry that routinely gets overblown.

An example is conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who recently warned that China’s Navy has more ships than the U.S. Navy, ignoring the fact that most of China’s ships are small Coast Guard frigates and corvettes. China’s major strategic concern is the defense of its coasts, where several invasions landed in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Chinese strategy is “area denial”: keeping American aircraft carriers at arm’s length. To this end, Beijing has illegally seized numerous small islands and reefs in the South China Sea to create a barrier to the U.S. Navy.

In the World Bank’s Wake

Shutterstock

But China’s major thrust is economic, through its massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), not military, and is currently targeting South Asia as an area for development.

South Asia is enormously complex, comprising Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Tibet, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka. Its 1.6 billion people constitute almost a quarter of the world’s population, but it only accounts for 2 percent of the global GDP and 1.3 percent of world trade.

Those figures translate into a poverty level of 44 percent, just 2 percent higher than the world’s most impoverished region, sub-Saharan Africa. Close to 85 percent of South Asia’s population makes less than $2 a day.

Much of this is a result of colonialism, which derailed local economies, suppressed manufacturing, and forced countries to adopt monocrop cultures focused on export. The globalization of capital in the 1980s accelerated the economic inequality that colonialism had bequeathed the region.

Development in South Asia has been beholden to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which require borrowers to open their markets to western capital and reduce debts through severe austerity measures, throttling everything from health care to transportation.

This economic strategy — sometimes called the “Washington Consensus” — generates “debt traps”: countries cut back on public spending, which depresses their economies and increases debt, which leads to yet more rounds of borrowing and austerity.

The World Bank and the IMF have been particularly stingy about lending for infrastructure development, an essential part of building a modern economy. It is “the inadequacy and rigidness of the various western monetary institutions that have driven South Asia into the arms of China,” says economist Anthony Howell in the South Asia Journal.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) takes a different tack. Through a combination of infrastructure development, trade and financial aid, countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe are linked into what is essentially a new “Silk Road.” Some 138 countries have signed up.

Using a variety of institutions — the China Development Bank, the Silk Road Fund, the Export-Import Bank of China, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank — Beijing has been building roads, rail systems, and ports throughout South Asia.

For decades, western lenders have either ignored South Asia — with the exception of India — or put so many restrictions on development funds that the region has stagnated economically. The Chinese Initiative has the potential to reverse this, alarming the West and India, the only nation in the region not to join the BRI.

The European Union has also been resistant to the Initiative, although Italy has signed on. A number of Middle East countries have also joined the BRI and the China-Arab Cooperation Forum. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt have signed on to China’s Digital Silk Road, a network of navigation satellites that compete with America’s GPS, Russia’s GLONASS, and European Union’s Galileo. China also recently signed a $400 billion, 25-year trade and military partnership with Iran.

Needless to say, Washington is hardly happy about China elbowing its way into a U.S.-dominated region that contains a significant portion of the world’s energy supplies. In a worldwide competition for markets and influence, China is demonstrating considerable strengths.

That, of course, creates friction.

The United States, and to a certain extent the EU, have launched a campaign to freeze China out of markets and restrict its access to advanced technology. The White House successfully lobbied Great Britain and Australia to bar the Chinese company Huawei from installing a 5G digital network, and is pressuring Israel and Brazil to do the same.

An October Surprise?

Not all of the current tensions are economic.

The Trump administration needs a diversion from its massive failure to control the pandemic, and the Republican Party has made China bashing a centerpiece of its election strategy. There is even the possibility that the White House might pull off an “October surprise” and initiate some kind of military clash with China.

It is unlikely that Trump wants a full-scale war, but an incident in the South China Sea might rally Americans behind the White House. The danger is real, especially since polls in China and the United States show there is growing hostility between both groups of people.

But the tensions go beyond President Trump’s desperate need to be re-elected. China is re-asserting itself as a regional power and a force to be reckoned with worldwide.

That the U.S. and its allies view that with enmity is hardly a surprise. Britain did its best to block the rise of Germany before World War I, and the U.S. did much the same with Japan in the lead up to the Pacific War.

Germany and Japan were great military powers with a willingness to use violence to get their way. China is not a great military power and is more interested in creating profits than empires. In any case, a war between nuclear-armed powers is almost unimaginable (which is not to say it can’t happen).

China recently softened its language toward the U.S., stressing peaceful co-existence. “We should not let nationalism and hotheadness somehow kidnap our foreign policy,” says Xu Quinduo of the state-run China Radio. “Tough rhetoric should not replace rational diplomacy.”

The new tone suggests that China has no enthusiasm for competing with the U.S. military, but would rather take the long view and let initiatives like the Belt and Road work for it. Unlike the Russians, the Chinese don’t want to see Trump re-elected and they clearly have decided not to give him any excuse to ratchet up the tensions as an election year ploy.

China’s recent clash with India, and its bullying of countries in the South China Sea, including Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Brunei, have isolated Beijing, and the Chinese leadership may be waking to the fact that they need allies, not adversaries.

And patience.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Featured Photo: Chengdu, China, starting point of the Road and Belt Initiative (Shutterstock).

“There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

— Albert Camus, “The Plague”

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – Camus’ novel of a lethal contagion in the North African city of Oran is filled with characters all too recognizable today: indifferent or incompetent officials, short sighted and selfish citizens, and lots of great courage. What not even Camus could imagine, however, is a society in the midst of a deadly epidemic pouring vast amounts of wealth into instruments of death.

Welcome to the world of the hypersonic weapons, devices that are not only superfluous, but which will almost certainly not work. They will, however, cost enormous amounts of money. At a time when countries across the globe are facing economic chaos, financial deficits, and unemployment at Great Depression levels, arms manufacturers are set to cash in big.

A Hypersonic Arms Race

Hypersonic weapons are missiles that go five times faster than sound — 3,800 mph — although some reportedly can reach speeds of Mach 20, 15,000 mph. They come in two basic varieties. One is powered by a high-speed scramjet. The other, launched from a plane or missile, glides to its target. The idea behind the weapons is that their speed and maneuverability will make them virtually invulnerable to anti-missile systems.

Currently there is a hypersonic arms race going on among China, Russia, and the U.S., and, according to the Pentagon, the Americans are desperately trying to catch up with its two adversaries.

Truth is the first casualty in an arms race.

In the 1950s, it was the “bomber gap” between the Americans and the Soviets. In the 1960s, it was the “missile gap” between the two powers. Neither gap existed, but vast amounts of national treasure were nonetheless poured into long-range aircraft and thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The enormous expenditures on those weapons, in turn, heightened tensions between the major powers and on at least three occasions came very close to touching off a nuclear war.

In the current hypersonic arms race, “hype” is the operational word. “The development of hypersonic weapons in the United States,” says physicist James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “has been largely motivated by technology, not by strategy. In other words, technologists have decided to try and develop hypersonic weapons because it seems like they should be useful for something, not because there is a clearly defined mission need for them to fulfill.”

They have certainly been “useful” to Lockheed Martin, the largest arms manufacturer in the world. The company has already received $3.5 billion to develop the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (Arrow) glide missile, and the scramjet-driven Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (Hacksaw) missile.

The Russians also have several hypersonic missiles, including the Avangard glide vehicle, a missile said to be capable of Mach 20. China is developing several hypersonic missiles, including the DF-ZF, supposedly capable of taking out aircraft carriers.

“No Advantage Whatsoever”

In theory hypersonic missiles are unstoppable. In real life, not so much.

The first problem is basic physics: speed in the atmosphere produces heat. High speed generates lots of it. ICBMs avoid this problem with a blunt nose cone that deflects the enormous heat of re-entering the atmosphere as the missile approaches its target. But it only has to endure heat for a short time because much of its flight is in frictionless low earth orbit.

Hypersonic missiles, however, stay in the atmosphere their entire flight. That is the whole idea. An ICBM follows a predictable ballistic curve, much like an inverted U and, in theory, can be intercepted. A missile traveling as fast as an ICBM but at low altitude, however, is much more difficult to spot or engage.

But that’s when physics shows up and does a Las Vegas: what happens on the drawing board stays on the drawing board.

Without a heat deflecting nose cone, high-speed missiles are built like big needles, since they need to decrease the area exposed to the atmosphere. Even so, they are going to run very hot. And if they try to maneuver, that heat will increase. Since they can’t carry a large payload, they will have to be very accurate — but as a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists points out, that is “problematic.”

According to the Union, an object traveling Mach 5 for a period of time “slowly tears itself apart during the flight.” The heat is so great it creates a “plasma” around the craft that makes it difficult “to reference GPS or receive outside course correction commands.”

If the target is moving, as with an aircraft carrier or a mobile missile, it will be almost impossible to alter the weapon’s flight path to intercept it. And any external radar array would never survive the heat or else be so small that it would have very limited range. In short, you can’t get from here to there.

Lockheed Martin says the tests are going just fine, but then Lockheed Martin is the company that builds the F-35, a fifth generation stealth fighter that simply doesn’t work. It does, however, cost $1.5 trillion, the most expensive weapons system in U.S. history. The company has apparently dropped the scramjet engine because it tears itself apart, hardly a surprise.

The Russians and Chinese claim success with their hypersonic weapons and have even begun deploying them. But Pierre Sprey, a Pentagon designer associated with the two very successful aircraft — the F-16 and the A-10 — told defense analyst Andrew Cockburn that he is suspicious of the tests.

“I very much doubt those test birds would have reached the advertised range had they maneuvered unpredictably,” he told Cockburn. “More likely they were forced to fly a straight, predictable path. In which case hypersonics offer no advantage whatsoever over traditional ballistic missiles.”

Guns or Vaccines

While Russia, China, and the U.S. lead the field in the development of hypersonics, Britain, France, India, and Japan have joined the race too.

Why is everyone building them?

At least the Russians and the Chinese have a rationale. The Russians fear the U.S. anti-missile system might cancel out their ICBMs, so they want a missile that can maneuver. The Chinese would like to keep U.S. aircraft carriers away from their shores.

But anti-missile systems can be easily fooled by the use of cheap decoys, and the carriers are vulnerable to much more cost effective conventional weapons. In any case hypersonic missiles can’t do what they are advertised to do.

For the Americans, hypersonics are little more than a very expensive subsidy for the arms corporations. Making and deploying weapons that don’t work is nothing new. The F-35 is a case in point, but nevertheless, there have been many systems produced over the years that were deeply flawed.

The U.S. has spent over $200 billion on anti-missile systems, and once they come off the drawing boards, none of them work very well, if at all.

Probably the one that takes the prize is the Mark-28 tactical nuke, nicknamed the “Davy Crockett,” and its M-388 warhead. Because the M-388 was too delicate to be used in conventional artillery, it was fired from a recoil-less rife with a range of 2.5 miles. Problem: if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, the Crockett cooked its three-man crew. It was only tested once and found to be “totally inaccurate.”

So, end of story? Not exactly. A total of 2,100 were produced and deployed, mostly in Europe.

While the official military budget is $738 billion, if one pulls all U.S. defense related spending together, the actual cost for taxpayers is $1.25 trillion a year, according to William Hartung of the Center for International Policy. Half that amount would go a long way toward providing not only adequate medical support during the Covid-19 crisis — it would also pay jobless Americans a salary.

Given that there are more than 31 million Americans now unemployed and the possibility that numerous small businesses — restaurants in particular — will never reopen, building and deploying a new generation of weapons is a luxury the U.S. and other countries cannot afford.

In the very near future, countries are going to have to choose whether they make guns or vaccines.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

——–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “Why is worldwide military spending going up? | Inside Story”

Austerity and an anti-immigrant blockade left Italy with an older population and underfunded health care. Could the same happen here?

( Foreign Policy in Focus) As the viral blitzkrieg rolls across one European border after another, it seems to have a particular enmity for Italy. The country’s death toll has passed China’s, and scenes from its hospitals look like something out of Dante’s imagination.

Why?

Italy has the fourth largest economy in the European Union, and in terms of health care, it is certainly in a better place than the United States. Per capita, Italy has more hospital beds — so-called “surge capacity” — and more doctors and more ventilators. Italians have a longer life expectancy than Americans, not to mention British, French, Germans, Swedes, and Finns. The virus has had an especially fatal impact on northern Italy, the country’s richest region.

There are a number of reasons why Italy has been so hard-hit, but a major one can be placed at the feet of former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini of the xenophobic, right-wing League Party and his allies on the Italian right, including former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Aging Out

Italy has the oldest population in Europe, and one of the oldest in the world. It did not get that way by accident.

Right-wing parties have long targeted immigrants, even though Italy’s immigrant population — a little over 600,000 — is not large by international standards. Calling immigrants a “threat to European values” has been the rallying cry for the right in France, Germany, Hungry, Poland, Greece, Spain, the Netherlands, and Britain as well.

In the last Italian election, the League and its then ally, the Five Star Movement, built their campaigns around resisting immigration. Anti-immigrant parties also did well in Spain, and certainly played a major role in pulling the United Kingdom out of the EU.

Resistance to immigration plays a major role in “graying” the population. Italy has one of the lowest birthrates in the world, surpassing only Japan. The demographic effects of this are “an apocalypse,” according to former Italian Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin. “In five years,” she continued, “we have lost more than 66,000 births” per year — more than the population of the city of Siena. “If we link this to this increasingly old and chronically ill people, we have a picture of a moribund country.”

According to the World Health Organization, the ideal birth-death replacement ratio in advanced countries is 2.1. Italy’s is 1.32., which means not only an older population, but also fewer working age people to pay the taxes that fund the social infrastructure, including health care.

As long as there is no major health crisis, countries muddle though. But when something like the coronavirus arrives, it exposes the underlying weaknesses of the system.

Some 60 percent of Italians are over 40, and 23 percent are over 65. It is demographics like these that make Covid-19 so lethal.

From age 10 to 39, the virus has a death rate of 0.2 percent, more deadly than influenza, but not overly so. But starting at age 40, the death rate starts to rise, reaching 8 percent for adults aged 70 to 79, and then jumping to 14.8 percent over 80. The average age of coronavirus deaths in Italy is 81.

Austerity

In addition to its graying population, today Italy is being haunted by the years of austerity that followed the global recession a decade ago.

When the economic meltdown hit Europe in 2008, the European Union responded by instituting painful austerity measures that targeted things like health care. Over the past 10 years, Italy has cut some 37 billion euros from its health system. The infrastructure that could have dealt with a health crisis like Covid-19 was hollowed out, so that when the disease hit, there simply weren’t enough resources to resist it.

Add to that the age of Italians, and the outcome was almost foreordained.

The issues in Italy’s 2018 election were pretty straightforward: slow growth, high youth unemployment, a starving education system, and a deteriorating infrastructure — Rome was almost literally drowning in garbage. But instead of the failed austerity strategy of the EU, the main election theme became immigration, a subject that had nothing to do with Italy’s economic crisis, troubled banking sector, or burdensome national debt.

Berlusconi, leader of the right-wing Forza Italia Party, said “All these immigrants live off of trickery and crime.” Forza made common cause with the fascist Brothers of Italy, whose leader, Giorgia Meloni, called for halting immigrants with a “naval blockade.”

The main voice of the xenophobic campaign, however, was Salvini and the League. Immigrants, he said, bring “chaos, anger, drug dealing, thefts, rape, and violence,” and pose a threat to the “white race.”

Five Star Movement leader Luigi Di Mario joined the immigrant bashing, if not with quite the vitriol of Berlusconi, Salvini, and Meloni. The center-left Democratic Party ducked the issue, leaving the field to the right.

The outcome was predictable: the Democratic Party was routed and the Five Star Movement and League swept into power. Salvini took the post of Interior Minister and actually instituted a naval blockade, a violation of international law and the 1982 Law of the Sea.

Eventually the League and Five Star had a falling out, and Salvini was ousted from his post, but the damage was done. The desperately needed repairs to infrastructure and investments in health care were shelved. When Covid-19 stuck, Italy was unprepared.

Italy’s Not Alone

Much the same can be said for the rest of Europe, where more than a decade of austerity policies have weakened health care systems all over the continent.

Nor is Italy facing a demographic catastrophe alone. The EU-wide replacement ratio is a tepid 1.58, with only France and Ireland approaching — but not reaching — 2.1.

If Germany does not increase the number of migrants it takes, the population will decline from 81 million to 67 million by 2060, reducing the workforce to 54 percent of the population — not enough to keep up with current levels of social spending. The Berlin Institute for Population and Development estimates that Germany will need 500,000 immigrants a year for the next 35 years to keep pensions and social services at current levels.

Spain — which saw the right-wing anti-immigration party do well in the last election — is bleeding population, particularly in small towns, some 1,500 of which have been abandoned. Spain has weathered a decade and a half of austerity, which damaged the country’s health care infrastructure. After Italy, Spain is the European country hardest hit by Covid-19.

As populations age, immigrants become a necessity. Not only is new blood needed to fill in the work needs of economies, broadening the tax base that pays for infrastructure, but, old people also need caretaking, as the Japanese have found out. After centuries of xenophobic policies that made immigration to Japan almost impossible, the Japanese have been forced to accept large numbers of migrants to staff senior facilities.

The United States will face a similar crisis if the Trump administration is successful in choking off immigration. While the U.S. replacement ratio is higher than the EU’s, it still falls under 2.1, and that will have serious demographic consequences in the long run.

It may be that a for-profit health system like the U.S. model simply can’t cope with a pandemic because it finds maintaining adequate surge capacity in hospital beds, ventilators, and staff reduces stockholders’ dividends. And public health care systems in Europe — which have better outcomes than the American system’s — only work if they are well funded.

To the biblical four horsemen — war, famine, wild beasts, and plague — we can add two more: profits and austerity.

Conn Hallinan can be read at www.dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.worpress.com and www.middleempireseries.wordpress.com.

——–

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Italy’s Coronavirus Death Toll Surpasses 10,000 | MSNBC

By Conn Hallinan, November 5, 2019.

The fallout from the September attack on Saudi Arabia’s Aramco oil facilities is continuing to reverberate throughout the Middle East, sidelining old enmities — sometimes for new ones — and re-drawing traditional alliances. While Turkey’s recent invasion of northern Syria is grabbing the headlines, the bigger story may be that major regional players are contemplating some historic re-alignments.

After years of bitter rivalry, the Saudis and the Iranians are considering how they can dial down their mutual animosity. The formerly powerful Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) of Persian Gulf monarchs is atomizing because Saudi Arabia is losing its grip. And Washington’s former domination of the region appears to be in decline.

Some of these developments are long-standing, pre-dating the cruise missile and drone assault that knocked out 50 percent of Saudi Arabia’s oil production. But the double shock — Turkey’s lunge into Syria and the September missile attack — is accelerating these changes.

Saudi Arabia’s Slow Backpedal

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan recently flew to Iran and then on to Saudi Arabia to lobby for détente between Teheran and Riyadh and to head off any possibility of hostilities between the two countries. “What should never happen is a war,” Khan said, “because this will not just affect the whole region… this will cause poverty in the world. Oil prices will go up.”

According to Khan, both sides have agreed to talk, although the Yemen war is a stumbling block. But there are straws in the wind on that front, too. A partial ceasefire seems to be holding, and there are back channel talks going on between the Houthis and the Saudis.

The Saudi intervention in Yemen’s civil war was supposed to last three months, but it has dragged on for over four years. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) was to supply the ground troops and the Saudis the airpower. But the Saudi-UAE alliance has made little progress against the battle-hardened Houthis, who have been strengthened by defections from the regular Yemeni army.

Air wars without supporting ground troops are almost always a failure, and they are very expensive. The drain on the Saudi treasury is significant, and the country’s wealth is not bottomless.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is trying to shift the Saudi economy from its overreliance on petroleum, but he needs outside money to do that and he is not getting it. The Yemen war — which, according to the United Nations is the worst humanitarian disaster on the planet — and the prince’s involvement with the murder and dismemberment of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, has spooked many investors.

Without outside investment, the Saudis have to use their oil revenues, but the price per barrel is below what the kingdom needs to fulfill its budget goals, and world demand is falling off. The Chinese economy is slowing — the trade war with the U.S. has had an impact — and European growth is sluggish. There is a whiff of recession in the air, and that’s bad news for oil producers.

Riyadh is also losing allies. The UAE is negotiating with the Houthis and withdrawing their troops, in part because Abu Dhabi has different goals in Yemen than Saudi Arabia, and because in any dustup with Iran, the UAE would be ground zero. U.S. generals are fond of calling the UAE “little Sparta” because of its well trained army, but the operational word for Abu Dhabi is “little”: the emirate’s army can muster 20,000 troops. Iran can field more than 800,000.

Saudi Arabia’s goals in Yemen are to support the government-in-exile of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi control its southern border and challenge Iran’s support of the Houthis. The UAE, on the other hand, is less concerned with the Houthis but quite focused on backing the anti-Hadi Southern Transitional Council, which is trying to re-create South Yemen as a separate country. North and South Yemen were merged in 1990, largely as a result of Saudi pressure, and it has never been a comfortable marriage.

Turkey’s Checked Ambitions in Syria

Riyadh has also lost its grip on the Gulf Cooperation Council. Oman, Kuwait, and Qatar continue to trade with Iran in spite of efforts by the Saudis to isolate Teheran,

The UAE and Saudi Arabia recently hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin, who pressed for the 22-member Arab League to re-admit Syria. GCC member Bahrain has already re-established diplomatic relations with Damascus. Putin is pushing for a multilateral security umbrella for the Middle East, which includes China.

“While Russia is a reliable ally, the U.S. is not,” Middle East scholar Mark Katz told the South Asia Journal. And while many in the region have no love for Syria’s Assad, “they respect Vladimir Putin for sticking by Russia’s ally.”

The Arab League — with the exception of Qatar — denounced the Turkish invasion and called for a withdrawal of Ankara’s troops. Qatar is currently being blockaded by Saudi Arabia and the UAE for pursuing an independent foreign policy and backing a different horse in the Libyan civil war. Turkey is Qatar’s main ally.

Russia’s 10-point agreement with Turkey on Syria has generally gone down well with Arab League members, largely because the Turks agreed to respect Damascus’s sovereignty and eventually withdraw all troops. Of course, “eventually” is a shifty word, especially because Turkey’s goals are hardly clear.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to drive the Syrian Kurds away from the Turkish border and move millions of Syrian refugees into a strip of land some 19 miles deep and 275 miles wide. The Kurds may move out, but the Russian and Syrian military — filling in the vacuum left by President Trump’s withdrawal of American forces — have blocked the Turks from holding more than the border and one deep enclave, certainly not one big enough to house millions of refugees.

Erdogan’s invasion is popular at home — nationalism plays well with the Turkish population and most Turks are unhappy with the Syrian refugees — but for how long? The Turkish economy is in trouble and invasions cost a lot of money. Ankara is using proxies for much of the fighting, but without lots of Turkish support those proxies are no match for the Kurds — let alone the Syrian and Russian military.

That would mainly mean airpower, and Turkish airpower is restrained by the threat of Syrian anti-aircraft and Russian fighters, not to mention the fact that the Americans still control the airspace. The Russians have deployed their latest fifth-generation stealth fighter, the SU-57, and a number of MiG-29s and SU-27s, not planes the Turks would wish to tangle with. The Russians also have their new mobile S-400 anti-aircraft system, and the Syrians have the older, but still effective, S-300s.

In short, things could get really messy if Turkey decided to push their proxies or their army into areas occupied by Russian or Syrian troops. There are reports of clashes in Syria’s northeast and casualties among the Kurds and Syrian Army, but a serious attempt to push the Russians and the Syrians out seems dubious.

The goal of relocating refugees from Turkey to Syria is unlikely to go anywhere. It will cost some $53 billion to build an infrastructure and move 2 million refugees into Syria, money that Turkey doesn’t have. The European Union has made it clear it won’t offer a nickel, and the UN can’t step in because the invasion is a violation of international law.

When those facts sink in, Erdogan might find that Turkish nationalism will not be enough to support his Syrian adventure if it turns into an occupation.

The Middle East That’s Coming

The Middle East that is emerging from the current crisis may be very different than the one that existed before those cruise missiles and drones tipped over the chessboard.

The Yemen war might finally end. Iran may, at least partly, break out of the political and economic blockade that Saudi Arabia, the U.S., and Israel has imposed on it. Syria’s civil war will recede.

And the Americans, who have dominated the Middle East since 1945, will become simply one of several international players in the region, along with China, Russia, India, and the European Union.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

——-

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

New China TV: “Chinese oil giant finishes refinery project in Kuwait”

In many ways it doesn’t really matter who — Houthis in Yemen? Iranians? Shiites in Iraq? — launched those missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia. Whoever did it changed the rules of the game, and not just in the Middle East. “It’s a moment when offense laps defense, when the strong have reason to fear the weak,” observes military historian Jack Radey.

In spite of a $68 billion a year defense budget — the third highest spending of any country in the world — with a world-class air force and supposed state-of-the-art anti-aircraft system, a handful of bargain basement drones and cruise missiles slipped through the Saudi radar and devastated Riyadh’s oil economy. All those $18 million fighter planes and $3 million a pop Patriot anti-aircraft missiles suddenly look pretty irrelevant.

This is hardly an historical first. British dragoons at Concord were better trained and armed than a bunch of Massachusetts farmers, but the former were 5,000 miles from home and there were lots more of the latter, and so the English got whipped. The French army in Vietnam was far superior in firepower than the Viet Minh, but that didn’t count for much in the jungles of Southeast Asia. And the U.S. was vastly more powerful than the insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, but we still lost both wars.

The September 14 attack on Saudi Arabia’s Aramco refineries at Abqaiq and Khurais did more than knock out 50 percent of Saudi Arabia’s oil production — it shook the pillars of Washington’s foreign policy in the region and demonstrated the fragility of the world’s energy supply.

The End of the Carter Doctrine?

Since 1945, Washington’s policy in the Middle East has been to control the world’s major energy supplies by politically and militarily dominating the Persian Gulf, which represents about 15 percent of the globe’s resources. The 1979 Carter Doctrine explicitly stated that the U.S. reserved the right to use military force in the case of any threat to the region’s oil and gas.

To that end, Washington has spread a network of bases throughout the area and keeps one of its major naval fleets, the Fifth, headquartered in the Gulf. It has armed its allies and fought several wars to ensure its primacy in the region.

And all that just got knocked into a cocked hat.

Washington blames Iran, but the evidence for that is dodgy. The Americans have yet to produce a radar map showing where the missiles originated, and even the Trump administration and the Saudis have scaled back blaming Tehran directly, instead saying the Iranians “sponsored” the attack.

Part of that is plain old-fashioned colonial thought patterns: the “primitive” Houthis couldn’t pull this off. In fact, the Houthis have been improving their drone and missile targeting for several years and have demonstrated considerable skill with the emerging technology.

The U.S. — and, for that matter, the Saudis — have enormous firepower, but the possible consequences of such a response are simply too costly. If 18 drones and seven cruise missiles did this much damage, how much could hundreds do? World oil prices have already jumped 20 percent. How high would they go if there were more successful attacks?

The only way to take out all the missiles and drones would be a ground attack and occupation. And who is going to do that?

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has already begun withdrawing its troops from Yemen and has been holding talks with the Houthis since July (which is likely why UAE oil facilities were not attacked this time around). The Saudi army is designed for keeping internal order, especially among Shiites in its Eastern provinces and Bahrain. The princes in Riyadh are far too paranoid about the possibility of a coup to build a regular army.

Would the U.S.? Going into an election with prices already rising at the pump? The U.S. military wants nothing to do with another war in the Middle East, not, mind you, because they have suddenly become sensible, but as Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chair of the Joints Chiefs of Staff put it, it drains resources from confronting China.

Starting with the administration of George W. Bush, and accelerated during the Obama presidency’s “Asia Pivot,” the U.S. military has been preparing for a confrontation with China in the South and/or East China Sea. The Pentagon also has plans to face off Russia in the Baltic.

One suspects that the generals made it clear that, while they can blow up a lot of Iranians, a shooting war would not be cost free. U.S. Patriot missiles can’t defend our allies’ oil fields (or American bases in the region), and while the anti-missile capabilities on some U.S. naval ships are pretty good, not on all of them are armed with effective systems like the Sea Sparrow. Americans would be coming home in boxes just as the fall election campaign kicked into high gear.

Whether the military got that message through to the Oval Office is not clear, but Trump’s dialing down of his rhetoric over Iran suggests it may have.

Making Good on a Stalemate

What happens now? The White House has clearly ruled out a military response in the short run.

Trump’s speech at the UN focused on attacking globalism and international cooperation, not Iran. But the standoff is likely to continue unless the Americans are willing to relax some of their “maximum pressure” sanctions as a prelude to a diplomatic solution.

The U.S. is certainly not withdrawing from the Middle East. In spite of the fact that shale oil has turned the United States into the world’s largest oil producer, we still import around one million barrels per day from Saudi Arabia. Europe is much more dependent on Gulf oil, as are the Chinese and Indians. The U.S. is not about to walk away from its 70 plus year grip on the region.

But the chessboard is not the same as it was six months ago. The Americans may have overwhelming military force in the Middle East, but using it might tank world oil prices and send the West — as well as India and China — into a major recession.

Israel is still the dominant local power, but if it picks a fight with Iran or Hezbollah, those drones and cruises will be headed its way. Israel relies on its “Iron Dome” anti-missile system, but while Iron Dome may do a pretty good job against the primitive missiles used by Hamas, mobile cruises and drones are another matter. While Israel could inflict enormous damage on any of its foes, the price tag could be considerably higher than in the past.

Stalemates can be dangerous because there is an incentive to try and break them by introducing some game changing weapon system. But stalemates also create the possibility for diplomatic solutions. That is certainly the case now.

If a more centrist government emerges from this last round of Israeli elections, Israel may step back from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s relentless campaign against Teheran. And Trump likes “deals,” even though he is not very good at them.

“This is the new strategic balance,” says Newclick Editor-In-Chief Prabir Purkayastha in the Asia Times, “and the sooner the U.S. and its NATO partners accept it, the quicker we will look for peace in the region.”

Foreign Policy in Focus

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

TRT World: “Pentagon announces troop deployment to Saudi Arabia”