TACKLING GLOBAL THREATS REQUIRES UNIFIED FRONT
If a reminder is necessary that no nation can afford to go it alone anymore, it is to be found this week in Paris, where two great threats to the globe — climate change and terrorism — are on every mind.
Only an aggressive worldwide effort to cut carbon emissions will slow increases in global temperatures to reasonably safe levels. Yet a plan on the table at a two-week Paris summit on climate change will, even if agreed to, fall far short of that goal.
And Paris, still reeling from the terrorist attacks of two weeks ago, is on high alert, with soldiers patrolling the streets and watching from rooftops. Heads of state from 147 nations, including President Obama, are attending the summit, which begins Monday. The gathered global leaders will be on guard against the shared threat of terrorism, most notably at the hands of ISIS, from which no one nation can exempt itself or counter alone.
Defeating or simply containing ISIS likely will require the sort of “grand, single coalition” French President Francois Hollande called for last week. International teamwork is essential to an effective military response, but also to any long-term political solution.
Yet there still is no consensus on a grand coalition among nations of the European Union, and certainly not with Russia. And a lot of empty tough talk here at home — Donald Trump, for one, would “bomb the s---” out of ISIS — undermines Obama’s efforts to pressure Europe into stepping up in the fight.
When nobody has a good plan for defeating ISIS — and nobody does — a little humility is called for. Banding together, despite age-old differences and conflicting agendas, in itself becomes the beginning of a plan.
Standing in the way of a truly unified coalition is the question of the fate of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Hollande and Obama say Assad, who has killed far more of his own people than ISIS ever has, must go.
As long as Assad remains in power, they say, there will be no end to the Syrian civil war that created the chaos in which ISIS has flourished. Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, told Hollande it is up to the Syrian people whether Assad remains in power, and he has previously called Assad a natural ally in the fight against ISIS.
It is an open question as to whether, in fact, the opposite might be true — that Assad is secretly supporting ISIS by purchasing oil from the terrorist group through a middleman. But in any event, the problem of Assad gets to the heart of why the American-led coalition now bombing ISIS has no better plan.
From the American intervention in Somalia in 1992 to the American intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 to the French intervention in Mali in 2013, the lesson of recent history is that a Western power can overrun a third-rate military force like ISIS in months. All it takes is an overwhelming ground attack.
But once those ground troops rush in, they cannot responsibly leave until there is a credible political and military structure, supported by the local population, capable of maintaining order. When there is not — and there never will be in Syria as long as Assad remains in power — the militarily imposed peace inevitably disintegrates, peacekeeping forces find themselves in growing danger, and the enemy creeps back in. The Taliban is coming back strong in Afghanistan.
As journalist Steve Coll writes in the New Yorker this week, American troops “could be waving flags of liberation in Raqqa by New Year’s,” but then what? “Without political cooperation from Bashar al-Assad, Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, Turkey, the Al Qaeda ally Al Nusra, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and others, the Marines (and the French or NATO allies that might assist them) would soon become targets for a mind-bogglingly diverse array of opponents.” You win, and then you lose. Obama has resisted pressures to escalate the war against ISIS militarily. At minimum, the president is demanding greater buy-in first from allies such as Great Britain and Germany. If the United States, in the wake of the Paris attacks, is going to step up the fight against ISIS despite having no real plan, Obama seems to be of the view that our nation should not be feeling its way in the dark alone.
A superpower becomes no less a superpower when it joins forces with other nations, whether in combating ISIS or global warming. Its stature as a moral and ideological force in the world only grows.
When nobody has a good plan for defeating ISIS — and nobody does — a little humility is called for.