World in Danger. Wolfgang Ischinger
one of my advisors and experts suggested addressing the Ukraine crisis as the start of a major European security emergency. Everyone considered these events to be a domestic topic for Ukraine.
Six weeks later, everything had changed: Russian soldiers and tanks invaded, Crimea was annexed, and the crisis was no longer an inner-Ukrainian matter, but a massive international security conflict with threatening effects even today.
Just as bad, at the same time not one of us had recognized the relevance of a second topic: key word “Islamic State” (IS). In retrospect, I know now that there were definitely experts at the German Intelligence Service (BND) and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and certainly in the back offices of the German Foreign Office as well, who were already worried about the Islamic State. However, the topic had not yet been picked up by decisionmakers. Only a few months later, in June 2014, everyone who followed the news knew that the IS presented a major security policy risk on a global scale—one that would occupy us for many years and continues to do so to this day.
Alternatively, take the year 2016: Why was almost everyone caught off guard in the days before the Brexit decision? Why were the analysts not able to predict the result with any accuracy? And what about the U.S. election? Who saw that ending with a loss for Hillary Clinton?
In 2017 I had the opportunity to accompany the German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel to a discussion with the Saudi Arabian foreign minister about the current situation in the Middle East. There were no signs beforehand that a crisis with Qatar would erupt overnight. Suddenly we were facing the threat of war. Who had seen that coming? No one! And this list of surprises will be continued in 2020 and beyond.
A lack of predictability can cause headaches for stockbrokers. But in foreign policy it presents a new—and significant—problem. It was never possible to plan foreign policy precisely, of course, but in the past it was possible to make a more reliable prognosis of strategic developments. Conflicts escalated more slowly, the actors involved were old acquaintances, and their arguments and interests, familiar. This is no longer the case. Conflict prevention, as good as it sounds, has thus become much more difficult.
We can no longer prepare for what is coming and always have to be prepared for surprises. Expect the unexpected!
The Loss of the Nation-State’s Monopoly of Power
An entirely different phenomenon that complicates efforts toward peace is the loss of the nation-state’s monopoly of power. When the German Empire was founded in 1871, Otto von Bismarck was able to assert that he, as chancellor of the new state, was capable of providing for its external and internal security and prosperity. Today’s small European nation-state can no longer make such a promise. Angela Merkel is smart enough to not even insinuate to voters that, as chancellor, she could save us from polluted air, terrorism, or pandemics. Indeed, the solution to nearly all difficult questions we face today transcends the capacity of individual nation-states. Only global approaches to problem-solving have any prospect of success. The increasing popularity of authoritarian leaders and populists is based in part on the fact that they assert the opposite and deceive their supporters by telling them what they want to hear: that the nation-state that forged the country’s national identity is alive and well, and potent.
The Fundamental Change in the Nature of Conflicts
A further problem is the changing nature of conflicts. When our grandfathers and fathers went to battle in World Wars I and II, those were conflicts between nation-states. The German kaiser, the Russian czar, Hitler, or the French or American president issued the marching orders. States fought against states.
In 2019, the long list of armed conflicts in the world does not include any classic wars between nation-states. Not a single one.
In Afghanistan the Taliban are fighting fellow Afghans; in Syria the combatants include the Shiites against the Sunnis. Nor are the conflicts in Yemen and Mali classic interstate wars, although they do involve some external powers. Of course, mercenaries and foreign influences are everywhere. But in essence, all of these conflicts are variants of civil wars, very different from the wars of the past. This intensifies the powerlessness of the international community, because the world order of the United Nations is based on states as the acting subjects and prescribes rules for their interactions. Now conflicts involve entities like the Islamic State, which calls itself a state but is not. How can the UN take action against them? We will not get far with classical international law.
Added to this are technological developments that further relativize the nation-state’s monopoly on power. The conflicts of today, and those of tomorrow even more so, are conducted by drone or by cyberattack—“weapons” that can be procured by any group or even by individuals. How helpless are the military and the police if the electricity supply to a large city is cut off, or a drone loaded with explosives is flown into a sold-out stadium? Such events also blur the classic boundaries between the roles of the military and the police, between foreign and domestic policy, and between international and homeland security.
OVERTAXED PEACEMAKERS
The EU, the transatlantic partners, and Germany itself all ask themselves, are we sufficiently prepared for all of these epochal security challenges, some of which we have never seen before?
The European Union has certainly seen better days as a peacemaker. European integration is anything but a one-way street toward an ever-closer union. Brexit, the intra-European effects of the financial and economic crisis, and the disagreements among member states about how to deal with the refugee crisis have made this abundantly clear. By now it is no longer unthinkable that the process of European unification could actually be rolled back or will leave individual members, like Great Britain, behind.
Of course, there have always been severe crises in the EU. But they have never been waged as personally and as bitterly as is happening now on the issues of quotas for refugees or in the dispute about the basic principles of the rule of law. This even led to leaders of EU member states refusing to participate in the same panel discussion at the 2018 Munich Security Conference, which is an extremely alarming development, especially since the capacity for joint foreign policy action—an EU that speaks with one voice—is needed more than ever. How can we square that circle?
Sadly, we can no longer rely on our American partner, either. On the other side of the Atlantic, old certainties are being called into question. As stated so diplomatically in the coalition agreement of the new German government in 2018, “The U.S. is undergoing a profound transition, which presents us with great challenges.”
In other words, since taking office, President Donald Trump has baffled America’s friends by cossetting autocrats all over the world while never tiring of complaining about the United States’s classical alliance partners, especially the Europeans. It took an effort to make Trump acknowledge Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which commits the signatories to collective defense if any member is attacked. At the NATO Summit in July 2018, Trump even threatened that the Americans would “go it alone” unless his NATO partners raised their monetary contributions immediately. Understandably, all of this has triggered new thinking about the future of NATO and thus of the security of Europe. Or as others have put it, now it has become “painfully clear to America’s allies that they will increasingly have to fend for themselves.”9 The United States’s renunciation of the nuclear deal with Iran only heightened the shock in Europe about the unreliability of Trump’s foreign policy.
Polling numbers published by the Pew Research Institute reveal the extent of this shock about Washington’s retreat: According to results from September 2018, 37 percent of respondents from all over the world said that the United States is now doing less to help address major global problems compared to a few years ago. Only 14 percent said the United States was doing more. Among North Americans and Europeans, the number was even smaller.10 Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, had already signaled a sea change, speaking of the United States as a Pacific power that wanted to dedicate itself to addressing the dangers on the other side of the globe, thereby necessitating a “pivot to Asia.” Although the events in Ukraine have since resulted in the United States increasing its military presence in Europe, one thing is clear in the long run: We Europeans will have to become much more self-reliant. What would happen if the United