Diplomacy & Crisis News

Being vaccinated against COVID-19 may not prevent transmission and vaccination passports may not be an “effective strategy” for restarting travel, the World Health Organization (WHO) cautioned on Tuesday.

Washington promised to bring liberal democracy to Kabul. It created a bloated and ineffective sector of artificial NGOs instead.

The United Nations Secretary-General on Tuesday urged everyone involved in the sport sector to help advance climate action, combat discrimination and prejudice, and ensure that global sporting events leave a positive legacy. 

The outcome of today’s vote could decide whether the island bucks environmental concerns and embraces its potential as a rare-earth powerhouse.

Cette recension a été publiée dans le numéro de printemps 2021 de Politique étrangère (n° 1/2021). Sina Schlimmer, chercheuse au Centre Afrique subsaharienne de l’Ifri, propose une analyse de l’ouvrage de Kathleen Klaus, Political Violence in Kenya: Land, Elections, and Claim-Making (Cambridge University Press, 2020, 374 pages).

Kathleen Klaus propose un ouvrage empiriquement riche, croisant l’analyse des relations foncières, de la compétition électorale, de la sociologie des mobilisations et des régimes politiques au Kenya.

Les élections générales de 2007 constituent le point de départ de l’ouvrage : Raila Odinga, le candidat du parti d’opposition Orange Democratic Movement, conteste la réélection du président sortant, Mwai Kibaki (Party of National Union). Odinga appelle alors l’opposition à se mobiliser en masse, ce qui se traduit par des violences dans les zones rurales, et urbaines provoquant la mort de 1 500 personnes et le déplacement de 600 000 autres.

Si l’auteur articule deux objets de recherche complexes, les violences électorales et la politisation des régimes fonciers, elle formule une question simple à laquelle répondent les huit chapitres : pourquoi des mobilisations violentes avant, pendant et après les élections s’observent-elles dans certaines localités et non pas dans d’autres ? Elle argumente que la violence électorale est une production conjointe entre les objectifs politiques des élites et les préoccupations de citoyens dits ordinaires.

L’ouvrage met la focale sur les dynamiques locales, se distinguant ainsi des travaux qui décrivent les violences électorales comme un phénomène national. Il compare le déroulement des événements post-électoraux dans différentes circonscriptions dans la région de la Vallée de Rift (Nakuru et Uasin Gishu) – où se sont concentrées les violences autour des élections en 2007-2008 – et dans la région de la Côte (Kwale et Kilifi) où la situation a été plutôt calme.

D’où la conclusion : la violence électorale est susceptible d’éclater d’abord lorsque deux communautés ethniques avoisinantes disposent de différents degrés de sécurité et de droits financiers. Sur cette inégalité, les communautés construisent, deuxièmement, des « discours fonciers contentieux » désignant l’autre groupe ethnique comme étant à l’origine de l’insécurité foncière. Ces rivalités ethniques exacerbées par la crainte de perdre l’accès aux terres sont exploitées par les candidats lors des campagnes électorales dans une logique de patronage.

En combinant un regard historique et une analyse fine des relations contemporaines entre gouvernants et gouvernés, cette recherche présente à juste titre les rapports au foncier comme l’épine dorsale de la (trans)formation de l’État et de la vie politique au Kenya.

Le travail de Klaus ne se limite pourtant pas à l’analyse des politiques foncières. Son ouvrage cherche à alimenter plusieurs corpus, y compris sur les mobilisations électorales, sur les dynamiques ethniques et, plus généralement, sur la trajectoire historique du régime politique kenyan. Si cette approche lui permet d’écrire un livre pouvant intéresser un large public, elle en rend la lecture parfois fastidieuse, notamment lorsque la richesse des matériaux empiriques paraît se perdre dans l’argumentation théorique.

Si l’ouvrage offre une lecture complète de l’histoire des relations entre la lutte pour les votes et la politisation du foncier au Kenya, il reste à savoir si la décentralisation des fonctions publiques vers les comtés, en cours depuis l’adoption de la Constitution de 2010, corrobore ces résultats, ou invite plutôt à les repenser.

Sina Schlimmer

>> S’abonner à Politique étrangère <<

The country says it wants to pivot from hard power to economic power, but its economy begs to differ.

WHO has no power to demand openness or independently confirm data at present.

The COVID crisis "has revealed how unequal our societies are” said the UN chief in his message for World Health Day released on Monday.

Fifty-eight women and children of more than 600 who were abducted last year during vicious intercommunal fighting in South Sudan, have been reunited with their families, the UN Spokesperson told reporters on Monday.  

Waning immunity, new virus variants—India’s sharp surge could be caused by any number of alarming factors.

Beating the pandemic has made the government and people overly complacent about China.

In Lebanon’s absurd economy, money’s value depends on whom you ask.

« Le Monde diplomatique » a publié le mois dernier un article sur les facteurs économiques et sociaux du problème algérien. Il se trouve que ce texte, résumé d'un ouvrage paru en 1960 aux Presses Universitaires de France (« Sociologie de l'Algérie », par Pierre Bourdieu), a été adressé par un inconnu (...) / Algérie, Citoyenneté, Identité culturelle, Minorité nationale, Nationalisme, Colonisation - 1961/07

United Nations agencies in Timor-Leste are supporting response efforts, as floods and landslides left widespread damage across the country, including in the capital, Dili.  

The kingdom has attempted to play down a weekend of turmoil that ended with a former royal heir under house arrest.

Kyle Mizokami

Russian Submarines, Europe

The Oscars needed to be fast to intercept American nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and that meant they too needed nuclear propulsion.

Here's What You Need to Remember: In the end, the sinking of the Kursk appears to have been caused by a simple, freak accident of chemistry. The tragedy only reinforces how dangerous life aboard a submarine really is, and how important safety is in the underwater realm.

In 2000, a Russian submarine designed to sink aircraft carriers became a victim of its own arsenal. The cruise-missile submarine Kursk suffered a massive explosion and sank after an onboard torpedo accidentally detonated. The accident was the worst naval disaster suffered by post–Cold War Russia.

The Soviet Union’s greatest adversaries at sea were the aircraft carriers of the U.S. Navy. With their versatile air wings, American carriers could frustrate the Warsaw Pact’s plans wartime plans, doing everything from escorting convoys across the Atlantic to bombing Soviet Northern Fleet bases above the Arctic Circle. They also carried nuclear weapons, making them exceptionally dangerous to the Soviet coastline.

The Soviets’ solution was the construction of the Oscar-class submarines. Some of the largest submarines ever constructed, they displaced measure 506 feet long with a beam of nearly sixty feet—nearly twice that of the Soviet Union’s Alfa-class attack submarines. At 19,400 tons submerged, they were larger than the American Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines.

They were large for a reason: each Oscar carried two dozen huge P-700 Granit missiles. The P-700 was a large missile designed to kill large ships. The P-700 was thirty-three feet long and nearly three feet wide. Each weighed 15,400 pounds each, most of which was fuel for the ramjet-powered engine which propelled the missile at speeds of Mach 1.6 to a range of 388 miles. The missile packed either a 1,653-pound conventional high explosive warhead, enough to damage an aircraft carrier, or a five-hundred-kiloton nuclear warhead, enough to vaporize a carrier. The missiles would be fed targeting data from the Legenda space surveillance system, which would hunt fast-moving carrier battle groups from orbit.

The missiles were concealed beneath the hull in two rows of twelve, in silos pointed upward at a seventy-degree angle. It was this arsenal that earned them the then-unusual SSGN designation in the West, with the G standing for “guided missile.”

If that weren’t enough, the Oscars had a large complement of torpedoes. Each submarine had four standard-diameter 533-millimeter torpedo tubes that could launch standard homing torpedoes, SS-N-15 “Starfish” antisubmarine missiles or SS-N-16 “Stallion” antiship missiles. It also had two oversized 650-millimeter torpedo tubes for launching Type 65-76A torpedoes against larger ship targets. Together the six tubes were armed with twenty-four torpedoes.

The Oscars needed to be fast to intercept American nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and that meant they too needed nuclear propulsion. Each was powered by two OK-650 nuclear reactors that together provided 97,990 shipboard horsepower. This accelerated the submarines to up to fifteen knots on the surface and a speedy thirty-three knots underwater.

Twenty Oscar-class submarines were planned, but only thirteen were built before the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union. K-141, also known as Kursk, was laid down in March 1992 and commissioned into the Russian Northern Fleet in December 1994.

On August 15, 2000, the Kursk was on exercise with major elements of the Russian Northern Fleet, including the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov and battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy. Kursk, which was fully loaded with Granit missiles and torpedoes, was scheduled to make a simulated attack on an aircraft carrier. At 11:28 a.m., an underwater explosion was detected followed two minutes later by a second, larger explosion. One Russian account claims that the twenty-eight-thousand-ton battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy shook from the first explosion, and a Norwegian seismic station recorded both explosions.

Kursk had suffered two massive explosions and sank in 354 feet of water at a twenty-degree vertical angle. An explosion had ripped through the front of the hull, tearing a terrible gash along the upper bow. Still, at least twenty-three of the 118 crew had survived the sinking, as a note penned by one of the ship’s senior officers, Lt. Capt. Dmitri Kolesnikov, indicated. The note was dated exactly two hours after the initial explosion. Rescue efforts by Russian—and later British and Norwegian—teams failed to rescue the survivors.

A Russian inquiry into the accident concluded that one of the Kursk’s Type 65-76A torpedoes had exploded. A faulty weld in a torpedo or damage to a torpedo during movement had caused it to leak hydrogen peroxide. Like many torpedoes, the Type 65 used hydrogen peroxide as an underwater fuel. Unfortunately, hydrogen peroxide becomes explosive when it comes into contact with a catalyst, such as organic compounds or fire. A similar accident is thought to have sank HMS Sidon, a Royal Navy submarine, in 1955.

Conspiracy theories regarding the sinking of the Kursk are rife on the Russian Internet. Many allege that nearby American attack submarines sank the Kursk with Mark 48 torpedoes. While technically possible (in absence of the evidence of an internal torpedo explosion) there is no remotely plausible motive for such an attack during a period of good U.S.-Russian relations. Why attack the Kursk? Why was only the Kursk sunk, and not the Kuznetsov and Pyotr Velikiy? Why would the Russian government cover up the attack?

In the end, the sinking of the Kursk appears to have been caused by a simple, freak accident of chemistry. The tragedy only reinforces how dangerous life aboard a submarine really is, and how important safety is in the underwater realm. Finally, the rush to conspiracy is a warning that, had this incident occurred during a genuine crisis, such an accident could cause a dangerous escalation that could lead to war.

Kyle Mizokami is a defense and national security writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in the Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and the Daily Beast. In 2009 he cofounded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. You can follow him on Twitter: @KyleMizokami.

This first appeared in November 2016 and is being reposed due to reader interest. 

Image: Wikipedia.

Robert Farley

Russo-Japan War, Asia

Land combat between Russian and Japanese forces in 1904 and 1905 was recognizably modern.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The Battle of Yalu River, the Siege of Port Arthur, and the Battle of Sendepu differ from 20th century land combat only in emphasis. Both Japanese and Russian forces suffered enormous casualties in efforts to take prepared defenses. The Battle of Mukden, fought in March 1905, produced a total of nearly 150,000 casualties.

The Russo-Japanese War commenced over 100 years ago, lasting eighteen months before a US-brokered truce mercifully put it to rest. The war killed upwards of 125,000 people, and sharply limited Russian influence in Northeast Asia. Japan gained control of Korea, and gained a long-term foothold for influencing events in Manchuria and China.

Writers have ascribed many legacies to the conflict, some of which we can set aside. Victory against Japan probably would not have prevented the collapse of Imperial Russia and the founding of the Soviet Union; the Revolution happened for other reasons. Moreover, the conflict did not give the Central Powers a “window of opportunity” for defeating Russia in Europe; we now know that Vienna and Berlin over-estimated, rather than under-estimated, Russian power in 1914. Defeat might conceivably have broken Japanese militarism for a time, but the weakness of China and of the European colonial empires would likely have proven too tempting for Tokyo in any case.

Still, the Russo-Japanese War may indeed have been a “regional” conflict, but Northeast Asia is a remarkably important region, home to three of the largest economies of the 21st century. The war set the terms upon which Russia, China, Korea, and Japan would contest control of the region over the course of the 20th century. The conflict also had important legacies for the conduct of war. The power of conscript and rapid fire weapons would prefigure the experience of 20th century land combat, while fighting between “castles of steel,” would lend key lessons for naval planners in both World Wars.

The Politics of Northeast Asia: 

The waning power of the Qing dynasty in the 19th century set the state for Russo-Japanese conflict in Northeast Asia. Although Japanese success at sea was not replicated to the same extent on land, the Japanese victory did place stark limits on the extent of Russian power in the Pacific. Even after the Soviets won a decisive victory over Japan at Khalkin Gol, and crushed the Kwantung Army in the waning days of World War II, circumstances prevented permanent territorial aggrandizement. Had the Russians maintained their position in Asia in 1905, this might have turned out much differently.

With the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, and the ensuing collapse of the Chinese state, China was unable to resist foreign encroachments upon its territory.  Fortunately for China, Russia remained in such disorder that it could not take advantage to its own territorial aggrandizement, and in any case Japanese power held Russia in check.

Japan, however, took advantage of Chinese disorder. In 1931 the Japanese Kwantung Army occupied Manchuria and declared it independent of China, installing the last emperor of the Qing dynasty in what became Manchukuo.  Neither Communist nor Nationalist Chinese forces had the strength the contest this move, but the Soviet invasion of August 1945 quickly annihilated the Kwantung Army. Rather than maintain Manchukuo as a Soviet satellite, the Russians looted in, then used it to bolster the position of the People’s Liberation Army. In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party took control of most of China, including Manchuria but not including either Taiwan or Mongolia.

Had Russia prevailed in 1905, then either Russia or the Soviet Union, instead of Japan, might well have detached Manchuria, just as the Soviets detached Mongolia. Under such circumstances, it’s unlikely that any Chinese government would have been able to recover the territory; the Soviet Union was in no mood for reparations in 1945. Whether incorporated directly into Russia or simply into the Soviet sphere, Manchuria might now remain politically separated from the rest of China.  Conversely, a Korea more capable of playing Russian influence off Japanese might have been able to retain its independence.

Of course, much remains unknowable. A defeated Japan might have taken advantage of the opportunity provided by the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1918 to seize what it could not take in 1904.  Even this, however, might have produced a different configuration of power in Northeast Asia than eventually held.

Decisive Naval Battle: 

Fought in late May, 1905, the Battle of Tsushima remains the great battle of annihilation of the steam age, and possibly the single greatest naval victory of all time. Admiral Heihachiro Togo’s decision to offer battle at Tsushima remains an unremarked-upon curiosity. The Russian fleet was, in numbers, considerably superior to the Japanese, and in the technology of its most advanced ships qualitatively equal.  The first rate Russian battleships were of modern design, and the Russian 12” gun well regarded, even at long ranges.

To be sure, Togo had major advantages. His ships were well drilled, and his sailors in top condition.  The Russian squadron had endured a series of traumatic adventures in its interminable journey around Eurasia, and wasn’t in fighting shape. Nevertheless, offering battle represented a real risk. A single well-placed shot could have destroyed one of Togo’s battleships, probably tipping the result inexorably in the Russian favor.

Moreover, it’s unclear what precisely the Russian fleet could have done to change the verdict of the war. The geographic situation strongly favored Japan, as the Russian fleet could only disrupt communications if it deployed in force; otherwise, Togo could destroy it piecemeal. The Russians could have raided Japan or harassed the Japanese fishing fleet, but without a proximate base could neither have forced battle nor prevented Japan from supplying and augmenting its fielded forces on the mainland.

Nevertheless, Togo forced battle on the exhausted Russian fleet, and used two major advantages to great effect. The speed and coherence of the Japanese line allowed it to conduct what has become known as the “Togo Turn,” a maneuver which crossed the Russian “T” and effectively allowed the Japanese to double up on the lead Russian warships. The most powerful Russian battleships were destroyed in echelon, while the Japanese tracked down most of the escapees the next day.

In addition to its military impact, the victory had a great morale effect, serving as an international signal of Japan’s prowess, and Russia’s decay. The defeated Russian admiral was treated as a hero by opponents of the Czar, who argued that the corrupt, incompetent Russian government had needlessly sent thousands of brave young men to their deaths.

Whatever its effect on the war, Tsushima was enormously influential abroad. In the short term, this accelerated the trend towards fast, all-big-gun battleships. In the longer term, it helped ensconce the idea of a single, decisive battle in the minds of naval theorists and practitioners.  A concentrated Japanese fleet had prevailed over a concentrated Russian fleet through superior tactics and training, completely destroying the latter in the process.  The victory left Russia effectively without maritime recourse, no longer in a position to threaten Japanese communications with the mainland.

This is the victory that Jellicoe and Scheer sought at Jutland, and the victory that the admirals of the IJN wanted to inflict on the battleships of the U.S. Navy in the Second World War. Conversely, it was the defeat that the Italians desperately wanted to avoid in the central Mediterranean, and that the British feared off the Falklands. Tsushima, combined with a bastardized form of Mahanianism, influenced naval thought for generations, and remains important today.

Ground Combat: 

Most historical analysis of the Russo-Japanese War has focused on naval heroics, with the Battle of Tsushima taking a central place. In many ways, however, the legacy of the land war has proven more enduring. The transformative effect of military technology on the land warfare slowly became apparent across the nineteenth century. The Crimean War, the American Civil War, and the Franco-Prussian War were all “transitional” wars, progressive steps from the (graduated) plateau of eighteenth century infantry combat to the plateau of “modern system” combat.

Land combat between Russian and Japanese forces in 1904 and 1905 was recognizably modern. Although the airplane would not have an impact until the next decade, most of the pieces associated with the 20th century “Revolution in Military Affairs” were set in place. Most notably, this included the combination of mass, conscript armies with the advent of modern, rapid-fire weapons that could effectively clear the field, leading to the phenomenon of the “empty battlefield.” Armies have struggled to solve the problem of the empty battlefield since 1905, developing a cascade of innovations, from trenches, to tanks, to sophisticated artillery barrages, to storm troopers, to (in their own way) strategic bombers.

The Battle of Yalu River, the Siege of Port Arthur, and the Battle of Sendepu differ from 20th century land combat only in emphasis. Both Japanese and Russian forces suffered enormous casualties in efforts to take prepared defenses. The Battle of Mukden, fought in March 1905, produced a total of nearly 150,000 casualties.

To be sure, much has changed; the advent of the aircraft and the widespread use of the radio would change the means of land combat within fifteen years of the Russo-Japanese War. Still, the forms of battle are essentially recognizable, in a way that the battles of the American Civil War are not.

Conclusion

World War I and World War II so transformed the maps of both Europe and Asia that discerning the influence of antecedent conflicts like the Russo-Japanese War can be hard. Still, the setback that the Japanese dealt to the Russians in 1904-05 helped shape the contours of Asian politics for a century. Surprisingly, given the relative backwardness of the Russian and Japanese economies in 1905, it also served as the world’s first taste of modern, industrial warfare.

Robert Farley is a senior lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce. His work includes military doctrine, national security, and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination and The Diplomat. Follow him on Twitter:@drfarls.

This first appeared in 2014 and is being reposted due to reader interest. 

Image: Wikipedia.

Wealthy democratic governments have pushed liberal market principles aside in the face of vaccine shortages.

Robert Farley

Security, Asia

If the United States was deeply surprised to find itself at war with the People’s Republic of China, a country that hadn’t even existed the year before, it was even more surprised to find itself losing that war. It happened then and it could happen again.

Here’s What You Need to Remember: In November 1950, China and the United States went to war. Thirty-six thousand Americans died, along with upwards of a quarter-million Chinese, and half a million or more Koreans. If the United States was deeply surprised to find itself at war with the People’s Republic of China, a country that hadn’t even existed the year before, it was even more surprised to find itself losing that war. The opening Chinese offensive, launched from deep within North Korea, took U.S. forces by complete operational surprise. The U.S.-led United Nations offensive into North Korea was thrown back, with the U.S. Army handed its worst defeat since the American Civil War.

The legacies of this war remain deep, complex and underexamined. Memory of the Korean War in the United States is obscured by the looming shadows of World War II and Vietnam. China remembers the conflict differently, but China’s position in the world has changed in deep and fundamental ways since the 1950s. Still, as we consider the potential for future conflict between China and the United States, we should try to wring what lessons we can from the first Sino-American war.

Initiation: 

In early 1950, the politics of the Cold War had not yet solidified around a pair of mutually hostile blocks. Nevertheless, the contours were visible; the Soviets had spent several years consolidating control of Eastern Europe, and the Chinese Communist Party had ridden the victories of the People’s Liberation Army to power in Beijing. The stage was set for a zero-sum interpretation of the global struggle between Communist and non-Communist powers. It was just such an interpretation that dominated Washington’s thinking as North Korean forces escalated the Korean civil war with a massive invasion across the 38th parallel.

Inside the United States, tension over the collapse of Nationalist China remained high. The Nationalist government possessed an extremely effective public-relations machine in the United States, built around the Soong family’s relationship with Henry Luce. This influential domestic lobby helped push the United States towards both intervention and escalation, while at the same time undercutting the advice of experts who offered words of caution about Beijing’s capabilities and interests.

The initial Chinese victories in the late fall of 1950 resulted from a colossal intelligence failure on the part of the United States. These failures ran the gamut from political, to strategic, to operational, to tactical. The politicization of American expertise on China following the establishment of the PRC meant that U.S. policymakers struggled to understand Chinese messages. The United States also misunderstood the complex relationship between Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang, treating the group as a unitary actor without appreciating the serious political differences between the countries.

On an operational level, advancing U.S. forces paid little heed to warnings of Chinese intervention. The United States failed to understand the importance of the North Korean buffer to Beijing, failed to detect Chinese preparations for intervention, failed to detect Chinese soldiers operating in North Korea and failed to understand the overall strength of the Chinese forces. This lack of caution stemmed from several sources. The U.S. military, having had experience with Chinese Nationalist forces during World War II, had little respect for the capabilities of the PLA, especially outside of Chinese borders. Americans overrated the importance of air superiority at the tactical and operational level, not to mention the relevance of nuclear weapons at the strategic level.

Conduct: 

The People’s Liberation Army appreciated the significance of U.S. air superiority over the battlefield, as well as the effectiveness of U.S. armor and artillery. The PLA (or PVA, as the expeditionary force in North Korea was dubbed) attempted to fight with the hybrid insurgent tactics that it had used to prevail in the Chinese Civil War. This involved using light infantry formations, designed to move and attack at night, in order to avoid U.S. airpower and concentrated American firepower. These tactics allowed the PLA to surprise U.S. forces, which were uncertain of the magnitude of Chinese intervention until it was too late to do anything but retreat.

Similarly, the United States fought with the tactics (and often the weapons) that it had used in World War II. Although North Korean armor and artillery had outmatched unprepared U.S. ground forces in the opening weeks of the war, by the time of the Chinese counteroffensive, the United States was fielding mobile, armored forces and employing combined arms tactics. These weapons and tactics allowed the United States to inflict severe losses on Chinese forces, even as it gave up wide swaths of territory.

The U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy expected to conduct sea and air operations in what we now refer to as a permissive environment, without significant interference from Communist forces. The Navy was right; the Air Force was wrong. Expecting overwhelming advantages in training and material, the U.S. air forces found cagey Communist forces equipped with the MiG-15 interceptors, which could outfight American piston-engined aircraft and most early jets. Formations of B-29s attempted to conduct daylight precision bombing raids of North Korea, finding that MiG-15s could cut them to pieces. U.S. forces, fresh from the bloody organizational fights that had birthed the U.S. Air Force, also struggled to develop a compatible, cooperative ground-air doctrine. Still, despite the problems, the United States managed to establish and hold air superiority for most of the war, using that freedom to inflict severe damage on Chinese and North Korean forces, infrastructure and logistics.

Lessons and Legacies: 

The most important legacy of the first Sino-American War is the enduring division of the Korean Peninsula. Following the exhaustion of the Chinese counteroffensive, neither side really threatened to throw the other off the peninsula. The relationships between Seoul, Washington, Beijing and Pyongyang have changed mightily over the years, but the conflict remains frozen along the geography established in 1953.

Many of the problems have stayed the same, despite the fundamental transformations that have overtaken global politics. Beijing has grown tired of the antics of its North Korean client, just as South Korea has grown significantly in wealth and power. But North Korea can still threaten the security and prosperity of the Republic of Korea, and threats to the DPRK are still felt in Beijing.

China and the United States remember this conflict much differently. For the United States, the Korean War represents an odd aberration; a war fought for justice but without satisfactory resolution. Americans’ most enduring memory of the conflict came through the television show M.A.S.H., which used the war as a proxy for talking about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Even this memory has begun to fade, however.

For China, the war represents a remarkable victory over imperialism in the face of overwhelming odds. It introduced the People’s Republic of China to the international system with a (literal) bang. At the same time, the legacy of the war complicated China’s international situation. In part because of the memory of Chinese intervention, but also in combination with China’s domestic politics, the United States managed to keep the PRC isolated from the international system into the 1970s. Today, the PRC poses a quasi-imperial threat to neighbors all along its vast periphery, while at the same time representing one of the three major tent-poles of the growing global economy.

Militarily, the political, social and technological conditions that produced mass infantry warfare in Korea in the 1950s no longer hold. The United States has grown accustomed to fighting opponents who excel in hybrid warfare, but the People’s Liberation Army has been out of that business for decades. The ground forces of the PLA are now transitioning between mechanized and postmechanized warfare, while the air and sea forces are in the process of perfecting the world’s most extensive anti-access/area denial system. If conflict were to happen again, China would challenge U.S. control of the air and seas in a way that it never did during the Korean conflict.

The most interesting, useful lessons may involve botched war termination. The Korean War dragged on for nearly two years after the settlement of the key strategic issues became clear. Nevertheless, poor communication between Washington and Beijing, combined with reputational concerns on both sides, inflated minor issues—such as POW repatriation—and extended the war well beyond its productive limits. That the United States viewed its conflict with China as a proxy war complicated the problem, as American policymakers became obsessed with the message that every action sent to the Soviet Union. In any future conflict, even as political questions associated with escalation and reputation loom large, Beijing can likely count on having Washington’s full, focused attention.      

Conclusion

There was nothing good about the last Sino-American War, not even the “peace” that resulted from it. The experience of this war, now nearly forgotten on both sides, should serve as a grim lesson for policymakers in both Washington and Beijing. The Korean War was anything but accidental, but miscalculation and miscommunication both extended and broadened the war beyond its necessary boundaries.

Robert Farley is a senior lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce. His work includes military doctrine, national security, and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination and The Diplomat. Follow him on Twitter:@drfarls.

Image: Reuters

This article was first published in 2014.

Robert Farley

Russia Cold War, Europe

In retrospect, Soviet defeat seems overdetermined.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The United States certainly enjoyed tremendous advantages in 1945, including the world’s most robust economy, an advanced technological base, a well-developed set of internal economic infrastructure, and a relatively appealing sociopolitical model. But few who actively fought the Cold War believed in American invincibility.

Could the Soviets have won the Cold War? In retrospect, Soviet defeat seems overdetermined. The USSR suffered from a backwards economy, an unappealing political system, and unfortunate geography. But even into the 1980s, many Cold Warriors in the West worried that Red Victory was imminent.

We can think of Red Victory in two ways; first, if the fundamental rules of the competition between the United States and the USSR had operated differently, and second if Moscow and Washington had made different strategic decisions along the way.

Changing the Rules

The idea of socio-political “rules” that dictate how the world works runs counter to a lot of work in the social sciences. Still, certain social and political experiments initiated at the start of the Cold War ran aground on the shoals of social and human capacity. If we imagine the loosening of some of these “rules” then the Soviet and American experiments might have performed differently.

It was not obvious that central planning would fail as dismally as it did. Some economists, often working from the experience of World War II, believed that central governments could process information with sufficient speed and accuracy to successfully allocate resources across a society. This included the allocation of capital (human and resource) to technological innovation. In a wartime context, this worked well enough; the state could direct investment away from consumer goods and towards critical military production and innovation. In peacetime, the system worked less well, as workers and consumers demanded better treatment.

As it turned out, of course, state central planning fell short of the various forms of capital allocation found in the West, especially where innovation was concerned. This eventually had an impact on military innovation, as civilian technological contributed to military advances. Eventually, the United States could rely on its productive civilian economy not only to out-produce the Soviets in consumer goods, but also to produce more effective weapon systems.

On the other hand, if the American system had proven less resilient to economic and social pressures, then the United States might have had to give up on the Cold War. During the 1960s, this looked distinctly possible. Although the economy continued to perform well, social conflict over civil rights, and over Vietnam War, threatened to cause serious damage to U.S. democracy. Informed by a version of Marxist orthodoxy, Soviet planners expected that class conflict and economic stagnation would produce precisely this outcome, but in reality it happened for reasons that they could not have predicted. The crisis of the West emerged not from economic dislocation, but from its opposite; the 1950s and 1960s were an economic “golden age” according to Thomas Piketty, who observed that inequality in wealth and income began to accelerate in the 1970s. The social upheaval that threatened to destroy the West in the 1960s stemmed from the decay of systems of social and political inequality, rather than from a stagnating economy.

Related to this, we now think of the U.S. commitment to a certain level of civil liberties as one of its greatest Cold War strengths. The far greater tolerance in the United States (which ran far short of absolute) for political dissent created an altogether stronger and more attractive social system, while also synergizing with the economic system to enable consistent economic growth and technological innovation. At the time, however, many (both in the West and in the USSR) believed that tolerance for civil and political liberties exposed social and political weakness; the repressive Soviet system could better weather internal dissent than the relatively open American system.

Finally, the United States drew a tremendous amount of strength from the international economic system that it created at the end of World War II. This system eventually extended across the developing world, and supplied the West with the labor forces and raw materials necessary to vastly outperforming their Communist counterparts. If revolutionary models had proven more appealing in the postcolonial world, the balance of economic power might have shifted. In reality, while the Soviet political and economic model had some appeal across the developing world, would-be revolutionaries still found themselves embedded within a larger system that pushed them into collaboration with the West.

Strategic Decisions

What about changes that don’t involve breaking the world open and tinkering with the mechanisms? In this case the immense vulnerability of the USSR weighs against success, but there are still some strategies that might have played out more effectively.

If the Soviets had undertaken much more aggressive measures in the first two decades of the Cold War, they might have shattered the NATO alliance and prevented the development of the transatlantic coalition that won the Cold War. A general Red Army offensive into Western Europe in the 1950s or 1960s almost certainly would have enjoyed tremendous short-term success. The problem was twofold; the Americans had a nuclear advantage that could devastate the Soviet homeland, and the Soviets could barely afford to maintain the empire they had, to say nothing of expanding it into Western Europe. But the Soviets appreciated that the first might have been a bluff, and if they had calculated the long-term odds differently, might have gambled on the second. Bringing millions of sullen Germans, Frenchmen, and Italians under the Soviet boot might not have increased Soviet power in the long-run, but it would have dealt a blow to the architecture of the American-led post-war global system.

Another alternative would have involved deliberately retreating from central planning in the 1950s and 1960s, rather than in the late 1980s. China undertook this policy with great success at the end of the 1970s, producing enormous economic growth. Such an effort might not have generated a tremendous amount of foreign direct investment (as it did in China) but would at least have unshackled a moribund economic system. And the Chinese Communist Party has managed, thus far, to hold the lid on political dissent. Undertaking these steps before falling too far behind might have saved the USSR, at least for a time.

What about American decisions? The United States could have decided not to wage the Cold War at all. The Soviets seemed willing to accept the Finlandization of much of Western Europe, and in the absence of a U.S. presence Moscow might have renewed its old ties with Paris. As a result of reduced tension between the United States and the USSR, the Soviets would presumably have dedicated fewer resources to their war machine, reducing pressure on the rest of the economy. Of course, moving off a war footing might have produced social instability and pressure for internal change of repressive Soviet policies.

With its enormous economic resources, the United States had the advantage of making tragic mistakes, as the experience of Vietnam illustrates. It could have been worse; the United States could have decided to bog itself down in an effort to save the Chinese Nationalist regime in the 1940s and 1950s. Such a decision would not only have proven tremendously costly in blood and treasure; it would also have raised dangerous questions about U.S. imperial aims, and about the wisdom of U.S. strategic policymaking. The Soviets could have bled the Americans much more effectively than they did in either Korea or Vietnam, although it’s unclear whether it would have been enough to force the United States to scale down its international commitments.

Final Shots

The United States certainly enjoyed tremendous advantages in 1945, including the world’s most robust economy, an advanced technological base, a well-developed set of internal economic infrastructure, and a relatively appealing sociopolitical model.

But few who actively fought the Cold War believed in American invincibility. Rather, they believed that U.S. victory (or even survival) depended on carefully calibrated investment in particular military technologies, as well as extensive interventions in the domestic politics of foreign countries (with the Korean and Vietnamese Wars representing the most extravagant such interventions). Even in the 1980s, when the signs of Soviet decay became increasingly evident, few believed that the USSR would either collapse or withdraw from the conflict.

In any event, Soviet weakness ran deeper than almost anyone expected. Even to the extent that “new Cold Wars” are developing between the United States and Russia, or the United States and China, few want to replicate Soviet mistakes. But it would also be an error to discount the perceptions of those who waged both sides of the Cold War.

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, is author of The Battleship Book. He serves as a Senior Lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His work includes military doctrine, national security, and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination and The Diplomat. This article first appeared several years ago.

Image: Reuters.