Diplomacy & Crisis News

More than forty years ago, I wrote a book titled Negotiating Peace that analyzed the diplomatic and military dynamics of bringing a war to an end. It drew material from the endings of wars through nearly two centuries, as well as a closer examination of a few major cases that had extended periods of simultaneous combat and negotiations. It also drew on theoretical work, chiefly by economists, about bargaining. Parts of the book got rather technical—it included differential equations—but it also had a more digestible prescriptive side. An appendix titled “Lessons for the Statesman at War” included forty-four pieces of advice for how best to employ diplomatic and military instruments to achieve a peace that will maximize the interests of one’s own nation.

Much of this advice is at least potentially applicable to the current war in Ukraine—from the standpoint not only of decisionmakers in Kyiv and Moscow but also of policymakers in Washington, in terms of what they should expect or hope to promote. The actual applicability of some of my apothegms will depend on events yet to unfold, but the following outlines a few of the major lessons.

The ending of the war in Ukraine will almost certainly entail some form of bargaining between Ukraine and Russia, and will leave a situation that represents a compromise between the interests of the two nations. It is rare in interstate conflicts for one belligerent to eradicate the other so that it has no need for any bargaining or compromise. It is not so rare in intrastate warfare, in which an insurgency might eliminate and replace an incumbent regime or the regime might crush the insurgency solely through military means (such as Sri Lanka’s final eradication of the Tamil Tiger insurgency in 2009).

But the eradication of a nation-state is a different matter and a less feasible outcome. Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein managed to do that temporarily when he used armed force to swallow Kuwait in 1990, but a U.S.-led intervention reversed that outcome the following year. The objective of Russian president Vladimir Putin in launching the current war in February 2022 may have been to eliminate Ukraine as an independent country, either through formal incorporation into Russia or by installing a puppet regime in Kyiv. It now is clear that Russian military force is insufficient to achieve any such outcome. And obviously, Ukraine cannot eliminate the Russian state.

Even a war that is said to end in a surrender does not involve totally imposing the will of one side on the other and involves a negotiated compromise. No surrender is unconditional if the side surrendering still has some ability to fight. The surrender of Japan in 1945 was a deal in which Japan agreed to stop fighting and thus spared the Allies what would have been an extremely costly military conquest of the main islands of Japan. 

Another possible ending of an interstate war is for one or both belligerents simply to withdraw from the battle (as occurred with the border war between China and India in 1962), leaving a frozen conflict with or without occupation of the disputed territory. Such an outcome is possible in Ukraine, but an explicit war-ending agreement has multiple advantages for all concerned. It provides a framework that facilitates prisoner exchanges, peacekeeping protocols, and other useful measures. It provides a degree of certainty that reduces the risk of misinterpretations of the other side’s actions leading to renewed warfare. 

In any event, bargaining, possibly tacit, is still taking place even without a formal written agreement. The withdrawal from battle leaves a state of affairs that affects the interests of each belligerent in both positive and negative ways, and which each side must compare with the “no agreement” situation of continued warfare to decide whether to accept the bargain that this state of affairs represents.

An implication of the foregoing is that to speak of the termination of the war in Ukraine in terms of “winning” or “losing” the war is not helpful in understanding likely scenarios for termination and in preparing for those scenarios.

The end of the war is likely to be preceded by a period of bargaining—perhaps in formal negotiations—accompanied by continued combat, rather than a military outcome being fully established before work begins on constructing a political outcome. Traditionally there tended to be a temporal separation between military operations and peace diplomacy—such as with the end of World War I, when the guns were silenced by an armistice at Compiègne in November 1918 and a peace treaty was negotiated at Versailles the following year. But that sequence was mainly a legacy of the limitations of pre-modern communications, when day-to-day coordination of military operations and diplomacy was difficult (except for someone like Napoleon Bonaparte, who combined military field command and ultimate political authority in his own person). That difficulty no longer exists, and belligerents have an incentive to continue using their military instrument in ways that they hope will add heft to their diplomacy.

Regardless, silencing the guns—and ending the suffering of Ukrainians from a continued war, and with it the threat of escalation into a wider war—ought to be considered the most important component of terminating this war. Moreover, even an agreement that is labeled as merely an armistice and not a full resolution of political issues may be the only peace agreement that a conflict ever gets. That has been true, for seventy years and counting, of the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War. This is one of the reasons that the Korean War—which was one of the major cases I studied in researching the book—has been mentioned by some other observers as a model for terminating the war in Ukraine.

Belligerents will become willing to negotiate a peace agreement when they both have demonstrated, to themselves and to the enemy, the limits of what they are able and willing to do militarily, and there is little or no prospect for either side to change the situation on the battlefield appreciably with one more offensive effort. Another analyst, I. William Zartman, has called such a situation a “hurting stalemate.”

A war that has not reached a stalemate and is going either too badly or too well for a belligerent is likely to lead that belligerent to resist peace negotiations for the time being, for different reasons. Too badly, and the impulse is to keep fighting to shore up the situation on the battlefield, in the hope of looking and being stronger in whatever negotiations eventually take place. Too well, and the tendency is to expand one’s war objectives and to hope to accomplish them without the need for negotiation and compromise. The first year of the Korean War illustrated each of these tendencies, as the front line moved up and down the peninsula with the initial North Korean invasion, the U.S.-led intervention under the United Nations flag, the later Chinese intervention, and another UN push that finally brought the line to what became a stalemate near the 38th parallel.

An implication of this pattern for the war in Ukraine is that it is a mistake to talk about hoped-for breakthroughs by the Ukrainian counteroffensive, with Russian forces thrown backward, as being a precursor, and maybe even a necessary precursor, for peace negotiations. Given Putin’s stake in the conflict, his reaction might be just like the U.S. reaction to the two major communist offensives that threw friendly forces backward in Korea: to see this as making it all the more necessary to assume increased military costs and risks to improve the battlefield map before sitting down to talk peace.

One other lesson, regarding the substance of any possible peace agreement, is already worth mentioning. Notwithstanding the value of a written peace agreement in lending precision and certainty to the postwar situation, sometimes some uncertainty can have value in helping the parties come to any agreement at all. This was true regarding the uncertain future of the South Vietnamese government in the years following the peace agreement between the United States and North Vietnam in 1973. Although the concept of a “decent interval” involved a domestic political motive for President Richard Nixon, leaving the fate of the Saigon regime somewhat to chance was a way to reconcile the United States’ refusal to explicitly abandon that regime with Hanoi’s objective to rule all of Vietnam.

In Ukraine, the bargaining gap that must be bridged is between Ukraine’s disinclination to formally cede any of its territory and Putin’s need to show some gain from his costly military misadventure. Some political issues probably will have to be in effect punted, with their eventual outcome uncertain, if any peace agreement is to be reached, despite the future risk of misunderstandings and festering grievances. Mechanisms such as referenda that leave some future outcomes to chance may be part of a formula for ending this war.  

Paul Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as a National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. Professor Pillar also served in the National Intelligence Council as one of the original members of its Analytic Group. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.

Image: paparazzza / Shutterstock.com

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More than a century and a half after the end of the American Civil War, historians still debate the reasons for the Northern defeat of the South. President Abraham Lincoln’s effective leadership? General Ulysses Grant’s winning military strategies? The failure of the Confederacy of the eleven states of the South to win support from Britain and France?

But there is a general consensus among researchers that in many ways, the Union’s victory in the war was preordained that the agrarian economy of the South was no match for the industrial capacity of the North that helped it to manufacture its arms and build its transportation infrastructure.

On another level, the conflict between the South and the North amounted to a struggle between the past and the future, between a world built on an agricultural economy based on the exploitation of slave labor and a rising universe of manufacturing industries and commercial centers; between those who fancied themselves as the romantic knights of Walter Scott’s novels and an emerging urban population whose values reflected those of the Enlightenment.

From that perspective, the kind of civilizational clash is evident in the current evolving cold civil war in Israel. Although it may be seen as a struggle over judicial reform, it is really one between the future—the demonstrators who represent Israel’s Westernized economic and cultural elites—and the forces of the past—the ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students and ultra-right West Bank settlers.

Israeli pundits have proposed that the conflict is between two opposing forces: “Judea,” the Jewish settlers who seek to annex the occupied Palestinian territories and establish in Israel an apartheid system joined by ultra-Orthodox theocrats whose sons don’t serve in the military and don’t study basic math; and “Israel,” the high-tech entrepreneurs of the celebrated start-up nation, retired air force pilots, and other members of the nation’s productive economic sector.

It's a struggle whose outcome would determine Israel’s future. Will Israel remain a progressive liberal democracy and an advanced industrial and high-tech economy? Or will it be transformed into a backward theocracy with a third-world economy, a binational state, and eventually a Middle Eastern community like Lebanon with never-ending fights between ethnic groups, religious sects, and tribal factions?

Not unlike the leaders of the southern Confederacy during the American Civil War, those who lead “Judea” live in a fantasy in which they would be able to rule forever on another nation, in which the United States needs Israel more than Israel needs the United States, and if the world refuses to abide their dictates they would lead a fight to the end a la Masada, this time with nuclear weapons added to the mix.

But more likely than not, the war between Judea and Israel would not end in an apocalyptic nightmare. Instead, with the situation deteriorating, Israel’s best and brightest young would emigrate from a collapsing Jewish state to Silicon Valley, to Wall Street, to London and Berlin.

After all, why should they risk their lives to defend young healthy men who refuse to serve in the military and help subsidize the ultra-Orthodox Jewish parasitic economy and the West Bank settlements that threaten the long-term chances for peace? Why should they live in a country where women and LGBTQ people are discriminated against and Arabs are treated as second-class citizens?

Policymakers and lawmakers in Washington need to take into consideration these dramatically changing political realities in Israel and recognize that the country’s pragmatic political and military elite may soon be swept away and replaced by politicians whose values and interests don’t align with those of the United States.

To put it differently, if there was a time when Americans were worried that irrational ayatollahs in Tehran would have access to nuclear weapons, they should now find themselves worrying about what would happen if a Masada-obsessed Jewish fanatic would have control over Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Unless that is, the lessons of the American Civil War are applied and Israel defeats Judea.

Dr. Leon Hadar, a contributing editor at The National Interest, has taught international relations at American University and was a research fellow with the Cato Institute. A former UN correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, he currently covers Washington for the Business Times of Singapore and is a columnist/blogger with Israel’s Haaretz.

Image: Noa Ratinsky / Shutterstock.com

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In a turbulent year for both Israel and Lebanon, one would assume the two countries would work to avoid additional crises at all costs. Rather, Tel Aviv and Beirut are opting to escalate their long-running border dispute, raising concerns regarding a major conflict like the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah War. Yet, while neither side can realistically afford renewed fighting of such a magnitude, this round likely represents an attempted show of strength on the part of actors in both countries—one that centralizes so-called “deterrence through resilience” on the border while managing and minimizing potentially escalatory actions. Additionally, political elites in both countries likely see the value of the crisis in distracting their populaces from other pressing issues.

Current events are symptoms of long-running border disputes in the area where Lebanon, Syria, and Israel meet. This includes the city of Ghajar and the rural areas of Shebaa Farms and the Kfar Chouba Hills—all areas captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and originally part of Syria’s Golan Heights. Israel currently occupies Golan despite UN condemnation following its annexation in 1981. This worsened Tel Aviv’s border conflict with Beirut while further complicating a pre-existing dispute between Syria and Lebanon. Damascus and Beirut have long disagreed over the Golan borders demarcated during the former French Mandate and Ottoman eras.

As a result, the two countries have sparred over relatively minuscule bits of territory for decades, often with only the slightest movements along the “Blue Line”—the established border following the Israeli withdrawal and controlled by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). UNIFIL was established in 1978 to oversee an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. Following the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, the UN amended UNIFIL’s mandate to monitor the cessation of hostilities and act as a neutral arbiter to keep the peace. Roughly 9,300 UN peacekeepers are deployed to the disputed area.

Yet UNIFIL struggles to contain aggression on either side of the border, as reflected by the last two months of aggressive actions by Israel and Hezbollah. The current crisis revolves around Hezbollah’s establishment of an “outpost” in the form of two tents in the Chebaa Farms and Kfar Chouba Hills area and claims it shot down an Israeli drone in June. Hezbollah and other Lebanese officials claim the move was in response to Israel’s construction of a border fence around the Lebanese side of Ghajar, a city spanning both Lebanon and the Golan split in half upon the Blue Line’s creation in 2000. The northern part of the city was re-occupied by Israel in 2006. Tel Aviv refuses to vacate the city and effectively prevents entry from the Lebanese side, violating the terms of the split.

A series of tit-for-tat incidents occurred before and after Israel asked UNIFIL to request the tents’ removal, which Beirut conditioned upon Tel Aviv’s pullout from Ghajar. This includes an incident between an Israeli bulldozer and soldiers of each country on July 5, Israeli shelling near Kfar Chouba in response to a missile fired near Ghajar into its territory on July 6, and an explosion near the Lebanese city of Bustan that wounded three Hezbollah members supposedly attempting to cross into Israel and sabotage the border fence on July 12—the seventeenth anniversary of the beginning of the 2006 war. Israel claims it used stun grenades, while Hezbollah accused Tel Aviv of excessive force. A similar construction incident occurred on July 20 that led Israeli forces to launch smoke grenades at Lebanese citizens attempting to build a road near the border.

This series of events is unique from other issues that regularly occur in these areas, not limited to Hezbollah-backed protests along the border or militant attempts to enter Israel. Typically, such problems are connected to violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), given Hezbollah’s strong support for the Palestinian resistance. Similarly, Israel violates the border with its occupation of the Golan and military flights over Lebanon to bomb Iranian targets in Syria, let alone aggressive actions that cross the border—often against the border protests in Lebanese territory.

For Lebanon, and particularly Hezbollah, this round is at least partially connected to recent violence in the West Bank—namely, the brutal Israeli raid on Jenin on July 4 that killed twelve Palestinians and destroyed vast stretches of property. However, the Israeli fence around northern Ghajar also plays a role, given the long-running nature of disputes in this area and the northern Golan more broadly. Beirut feels strongly about its right to these areas—making this situation more than just a Hezbollah issue.

Of potentially equal importance to Lebanon’s political elites is the unifying nature of the situation and its ability to distract the public, as some Hezbollah affiliates have indirectly hinted. Indeed, a renewed border crisis offers a useful distraction for Lebanon’s political class, who wish to draw public attention away from the economic and political nightmare of the last few years. While hardly enough to resolve widespread frustrations, Lebanon’s powers that be likely view a manageable crisis as helpful at a time when their popularity is waning. One need only look at their rampant scapegoating of Syrian refugees to understand how Lebanon’s elites view and utilize a good distraction.

For Israel, any border dispute threatens deterrence against attacks from Iran-backed militants. Tel Aviv is home to a hawkish approach to national security that often rejects compromise—at least publicly—with such groups. Hezbollah is no exception, given it poses the greatest threat to Israel on its border. While the Israeli government likely views this situation as manageable as well, it will not show weakness in the face of one of its core rivals. Hezbollah will likely follow suit.

The fortunate reality is that neither actor desires a major escalation on their disputed border. Israel is struggling with domestic unrest stemming from a deeply polarizing judicial reform effort under the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and an increasingly difficult security situation in the West Bank that it appears to be ill-prepared to address without a full-scale military operation—one that will cause a full-blown war with Palestinian militants and further harm its international image. On the other hand, Hezbollah does not appear willing to take on Israel, as evidenced by its reaction to the Hamas rocket launch from southern Lebanon in early April. It should be noted that Tel Aviv also opted to avoid escalation at that time, assessing Hezbollah was not interested in a broader war.

For these reasons, while this round of border insecurity is notable and exceptional, neither major actor appears willing to escalate their actions beyond a point of no control. The time is not ripe for a repeat of 2006—a reality that hopefully sustains itself to prevent such bloodshed.

Alexander Langlois is a foreign policy analyst focused on the Middle East and North Africa. He holds an M.A. in International Affairs from American University’s School of International Service. Follow him at @langloisajl.

Image: Shutterstock.

While President Joe Biden termed the idea of Saudi-Israel normalization “a long way off” in a CNN interview in early July, his administration is seriously discussing with the Saudis the set of U.S.-provided incentives which they want as sweeteners for a potential deal. The primary requests from Riyadh are formal security guarantees from the United States, a U.S.-Saudi partnership to develop civilian nuclear energy, and the ability to access arms sales without Congressional review, as press reports in March indicated. While Israel obviously would like to see normalization with one of the most important Arab states, the influential Saudi commentator Ali Shihabi has laid out a “sales pitch” to Washington in a recent article for the Hoover Institution, arguing that the United States also would see profound benefits from such a deal. Shihabi holds out the prospect for what is essentially a reset of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, restoring diminished U.S. influence. In return for a “formal structure or agreement” which would “be perceived by adversaries as obligating the United States to come to the defense of the [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] (in one form or another) if the latter is threatened,” Washington could “could expect a much closer and more influential relationship with Saudi Arabia, with all that such an alliance would entail.”

It is difficult to envision U.S. security guarantees taking the form of a Senate-ratified treaty, but there has been plenty of support in the U.S. Congress for the goal of promoting regional security integration between the United States, Israel, and Arab partner militaries, particularly on the development of joint regional air and missile defenses. While Shihabi does not explicitly make the argument that it would diminish Chinese influence in the kingdom in relative terms, that effect is clearly implied.

From a U.S. standpoint, though, Shihabi’s argument rings hollow. Offering security guarantees (even if less than a treaty) is a major concession that could tie our hands in a future crisis, and there are many reasons to doubt that it offers much incremental benefit to the United States. First, Saudi policymakers’ increasing shift to the East, and to China, is structural and economically driven. China is now by far the Saudis’ larger trading partner. While oil is still fungible, the United States’ need for imports from the Persian Gulf region has largely evaporated due to the increase in supply from domestic producers and other countries in the Western Hemisphere. It is, therefore, very difficult to see U.S. relative influence in the bilateral relationship going back to where it was during the “unipolar moment” of the 1990s, even if the Saudi side were no longer frustrated about what it considers a U.S. failure to use force against Iran after the September 2019 attacks against critical oil facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais, as well as broader a perceived U.S. retreat from its regional security role. Second, the tradeoff articulated by Shihabi would involve very specific U.S. commitments on security in return for the relatively abstract and unenforceable notion of restored bilateral relations and relative influence. 

The Abqaiq and Khurais attacks are often cited by Saudi observers as proof that the United States has abandoned its security role in the region, but while they demonstrated Iran’s new capabilities in a jarring manner, the attacks were calibrated to avoid a catastrophic oil market disruption—not to cause one. It is true that the facilities at Abqaiq in particular are uniquely important to Saudi export flows, and arguably a more important vulnerability than the Strait of Hormuz. However, the facility runs at well below its maximum capacity, and it was designed so that oil volumes can be routed around individual components of the facility which might be damaged in an attack. By targeting only a limited number of components at Abqaiq, Iran created a large outage—5.7 million barrels per day according to Saudi Aramco—but one which allowed for the kingdom’s full production level to be restored by the end of September 2019, about two weeks after the attack. This also was apparent to analysts, including me, looking at the commercial satellite photos available the day after the attack, limiting the impact on oil prices. It also was certainly clear to U.S. officials, and the intentionally limited impact on oil flows is likely a large part of the reason why President Donald Trump chose not to take military action against Iran as a result. Iran had shown that it could cause a catastrophic volume loss by hitting roughly triple the number of aim points at Abqaiq with accurate suicide drones, but it chose not to do so. 

The Abqaiq episode has not demonstrated to Iran that the United States has abandoned its interest in protecting the free flow of oil from the region or would be unwilling to take military action if Iran caused damage at a higher threshold. If Saudi Arabia had a U.S. security guarantee, that probably would have prevented a demonstration attack like this, but if it had not the United States could have been locked into taking military action over something below the threshold of major damage to U.S. interests. Trying to decide exactly how the threshold for such a guarantee should be defined would be difficult in a region known for the widespread use of gray-zone provocations, but an unambiguous guarantee with a low threshold could easily entangle the United States in an escalating conflict over a relatively minor trigger. Abqaiq is a perfect example of how U.S. and Saudi views about these thresholds can differ.

In addition, the use of support for proxies and gray-zone provocations by both Saudi Arabia and Iran raises the issue of potential “moral hazards” stemming from a security guarantee. Would Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman feel emboldened in his regional actions? The converse of that seems to have arguably been operative in the years since Abqaiq, in which a sense of vulnerability produced a dialogue with Iran and the recent agreement to normalize relations and mutually curtail actions that had caused friction between Iran and Saudi Arabia, including support for proxies. The fact that China stepped in to midwife the agreement toward the end of the process made it a bit uncomfortable for the United States, but it still promotes the U.S. interest in regional stability.

The Saudis and Emiratis’ frequent complaints in the years since Biden took office that the United States is “withdrawing” from the Middle East are belied by the facts. The United States still maintains a robust naval presence in the Persian Gulf and has substantial land-based air assets in the region, along with pre-positioned equipment for ground forces. This is clearly a major reduction from the levels seen in the post-9/11 era. However, it compares to the levels seen in the 1990s following the first Gulf War of 1991 and is well above levels of in-theater CENTCOM assets that prevailed in the 1980s. The United States is not withdrawing from regional security but rather returning to a more normal level. What is different, though, is the challenge the United States faces from a rising China outside the region, which is an argument for not allowing commitments in the Middle East to tie up more U.S. military resources.

Even without a security guarantee, there is plenty the United States can and should do to help Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab states secure themselves against the primary threat they face, which is Iran’s growing arsenal of precision-guided munitions (PGMs)—suicide drones and much more accurate ballistic missiles—which has sometimes been shared with proxies such as the Houthis in Yemen. Israel is a technology leader in this field, and the United States should facilitate cooperation to the extent possible. An integrated regional network would be ideal, but there are plenty of political obstacles unrelated to a U.S. security guarantee, especially the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as distrust among Gulf Arab states, including between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Regardless of any U.S. guarantees, it is difficult to envision sufficient trust between these states to do the sort of extensive integration of sensitive data and information technology systems, which is seen between the United States and Canada in NORAD or members of NATO in Europe. Even if not fully integrated or publicly acknowledged, though, such cooperation should be encouraged.

The U.S.-China rivalry is driving the Saudi’s strategy of emphasizing their options and trying to use that to extract concessions from the United States. But while the United States cannot hope to pry Saudi Arabia away from China due to their economic interests, there is little indication that the Saudis genuinely have the option of junking the U.S. security relationship. China has long sought to be a supplier of military systems the West would not sell to the kingdom, going back all the way to China’s sale of medium-range ballistic missiles to Riyadh in the mid-1980s, but it has shown no interest in providing fourth- or fifth-generation fighter aircraft to regional powers—where U.S. and British systems currently provide the Saudis with overwhelming air superiority in any conflict with Iran. The financial cost of converting its forces to different equipment also would be prohibitive during a period when the kingdom is focused on diversifying its economy away from dependence on oil, not to mention the chronological gap in capabilities during the transition if the United States were ever to withdraw support for its weapons systems. China also is clearly not interested in abandoning its extensive relationship with Iran.

In sum, it simply does not make sense for the United States to make huge concessions to Saudi Arabia in the form of a formal security guarantee in response to concerns about China or the desire for Saudi-Israeli normalization. The United States should continue to play a leading role in regional security, but on its own terms, not theirs.

Greg Priddy is a Senior Fellow at the Center for the National Interest.

Image: Shutterstock.

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