By Marc Champion / Bloomberg Opinion
If you’re curious to know what a truly post-American world will look like, take a close look at what’s been going on the last few days, and you’ll get what I suspect is a pretty accurate snapshot.
In the Levant, Syria’s smoldering civil war flared up, with an apparently reformed Islamist terrorist organization retaking the northern city of Aleppo. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, surprised even itself by the ease with which President Bashar al-Assad’s forces initially melted before it.
This became feasible because Assad’s allies — who stepped into the void in 2015, after then-U.S. President Barack Obama declined to hold the ring — find their militaries sapped by engagements elsewhere. Russia is mired in Ukraine; Iran and Hezbollah have taken a severe beating from Israel. HTS, backed by Turkey, chose its moment accordingly.
None of these players asked U.S. permission to act. Even Israel ignored U.S. opposition to its invasion of Lebanon and continued war in Gaza. President Joe Biden’s lame-duck administration has made clear it has nothing to do with the opposition campaign in Syria, and no interest in its continuation. Conspiracy theorists will need to find new narratives.
Meanwhile, in the Transcaucasia region, a long day’s drive northeast from Aleppo, a decision by the government of Georgia to end its bid to join the European Union drew huge crowds into the streets of the capital Tbilisi. They fought rolling street battles with riot police, exchanging fireworks and other projectiles for water-cannon blasts.
This is happening, because although the vast majority of Georgians say they want to join the EU, their current government has been able to keep power while abandoning the EU path. That may in part be due to electoral fraud, if opposition allegations prove accurate. But primarily, it’s down to the popular fear — encouraged by the government itself and a bombardment of Russian propaganda — that if this small country tries to do what its people want, it will end up like Ukraine. Russian tanks and troops already occupy parts of Georgia barely more than an hour from the capital, so that’s no idle threat.
Further west in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin is ramping up his efforts to seize as much territory and degrade as much of Kyiv’s capacity to resist as he can, ahead of the settlement talks now widely expected to take place after President-elect Donald Trump moves into the White House on Jan. 20. He’s doing so, because what Trump brings to the table that’s new is a stated desire to end U.S. aid for Ukraine’s defense.
A little further west still, in Romania, an ultra-right, anti-Western nationalist party doubled its share of the vote to come second in parliamentary elections, with about 18 percent, even as France’s hard-right and Putin-friendly Marine Le Pen threatened to tumble the government there.
The most important drivers of all these developments are domestic. That’s true even in Syria, where the failure of Assad and his foreign allies to rebuild the economy since fighting subsided around 2019, made a resurgence of the rebels — who at root represent the country’s Sunni majority against Assad’s favored Alawite minority — a matter of when, not if. It’s the enablers that come from outside.
Yet there is a common thread stretching from even Trump’s anti-establishment MAGA movement in the U.S., to Syria, and that is rising nationalism as the old U.S.-dominated, “liberal” order disintegrates.
I don’t pretend to know how all any of this will play out. I can’t even be certain whether the freedom of sovereign states to pursue their perceived interests without U.S. interference will turn out better or worse than what came before. Recall the Cold War — when the world divided into hostile camps and was prone to proxy wars — and the unipolar “moment” that followed, when Washington wrote, selectively enforced and often broke the so-called rules-based world order that it pressed upon others. “Pax Americana” never did deliver either world peace or fairness.
What’s certain, though, is that there will be turmoil, uncertainty and unfairness in the future. Where we until recently had — for the most part — just one major power abusing force to assert itself, we will now have many.
Russia, for example, has a perceived national interest in dominating or absorbing its neighbors, whether that’s in the Baltic States, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Ukraine or indeed the Balkans, as well as keeping its only Mediterranean naval base, which is on the Syrian coast. Turkey has a perceived interest in removing Kurdish fighters from the Syrian side of its border, and in having fellow Sunni allies in charge of Damascus. Iran, meanwhile, has a perceived interest in keeping Assad and the Alawites — an ethnically Arab Shiite splinter sect — in control of Syria, and thereby a friendly corridor through which to resupply Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Israel, of course, has a strong incentive to prevent that, although confusingly it also doesn’t want a radical Sunni regime in Damascus.
For now, opposition to the U.S. has united many of the new nationalists, because they are revisionists, unhappy with their borders and the current balance of power (or in Trump’s case, balance of trade). But remove the U.S., as in essence has happened since the Nov. 5 presidential election made Biden’s administration a lame duck, and their interests will conflict.
They won’t all necessarily go to war. Iran, Russia and Turkey are talking to avoid direct conflict with each other in Syria, while at the same time pursuing their nationalist goals. Yet almost every major event in one theater will have pass-through effects to others, as the opportunistic move by the Turkey-dependent HTS in Syria last weekend showed. Until some new world order emerges, the threat of contagion, or of a regional or even global war, will be ever present.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.
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