UN has to be the forum for achieving peace
The only exceptions to the ceasefire requirement were “military operations against (Daesh), Al-Qaeda and Al-Nusra Front, and all other individuals, groups, undertakings and entities associated with Al-Qaeda or (Daesh) and other terrorist groups, as designated by the Security Council.”
If you were a visitor from Mars and had been told that the UN Security Council was the cornerstone of the international security order that arose after the Second World War and that all the major powers constantly expressed support for the UN and a commitment to the peaceful resolution of conflict, you might be forgiven for thinking that such a resolution would have some effect.
Imagine your surprise then when it turns out that not only did the resolution have no impact whatsoever on the Syrian conflict, but some of those involved actually pretended that its words meant something different from what was on the page. They claimed they had the continuing right to strike against the two main armed opposition groups inside Eastern Ghouta — Failaq Al-Rahman and Jaysh Al-Islam — which, however repugnant they might be, have not been designated by the Security Council as terrorist groups. They have also participated in peace talks convened by the aggressors and have tried to expel Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, a group that is designated by the UN, from the area.
Russia even called for short daily interruptions of the shelling and what has now also become a conflict on the ground, knowing nothing would change — just as with the de-escalation zones it proudly claimed to have agreed last year. You might discover that this resolution was one in a series that had no effect and that similarly brutal destruction had been inflicted on Aleppo in 2016 and was probably going to happen in Idlib. You might then wonder if you had landed on a planet where language actually signified the opposite of what it appeared to mean.Events in the Middle East are almost certainly not going to produce a global conflagration, but we will see further human suffering and physical destruction if we do not come to a comprehensive agreement.
Sir John Jenkins
The fact is that none of this is really new. From the beginning of the Syrian conflict in 2011, the international community — as represented by the UN, the Security Council, the EU and the Arab League, as well as the individual countries involved in supporting different participants in the violence — has wrung its collective hands but found it almost impossible to agree on what steps need to be taken to end it, how to enforce even those minimal measures on which they occasionally agree, and what the desired end state should be. We started off in 2011 with an Arab League initiative, then the 2012 Geneva Communique, followed by numerous further meetings in Vienna and Riyadh, but mostly Geneva, that capital of lost causes, before Russia, Iran, Turkey and the Syrian regime decided a year or so ago to establish a separate negotiating forum in Astana, with a visit to the beaches of Sochi as a reward.
Given the central role Russia has played in all this — first in protecting Assad and his associates and then decisively intervening on his side in 2015 — it is tempting to recall the behavior of Catherine the Great’s minister and favorite, Grigory Potemkin, who constructed fake villages filled with fake peasants to impress the tsarina on her progress around the country. All the peace processes we have seen over the last four years have been essentially the same thing, Potemkin villages.
Why is that? If you think back to the 1990s in the Balkans, once the brutality had become too visible to ignore (notably at Srebrenica), the conflict was decisively ended by a combination of NATO’s military power and a determination by the US in particular, with Russian acquiescence, to force a negotiated settlement. What has changed?
Well, for a start, the conclusion that President Vladimir Putin seems to have drawn from the 1990s is that Russia was too weak to protect its interests and its status as a great power. He seems determined to advance the former, including pushing the US out of the Middle East, an objective he shares with Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and promote the latter, something he calculates will appeal to Russian nationalist sentiment. The US, conversely, has become far less willing to assert itself and lead coalitions of the willing, backed by military force if necessary. This isn’t particularly about President Donald Trump’s proclaimed aim to put US interests ahead of any collective international action. It is a product of the Afghan and Iraqi wars and of the Obama administration’s apparent belief that the world had become the sort of place where lions could safely lie down with lambs, and carnivores would become vegan overnight.
When it has been effective, the UN has always reflected real power balances in the real world. In that sense, particularly since 1989, it has been the product of a US-dominated international order. There may be many reasons why that order seems less stable now than it did. But, if the US simply refuses or is unable to lead, we end up with more disorder, as we are also seeing in Yemen, where Russia has manipulated the Security Council to protect Iran, a reflection of the increasing closeness of their relationship.
What we are seeing in Syria is not simply the end of a historical period. It is a chapter in the continuous unravelling of international order that has no obvious — certainly no good — conclusion. In that sense, the wider hostile activities of Iran in Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere; the rise, destruction and probable future recovery of Daesh, paralleling that of Al-Qaeda; the Islamist insurgency in the Sinai; the continuing fragmentation of Libya and Yemen; China’s expansion into the South China Sea; and the malign activities of Russia and Iran in cyberspace are all part of the same picture. The UN cannot help resolve any of this if the main pillar of the system — a hierarchy of states who have consented to surrender some of their power to shape events in the interests of collective security — is crumbling.
What we are seeing instead is the re-emergence of spheres of influence. This was once the past and may again be the future in the Middle East and North Africa, with Russia embedding itself in parts of Syria and cultivating friends in Egypt and elsewhere; the US seeking to find a way to support the Kurds in Iraq and Syria without irrevocably alienating Turkey; Turkey seeking to establish a cordon sanitaire on its borders with Syria and Iraq and to rebuild Ottoman-era links to parts of Africa; Iran claiming a core role throughout the wider Levant; and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states seeking their own insurance policies. The trouble with this is that it will not be stable.
My former colleague, the excellent Fanar Haddad, has recently pointed out the links between the suppressed insurgency in Iraq in 1991 and the emergence of a new form of militant Shiite politics there after 2003. Frozen conflicts re-emerge. And in Europe, between the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the emergence of spheres of influence without a rule book or a referee led to division, resentment, greed, and revanchist conflict. That will happen again.
If, in the early summer of 1914, Sir Edward Grey’s proposal for mediation had been taken up — as Otto von Bismarck’s had been in Berlin 36 years earlier — we might just have avoided the First World War. It would also have helped if Grey and his continental counterparts had been clearer and more realistic about what it was they wanted (generally peace but on their own terms, which they were hesitant to reveal).
Events in the Middle East are almost certainly not going to produce a similar global conflagration; that is not the future of war. But the human suffering and physical destruction they have already caused are terrible enough. And we shall see more of both unless we can come to a comprehensive agreement, guaranteed internationally, not just about Syria but about more general collective security in the region. This is not some wooly-minded version of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, it would have to be a tough-minded settlement, as at Dayton in 1995, which imposes real costs on those states who wish to disrupt the peace or overturn regional order.
The UN has to be the forum for this. The Arab League and the EU can provide significant support, as can China and India. But it — and we — need US leadership and US guarantees if we want to create a new structure to contain aggression and stop humanitarian disasters. Some might object to this on familiar grounds, but recent polling suggests that, whatever people in the region think about past US actions, they still want the US to play a central role in settling disputes in the present. They certainly want peace. But the lesson of Syria, and particularly the assault on Eastern Ghouta since 2013, is that peace doesn’t come by itself. It needs help. And that, as Carl von Clausewitz told us 200 years ago, means having a vision, securing allies, deploying skilled diplomacy, spending money and being willing to apply force where necessary.
- Sir John Jenkins is a senior fellow at Policy Exchange. Until December 2017, he was Corresponding Director (Middle East) at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), based in Manama, Bahrain, and was a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. He was the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia until January 2015.
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