Superpowers, Rogue States and Terrorism

Countering the Security Threats to the West

Paul Moorcraft

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781473894723
• eBook ISBN: 9781473894747
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Numerous books have attempted to assess the generational threat from Jihadist-inspired terrorism but few offer any positive advice on solutions. Islamist terrorism is today a fact of life and its potency is vividly illustrated by outrages in otherwise secure Western democracies not to mention overt ISIL aggression in the Middle East and many African States. Without a far better understanding of the Islamic religion, its beliefs, value, hierarchy (or lack of) and different sects, countering the existential threat will be greatly hindered, not to say nearly impossible. In this thoughtful book the author, who combines scholarship with gritty on-the-ground experience, examines numerous options to counter the insidious threat that faces not only Western civilization but the wider world. These range from the extremes such as deportation and internment, through the multifaceted combined actions against hate preachers, intensified intelligence work and border security to comprehensive and inclusive joint action programs. This is an important and timely book on what is today the greatest security threat, written by an acknowledged expert.

Chapter 1

Decline of the West?

As a child of empire, and inevitably a keen philatelist of empire, I grew up with exotic geographic notions such as ‘the Far East’. It is ‘far’ if your eyes roam from the ‘Rhondda grey’ in Wales across those broad swathes of pink on schoolroom maps. The West also had a rose-tinted perspective if you happened to be born in northern America or northern Europe. The West was transformed into the democratic domains of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Sociologist Max Weber’s notions connecting Protestant work ethics and capitalism infused much of imperial thinking. Maybe it was all in the terrain – social democracy flourished in the cold climes of Scandinavia and Canada, while traditional ideals of Anglo-American financial transparency prospered less well in the warmer, and ipso facto more corrupt, southern climates of Catholic territories in southern Europe or Latin America. Such geographic (and religious) determinism largely grew less fashionable in the late-twentieth century, but not the racial superiority associated with a WASP-dominated West.

Asians, South Americans or Africans would interpret the West differently, as did the ideologues in Soviet Moscow. In 1978 Edward Said published his masterpiece, Orientalism; it forced Western academics and journalists to look again at the Islamic and Arab worlds. And yet the West is not just a pseudonym for the Occident or antonym for the Orient. What is it then? Most educated people might risk a rough guesstimate of what ‘the West’ means – perhaps ‘Plato to NATO’. Or maybe ‘Christendom’ or ‘liberal democracy’. Some might suggest ‘capitalism’.

British private-school history courses would usually gallop through the cultural glories of Greece that later add a superficial lustre to the military prowess of Rome. The Roman emperors eventually made Christianity the official religion of all their territories while also quietly absorbing local deities for political and cultural convenience. In 395 the Roman Empire was divided into east and west, partly because of encroaching barbarian armies and also bloated bureaucracy. The western empire finally expired in 476. From its long-cold ashes, the Holy Roman Empire eventually emerged, which – as every schoolchild used to know – was not holy, not Roman nor really an empire. It survived a thousand years, however, and helped to put the papacy in its place; and so most of Europe avoided the blinkers of a theocracy. Meanwhile, the Renaissance helped to drive away the legacy of the so-called Dark Ages. Religious wars had savagely blighted European development for too long. In 1648 the Treaty of Westphalia formally ended the Thirty Years’ War and introduced the concept of the individual sovereignty of modern nation states. The Enlightenment, well, it helped to enlighten the tiny minority of people who were not obsessed with finding the next crust of bread. The scientific and agricultural revolutions provided more bread, more cheaply, and turned first Britain then the empires of France and Germany into major industrial powers. In the nineteenth century Britain and France expanded their land-holdings throughout the world, sometimes at the expense of other older European imperialists such as Portugal and Spain who had taken over Latin America and parts of Africa centuries before. Germany, Italy and Belgium were latecomers to imperialism but nonetheless still fervent as all late converts are.

Until 1914 European states dominated the globe. Imperialism and Western domination co-existed as kith and kin. After the two world wars, however, America and the USSR, now both exalted to the title of ‘superpower’, overshadowed the planet and bisected Europe. This was the Cold War. The West was dubbed the ‘first world’, the USSR and its satellites the ‘second world’, and the third category comprised the developing and ‘non-aligned’ countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia. This was the high point of the modern concept of the West – the ‘Free World’ versus the Soviet ‘evil empire’, to use a phrase popularised by President Ronald Reagan. The West was largely white, superficially Christian and claiming to be democratic – according to the principles of the demos allegedly handed down from Athens. Of course, ancient Greece depended on slaves, who did not have the vote, and the Marxist-Leninists headlined this point, comparing ancient slavery with the modern version of captive states in the European empires. Like most generalisations, this charge contained some truth.

The USA practised slavery legally until the Civil War, and almost until the Obama presidency unofficial Jim Crow restrictions persisted. Despite its self-image as the shining city on the hill, the USA has always been a flawed democracy. As Kwame Anthony Appiah outlined in his brilliant 2016 Reith lectures on Western culture, you can’t trace a straight line from the Athenian democracy to European and American liberal democracy. Much of European history has been blighted by barbaric governance and practices, and not just egregious examples such as the Spanish Inquisition. Spain, Portugal and Greece itself endured dictatorship after the European Community was forged and long after democracy flourished in developing countries such as India. Nor is it always useful to deploy the term ‘the West’ to differentiate the North Atlantic countries of North America and Europe, the apparently enlightened ones, from the global South or, especially, the Islamic world. It is important to remember that many of the Greek and Latin classics, including some of those written by Plato himself, survived only because they had been translated into Arabic during Europe’s Dark Ages. Professor Appiah’s Reith lectures also delved into the question of Western ‘culture’. He asked, for example, whether the term ‘could apply equally to Mozart and Justin Bieber, to Thomas Aquinas or Kim Kardashian’? It is a sad comment on Western ‘culture’ that Ms Kardashian’s butt has caused far more discussion and analysis than anything its owner has said or done.

The bad news

The first volume of Oswald Spengler’s famous Decline of the West was published in 1918. The Great War was ripping apart the heart of Europe and marking the beginning of the ascendancy of Soviet Russia and capitalist America. The unholy trinity of trenches, barbed wire and machine guns also eviscerated the Victorian and Edwardian beliefs in meliorism: that scientific and moral progress would inevitably improve modern life and homo sapiens. This was also the appeal of communism: terminating the oppressive state system would create paradise for all mankind, especially the workers. Instead, the mechanisation of war in 1914–18 – bomber aircraft, tanks and poison gas – introduced new technological nightmares. The belief that ‘the bomber will always get through’ was partly vindicated at Guernica and in the early stages of the London Blitz; it reached its zenith in the firestorms of Dresden in 1945. The Nazis’ mass killings in the Holocaust destroyed belief in European civilisation. And it annihilated the faith of many: some rabbis even opined that Yaweh had also died in Auschwitz. The creed of inevitable human progress dissolved in the mushroom clouds above two Japanese cities in the last weeks of the Second World War.

Nevertheless, just as after 1918, in 1945 the cry was ‘Never Again’. The western half of Europe rebuilt itself and constructed the European Union, partly to banish war from the continent. American money bankrolled the restoration of Europe which was protected by US weapons in NATO. It was unlikely that the Soviets really wanted to march all the way to the Channel but American tanks stood in their way should they choose the belligerent option. Instead, trying to keep up with US military spending helped to undermine the whole Soviet Union that collapsed – much to the surprise of nearly all Sovietologists in the West. Paul Kennedy’s influential book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was pessimistic about US power because it was replicating the imperial overstretch of the Pax Britannica, or so he argued. And yet it was the USSR that fell apart because of this precise problem, just three years after Kennedy’s book came out. Western optimists predicted then the ‘end of history’, and the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy. The Western democracies had won in both world wars and now the Cold War. Surely the triumph of liberal democracy was irreversible? It was not – it was soon met by the rise of autocracy in Russia and China, and also implacable theocratic authoritarianism in the Middle East. After a brief period of optimism, ‘pop’ pessimism took over, based on left-wing ideologies as well as very negative forecasts about the environment. The cultural output grew darker as well, especially in the cinema, from a future of ‘Mad Max’ to the grim robotic world of the ‘Terminator’.

The US colossus bestrode the world, yet the American empire overspent its capital in too many wars, initially in Vietnam and then in the Middle East after 2001. By 2016 Donald Trump’s victory apparently symbolised a retreat into US protectionism, semi-isolationism and the garrison state. By some economic indicators, China had already overtaken the US; Beijing had outplayed the master at the capitalist game, but without undermining the disciplined control of the Chinese Communist Party.

Spengler had been an early prophet of cultural pessimism; Arthur Herman’s Idea of Decline in Western History updated and re-energised the old argument for writing off the West. In a sweeping analysis, from Freud to Madonna, Herman explained how the decline of Western civilisation had become embedded in the popular imagination. It was an easy shot to make a case for the degradation in music by analysing Madonna but in his survey of philosophers from Nietzsche to Sartre and then to Foucault he constructed a more sophisticated critique of the declinist argument.

The cultural pessimists were given a mighty boost in 2008. It was the year of the financial crash that did more damage to Western capitalism than all the abominations of al-Qaeda. In Britain parts of some big commercial banks were nationalised. When the going was good they could make huge profits for the bankers and the shareholders, but when things went wrong the poor bloody taxpayers were expected to shoulder the burden. This was welfare-state capitalism with a vengeance. Even Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, was heard to ask publicly why nobody had seen the financial crash coming. The left-wing had long despised the bankers; now the general public loathed them as well. Bankers were relegated in social status to below estate agents and used-car salesmen. Jokes abounded: why don’t sharks attack bankers? Professional courtesy. So it was no surprise that later a suspicion of experts – especially those organisations and ‘economists’ who had made such a massive cock-up – should lead to Brexit and the rise of the Donald in 2016.

The year of living dangerously

Some years are clearly more significant than others: 1848 was the year of revolutions in Europe. The year 1917 marked the Russian revolution(s) and the entry of the USA into the Great War. The period 1945-46 witnessed the end of the war against Nazi Germany and the onset of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and its allies. If Putin starts the advertised war with the West in 2017, then that year, or thereabouts, may well outshine – literally – any survivor’s calendar of important dates.1

George W. Bush and Tony Blair had inspired a decade and more of disasters in the Middle East and so Barack Obama and David Cameron tried to avoid ‘boots on the ground’. Nevertheless, the intervention in Libya demonstrated that Cameron was just as eager as Tony Blair to cosy up to Washington in matters of war and peace. And yet the British House of Commons failed to support Cameron’s first attempt at intervention in Syria after President Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons. This vote was an excuse for President Obama to back off from his much-trumpeted ‘red line’ over the use of Syrian WMD. This time, non-intervention, however, may have made the civil war in Syria worse. It was a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t. At the same time Washington did lead a coalition air war against the Islamic State. Bush’s war on terror and then the Arab Spring engulfed the Islamic world from the Sahara to Pakistan. Governments fell or tottered into even greater secular authoritarianism or jihadism. An anti-Western Islamic blowback roared, and yet paradoxically many millions of Muslims risked their lives to join the massive wave of migrants who swamped Europe. Thousands of Muslims were prepared to proclaim and even die for the new caliphate, yet millions of their co-religionists risked their lives to live in the land of the infidels. Not since the end of the Second World War had the continent been so engulfed by so many columns of desperate refugees, although many in 2015-16 owned smart phones and wore designer gear. Europe could not cope with this influx, exacerbated by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s noble but disastrous invitation to them. Financial crashes contributed to the fatal weakening of the euro, while the tsunami of people from the Middle East, Asia and Africa shook the foundations of the European Union.

Poorer whites in Europe and in the USA looked to their governments to solve these crises. Many in the working class white majority resented being treated as a minority in their own country. They shape-shifted from lumpenproletariat or lower middle class into a new revolutionary class. Leadership had failed and so followership changed too. Although connected, Brexit and Trumpism were different. In Britain the drive to leave the EU was led by people who were more optimistic and globally minded and not necessarily Little Englanders. Brexit offered many different, sometimes contradictory, solutions. The election of Trump for president was more negative than positive, anybody but ‘crooked’ Hillary Clinton. The fact that she won more popular votes – if not electoral college votes – showed perhaps that many Americans wished a plague on both houses.

It could be argued that America’s rebellion and 240-year-old experiment in self-government had failed. Britons joked that a return to the British Crown might work better than a system where a whole country put up two final presidential contenders who were massively unpopular. Maybe the bumper stickers should say: ‘Make America Great Britain Again’. Theresa May, who succeeded Prime Minister Cameron, enjoyed popularity levels that Trump or Clinton couldn’t even dream of. Arguably, the Brexit victory in Britain showed that British democracy worked. The fact that Trump could win partly because of his billionaire status and TV fame in ‘The Apprentice’ and also because of the sheer force of his strange personality trumpeted that the US system was broken. Some commentators suggested that in both countries the plebs used their vote to tell the liberal elite to get stuffed. There is some truth in this. Daniel McCarthy, the editor of the American Conservative, put it thus: ‘With Clinton, there is neither hope nor change. Trump may be awful, but he was awful different.’

Both popular revolutions in the US and UK would change the Western alliance. The immigration and euro crises were likely to implode the EU, so Britain was wise to leave, although Brexit would be blamed for hastening the pre-existing existential threats to the Brussels bureaucracy. The challenged elites in Washington and London stamped their collective feet in utter horror at the Trump and Brexit victories. But the democratic decision had been made, so backsliding on departure from the EU or attempts to impeach Trump were almost bound to be self-defeating. The most important factor in both countries was to heal the massive chasm in the electorate. The Spectator columnist Rod Liddle condemned those who attacked pro-Brexit voters as typical of a ‘hate-filled xenophobic shitbag about to go out and lamp a Pole’. (For my American readers, ‘lamp’ means to strike someone with force, usually in the face.)

Before the referendum on leaving or staying in the EU in June 2016, the vast majority of ‘experts’ in government, the World Bank and a multiplicity of economic organisations all prophesied Armageddon if Britain left the security blanket of the EU. The majority of Britons had long given up on expert opinion, especially about economics, the dismal science. It was certainly dismal but it was no science. The British economy and the stock market improved after Brexit, although a final verdict can be reached only when Britain has completed the inevitably long and probably bitter divorce from the EU. Suspicion of expert opinion had been nourished by a number of factors: the decline of class deference in the UK, the anger at the failed intelligence estimates that led to war in Iraq, the dislike of politicians as a result of various parliamentary expenses’ scandals and, above all, the failure of almost the entire economic and political establishment to see the 2007/8 crash coming. The bankers had caused the crash but it was the poorest in society who ended up paying for the new age of austerity. Then came the warning about Brexit. This was the equivalent of the ‘dodgy dossiers’ about Saddam’s alleged WMD. The experts – wittingly or unconsciously – were saying what their political paymasters wanted them to say. This was sexed-up ‘science’ with a vengeance. And when the economy improved, although the value of the pound dropped (inadvertently helping exporters), the so-called experts appeared to be mendacious self-serving toffs. This only entrenched the divisions that had partly caused Brexit.

Not only were economic values questioned. The whole international system was in turmoil. For the first time since 1945 many states, great and small, were in thrall to various sorts of chauvinism and nationalism. The world has been experiencing globalisation and increasing regionalisation. With Trump in Washington, relations with Russia looked set to improve. Yet Russia, as well as Turkey and China, had recently embraced a zerosum view of global politics. Within the EU the old borders were literally being resurrected not least to stop the flood of refugees as well as to block Islamist terrorism. The poorer southern states could quit the euro and even the EU. Italy and even France showed signs of wanting to opt out of the club. And the hub of European power, Germany, was questioning its traditional passive international role, and even permanent penitence about Nazism.

America had always regarded the EU as a natural component of the Washington-led defence architecture. British Brexiteers had insisted that they were committed to NATO. The new commander in chief, Donald J. Trump, had openly questioned the NATO alliance, however, defining it as a military welfare state. The allies did little and paid even less, while Uncle Sam shouldered the burden, again. Trump was largely correct in this stark analysis. It was time for the Western allies of the US to do much more, especially as the Cold War Mark 2 became far more dangerous, with the increase of NATO forces in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. Pax Americana could even be on the way out. The Brits, with a new political independence and a so-called ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent, may be required to take a bigger military role in defending a fragmenting Europe. The EU might need Britain more than vice versa, especially the dominant financial role of the City of London. So the economic and military arguments might make the actual British exit a little ‘softer’.

The decline in cultural or economic influence the West can exert is not as important as hard power. The West, including the USA, has arguably suffered a decline in military power as well.

Chapter 2

Law of the Jungle

One of the most influential books written recently about political decline is Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, first published in 1987 and briefly discussed in the previous chapter. Kennedy was a specialist in naval history and used expenditure on navies as one of the key measures of imperial waxing and waning. The metric still applies – especially to the country which once possessed the world’s largest navy – Britain. At the time of writing, Britain doesn’t have a single operational aircraft carrier. It will do soon but it won’t have any aircraft to fly off the damn thing. The promised two carriers are the biggest warships ever commissioned for the Royal Navy, the size of ten football pitches. They have certainly provided jobs for Scottish shipyards. After the carrier deals were signed in 2008 it was mooted initially that only one ship would be built and then the original two would go ahead, perhaps one for the Royal Navy and one jointly deployed with the French navy. The British possibly needed only one but political pressures kept both in play partly because the Scottish nationalists were running rampant, first in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• About the author
• Contents
• List of maps
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Decline of the West?
• Chapter 2: Law of the Jungle
• Chapter 3: ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’
• Chapter 4: Where did the Islamic State come from?
• Chapter 5: Taking on the Islamists
• Chapter 6: Dealing with Russia
• Chapter 7: Wider threats to the West
• Chapter 8: Future Options
• Conclusion
• Endnotes
• Select Bibliography
• Plate section