We are all living in the mess the Iraq invasion made
- Countering China, Russia and Iran all at once is pure folly, but the US is forced into this impasse as the terrible legacy of ‘the war on terror’ and the Iraq invasion 20 years ago
Everyone is writing about the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, so I might as well join the circus. I could denounce the horrors and war crimes the US invaders visited upon the Iraqi people; the lies and deceptions the George W Bush government used to deceive the American public and the world. Bush tore up the UN Charter as much as Vladimir Putin has done in Ukraine today.
But that’s just too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel. Instead, let’s consider why and how the invasion and occupation have been detrimental to US interests, leading to the current muddle and incoherence in the way contemporary US leaders, whether Republican or Democrat, have responded to real and imaginary threats.
Given the continued, if weakened, preponderance of US global power, the mismanagement and mishandling of those responsible for US foreign policy will also have a terrible impact on the rest of the world, as we are seeing now.
Fighting three enemies at once
The American military is supposedly designed to fight two major wars at the same time, hence its humongous real budget of more than a trillion US dollars a year, as opposed to its much lower nominal figures. It’s not clear whether it’s really capable of fighting on two fronts, and I would hate to find out. But when it comes to diplomacy, even if highly militarised in the usual American style, it’s pretty clear by now that Washington is incapable of confronting three adversaries of varying threat intensity, animosity and capability, all at the same time.
Containing China, Russia and Iran simultaneously is an impossible task. Arguably, it won’t even be able to contain China alone. And yet, that’s precisely what Washington is trying to do.
But why? The ill-conceived Iraq war and the broader “war on terror” have led the US to this impasse. But before we start, let’s quote again a well-known passage from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, as a reference point:
“Potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘anti-hegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.”
China
China’s economic rise, especially after joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, coincided with the US war on terror, which targeted mainly Islamic countries and “terrorist” groups based in them. Outside the south of the Philippines and aside from a few radical groups in Indonesia, East Asia was mostly left alone by a US distracted by war elsewhere, and became a zone of relative peace, prosperity and booming world trade, as countries in the region recovered from the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. They also learned to manage their financial and banking systems, as well as monetary policy much more competently than before the crisis. China was arguably the biggest beneficiary of those developments.
There is currently a false narrative that out of sheer goodwill, the US mistakenly allowed or enabled China to piggyback on the last great wave of globalisation in the belief that a richer China would become liberal and democratic, just like the West.
In reality, there was a symbiosis developed between the two biggest economies during the Bush years and even before. It was a marriage of convenience, designed to enable the US to offshore its labour and manufacturing to developing countries, especially China. While China developed its industrial capitalism, the US deindustrialised and switched to financial capitalism. The low interest rates and borrowing costs, enabled by the recycling of Chinese profits into lending back to America through buying US treasuries, made those costly US wars affordable. That was how they became “the forever war”.
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That symbiosis gradually ended after the last global financial crisis, so it was not apparent for some time. But by then, China was already the world’s second-largest economy, and now perhaps the biggest by some measures. The US suddenly realises it has a peer or near-peer challenger, whether democratic or authoritarian. By any standard of hegemony, that’s intolerable. Hence, the hot war on terror has turned into a cold war on China.
However, the genie is long out of the bottle. No amount of “friendshoring” of industrial capacities and re-routing of global supply chains can put China back in the bottle. As US political scientist John Mearsheimer once observed, the time to stop China’s rise and contain its influence was in the early 2000s. That ship has sailed.
Everywhere the US turns, a hot war is not far behind. That’s why the US military-diplomatic reassertion in the Indo-Pacific, along with China’s predictable responses, is scaring everyone in the region. There is still one way to reverse all or most of China’s gains – to start a hot war, most likely over Taiwan. The US may just be crazy or desperate enough to do that.
Iran
After the planes hit the Twin Towers, Iranians lit candles in masses to commemorate the victims. The mayor of Tehran wrote to his New York counterpart, Rudy Giuliani, to express sympathy and support. That could have been a moment of rapprochement, winning over an adversary in the volatile Middle East. Iran was rebuffed.
Instead, Washington preferred to “shock and awe” through Iraq to make other Arabs and Persians (Iranians) bend at the knee. It certainly destabilised the entire region, but it also made Iran the biggest beneficiary of the US misadventure.
The US forgot its own lesson as to why it supported Saddam Hussein in the brutal Iran-Iraq war throughout the 1980s in the first place. It was to use Iraq as a bulwark against Shia expansionism. That was why he was left in place after the first Gulf war. By removing Saddam and plunging the whole country into chaos, suddenly a major barrier to Iranian ambitions was voluntarily lifted by the US.
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Much of US actions in the region in the past decade – arming Israel and letting it loose; backing Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates’ brutal intervention in the Yemeni civil war; walking out on the Iran nuclear deal – was all about rolling back Iranian influence in the region, an expansion that the US invasion made possible.
The latest Iranian-Saudi rapprochement must be understood in this context. That it was brokered by China must be even more humiliating. China aside, Saudi Arabia under Mohammed bin Salman has punctured two basic assumptions of US policy in the Middle East at least since the 1970s – the Shia-Sunni or Iranian-Arab divide, and the petrodollar.
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Tehran and Riyadh might yet come to blows again, but then, they might not. And much of the world still prices oil, gold and most other commodities in the US dollar, but that won’t last forever. The Saudi crown prince has made it clear he is not committed to maintaining the petrodollar while Iran, Russia and China increasingly trade oil, among other goods, in the Chinese currency. The Saudis and Chinese are currently negotiating to trade some oil transactions in the yuan. A yuan-trading bloc is slowly taking shape.
A threesome between Beijing, Tehran and Riyadh will be the ultimate nightmare for Washington. At the very least, the Saudis can no longer be relied on to counter Iran.
Russia
While a majority of nations in the United Nations General Assembly condemned the Russian war in Ukraine, the latest resolution also called for an urgent end to the war. The results were similar to those passed last September. Back then, what was not usually reported was that 66 countries called urgently for diplomacy to end the war through peaceful negotiations, rather than arming the combatants.
When it comes to the war in Ukraine, there is a wide gulf in perception on its nature, origins and purpose, between the West and the Global South. A February survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations found that outside the West, much of the rest of the world takes a much more neutral stance and wants the conflict to end as soon as possible.
The rest of the world has simply refused to be taken for a ride again by the US to form another “coalition of the willing” like last time against Iraq when 49 countries were strong-armed into signing up. Back then, claims by the US about Saddam’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” still carried weight. Of course, only Britain, Australia, Denmark and Poland ended up sending troops for a war launched under lies and false pretences.
That is the background to understanding the responses of the Global South to the Ukraine war. Many outside the West increasingly consider the conflict as a proxy war led by the US and Nato to eliminate the Putin regime and destabilise Russia.
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Brazil, Colombia and Namibia have explicitly rejected Western demands to break off diplomatic relations with Russia. India, Mexico and South Africa have refused to condemn Russia. While most countries may be willing to condemn the invasion in a UN resolution, the vast majority have refused to impose their own sanctions, join those imposed by the West or break off relations with Russia.
Once bitten, twice shy. They understand where their national interest lies, and that’s ending the war quickly, along with its devastating effects on food supply, energy prices and inflation, especially for the poorer countries, rather than helping Uncle Sam win another war.
Conclusions
The US had enjoyed a very short unipolar moment. But rather than exploiting it to cement America’s total world dominance, the war in Iraq helped to end it decisively. It has created more problems than the US can address. By trying to contain and fight back a revanchist Russia, a resentful Iran and a powerful China, it is pushing them into each other’s arms.
A world empire has always been hard to run; the US is now finding it nearly impossible.
