As the Russian military intervention in Syrian continues to escalate and threaten Western supported rebels, world leaders are hyper-focused on ways to mitigate the potential harm from the Russian Intervention Crisis, the Islamic State Threat, the Syrian Civil War, and the Syrian Refugee Crisis. With their time and energy devoted to the threats emanating out of Syria, world leaders cannot give global initiatives the proper attention they need to ensure they will result in constructive policies. One of those initiatives is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
TPP is an economic policy issue, yet it is being framed and promoted as a means to balance Chinese influence. With Chinese aggression in the South China Sea and the East China Sea driving China’s neighbors to seek closer ties with the US, as well as China’s tenuous position on Syria, TPP appears to be a means of mitigating Chinese economic power. Framing TPP in terms of national security, however, distorts the benefits of this massive free trade agreement and pushes people to embrace a policy that can only be successful if it is economically beneficial to the US and its trade partners.
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Russia has been characterized as acting like a Nineteenth Century power and embracing a “might makes right” mentality since the beginning of the Ukraine Crisis. At the heart of this argument is the Putin government’s blind pursuit of its own interests without regard for the interests of other nations. Where this writer has discussed the topic in terms of resovereignization while those who see the potential for war fear nationalist movements and patriotic fervor within countries like Russia and China, it is also important to recognize the harm caused by another trait of traditional powers.
When countries fought wars in the past, their leaders would rally support by fostering hatred of their enemy. By vilifying, and even demonizing, the enemy, leaders dehumanized the populations of their revival nations and legitimized the wrongs done against their enemies in the name of war. This process may well have helped bolster support for one’s home country, even if the conflict was only in the interests of the government and hurt the general population, but it also made it more difficult to heal divisions once the war was over. In the age of the globalization, current campaigns to vilify revival nations, cultures, and religions make it far more difficult to sustain a stable, peaceful International Community. “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.” ― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
The drama of the Ukraine Crisis and the Syrian Civil War is monotonous and frustrating. It distracts world leaders from working on their policy priorities and issues like nuclear disarmament, poverty, economic instability, climate change, cyber security, and a myriad of other hurdles to human progress. The truth is that most people would like to avoid all of these problems in order to focus on far more interesting, progress-building subjects like space travel, advances in medicine, and nanotechnology, but the crises before the world today must be addressed before the future can be built. The Western-Russian conflict, which inspired the Cold War and the Ukraine Crisis, the traditional Chinese-Russian conflict, the Korean War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Kurdish-Turkish conflict, the Indian-Chinese-Palestinian conflict, widespread destitution in Africa, globalized terrorism, skyrocketing National Debts, and severe economic disparity are all issues no one wants to hear about. These problems may also be other peoples’ problems, but the nasty thing about these kinds of problems is that they tend to eventually become everyone’s problems when they are ignored. Until these deeply rooted, difficult-to-solve problems can be resolved, the world must focus on dealing with these issues. Russia’s controversial airstrikes against non-Islamic State targets near Homs in Western Syria send three messages. First, Russia will act without the blessing of the International whenever and wherever in the world it chooses to do so based on its own rules. Second, Russian President Vladimir Putin sees all insurgent groups, i.e. dissenters, in Syria as potential threats and will stomp those threats out. Third, Putin will stand by his supporters and strike against his detractors; the only choice is to support Putin and his allies.
Through his brazen and defiant exercise of sovereign power, Putin has taken control of the next chapter in the Syrian Civil War. Coming less than 48 hours after Putin and US President Barack Obama’s dueling UN addresses, Russia’s airstrikes ended the rhetorical battle between the American vision for engaging global conflict and the Russian plan for Syria. Although the Russian military buildup in Syria over the past few weeks was likely orchestrated to ensure Russia could launch these airstrikes after his UN appearance, the actual intervention leaves the International Community struggling to respond. |
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April 2020
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