Rabbit obsessed Noah Smith has a thread on twitter about how the Middle East is now "a big mess of proxy wars", starting and ending with these:
For all of the claims that the US meddling in the Middle East was more trouble that it was worth, I am not sure that this alternative makes for a better situation for the West, or the globe generally.
3 comments:
What is the problem for the West? The Middle East as so often being a region in conflict. If not for black gold it has no significance for the West. We are under no moral obligation to try and settle their disputes. Our only obligation is to prevent their madness spreading beyond their territories. The West jumping into these situations is often paternalistic condescension, as if we must stop the children fighting. Some countries in the region are failed states with next to no hope of rejuvenation.
I know what you're saying, John.
The problem is the extent to which these places do export their problems to the West: whether it be heroin from Afghanistan; radical Islamist terrorists; massive refugee numbers trying to get into Europe. There is an element of self interest in trying to see whether external intervention can calm a place down, and I guess I am just not feeling very confident that the new combination of proxy influences is better than the old combination of proxy influences for us in the long term (apart from, obviously, saving some American - and often Australian - lives and dollars from reduced military participation. Ironically, though, Trump is proud of both not getting involved in wars and still massively increasing spending anyway.)
Things might have been different if the drone attacks hadn't counted all those children being killed as collateral damage. If we had stayed away they would have kept fighting each other but we made ourselves the enemy. Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, all failing or failed states. We can't solve those problems, we need to be much more realistic about our ability to control sectarian conflicts.
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