Legacy (December 1, 2023)
Welcome to Home & Away. Or, for many of you, welcome back, as we took the week off to celebrate Thanksgiving, as well as overeat and over-indulge in (American) football. I will mostly focus this week on Away: on the Middle East, on the climate meeting in the UAE, and on the legacy of Henry Kissinger, who qualifies as both Home & Away.
Hostage to Hostages
The big news remains the Middle East, although the situation has changed considerably. What began on October 7 as a terrorist attack by Hamas and quickly morphed into a large and increasingly controversial military retaliation by Israel has evolved into something of an open-ended hostage crisis, albeit one punctuated by intermittent fighting.
The current dynamic involves a package of four elements: temporary cessations of hostilities; the return of some hostages, both Israeli and foreign nationals; a much-increased flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza; and the release of some Palestinian prisoners.
Both Israel and Hamas see advantages in breaks from the fighting. The Israeli government is under enormous pressure at home and from the Biden administration to secure the release of hostages. Meanwhile, Hamas is under pressure from the Gazan public to provide a respite from the bombing that has claimed over ten thousand lives and reduced much of the north to uninhabitable rubble. Hamas also benefits from buying time so that it can reposition its surviving 20-25,000 fighters throughout the south and to prepare for renewed warfare.
The current situation—pauses that give way to warfare that is again paused—could stretch on for some time. The line between a pause and a truce and between a truce and a cease-fire is becoming increasingly blurred. Hamas took more than two hundred hostages because history had demonstrated Israelis cared enormously about their citizens’ welfare, in one instance exchanging over a thousand Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli soldier being held in the Gaza Strip. Hamas’s assessment has thus far proven prescient as its hostages have provided considerable protection and leverage. It may want to hold onto some of these hostages to preserve such protection and leverage for future waves of fighting. An additional factor complicating the release of all the hostages is the probability that some of them may well be under the control of other groups located in Gaza.
As of today, pause has given way to renewed fighting. But this begs the bigger question of what sort of Israeli military operations can be expected.
Up to now, much of the Israeli military effort has relied on attacks from the air and from a distance that minimize the likelihood of Israeli casualties. Unfortunately, such attacks also tend to maximize the chance of Palestinian civilian casualties. A refusal by Israel to adopt a more patient, measured, and targeted approach would generate many more such Palestinian casualties.
It is relevant here that in a recent phone call the Pope is said to have warned Israeli President Herzog that Israel should not respond to terror with terror. If true, this was a most unfortunate equation of what Hamas did on October 7 and Israel’s response. The former intentionally set out to kill civilians for a political purpose, the latter has not. But the Israeli response is problematic all the same, as the priority of going after Hamas has overwhelmed all other considerations. This raises not just a host of ethical and legal issues, but political and strategic ones as well.
At a minimum, the resumption of large-scale military operations would galvanize regional and international opposition to Israel and lead to demands for an open-ended ceasefire. It would also create a context in which it is hard to imagine either the Palestinian Authority stepping forward to assume a role in Gaza or the Saudis reviving their bid to normalize relations with Israel. The potential for a widening of the war would increase as well, although there are some interesting reports that the Saudis are trying to use their financial muscle with Iran to discourage any such widening.
A large-scale bombing campaign in the south of Gaza, where most Gazan civilians are currently located, would also cause more problems for the Biden administration, which is focused on the release of hostages and avoiding a scenario in which it is isolated at home and abroad owing to its support of Israel. Under such a scenario, it is not much of a stretch to imagine a move in Congress to condition additional U.S. military aid to Israel on its commitment to minimize civilian casualties. Indeed, such calls are already reportedly being made. And even if these conditions were not adopted, the danger is that support for Israel in the United States (and by extension U.S. support of Israel) would continue to diminish.
One last point. Still missing from this Israeli undertaking is anything resembling a political strategy. The great Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz argued that war must be conceived and conducted as a political and not just a military instrument, as the continuation of politics by other means. There seems not to be a Hebrew translation. The problem is that this prime minister and this government do not want to introduce a political track that would rein in settlements or build momentum toward a Palestinian state. But without such a track, it is increasingly unclear how Israel can succeed, not just in Gaza, but more fundamentally, in reducing the sort of radicalism that fuels groups like Hamas. And to return to a point I have made more than once, the creation of a separate Palestinian state remains the best and, in the long-run, the only way for Israel to remain a secure, democratic, Jewish, and prosperous country.
COP-out
A second big story also takes us to the Middle East, in this case to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The UAE is hosting the twenty-eighth meeting of the Conference of Parties pursuant to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, colloquially known as the COP-28. Tens of thousands of delegates, activists, CEOs, and experts representing more than 190 governments, hundreds of businesses, and thousands of organizations and causes have descended on this small but wealthy (and oil-rich) country.
The fact that this is the 28th such gathering in three decades while the world has grown considerably warmer and just experienced its hottest year ever tells you a lot of what you need to know. The stated goal is to cap the increase in the world’s temperature by 1.5 degrees centigrade (that’s 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit for those of you who have long forgotten the conversion you were taught in high school), but actions speak louder than words.
This gathering is expected to focus on three things. First, there will be a stocktaking or an audit as to how the world is doing in meeting this target. An honest assessment will not be upbeat as the world has already warmed by 80% (1.2 degrees) of its set ceiling and is not on a trajectory that will limit temperature increases to anything near the original goal. Individual countries that are making a bad situation worse by what they are doing or failing to do will not be named as they arguably should be. Indeed, blame over how we got here seems to be taking precedence over shame of those who are not doing what they should moving forward.
The second focus will be on standing up a fund under the auspices of the World Bank to compensate for losses and damages attributed to climate change. This happened on the first day of the summit, although still to be determined is who is willing to provide the cash for such a fund (initial commitments are not encouraging) and who decides who gets how much.
I would argue there is also a third problem with a loss and damages fund, namely, that such a fund (essentially a climate reparations fund) is backwards looking and divisive. I agree that many countries need and deserve help in adapting to climate change, much of which has resulted from the behavior of others. But even more than that, they will need access to emerging technologies that provide alternative forms of energy at a price they can afford and a scale that meets their needs. Establishing such arrangements would be a worthier task of this or future climate gatherings.
Last, there will be much ado about what sort of political declaration is to be issued at the conclusion of the conference. Differences are all but guaranteed to send the conference into overtime. Last time around, there was a debate over the necessity of phasing down as opposed to phasing out fossil fuels. The former sensibly won—we will need fossil fuels for decades to come, and not all fossil fuels are equally problematic—but the same outcome cannot be guaranteed this time. I would also predict any statement will be long on goals and short on implementation.
My enthusiasm for this diplomatic process is (as any reader will have sensed by now) distinctly finite. It is not that climate change is not a real threat—to the contrary, it most certainly is—but that diplomacy of this sort is all but certain to fail. It will come up short for the same reason that the last global trade round came to naught and that the UN General Assembly is not a venue for serious business. It comes as little surprise then that both President Biden and Xi Jinping decided to stay home. Universal multilateralism rarely works; as has been suggested here before, there is no international community. Multilateralism based on those governments and others that are most relevant to the task at hand and most willing to work together is a much better way to go.
The End of An Era
Last but not least is Henry Kissinger, who passed away this week at 100. Henry was the premier scholar-practitioner of the age and one of the great modern secretaries of state. Yes, there is reason to criticize Kissinger over the Vietnam war, East Pakistan, and more, but I would argue his accomplishments, including the opening to China, détente with the Soviet Union, and his handling of the October 1973 Middle East conflict, were great and far greater than any failures. Here is my assessment of his legacy, which I wrote for Project Syndicate.
To this I would add a few personal notes. I first encountered Henry 49 years ago during the summer of 1974. I was a young aide in the Senate, he was the Secretary of State, testifying about events in Cyprus in the aftermath of the coup mounted there by the colonels running Greece, a coup that led to Turkish military intervention and the division on the island that persists to this day. What was clear on that day and many others was that what Kissinger said and did garnered considerable attention and generated considerable controversy.
Actually, that paragraph is not entirely accurate, as I first encountered Henry through his writings. A year before, as a graduate student at Oxford, I read A World Restored, the book that grew out of his doctoral dissertation. The book went back and forth between the particular, including wonderful character portraits of the great diplomats who gathered at the Congress of Vienna, and larger insights into both the practice of diplomacy and workings of history. It both inspired and intimidated, as it was hard to imagine anyone so young writing anything so good.
Henry and I got to know each other over the decades when I was in and out of government. We would talk or meet before some of his trips or upon his return. These discussions occurred more often over the last twenty years during my time as president of the Council on Foreign Relations. It wasn’t always easy—Henry was quick to take offense and hold me responsible for anything appearing in the pages of Foreign Affairs that was critical of him—but we always managed to repair our relationship. I hosted dinners for his 90th and 100th birthdays and participated in numerous conversations and panels with him. I have no idea if we shall ever see his likes again, someone with his intellectual depth coupled with his operational skill. What I do know is that his legacy will be large and lasting.
I will end on an administrative note. I am off to what we used to call Asia or the Asia-Pacific and is now called the Indo-Pacific in an effort to underscore India’s strategic role, which remains more potential than actual. Regardless, I am heading East, which means next week’s Home & Away will be a day or two late but, on the upside, should include something of a trip report.
As always, some links to click on. And feel free to share Home & Away.
Richard Haass in the news
Thursday, November 30: MSNBC Andrea Mitchell Reports and BBC World Service Newshour on Secretary Henry Kissinger’s legacy.
Articles
The Legacy of Henry Kissinger (Project Syndicate)
Check out The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens