A casual interest in the affairs of the world will leave the unmistakable impression that everything is suddenly coming apart at the seams. A closer look reveals that, well, yes. It is. In Syria, Romania, Georgia and Moldova, a generation’s worth of history has unfolded over the past week or so. And that’s without even looking too closely at events in Gaza, or Ukraine. Or Hong Kong, or South Korea.
There’s been so much going on that even the collapse of the French government has barely worked its way into front-page news coverage. Wednesday’s no-confidence vote in the National Assembly marked the first time a French prime minister had been turfed by parliamentarians since 1962.
Prime Minister Michel Barnier was appointed by President Emanuel Macron only three months ago. In a nutshell, the snap election Macron called last summer ended up weakening his centrist hold on France. Macron’s squishy politics were squeezed by the French right and the French left, which have combined to attack the French Republic’s brittle and precarious status quo. It’s a dynamic that’s in play almost everywhere.
The cataclysms and upheavals of these past few days may seem mostly unrelated, but most of the disturbances are intimately connected. This is partly because they’re differently-shaped dominoes, and they’re falling, and partly because events in these places contradict the trite and boring claims encountered in thousands of internet-search instances for the words “dragging us into WW3.”
The dragging is most often pinned on U.S. President Joe Biden, former president and current President-elect Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Even British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is sometimes said to be doing this bad thing.
These claims are trite, boring and wrong simply because whatever terms you might want to use to describe the tectonic inflection points coinciding in the ways we’ve seen since the middle of November — the collapse of the rules-based international order, the new cold war, the twilight of late-stage capitalism and so on — they’ve been in motion for close to two decades now.
In the more comfortable neighbourhoods of the NATO capitals it’s become fashionable to imagine that such tumultuous disturbances in faraway lands are best ignored lest we become embroiled in “forever wars,” another trite and silly expression. The problem is that these wars, and the ascendant forces waging them, always seem to find a way to come to us in one way or another. They show up in the hybrid form, in transnational repression, sophisticated election interference strategies, elaborate disinformation operations, assassination plots and the appearance of millions of asylum seekers the world’s advanced economies can’t accommodate.
The main event is underway in Syria, which has disgorged eight million refugees since Bashar Assad enlisted Iran and Russia to make war on his own people more than a decade ago. It’s not all bad news. But let’s start with events in Seoul, because what happened there was an eruption of a kind that is sadly typical in the 17-year cascade of democratic backsliding around the world. In South Korea the trend was arrested on Wednesday and reversed, in the most heroic way.
The crisis began when the deeply unpopular president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law and ordered the military to take command of everything, including the news media. Yoon’s defence minister ordered soldiers to barge their way into the national assembly and seize opposition lawmakers. But the coup rapidly collapsed. South Korea’s Special Forces refused to enter the chamber, and they were eventually chased away from the legislative precincts by furious lawmakers and hundreds of unarmed citizens.
Since 1979, when the country’s 18-year military regime came to a close, it’s been a bumpy ride for South Korea’s presidents. Eight were either sentenced to death, sent to prison, or impeached. Roh Moo-hyun managed to complete his 2003-2008 term, but later committed suicide while being investigated on corruption charges. Yoon is facing impeachment. So you could say the system is working.
In Syria, disciplined fighters from a broad coalition of anti-Assad forces are sweeping south after a lightning-fast takeover of Aleppo, which was Syria’s largest city until it was mostly destroyed by Russian warplanes, Assad’s barrel bombers and Iran-backed Hezbollah ground forces in 2016.
This is where the dominoes come into it.
The coalition is led by the enigmatic Ahmed al-Sharaa, whose nom de guerre is Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, commander of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is the most accomplished of about a dozen Islamist groupings, U.S.-backed insurgent remnants and Turkish-aligned militias arrayed against Assad in northeastern Syria.
The first domino fell back in 2015, when the Obama administration allowed Assad to cross its “red line” in the use of chemical weapons to slaughter Syrian civilians. After Barack Obama’s White House invited the Russians to police Assad’s behaviour, the die was cast. Assad persisted in the use of poison gas, Vladimir Putin’s forces immediately turned their guns on the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army, and Russian fighter jets began bombing Syrian hospitals and civilian neighbourhoods.
Even so, the sham Washington-Moscow arrangement was left intact so that Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, could persist in fruitless nuclear-containment talks with the Khomeinist regime in Tehran, which mobilized its Quds Force and Hezbollah to join Putin’s forces in keeping Assad’s regime from collapsing.
This caused many if not most of the recruits to the pro-democracy Free Syrian Army to defect to Jabhat Al Nusra, nominally an al-Qaida affiliate, because the Nusra front arrayed itself against both the Assad regime and the jihadist butchers of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
By Jolani’s intrigues and connivings, the Nusra front bucked al-Qaida and transformed itself into HTS, which has pledged to confine its struggle to Syria, overthrow the Assad regime, secure civilian control through its efficient and locally-run “Syrian Salvation Government” and protect Syria’s Alawite, Druze and Christian minorities.
Genuine or not, it’s a winning formula. In sharp contrast with the terror and mass panics that afflicted the Afghan people following the bipartisan American betrayal of Afghanistan’s embryonic democracy three years ago, the HTS advance from Aleppo has been mostly orderly.
In some cases, as the HTS-led coalition swept through the governates of Idlib and Hama towards Homs, well-wishers and regime defectors lined the streets to welcome the fighters. The HTS is not a Syrian replication of the Taliban.
The capture of Homs would put Damascus within reach. It’s not likely that Assad’s regime will collapse any time soon, but it now controls only slightly more than half of the Syrian landmass, and its most lucrative revenue stream appears to be the manufacture and sale of captagon, “the poor man’s cocaine.” For the moment, the Kurds are holding their own in Northeast Syria, along with the remnants of the American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.
The last domino to fall before HTS walked into Aleppo was the Israelis’ near-total destruction of Hezbollah in Lebanon, followed by a ceasefire deal with the government in Beirut. Hezbollah fighters have been crucial to Assad’s survival.
Now, Iran’s Quds Force is a shadow of its former self in Syria, thanks to precision Israeli airstrikes that have thrown the Khomeinist regime off balance. Moscow is now urging all its citizens to evacuate Syria, and there are signs that the Russian fleet is pulling out of the Syrian port of Tartus.
Meanwhile, the Republic of Georgia has erupted in anti-Moscow riots and brutal police assaults following a contested October election that the European Parliament has declared “neither free or fair.” The ruling Moscow-friendly Georgian Dream suspended its bid to join the European Union last week, setting off the latest round of confrontations. The goal of joining the EU is entrenched in Georgia’s post-Soviet constitution.
Police have begun raiding the homes of opposition leaders and political activists. One opposition party leader was left unconscious after being detained by police.
On Friday in Romania, a constitutional court annulled the first-round results in the country’s presidential election following the declassification of intelligence documents indicating a mass influence operation favouring the previously unknown anti-European candidate Călin Georgescu. Having vowed to eliminate all political parties in the country, Georgescu was identified in the documents as the operation’s beneficiary. The outgoing prime minister supported the court’s decision, saying the documents prove the vote result was “blatantly distorted as a result of Russia’s intervention.”
In neighbouring Moldova, where the pro-Europe incumbent Maia Sandu was re-elected last month, Moscow’s failed campaign of bribery, sabotage and disinformation included bomb threats on polling places, even at polling stations set up in Germany to allow Moldovans to vote from outside the country, according to Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock.
Baerbock was in Beijing on Monday warning that China’s support for Russia could seriously damage its diplomatic relations with Germany, which may soon send troops to Ukraine.
Speaking of China, in almost entirely unnoticed act of judicial sadism last month, 47 Hongkongers who organized a “primary” for candidate selection during the local elections in 2020 were handed sentences ranging from four to 10 years. Beijing’s national security law aims at anyone anywhere in the world that the Chinese Communist Party determines to be guilty of activities that undermine the party’s rule in Hong Kong.
So what can a country like Canada do about any of this? A lot more than you might think, says former justice minister Irwin Cotler.
Under round-the-clock RCMP protection for a full year now following threats on his life that the RCMP says originated in Tehran, Cotler says the Moscow-Beijing-Tehran axis gets away with attacking liberal-democratic norms and sovereignty because we allow it to happen.
“We’ve indulged a culture of impunity for too long,” Cotler said.
Canada is chairing next summer’s annual G7 meeting, in Kananaskis, Alta. With the United Nations an increasingly useless instrument of the police-state bloc, Canada should start laying the groundwork now for a united community of democracies to confront transnational repression and foreign disruptions of the liberal democracies’ civic and political integrity, Cotler says.
With the return of the isolationist Donald Trump to the American presidency, it would serve Canadian interests to start speaking the language that Trump understands: national security.
“We’d be sending a signal to Trump that we are reliable, that we are prepared to hold the Axis of Evil responsible. We have to show that we are responsible. That’s language that Trump would hopefully understand.”
National Post