Ed Miliband Is Not To Blame

For all his faults, Ed Miliband would still have been a better Prime Minister than anyone else who had held the position since 2010, never mind his own torturer of a brother, and Patrick Porter writes:

Ever since Edward Samuel Miliband became UK Foreign Secretary, his more hawkish critics have accused him of a single, cosmic act of folly and weakness. In August 2013, it is said, he helped bring Russia’s brutal imperial war in Ukraine, as well as the military adventurism of aggressors around the world. You’ll recall that as Leader of the Opposition, Miliband opposed and defeated the government’s proposal in the Commons to support airstrikes against Syria after its regime had carried out the Ghouta chemical weapons attack on civilians. That vote was momentous. It played a significant part in persuading then US president Barack Obama not to conduct air strikes. But according to Miliband’s detractors, it was more momentous still — it fatally signalled weakness to the west’s adversaries. Allegedly, as a display of general passivity it nerved Russia’s bloodstained president Vladimir Putin to move on Crimea and Ukraine.

This is an odd but common — and confidently asserted — charge. Without much evidence, it draws a line from one decision point over one conflict to the calculations of another state in another conflict. Like most half-baked lines of attack on historical decisions, it doesn’t really offer a persuasive counterfactual. Would bombing Syria in 2013 really have persuaded Moscow not to strike into Ukraine when it felt its vital interests were on the line? It’s a disproportionate claim to make without much to go on. It suggests our adversaries are easily deterrable even over matters they really care about. And it suggests a superficial account of international politics. It’s past time for a proper interrogation.

I’m no Miliband fan, for what it’s worth. I don’t care for his “net zero” climate policy. It’s an ineffectual response to climate change that has little hope of denting the problem,when other prudent choices are available. It objectively requires disarmament and helps deny something Britain desperately needs, cheap and abundant energy. The new Miliband-Burnham declaratory doctrine of universal altruism, that “we will always support the underdog” is fictitious and, because it is obviously untrue, foolish. It sets tests any prudent state is bound to flunk. People do notice that the same Miliband who asserts morality over Israel-Palestine also sits down to bargain with authoritarian regimes from Beijing to Tehran. I sympathise with Miliband’s sanctioning of theft and atrocity in the West Bank. I also sympathise with the general predicament any foreign secretary faces, that in a harsh world of compromise and trade-off, we can’t do good for everyone everywhere all the time, while that is no licence for nihilism. Double standards are woven into the nature of statecraft, alas. But at the very least we are still owed a grown-up explanation.

Rather, I offer only this — an attack on an unfounded line of criticism that won’t go away. The suggestion that the vote against bombing Syria was a decisively bad act that tipped the world into catastrophe is wildly wrong and downright silly. Consider what that claim is really suggesting: that Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Crimea, and against Ukraine’s southern and eastern parts, then against the whole country, would not have happened but for a light bombing sortie over the Middle East. Follow it further. Confronted in 2014 with the impasse over Ukraine’s choice of trade deals, between Russia and the EU, and mindful that the EU’s trade deal contained NATO-partnership clauses, and fearful of the loss of the port of Sebastopol, Moscow would still have stayed its hand if only Barack Obama had led a coalition to strike Syria the previous summer. The fact is, Russia against any version of the United States had the balance of resolve on its side, because its interests were directly implicated, and America’s were second-order. The difficulty of deterring Russia in that case was situational, not dispositional. Thinking for a few seconds more, the proposition gets stranger still: bombing a few targets in Syria to make a point about chemical weapons use would have somehow persuaded Putin that the west might intervene directly over Crimea. Risible? Yes. But that’s what the argument sounds like when we play it back.

Those who charge Miliband with emboldening Russian imperialism unwittingly trivialise the very adversary force they fear. Recall that the proposal, after Bashar al-Assad used nerve gas to slaughter civilians, was an airstrike carefully calibrated to be limited. In the words of then Secretary of State John Kerry, even though it was a moment akin to the Munich settlement with Adolf Hitler, the bombing was to be “unbelievably small” a “very limited, very targeted, very short-term effort” that would not take the United States to war. Well, if in a counterfactual universe, the House of Commons had voted for that discrete, commitment-shy measure, and it had gone ahead, would it have sounded like a great trumpet, broadcasting the west’s fierce moral and strategic will and bring dictators to heel? More likely — much more likely — that bombing would have looked like the performative theatre that it was. It would have displayed not resolution, but the limits of resolution, signalling a reluctance to get involved beyond one round of salvos. The difference between the world that emerged since — one of bloody conquest and atrocity — and a different, better world was hardly one act of pinprick violence.

Even if Obama’s United States had carpet-bombed Syria in 2013, that also would probably not have changed Putin’s calculations. Flattening a non-nuclear, relatively small state is not a commentary on whether one is willing to risk major war with a nuclear peer, not over a cause like Crimea that Russia cared about more than any other state. After all, larger, bloodier, more expansive interventions in the Middle East, ones that led to regime overthrow in Iraq and Libya, demonstrably did not deter other parties from committing atrocities or grabbing land. The Iraq war, initiated partly to project an image of western strength, was followed by Russia’s attack on Georgia in the summer of 2008. The downfall of Colonel Gaddafi did not have the effect of signalling western resolve and thereby deterring other parties from aggression. To the contrary. It outraged and scared Russia and China. It made them more determined to resist what they saw as a dangerously revisionist, order-violating west. They care about looking tough, too.

The argument that unloading on Syria from high altitude on one occasion would have changed global history optimistically imposes great expectations on acts of warfare. Such acts, history suggests, do not reliably exert desired second and third order effects on others. History’s ways are crooked and ironic. For one thing, launching hostilities can tie down those that initiate them, occupying their attention and resources and creating openings for others to move, in other theatres. Recall the Suez campaign of 1956, which provided the Soviet Union with cover and space to smash the uprising in Budapest. A serious, and more intensive attack on Assad’s Syria, to really underline international determination to oppose chemical weapons use, would likely have drawn Washington into a protracted conflict that could easily have extended into the period where the EU-Ukraine-Russia crisis exploded. The west was not willing to go to the wall, or risk doing so, over Crimea even though it had kept its powder dry over Syria, as Putin accurately predicted. America’s willingness to consider direct action over Crimea would have been even less, had it already been engaged in a prolonged coercive campaign over Syria.

The “Syria vote” attacks on Miliband stem from something deeper, a particular kind of moralism, a frustrated do-something-ism that has taken hold over some observers of world affairs, including bright ones. To suppose that things could have been better “but for” one marginal decision is to put wishes ahead of sober realism. It is also just a little self-important and narcissistic, turning international politics into a moral drama about Britain’s spine and steel.

Nothing is certain. Maybe it would have been better, despite everything, to attack Assad’s monstrous regime and try to set some kind of deterrent baseline against WMD atrocities. Reasonable people can disagree. It’s doubtful whether that would work or even be necessary. Saddam Hussein’s regime promiscuously used chemical weapons against Iran, indeed with the active involvement of Washington as a supplier of dual use materials, and this did not cause an epidemic of chemical weapons use. The world’s abhorrence of such matters may not rise or fall on the occasional use of force. But we should resist the more dramatic claims still at large, that the power which has proven itself willing to bleed extensively to dominate its “near abroad” would have been put off by a punitive exercise of force elsewhere against a weaker adversary. The threshold for exercising violence abroad should remain high, as Donald Trump’s absurd, wasteful, hubristic current adventure in the Gulf reminds us. And a quarter of the way into the 21st century, it is still the war hawks who have the most explaining to do.