Act of War
In the hours after the highly coordinated attacks in Paris that killed more than 130 people, French President François Hollande called them an “act of war.” Not for the first time, a Western politician used the language of conventional warfare in the wake of a terrorist attack. But Mr. Hollande’s performance since the attacks has matched his rhetoric, and the crisis has proved a decisive moment in his otherwise unpopular and uninspiring presidency, turning a leftist French leader decidedly hawkish. He has begun to wield what muscle France has, and this week he will visit Washington and Moscow in an effort to build a more effective global alliance against Daesh*.
One thing France has not done is to formally call NATO to its defense. Under the provisions of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, to which the United States, Canada, Turkey, the UK and much of Europe are signatories, an armed attack against one member state is considered to be an armed attack against all members. Article 5 is known as the “one-for-all and all-for-one” article. If invoked by France, it could set in motion the treaty obligation of collective self-defense, though that does not automatically mean military action by all members.
The obligations in Article 5 were originally intended to dissuade the Soviet Union from attacking Western Europe, with the understanding that America would be duty-bound to defend the NATO allies beneath its nuclear umbrella. Article 5 has been invoked only once, by the United States after 9/11.
Regardless of whether France invokes Article 5, or whether the next NATO member to suffer an attack does, the West has in fact been at war with a shadowy collection of terrorist groups for some time. Daesh is the latest enemy, but the quagmire that helped create it, the Syrian Civil War, is so chaotic it’s hard to know who is warring with whom, particularly in an era when actual declarations of war seem as passé, even as quaint, as mounted cavalry.
The conflict in Syria began in March 2011, as Syrians began to resist the decades-long dictatorship of the al-Assad family. But the other proximate event that helped to birth Daesh was all America’s doing — the war in Iraq. These two wars have created a cross-border political vacuum that has allowed Daesh to flourish. Over the longer-term, the United States has made Daesh possible through its long-standing support for Saudi Arabia. As Kamel Daoud writes in The New York Times, the US preserves “the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on.” In short, the United States shares significant responsibility for the evil we all now confront.
Perhaps due to its excrutiating experience in Iraq, America was late to the party in Syria, only conducting airstrikes against Daesh since September 2014 after CIA attempts to arm and train anti-Assad rebels wilted.
A year later, Moscow waded into the Syrian pool with force to shore up President Bashar al-Assad’s weakening regime and reassert Russia’s long-absent influence in the region. Russia’s only Mediterranean base for its Black Sea Fleet is in the Syrian port of Tartous — a strategic asset the Kremlin would be loathe to lose.
Russia’s entry into the war puts its forces, particularly air power, in dangerous proximity to American and allied planes in a very hot war zone. The opportunities are vast for both mischief and mistake.
But Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered his forces, live on Russian television, “to establish direct contact with the French and work with them as allies” as France moves naval assets into the eastern Mediterranean. Russia has stepped up its attacks in Syria, and now against Daesh in the past week, in concert with the French. In fact, despite its rhetoric, Russia had up until last week focused its ire on the Western-backed rebels fighting the Assad regime. After Paris, Moscow finally began attacking Daesh.
Meanwhile, President Obama’s tone-deaf response to Paris has been to “keep on keeping on.” Even if the US believes its current strategy (which may be a generous term for it) against Daesh is valid, America appears to be standing still compared to a resurgent Russia which, in the ultimate irony, is positioning itself as very publicly coming to the aid of an American NATO ally. This serves to undermine Western unity for the sanctions imposed on Russia after it swallowed up part of Ukraine, and it positions Moscow both as a responsible partner in the war on terrorism and as a revived power player in the Middle East.
As Russia learned in Afghanistan and America learned in Vietnam and later Iraq, raw power has limits. The Syrian conflict may prove so difficult that a solution will take both the military and diplomatic power of NATO as a whole, plus Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The refugee and security crises in Europe seem unlikely to abate until Syria stops radiating war and terrorism.
With its projection of power into the region, and by virtue of what appears to be its own victimization by Daesh in the loss of a Metrojet airliner, Russia has given itself a seat at the table. Even without the use of Article 5, America and France would do well to begin creating a NATO-wide response to both Syria and Daesh, preferably before the next act of war.
*For our purposes, we will use the term Daesh to refer to the group alternately called ISIS, ISIL, IS or Islamic State. Daesh is the term used by Mr. Hollande and an increasing number of leaders. It serves to distinquish this terrorist group from Islam as a whole, which is wholly appropriate. It is a loose acronym for “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” (al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham)and it has negative connotations in Arabic, since it sounds similar to the Arabic word Dahes (“one who sows discord”).
This was originally posted as “Act of War” on Medium on November 22, 2015. Connect with Mack Bradley on LinkedIn or Twitter for more insights.