Summary: The Strategic Situation at the Turn of the Year
Lothar Rühl
As in the last years the trouble spots Afghanistan, Iraq and the Near East have determined events in 2006. North Korea is striving for an accepted status as a nuclear state, for an American security guarantee, and for immediate bilateral relationships with the USA in order to revalue its international status. Nuclear weapons would help Pyongyang to get military dominance against South Korea, which is a rich country protected by the USA, and would serve as a lever against its neighbours in the south and east.
Teheran’s probable, but still not completed case of proliferation indicates that, as far as non-proliferation of nuclear weapons is concerned, in the end all depends on treaty assertion, meaning international use of force as a last resort if necessary. Neither China nor Russia, however, wanted to make use of these means of enforcement against North Korea and Iran. Thus, in both cases international security and enforcement policy was blocked, and the USA and UN were politically outmanoeuvred.
In 2006 the worst misgivings concerning long-term effects of the American-British war of intervention proved to be true. In 2006 the crisis of the American occupying policy including operations against a hardly tangible enemy, which had been escalating since the summer of 2003, culminated and covered all of Iraq. The USA lost both their strategic flexibility and their initiative. Thus, the American policy of power is threatened with paralysis not only in the Gulf region, but also in the entire Middle East.
In 2006 the Hindukush region was no good time for the West, neither. Although the British, Canadians and Dutch, who had taken over Southern Afghanistan with its five restless provinces from the Americans, inflicted heavy losses on the Taliban, they were unable to prevent new fighters from the Pashtunic border region of Pakistan from invading, thus having to face the same unchanged problem which the Americans had been unable to overcome. The number of NATO troops within ISAF was not sufficient. The expansion of NATO’s responsibility for the security to the whole of Afghanistan drives the allies’ military engagement deeper and deeper into a country which never had been united or at peace, and which lies between neighbours, both in the west and in the east, who want to gain dominating influence: Iran and Pakistan.
The disastrous situation in the Palestinian region of Gaza, the difficulties in the West bank area of the river Jordan, where Palestine with Gaza as its annex is supposed to be born as an independent state, and the violent dispute for power between the rival radical organizations Fatah and Hamas since the elections in Israel are connected with the developments in Lebanon and the war of the Hezbollah in Israel. This connection may not be obvious, but it is illustrated by its link in Damascus in the Syrian conflict strategy against Israel, supporting a war on two fronts, with indirect aggression without a military involvement of Syria, aiming at winning back Golan, which has been annexed by Israel.
For America as the leading super-power, as external supreme power in the Middle and Far East, as the leader of Western alliances, and as a powerful guarantor of the international nuclear-political security regime, the tightened crises have become a critical political and strategic challenge which Washington so far has not been able to meet with a coherent strategy.
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