SPEAKING FREELYBy Emanuele Scimia
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Pyongyang is thousands kilometers away from Jerusalem and Damascus, but the transition of power occurring in North Korea in the aftermath of the death of Kim Jong-il (the “Dear Leader” who had been running the secretive North Korean regime over the last 17 years after succeeding his father Kim Il-sung), will also have fallouts on the whole Middle East and North Africa.
Starring actors in the Asian-Pacific region and beyond (United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia) must take into account that Kim Jong-il’s demise could even unleash a power struggle within the old-communist regime of Pyongyang. This infighting is likely to break out in the event that Jong-il’s third son and anointed heir, Kim Jong-eun, is unable to consolidate his grip on power in the foreseeable future.
The reality is that North Korea’s potential descent into political chaos could speed up the much-trumpeted comeback of the United States in Asia. Such a geopolitical shift – first laid out by United States President Barack Obama during his last November tour in Australia and Southeast Asia – would inevitably take shape to the detriment of other regional flashpoints.
According to the new US Strategic Defense Guidance – which Obama unveiled on January 5 – the American military Joint Force will primarily focus both on Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. Yet, it is hard to think that Washington could face a conflict in the Korean Peninsula and, at the same time, deal with the rash of intertwined challenges looming across the Middle East and North Africa, not least of all the Arab Spring’s effects from Maghreb to the Arabian Peninsula (with the civil unrest in Syria in the spotlight), the escalation of the nuclear threat from Iran, Hezbollah’s increasing clout in Lebanon, the resumption of sectarian strife in Iraq upon Washington’s withdrawal from this country and the unresolved issue of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In addition, the drawdown of US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) from Afghanistan risks to deepen further the instability in this country as well as in Pakistan.
Faced with a steady economical and financial crisis that will result in more than $450 billion in defense cuts over the next 10 years, the crucial question is whether the US Joint Force will be able “to do more than one thing at a time” and not limit itself to two, as declared by the US Joint Chiefs Chairman Army General Martin E Dempsey after the military strategic review’s announcement.
The start over the next few weeks of “Austere Challenge 12”, the largest joint US-Israeli war game ever held, would appear to confirm Dempsey’s words about the US persistent engagement in more than one strategic theater. Another yet validation in this regards, for instance, is the increase of military-to-military ties between Washington and Djibouti.
United States Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta just visited this Horn of Africa’s tiny country in mid-December 2011, where the one and only US military base in Sub-Saharan Africa is home to about 3.000 American soldiers. The outpost of Djibouti is essential to launch armed operations against al-Qaeda-related groups in Somalia and Yemen.
In this broad picture of volatility in the Near and Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, President Obama’s “Look Asia-Pacific” policy – which aims eventually at the containment of China’s rise in East Asia – would need at least a deputy in the Mediterranean basin to ease the US geostrategic exposure.
Yet, the obvious candidate, the European Union (EU), is still unable to wield a coherent common foreign policy, and this even towards its nearby neighbors. Notwithstanding the EU military budget is worth $255 billion per year (second-ranked all over the world after the US and more than the spending of China and Russia combined), Europe as a whole finds it hard to act as a regional security-provider.
The US attempt to outsource to Europe a leading military role in what it considers as minor battlegrounds just failed on the eve of the military intervention in Libya. In the effort to overthrow the Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, the EU should have played a major role, with Washington behind the scenes. But EU members split on the decision whether supporting the rebellion of the Benghazi’s National Transitional Council against the now late Libyan dictator and a coalition of willing – under the umbrella of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United Nations’ mandate – took the lead in the armed operation.
In light of what happened for the Libyan crisis, if the situation in Syria were to collapse, the US should eventually take the helm of the intervention. Besides, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad can display a more significant military apparatus than could be done by Gaddafi and it is not sure that repeating the formula adopted for the military action in Libya (dividing the country in two, with one portion controlled by anti-regime rebels under Western armed protection) also works in Syria.
Some European countries could at most participate in another yet coalition under the US leadership and with a critical position of France and Turkey. The problem in this perspective is the spat between Paris and Ankara after last December 22 the French National Assembly passed a law that punished the genocide of Armenians’ denial (before it comes into force the law needs the French Senate’s go-ahead).
Whether or not Europe has room to exert an assertive foreign policy on the Mediterranean chessboard, it will be actually circumscribed to the Maghreb and Sahel regions. From this point of view can be seen the “5-plus-5” summit of Nouakchott (Mauritania’s capital), when last December 11 the ministries of Defense of five European countries (France, Italy, Malta, Spain and Portugal) met with their counterparts from Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Mauritania and Tunisia to devise strategies to tackle the across-the-border terrorism, not least of all the network of kidnappers of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). It is easier to imagine for Europe a prominent role in handling a potential “Bread Revolution” in Algeria rather than a multiform conflict in the Fertile Crescent.
At this juncture, the string of challenges that is mounting in the Middle East and North Africa risks to thwart Washington’s rapid fly toward the Asia-Pacific. Linked by a subtle red line concerning nuclear proliferation, embattled Syria and North Korea might push (by accident) the US into a strategic overstretching, which will be unsustainable without a proactive support by Europe along the Koran Belt from Morocco to the Strait of Hormuz.
Emanuele Scimia is a journalist and geopolitical analyst based in Rome.
