Mapping Security Complexes

APPENDIX A Mapping Security Complexes security complex is defined in terms of physical proximity, patterns of amity and enmity, and an established distribution of power.1 A number of states on the boundaries A between nominal security complexes face at least two ways in their security planning, and they were assigned here to whichever security complex seemed to require the greater at- tention of their governments (see table A.1). The Middle East and North Africa security complex includes countries from Morocco east- ward to Syria and Jordan.The Arab-Israeli conflict is the defining contest within this complex, but there are a number of localized enmities as well (Morocco-Algeria, over borders and unre- solved claims to the Western Sahara; Libya-Egypt, deriving from Egypt’s rapprochement with Israel; and Syrian aspirations to hegemony over war-torn Lebanon). Important relations across security complex “boundaries” include Syria’s rocky relationship with Iraq, Saudi Arabia’s role as banker to those states actively confronting Israel, Libya’s meddling in both Chad and Sudan’s civil wars, and its efforts to annex a bit of Chad (the uranium-bearing Aouzou Strip). The Persian Gulf security complex includes Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the states on the Arabian peninsula (Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and one or two Yemens,depending on the time period).The Gulf Arabs fear their larger, northern neigh- bors’ hegemonic ambitions (Iran’s, played out with imperial grandeur and hubris under the late shah, and with true-believing zeal by his Shia Islamist successors; and Iraq’s, reflected in its ini- tiation of the Iran–Iraq War and the Gulf War).Subsidiary tensions include Saudi-Yemeni bick- ering over their mutual border (how it is drawn determines who has control over several interior oil fields). Cross-boundary issues (aside from the Arab-Israel conflict) include the ongoing question of the Kurds, who populate northern Iraq, far northwestern Iran and southeast- ern Turkey; the post-Soviet war on Iran’s northern border between Armenia and Azerbaijan; the 16-year meltdown in Afghanistan; and ongoing unrest in southern Pakistan. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Central Asia has gained five new republics, but their brand-new status and continued close security ties to Moscow left them out of the analysis, leav- ing Afghanistan in its own “complex”or, more correctly,making it a transitional state at the junc- ture of three other complexes (the Persian Gulf, the post–Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States, and South Asia). South Asia comprises Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and the small Himalayan states of Nepal and Bhutan, all of which were once part of British India and whose principal security concerns focus on present-day India. India’s concerns focus in turn on Pakistan and, to a lesser extent, China. Burma (dubbed Myanmar by its illegitimate military regime in 1988), although a former British protectorate as well, is as Buzan notes a transitional or buffer state between South and Southeast Asia.2 Because it is more closely linked to the latter—racially, culturally, religiously, and by the drug trade of the Golden Triangle—that is where it sits in this volume. 240 • Constructing Regional Security Table A.1 Regional Security Complexes Super-regionSecurity Complex Country Middle East Persian Gulf and Bahrain Qatar Arabian Iran Saudi Arabia Peninsula Iraq United Arb Emirates Kuwait Yemen Oman Yemen, South Middle East (Levant Algeria Libya and North Africa) Egypt Morocco Israel Syria Jordan Tunisia Lebanon Latin America Meso-America, Cuba Guatemala Central America, Belize Haiti and the Costa Rica Honduras Caribbean Dominican Mexico Republic Nicaragua El Salvador Panama South America Argentina Guyana Bolivia Paraguay Brazil Peru Chile Surinam Colombia Uruguay Ecuador Venezuela Asia Northeast Asia Korea, North Taiwan Korea, South Southeast Asia Brunei Papua New Guinea Burma (Myanmar) Philippines Cambodia Singapore Indonesia Thailand Laos Vietnam, N. and all Malaysia Vietnam, S. South Asia Afghanistan Nepal Bangladesh Pakistan India Sri Lanka Sub-Saharan Africa Southern Africa Angola Namibia Botswana South Africa Lesotho Swaziland Madagascar Tanzania Malawi Zambia Mozambique Zimbabwe Central Africa Burundi Equatorial Guinea Cameroon Gabon Central African Kenya Republic Rwanda Chad Uganda Congo (Brazzaville) Congo, Democratic Republic of (continues) The other states of Southeast Asia include Thailand, Laos,Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Sin- gapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. During the Cold War, the major security dynamic in this complex was ideological, with a global Cold War overlay (communist North Vietnam,later communist Indochina, and its Chinese and Soviet supporters versus the rest of the region and the United States). Since the end of the Cold War, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the region’s political consultative group, has admitted Vietnam as a member, and its members tend to look toward China as a common problem. (China, due to its size, borders at Mapping Security Complexes • 241 Table A.1 (continued) Super-regionSecurity Complex Country Western Africa Benin (Dahomey) Liberia Burkina Faso Mali Cote d’Ivoire Mauritania Gambia Niger Ghana Senegal Guinea Sierra Leone Guinea-Bissau Togo Horn of Africa Djibouti Somalia Ethiopia Sudan least five regional security complexes and is in a category by itself, as it has been by choice, historically. In this study it is treated as a supplier, not a recipient.) Northeast Asia includes Taiwan and North and South Korea. Since the amity-enmity relations in this security complex were and to some extent remain a joint result of the Pacific War, the Chinese Civil War, the Cold War, and U.S. political and/or military involvement in each, the United States might also be thought of as a member of this complex, with military forces based in the region (in South Korea and Japan) and ongoing interests there driving its engagement. While the U.S. presence could be thought of in terms of the “overlay” of the higher global security complex on Northeast Asia during the Cold War, in the 1990s the reasons for that presence are more regionally focused. In terms of local enmity, the two Koreas have focused mainly on one another while Taiwan has focused on China. In terms of amity, South Korea’s and Taiwan’s principal ally throughout the Cold War was the United States, while North Korea had the support of China and the USSR.As the Cold War ebbed and outside support dwindled, North Korea pulled further into itself and reinforced its international reputation as a rogue state, a reputation diminished only somewhat by a 1994 agreement to trade its nuclear weapons program for enhanced commer- cial nuclear power, food, and fuel. Skipping across the Pacific, the South American complex includes all states from Colombia southward. All but two of these states (Chile and Ecuador) share a border with Brazil, linking Andean and Amazonian politics together. The Central American security complex starts with Panama and continues northward to Guatemala.3 Several Central American states were wracked by civil war in the 1980s, and Guatemala was so cursed more or less continuously from the 1950s through 1996.The conflicts of Central America have had primarily economic roots, which translated into struggles for power and the right to redistribute wealth, although Guatemala’s struggle also had heavy eth- nic overtones.These struggles were, however, seen in Washington to mirror the global capital- ist-communist struggle, an impression encouraged by the parties in power in those states throughout the Cold War and reinforced by Soviet and Cuban assistance to the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and to rebel forces in El Salvador. Mexico’s and Canada’s relationships with the United States are largely amicable, the mi- gration and drug trafficking issues with Mexico notwithstanding, and the three are members of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In the Caribbean, Cuba has been locked into a hostile relationship with the United States since Fidel Castro took power in 1959, while other states have had a neutral relationship to U.S. power with periodic, short-term excep- tions (the Dominican Republic, subject of U.S. intervention in 1965; Grenada, the subject of a brief U.S. invasion-cum-rescue-mission in 1983; and Haiti, disgorger of economic refugees and subject of American occupation under UN auspices in the mid-1990s).The foursome of Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Cuba really should be considered as a single North American security complex. Canada and the United States are outside the scope of this study, 242 • Constructing Regional Security making Mexico and Cuba orphans that I have tried to track without bundling into Central America, as Cuba’s import patterns and technology levels, in particular, are historically quite different from those of Central America. I distinguished four subregional security complexes in sub-Saharan Africa, a region in which the flow of major weaponry is not great but conflicts and turmoil abound.The Horn of Africa includes Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, linked by climate and by mutual refugee flows from their respective long-running civil wars. Somali territorial claims led to a brief war with Ethiopia (1977–1978), and an ill-defined border led to war (1998–1999) between Ethiopia and newly independent Eritrea, which tore away from Ethiopia in 1993 after three decades of se- cessionist struggle. West Africa includes countries from Senegal to Nigeria. Its countries’ security concerns are largely self-contained but heavily influenced by Nigerian politics, which descended into civil war once (1967–1970) and may yet do so again despite the best efforts of newly elected presi- dent Olusegun Obasanjo. French military presence among the Francophone states of the region has helped stabilize (some might say ossify) local politics, but civil war in Liberia (1990–1995) and Sierra Leone (1992–1999) seriously unsettled the area and displaced millions of people.4 By and large its states are too poor to acquire major arms except through political largesse.

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