THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION Brookings Cafeteria Podcast September 19, 2018 CONTRIBUTORS HOST FRED DEWS BRUCE JONES Vice President and Director – Foreign Policy Senior Fellow – Foreign Policy, Project on International Order and Strategy 1 DEWS: Welcome to the Brookings Cafeteria, the podcast about ideas and the experts who have them. I'm Fred Dews. The 73rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly is about to get underway in New York City. Delegates will grapple with issues ranging from economic growth, to sustainable development, to promoting human rights, to combating international terrorism, to maintaining peace and security. The last item of peace and security is the topic of this special episode of The Brookings Cafeteria. Here to share his ideas and research on that matter is Bruce Jones, the Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy at Brookings, and author of numerous books on America's role in the global order, including “Still Ours to Lead: America, Rising Powers, and the Tension between Rivalry and Restraint.” And he is a co-author of a new paper titled “The New Challenges to International Peace and Security: Updating the Prevention Agenda.” You can follow the Brookings Podcast Network on Twitter @policypodcasts to get the latest information about all of our shows. And now on with the interview. Bruce welcome back to the Brookings Cafeteria. JONES: Thanks for having me again. DEWS: I say welcome back because you last appeared on the show in May of 2017 talking about your book about the Marshall Plan and the U.S. role in setting that up. So I encourage listeners to go find that and listen to a very interesting book and interview. But we're here today to talk about your new paper you’re the co-author with scholars including Charles Coll, Dan Toubolets, and Jason Fritz. It's on new challenges to international peace and security. And the opening sentence of the executive summary you write, “the world in 2018 faces an international security environment measurably worse than that of a mere five years earlier.” How is it worse? JONES: Well there are two main factors. First of all, after roughly 20 years of steady declines in the level of war in the world in every continent and every region, we saw a 2 substantial and major reversal in that trend from about 2012 onwards, an increase in both the number and the intensity of wars in the world. Most of that is concentrated in the Middle East. The second thing we've witnessed is the beginnings of a sustained erosion of relations between the major military powers: the United States, China, and Russia in particular. Those are not yet at an acute phase or anything like that, but there is a steady deterioration, particularly in U.S.-Russia relations and increasingly now in U.S.-China relations. Those two things intersect because to respond to wars in the post-Cold War period, primarily the United States has either been the driver of action or it's gone to the U.N. Security Council and pushed the U.N. to act to respond to war. But that's been much harder to do in the last few years because tensions between the United States, Russia, and China have blocked the U.N. Security Council from acting in some of the critical cases. So wars are getting worse. And great power relations are impeding us from trying to treat that problem. DEWS: Now there's a lot of data in your paper. I think it's a fascinating approach to put numbers behind these observations behind these research findings. And one of them it strikes me as very interesting, is that major wars, I think it's over 10,000 deaths a year, are the ones that are increasing and it's kind of overwhelming the decrease in less major wars. Can you explain kind of that dynamic? JONES: Yeah, this goes to a maybe a controversial point in the paper. There's been a lot of pieces in the last couple of years from economics and policymakers talking about the fact that we're now at a global peak of an all-time peak in levels of conflict, et cetera. We find that that's not really true. It's true only if you measure wars by a metric which is used now in academic circles that I find very unsatisfying, which is wars that kill more than 25 people a year. That's a fundamentally different thing … DEWS: 25? JONES: 25 people a year. That's the threshold that is used now versus some years 3 ago [when] it was more conventional to use a thousand battle deaths a year as a threshold. And in this paper and in the academic literature we use 10,000 battle deaths as a threshold for major wars. When you look at major wars there is a slight increase in the number of them. There's not a large increase in the number of them. And so that's a very different way of looking at things than to say, oh we’re at some sort of all-time peak in the numbers of conflict in the world. I think that's distorting. What is the case is that the wars in Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan are killing an awful lot of people, and particularly in Syria. And the number of battle deaths and the number of civilian deaths in those wars are very high. They're not higher than wars in, you know, the early 90s, the genocide in Rwanda, battle deaths in Angola, et cetera. But they are very high. And after roughly a 20 year period of continuous decline, it is a striking reversal. DEWS: Is there anything that ties together that increase in battle deaths in those three countries in the region? You mention the Middle East, Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan. Why is it happening in those areas of the world? JONES: Well I think there are two reasons. First of all Afghanistan has its own particular trajectory and has actually been in a war for more or less three decades, for a full decade before we intervened militarily it was struggling with a range of forms of violence and oppression and terrorism. Syria, Yemen, Libya, some of the other cases, these are all manifestations of the Arab Spring and the backlash to the Arab Spring, breakdown of regional order, breakdown of social order within the region. I think what's particular about that region is that unlike, say, conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America or the fringes of East Asia, it's much more difficult in the Middle East for international actors to come together to help to try to resolve those conflicts because the region simply plays a much weightier role in geopolitical affairs than does, say, sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America. Oil interests, security interests, democratic interests, aligned interests, all mean that the United States, Russians and others have very 4 significant interests in these states. And so they don't view the conflicts through the prism of how can we stop the violence against civilians; they view the conflict through the prism of their strategic interests. And so rather than working together through the Council or through a regional organization to try to resolve these wars, rather, we and others have been trying to make sure our side wins or make sure that we see an outcome that's aligned with our interests. And that's fueling these wars. Second point to make is that these are states with large, capable armies and large, capable states. They've been deteriorated through the course of violence. But, for example, in thinking about potentially responding to the Syrian civil war, you had to contend with the fact that Assad had a 500,000 strong army. That's a serious fighting force, whatever their degree of capability. So you can't just roll up with a few U.N. peacekeepers and take care of them like that. They're much, much tougher problems. DEWS: And now we have seen Russian military involvement in Syria which leads me to segue to Russia and its involvement in Ukraine and Crimea. I guess we could track back to Georgia, even in other places in Central Asia. You talk about how those kinds of conflicts are changing the global security picture. JONES: Yeah, we're seeing a return to a phenomenon that we were very familiar with during the Cold War, namely proxy wars involving the great powers. Almost all civil wars or proxy wars in one form or another, i.e. local combatants, the government itself have some support from neighbors or external parties, but it's a very different thing when that external party is a major military power. And so when either we or the Russians or somebody of that scale decides to lend support—financial, military advice, weapons, or direct deployments to one side of the conflict or another—it becomes a much, much more difficult proposition to resolve. And what we know from the Cold War is that proxy wars can last literally for decades. In a civil war, there are some finite level of resources or some finite level of pain the society can suffer and the pressures mount to resolve the situation. 5 But when you're fueling those wars through the flow of weapons and money and sometimes people, then they can extend essentially indefinitely. And I worry greatly that we're moving back into a phase of that kind of proxy warfare: huge human cost and cost to the relations between the powers.