The Developing Global Crisis: A Strategic Paradigm for Understanding Global Conflicts Today

Abstract

The Developing Global Crisis: A Strategic Paradigm for Understanding Global Conflicts Today

by Michael Andregg, University of St. Thomas, mmandregg@stthomas.edu For the ISA/ISS meetings in Baltimore, MD, USA, Feb. 22-25, 2017 Scheduled for SA-28, Feb. 25, in 326 BCC, -- draft 7

abstract

The US Air Force has been at war continuously for over 25 years now, and large areas of its operation like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya are still convulsed by wars. Those zones of conflict have grown, adding Syria, Yemen, Somalia and ‘tribal areas’ of Pakistan to the regular Air Force target lists. Dozens of other countries in Asia, Latin America and especially Africa see more discrete visits by US Special Forces with occasionally lethal consequences. Many Americans, including some troops who have deployed into war zones that their parents fought in, are starting to wonder why these wars do not end. The “Developing Global Crisis” is a strategic paradigm that tries to answer that question with a focus on why the wars are starting in the first place, and how to better address their ultimate causes, instead of just symptoms. That is the strategic “solution” to this problem, focus on ultimate causes instead of just symptoms. Those ultimate causes of organized, armed conflict present a disturbing picture because militaries cannot easily influence many of them. This is a main reason such wars are so hard to stop once started. Those forces, or ultimate causes, include population pressure, corruptions of governance, rising authoritarian law and militant religions that interact synergistically, severe and growing income inequalities, and derivative factors like climate change (a consequence of the ever-growing population pressures and corruptions of governance in addition to the obvious burning of fossil fuels and forests). That is six, very tough problems facing human civilization today. Basically, there are too many people trying to live on too little land in most conflict zones today, so genocide or at least ethnic “cleansing” is an option contemplated by far too many people and politicians. Fear of genocides, so amply illustrated by the ancient histories of such areas, also fuels violent resistance to elites. Syria provides an exceptionally vivid case with relatively hard numbers that can illustrate this “Developing Global Crisis” and why that resists solution by ancient and modern military methods. The confluence of WMDs and hundreds of millions of teen-aged males maturing into such desperate circumstances provides real urgency to the task of rethinking the old ways of conceptualizing global conflicts and how to solve them.