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… read about how current US military strategy in Africa started, and how it’s going.

Back in 2019, the US military’s Special Operations Command Africa thought it had a handle on its approach to the continent. In a classified campaign plan, the Command laid out [[link removed]] a five-year strategy to degrade and disrupt “violent extremist organizations” like al-Qaeda and ISIS affiliates across Africa. Special operations forces have been working to achieve those goals — particularly in Somalia, where a Seal-led task force has launched more than 200 airstrikes since 2017 — but disruption and degradation have been hard to come by. Just as the strategy reached its midway point, the Pentagon published a study saying that violence by the targeted organizations actually increased 43% in 2020. As the war on terror expands in Africa, the results are just as dispiriting as they have been everywhere else in the world.

Bishop of Roam

A prominent Catholic bishop who has spoken in favor of religious freedom for Middle Eastern Christians traveled [[link removed]] to Iraq recently, which caused some discomfort for other supposed advocates for Iraqi Christians.

The bishop in question is, of course, Pope Francis, while the competing voices claiming to defend Iraqi Christians are, rather less intuitively, Iranian-backed militias. Iran has funded a Christian militia in Iraq, and has tried to portray itself as the defender of Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq.

The pope, however, avoided meeting with any militia leaders and even avoided traveling to Christian-majority towns controlled by Iranian-backed militias. The visit, Iraq-watcher Phillip Smyth notes, was a public relations failure for Iran among religious minority audiences.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] How to organize a revolution

In a Newlines Magazine feature [[link removed]], journalist Zaina Erhaim looks back on the organizing of the Local Coordination Committees of Syria, the groups that made up the protest movement that grew into the Syrian revolution. Often meeting over Skype, the committees planned both protests and the online media approach that brought international attention to their struggle against the Assad regime in the early 2010s.

Erhaim was involved in the committees, and much of her look back chronicles her many compatriots who were killed by the regime or by militants. Yet she also explains how they built a functioning organizations system for peaceful protest in an intensely repressive environment.

Many of her fellow committee members were anonymous, but Erhaim was able to reconnect with some of them for the story. Many are now in exile but remain involved in peace activism.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE The leftovers: Part II

Last week on Deep Dive, we looked at new research on the situations where state leadership transitions cause a spike in the likelihood of war. This week, we’ll dig into a more optimistic take on state leadership turnover. In a recent article [[link removed]] in International Studies Quarterly, political scientist Robert Schub argues that leadership transitions — or, rather, the threat of leadership transitions — can actually increase the likelihood of peace in certain situations.

Schub’s analysis relies on two key observations. The first is that peace is not costless. Maintaining credible peace between states often means spending money to maintain a balance of military power between them. Even pursuing diplomacy and confidence-building measures costs money, and political capital, as well. The second is that the actual cost of achieving a particular peace between adversaries can vary dramatically over time. As a result, it is sometimes difficult for leaders to predict how certain events will affect peace costs.

A common way for political scientists to conceptualize war onset is to think of war as a failure of bargaining. Two countries have some dispute — a territory they both claim, for example — and the cost of a war between them will likely far outstrip any material gains either one would make as a result of the war. In theory, the two countries should be able to come to some compromise — say, splitting the territory in two, or one country keeping the territory but making compensatory payments to the other — that would save both the costs of going to war. The concept of peace costs throws a wrinkle in that theory. If you consider that maintaining peace is costly, then the range of situations narrows where war is clearly more costly than peace. The extent to which it narrows depends heavily on just how costly maintaining peace is now, and how costly it is likely to be in the future.

To Schub, the number one driver of peace cost variation is leader transition. Some leaders are more committed to conflict than others, and if a war-minded leader arrives on the scene then the cost to other countries of maintaining a military balance with that leader are likely to rise. Conversely, the rise of a more conciliatory leader means that competing states can reduce their military expenditures for a time. The problem, of course, is predicting what categories different future leaders fall into and when they will actually take power.

Here is where things get a bit sticky. Let’s say you’re the leader of a country — call it Mordor, for the sake of fantasy clarity. And let’s say you have a hated enemy — Narnia, to mix our metaphors. Narnia’s leader is aggressive, and the cost of maintaining peace with them is high. In fact, it is so high that it might be worth it just to fight them and see what happens rather than just having to engage in a constant arms race that is sapping your treasury. That is a war equilibrium: The cost of peace is so high that war, though costly, seems unavoidable.

But let’s say you hear a rumor of a coup brewing on the other side of the wardrobe. It’s impossible to tell who the new leader of Narnia might be, but they can hardly be worse than the growling lion you’re currently faced with. In the worst case scenario, the new leader will drive peace costs up, which just means you’ll end up fighting the war you figured you might have to fight anyway. There’s a chance, though, that the new leader will be more of a house cat, with less of a taste for violence. That will lower the cost of peace in the long term.

Schub’s argument is that, in that moment when the leadership transition is pending and knowledge of the future Narnia leader’s preferences are low, you are likely to pursue peace even with the existing leader. If you’re wrong and you’re paying the high peace cost only to fight later, then no harm is really done — the weapons you’re buying now to maintain the balance of power will work fine for a later war. If you’re right, though, opting for peace now means that the new Narnia leader will actually have a chance to institute their more peaceful policy. In that case, you can both reduce peace costs and enjoy a peace dividend.

Schub tests his theory by looking at the relationship between military spending, the rate of leader turnover, and war onset. If Narnia has a history of frequent leader turnover, he argues, Mordor leaders can reasonably assume that they won’t have long to wait at any given time until a new Narnia leader comes to power. What he finds is that, when Narnia states have high military spending (that is, when peace costs for Mordor are high), more leadership turnover in Narnia means that Mordor is less likely to opt to fight. In fact, when Narnia has had two leadership turnovers in the past 10 years, Mordor’s likelihood of going to war with them in a given year is around 2 percentage points less than it would be if Narnia had no leadership turnovers. That may not seem like much, but over years it amounts to a significant preference for peace. Conversely, when peace costs are low, leader turnover has no measurable effect on the likelihood of war.

In many ways, Schub’s research is a corollary to the Wu, Licht, and Wofford article we covered last week. Where Wu et al. saw the value for new leaders in testing their adversaries’ appetites for war, Schub focuses instead on the incentives for leaders watching their opponents reach the end of their terms to embrace a peaceful status quo, even if it is costly.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Patrick Winn examined [[link removed]] calls for international military intervention in Myanmar. Security services in the country continue to kill protesters marching against the recent military coup. In response, some protesters have begun invoking the concept of Responsibility to Protect to demand that the international community intervene in Myanmar to stop the killing. Experts, however, say that such an intervention is both unlikely and would probably not improve the situation if it did happen. Rather than reducing the violence, international intervention could easily turn into a proxy war between the US and China that would be difficult to end.

Kate Kizer laid out [[link removed]] the steps the Biden administration can take to make peace in Yemen possible. The administration has made positive steps so far, including ending US support for “offensive operations” in Yemen by Saudi Arabia. It has not yet, however, defined what counts as an “offensive operation,” nor has it taken action on a $36.5 billion deal to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that, if allowed to go through, would almost certainly lead to those weapons being used in Yemen. Kizer’s proposed plan would see the US actually end its support for the Saudi war effort and take a leading role in diplomatic efforts to end the conflict in Yemen.

Shirin Jaafari profiled [[link removed]] Syrian photographer Bassam Khabieh, who has recorded the lives of Syrian children growing up during the horrors of the country’s civil war. Khabieh was a computer engineering student before the war, and began taking photos as a way to raise awareness of the conflict. As the conflict has worn on, Khabieh’s work has documented the horrors and small joys of life in Syria. A book compiling his photographs has recently been published.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

The least realistic thing about these toys [[link removed]] is the concept that anyone would be held accountable for destroying a city.

The real reason the United Nations couldn’t be based [[link removed]] in Boston is that it would require Boston to acknowledge the existence of a world outside the I-495 corridor.

Dispatches [[link removed]] from former CENTCOM commander and Iraq War architect Gen. Tommy Franks.

Further [[link removed]] dispatches from former CENTCOM commander and Iraq War architect General Tommy Franks.

The F-35 of technicals [[link removed]].

Other ideas floated [[link removed]] by the Army’s Joint Culinary Center of Excellence (a real thing that exists) included “Spartan Bistros,” “Shake Shacks of Professionalism,” and “Leth-Eataly.”

Maybe this [[link removed]] was a mistake, but what is the concept of Florida Man if not a philosophy of praxis [[link removed]'s_philosophy_of_praxis].

The influence [[link removed]] of the military-industrial complex knows no boundaries.

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Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between The World and Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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