Gregory Copley at an earlier RUSI of Western
Australia lecture. |
 |
Clausewitzian Friction and the New Cold War:
How Population Growth, Urbanization, and
Globalization are Defining the Shape of the
Second Great Cold War
By Gregory
R. Copley
A report
published in Defense & Foreign
Affairs Strategic Policy, 6-2007,
and based on
Addresses to the US Army Command &
General Staff College, Ft. Belvoir,
Virginia, and the Royal United
Services Institute of Western Australia,
in May and June 2007 respectively.
The overwhelming
strategic phenomenon of the recent Cold War
period and into the first half of the 21st
Century has been the doubling of the human
population between 1950 and the turn of the
century.2
The ramifications of this continuing
population growth on all aspects of life on
the planet are enormous, and will continue
to dominate all that we do over the next
century.
We are reluctant
to discuss this continuing phenomenon of
compounded human growth because its
implications are substantially negative for
our own situation and for nature generally.
If we were zebras or elephants or kangaroos,
devouring more and more of our surroundings,
humans would cull us to sustain our balance
with nature.
However, nature
itself will, it seems, in a century or so,
reduce this spike in human population
numbers. Declining population growth rates
are already evident, and the prospect for
what could be termed �neo-Malthusian
adjustments� in population levels, and in
the quality of human life, no longer seem
far-fetched. In the meantime, the remaining
surge of population growth and movement is
the strategic reality which will drive
social formation and actions for the coming
few decades. It will be the spur of growth
and collapse over coming decades. It will
create new forms of society and therefore
new forms of competition and warfare. But
trends, including several generations of
sustained population growth, will pass, and
reverse, or change. There is, in history, no
uninterrupted chain of development.
The phenomenon
of combined population and technological
growth, the hallmark of our epoch, will
define itself in profound competition or
polarization between traditional society and
urban society. This will be exemplified in
global tensions which will have similarities
to the last Cold War. It is already forming
as a New Cold War. We cannot yet fully see
the shape or all of the components of this
New Cold War, because Cold War is actually a
process through which strategic blocs
form and solidify, deliberately obfuscating
much of their nature and activities, to
compete and maneuver. It is only rarely
about direct, materialized clashes, either
physical or political.
No significant
nation or society will be able to avoid this
New Cold War, just as none could fail to
have been impacted by the last Cold War
which led directly to the present period of
globalization and the New Cold War.
This New Cold
War is shaping up with different players
than the Cold War of 1945 to 1990, and is
not a revival of that great, silent, and
glacial clash between the Warsaw Treaty Pact
and NATO; between East and West. This New
Cold War transcends and embraces our
immediate conflicts.
The current hot
wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia,
Chechnya, Eastern Turkey, Lebanon, Sri
Lanka, the Solomons, and elsewhere, are the
symptoms of this New Cold War, seeping like
the lava of a subterranean eruption into the
media and the consciousness.
It is difficult
to say how long this New Cold War will
continue; the last dragged on for 45 years.
This one may, or may not, be decided by
economic or political collapse in the
People�s Republic of China, for China is
fast approaching several potentially
explosive strategic catalysts, perhaps
within the next decade. There are many
variables in the equation, but the fate of
China is an important one.
What is
difficult for society � all societies �
today is the angst of uncertainty created by
globalization, which entails the
overwhelming flow of imagery and words
across a world which has, in this maelstrom,
seemed to lose its definition and
hierarchical order. The world, however, is
now crystalizing starkly defined as an
urban-dominated world, driven by
technology.
This is the
world of cratometamorphosis: the
world of the transformation of societies. I
had asked my friend, a Greek Cypriot
professor, Dr Marios Evriviades, to help
devise two words which I needed for my
recent book, The Art of Victory3,
to describe how nation-states were being
terminated, and new states brought into
existence. He devised for me cratocide
for the murder of states, and
cratogenesis for the birth of states,
for we have entered a new age which is being
dominated by the destruction and birth of
nations. But we are also engaged in the
transformation of existing societies,
including our own. For this, the venerable
Marios Evriviades has devised for me the
word crato- metamorphosis.
So here we are,
at an age of movement; global movement.
Everything, in a strategic sense, is in a
state of flux, and we can make of the new
world whatever we will. All things are once
again possible; both to win and to lose.
I said, in
The Art of Victory, that �[t]here is,
along the path to the ultimate victory or
vanquishment, much winning and losing of
battles; even the ephemeral winning and
losing of wars.�
There is,
however, much still hanging on the wars in
Iraq, Afghanistan, and in Somalia and Sudan,
and on the New Cold War on which we are
currently embarked. Significantly, the hot
conflicts are being played out on one side
of the equation substantially by proxy
actors representing, largely, the weaker
powers in the New Cold War, combating formal
military coalitions of governments. This is,
then, asymmetric warfare in more than one
sense. We have defined asymmetric warfare as
the conflict between weaker powers and
greater powers, with the weaker powers
resorting to irregular battlefield doctrine
against what we call conventional warfare
doctrine. In reality, we are also witnessing
strategic asymmetric warfare, in which
politically, economically, and structurally
weaker powers are using informal � mostly
psychological � means of achieving their
goals in the face of experienced,
entrenched, weal- thy adversary states.
The playing
fields of human destiny are far broader than
direct military conflict, which is just one
part of the context of competition.
Consciousness of this contextual process is
what I call Strategic Situational
Awareness (SSA). For the strategist,
conflict is not merely where the heat is
apparent, but conflict is also
implicitly embedded within the framework of
whence it originates in the darkest
recesses of history, and from where
it derives the oxygen for its combustion.
As humanity, we
surge and unite and part in waves which we
call civilizations, nations, cultures. And
where our surges collide we often ignite.
And now, because human numbers have more
than doubled in the past half-century, these
surges carry with them the prospect of more
clashes because, at the same time, the
tensions build as we atoms of humanity move,
through urbanization, into closer and closer
and more frictional contact.
Friction in Cold War
Karl von
Clausewitz described the friction of war,
noting: �Everything is very simple in war,
but the simplest thing is difficult. These
difficulties accumulate and produce a
friction beyond the imagination of those who
have not seen war. � The influence of
innumerable trifling circumstances, which
cannot be properly described on paper,
depress us, and we fall short of the mark. A
powerful iron will overcomes this friction;
it crushes the obstacles, but at the same
time the machine along with them.�4
What we are
seeing today, and what we witnessed briefly
during what we can call the first Cold War,
is that, in strategic warfare, entire
populations are involved, albeit often
unwittingly, and that the very nature of
human concentrations into urban machines
creates a �friction of war� among civilian
societies. This makes societies as a whole
more challenging to manage, and makes
everyday life more filled with an angst
which cannot be released in normal battle,
although � again as I said in The Art of
Victory � all modern conflict is indeed
�total war�: war between whole societies.
This applies as much (if not more) to cold
wars as to hot ones.
And the human
population and its corresponding friction
will continue to grow, albeit briefly, until
population levels peak at around, perhaps,
12-billion before the end of this century,
and then begin to subside to the historical
levels of human population, perhaps around
two-billion or three-billion in the world,
by some time in the next century.
In the meantime,
the growth in human population, and its
concentration overwhelmingly into urban
conglomerations, will critically affect
global strategic developments. In a paper
which I wrote in November 2006, I said:
�Large urban groupings � the super-cities �
are the great strategic phenomenon of the
current Age of Global Transformation. They
represent, for the first time in history,
the reality that most of the masses of
humanity dwell in concentrations set apart
from the areas which are vital to their
physical survival: those areas which produce
their food and gather their water, generate
their resources of energy and building
supplies.�5
Underlying,
driving human psychological factors,
including logic, and personal and societal
imperatives are now beginning to profoundly
diverge between the urban and non-urban
societies, and this will affect the way in
which conflicts are fought, and who fights
them. Recognizing the great schism between
urban and non-urban mindsets is key to
understanding how sovereignty and power will
change over the course of the 21st Century.
It is also key to understanding how, and
why, for example, terrorism forms and is
sustained as individuals and societies fight
not only to retain or build a sense of
identity, but also regain their actual
ability to survive down the generations in
the face of the demands and threats of the
cities.
But, as I noted,
the global population will begin to decline
by the end of the Century, or perhaps
earlier, although we do not know whether
technology will have enabled people in the
year 2100 to have advanced into a true
�post-industrial society� status, being able
to use minimal resources to grow food,
produce clean water and energy, and to
manufacture, leaving the remainder of the
population to work in abstract endeavors in
the cities. Your grandchildren�s children,
who will still know your name, will live in
a time in which mass urban society will not
resemble the frenzied concentrations of
people we are building today. What all this
means is that we are not in a world of
linear expansion or the stable progression
of anything: not human numbers and the
conflicts which are generated through sheer
mass, nor the demands made on nature by
these numbers, nor even, necessarily, the
growth of human knowledge and achievement.
So if the bulk
of humanity is concentrating into urban
groupings, then much of future hot conflict
� short of strategic warfare � will, then,
be urban warfare. That would imply an
evolution for at least a period in the
process of IED (improvised explosive device)
weapons and doctrine.
The New Cold
War, however, is the arena in which true
success will be either obtained or denied.
Many feel that all rides on victory in Iraq,
or victory in Afghanistan, but, despite the
billions spent and the lives lost, Western
leaders � and, I suspect, the jihadist
leaders � have not yet adequately
defined victory. In reality, at some point,
Western society, wearied of its concerns,
bored and insensible to the reality of what
is occurring, will merely declare victory
and call us all home from the fray. Indeed,
as with the war in Vietnam in the 1960s and
1970s, or in Britain�s war in Waziristan in
the 1920s, questions will arise in later
generations as to what it meant at all, and
was this war or that meaningful to the
progress of our society. Some wars stand out
as watersheds: the World Wars, for example,
the sweeping conquests of Genghis Khan, the
conquests of Alexander the Great, or Darius.
These changed who we are to this day. But
will the wars of this decade, in Iraq and
Afghanistan, change human society?
These wars will
have meaning only if we decide that they
should; only if one society gathers great
strength from the iconic aspects of the
conflict (as Australia, New Zealand, and
Turkey did with the Gallipoli campaign), or
another society wallows in the negative
reflection of those same icons. In many
respects, it is struggle which defines
individual and societal identity.
That, indeed, is
the essence of survival: the preservation of
identity, which gives meaning and purpose �
and therefore will � to existence.
In essence, this
present fight in Afghanistan and Iraq is
symptomatic of a deeper conflict between
actors who do not regard themselves as equal
in terms of wealth or other power resources.
That is why the parties � in this case,
Iran, North Korea, the jihadist
Caliphate movement, and even China to a
degree � which recognize, or feel, their
strategic impotence, are forced to fight a
strategic Cold War, and to engage in direct,
hot conflict only out of desperation.
The same
principles apply as they did during the last
Cold War. The USSR and the People�s Republic
of China, during most of the Cold War,
recognized that they lacked the strength to
successfully confront the West. As a result,
they engaged heavily in proxy warfare,
manipulating the frustrations of elements of
essentially �trapped� societies around the
world � and they, as well, manipulated
frustrated, ignorant, or disoriented
individuals within successful societies � to
fight their battles for them through
terrorism and other forms of irregular and
psychological or political warfare.
Today, in the
New Cold War, the major sponsors of proxy
conflicts with the West � and particularly
against the US � are the states which feel
most threatened by the US and the West in
general or which are engaged in inevitable
competition with them. China is, with some
ambiguity, part of this, but Iran and North
Korea are of key significance, and they have
sought openly to build a new bloc of
states opposed to the US. [Of course Iran�s
clerical leaders and the DPRK are heavily
dependent on China, strategically.]
US Secretary of
State Dr Condoleezza Rice was correct when
she said, on May 14, 2007 , on her way to
Moscow for a meeting with Pres. Vladimir
Putin, that talk of a new US Cold War with
Russia had �no basis whatsoever�6.
That Cold War is indeed over, even
though Dr Rice herself and the US State
Department have persisted in treating
post-Soviet Russia as a Cold War enemy,
rather than as a state liberated from
communism which had, in fact, embraced the
West and wished to become part of it. The US
and European mistake in failing to recognize
that the West had won the Cold War and that
it now could re-shape its old adversaries
into allies and partners is one of the great
failings which marked the post-Cold War
period.
In early 1991,
at the end of the last Cold War, I noted:
�It would be a mistake to assume that the
traditional composition of world blocs,
which have been in recognizable shapes for
many years, will continue � The global
powers of the 1990s will continue to have
great economic leverage, but limited
willpower, or possibly even limited real
power, to control the growing anomie �
lawlessness � in many states.�7
And, in May
1992, in Defense & Foreign Affairs, I
pointed out the reality that the start of
the �New Cold War� began with the ending of
the old Cold War: �It will be impossible for
the global community to contain itself
within a single, harmonious family. The very
fact that � China is now able to start
welding together a bloc of states
hostile to, or disaffected from, the concept
of Pax Americana shows that the world
will once again start to re-form into
camps.�8
That report also
noted: �Virtually all solutions considered
today [1992] for the containment of
subnational or informal conflict have the
effect of either worsening the long-term
problem or creating a situation where
animosities and aspirations remain
unresolved. We are today not solving
problems, but creating bigger problems for
the future.�
So it was to be
for the West in Iraq in the 21st Century.
Abstract War
In cold wars,
states triumph, implode, or seek to break
out of the stalemate imposed by abstract war
� which is what cold war is � by moving to
hot war. Success in cold wars lies in
forcing the collapse � the implosion � of
the adversary state or in neutralizing and
containing it, possibly even by absorbing it
into the suc- cessful bloc without
resort to direct hot war. Disadvantaged
states or societies engaged in a cold war
seek to use the breathing space which such
an abstract conflict provides to build in
power and substance.
This is exactly
what the USSR attempted to do in the last
Cold War, and failed, leading to its
implosion. This is also what the People�s
Republic of China (PRC) sought to do, and
almost failed, but for the reprieve granted
by the death of Mao, the collapse of the
USSR, and the spread of globalization. The
PRC then began moving toward the creation of
true substance in its strategic complexion,
but still requires the framework of either a
cold war or a peace in which its freedom is
guaranteed in order to complete its goal.
Iran, certainly,
requires the time and competitive tension
afforded by a cold war to build its power
and the survivability of its leadership. But
the New Cold War has already imposed such
constraints on it � in the form of embargoes
and strategic isolation � that it must
resort to hot war, either directly or by the
use of thinly-veiled proxies, in order to
ensure that its population base does not
rise against the clerics. There are
parallels in the case of the DPRK.
Meanwhile, the
West could have been spared much of the pain
in the fight against jihadist
terrorism had it allowed Russia to re-emerge
as an ally. Russia could have shared, as it
wished to do, its own experience in the
Caucasus jihadist conflict, and we
would today not be facing to the same extent
the complex network of anti-modernist forces
which spread from Central Asia and across
the Middle East into Europe.
Success in cold
wars, then, is very much the result of
psychological strategies, rather than purely
military strategies, although the marriage
of the physical and psychological is
critical and symbiotic.
But if the
clarity of a war won or a war lost is not
always immediately apparent, then the
clarity of a conflict � hot or cold � when
it is underway is even less apparent. In the
embattled fortresses of war, the focus is
short, and few raise their heads above the
parapets to view the horizon.
Today, the
conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are being
fought less in the streets of Baghdad and
the plains of Kandahar Province and more
between Washington�s internal �warring
camps� where the combat is psychological and
political. It is in Washington, as the
Iranian leadership knows, that the outcome
of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be
determined. This reality � that wars are
determined by politicians, the media, and
polling, as we saw with the Vietnam War �
should be sufficient to emphasize the
reality of Napoleon I�s maxim that
psychological factors are two-thirds of the
strategic equation, and physical factors
(such as military conflict) are but
one-third of it.
So, with
Washington in the mode of thinking that all
that matters is �how the war plays in
Washington� or the media, it is not
surprising that the bureaucracies have
failed to sense that what is underway in
Iraq and Afghanistan are wars in which
survival is at stake. Not only the long-term
survival of the West, but also the immediate
survival of those who fight against the
Coalition, who have a far greater sense of
urgency than does Washington about how they
fight the wars. And they are fighting for
survival, which means that they are taking
the war more seriously than the Western
public. The Iranian clerics and their allies
understand it; Western leaders and
populations do not.
The Iranian
clerical leadership truly understands that
this is a war with vital, life-and-death
consequences.
But not one
member state in the Coalition fighting in
Iraq has grasped the reality that, whatever
the finer points of the truths about why the
war was begun, it is now a significant front
in the New Cold War, and they must fight to
win on the physical battlefield as well as
on the global psychological battlefields,
including the battlefields of their own
societies.
This is a vast
and complex equation, relating the immediate
and messy conflicts to the broader and
longer-term strategic issues. But it gets to
the heart of the need for leadership at all
levels of society. It gets to the need to
understand who are enemies and who are
friends. World War II was greatly protracted
because US Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and
Harry Truman insisted on war against the
totality of German and Japanese societies,
instead of specifically against the German
nazi leadership and the War Cabinet in
Tokyo.
Similarly,
although Iran�s clerics and DPRK leader Kim
Jong-Il have defined themselves the great
enemies of the West in the New Cold War, the
Iranian people and the North Korean people
are not the West�s enemy. Indeed, for
example, the Iranian people, more than
anyone, are the primary victims of the
clerics who dominate them and, once again,
as �Ayatollah� Khomeini did in 1982
in the war with Iraq, the clerics are
prepared to sacrifice the lives of hundreds
of thousands of Iranians in a war against
the US, Israel, and the West in order to
ensure that they, the clerics, retain power.
And the battlefield against the Iranian
clerics by the Coalition is only partly
occurring against the clerics� proxies and
their Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (Pasdaran)
fighting in Iraq; mostly it is a battle
conducted in the hearts and minds: in the
US, Iran, and around the world.
In speaking in
June 2007 to the Royal United Services
Institute of Western Australia (RUSI), I
said � to emphasize the more complex make-up
of the New Cold War � that Australia�s
position in the New Cold War would differ
from its r�le in the last. It will side with
its traditional Western allies in combating
the proxy, symptomatic warfare, but will
nonetheless have the ability to act as a
bridge between the factions. Australia will,
of necessity, be a more active participant
in the New Cold War than the previous event.
It cannot afford, for example, to let China
collapse, or India to become distracted by
renewed conflict with Pakistan, or the
Persian Gulf and Red Sea regions to become
strategically unstable. Such occurrences,
far more than in the previous Cold War, will
seriously affect Australia, and so
Australia�s strategic influence must
therefore be of a greater and more flexible
reach.
So all of our
battles depend on understanding the nature
of the overarching conflict; and our broad
search for continued victory, and seeing the
place of the battlefields of Iraq, or
Afghanistan, or East Timor or the Solomons,
must be seen within that context.
Moreover, we
need to see that conflict and challenges are
multi-dimensional, and that the
psychological factors are, in Napoleon�s
maxim, two-thirds of the equation. That
means that the West�s defense capabilities
will require a broad strategic force of both
military and non-military capabilities.
And so it is for
many countries. The need to re-think the
global strategic context will cause all
states to redefine the way defense and
strategic planning and structuring occurs.
In Conclusion,
some main points:
1. Global
population growth remains the profound
driver in strategic issues, particularly
involving the rapid movement of the majority
of the world�s population to urban centers,
which creates a changing set of priorities
and a disassociation from the sources of
food, water, and raw materials;
2. The changing
nature of global society means that entire
populations now feel a great angst which is
attributable in part to globalization, but
also to a Clausewitzian �friction of war�
which will, in some senses, demand a release
in some forms of outbursts or conflict;
3. Societies,
after conflicts, inevitably begin to
rebuild, so it is no surprise that a new set
of power blocs began to build after
the end of the last Cold War. And, because
of strategic asymmetry, these states cannot,
and do not necessarily at this point wish to
confront each other titanically. So a New
Cold War arises naturally to allow states to
develop their postures and alliances, and to
begin to compete without resorting to hot
war, except in isolated areas. Thus, the
conflicts we see emerging are symptomatic
of, and also often important fronts of, the
New Cold War, and need to be seen in that
context.
Footnotes:
1. This study
was drawn from an address to the Royal
United Services Institute (RUSI) of Western
Australia, on June 12, 2007, and also from
an address by the author to the US Army
Command & General Staff College, Ft. Belvoir,
Virginia, USA, May 21, 2007.
2. According to
the US Census� August 2006 statistics, the
global population stood at just more than
2.5-billion in 1950, and at some six-billion
in 1999. It noted: �The world population is
projected to grow from six-billion in 1999
to nine-billion by 2042, an increase of 50
percent that will require 43 years. The
world population growth rate rose from about
1.5 percent per year from 1950-51 to a peak
of over two percent in the early 1960s due
to reductions in mortality. Growth rates
thereafter started to decline due to rising
age at marriage as well as increasing
availability and use of effective
contraceptive methods. Note that changes in
population growth have not always been
steady. A dip in the growth rate from
1959-1960, for instance, was due to the
Great Leap Forward in China. During that
time, both natural disasters and decreased
agricultural output in the wake of massive
social reorganization caused China�s death
rate to rise sharply and its fertility rate
to fall by almost half.�
3. Copley,
Gregory R.: The Art of Victory:
Strategies for Personal Success and Global
Survival in a Changing World. New York,
2006: Simon & Schuster�s Threshold Editions.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-2470-0, or ISBN-10:
1-4165-2470-3.
4. von
Clausewitz, Karl: War, Politics, and
Power. Translation by Col. Edward M.
Collins, USAF. Chicago, 1962: Regnery
Gateway, Inc. pp 131-2. The text is also to
be found in Clausewitz�s On War,
published originally in German as Vom
Kriege in 1832.
5. Copley,
Gregory R.: The Rise and Fall of 21st
Century City States, in Defense & Foreign
Affairs Strategic Policy, 11-2006, pp 2 and
15.
6. Associated
Press report of May 15, 2007, datelined
Moscow.
7. Copley, Gregory R.: Global Geopolitics in
the 1990s: An Era of Instability. In Defense
& Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy,
Jan.-Feb. 1991.
8. Copley,
Gregory R.: The Global Strategic Outlook:
A New Era of Conflict. In Defense &
Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, May
1992.
9. Copley,
Gregory R.: The Global Strategic Outlook:
A New Era of Conflict. In Defense &
Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, May
1992.
10.
High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle.
|
