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Published | 2023/10/26 |
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Status | article incomplete |
Beau says:
Beau introduces a fictitious region to explain foreign policy dynamics, showcasing how power dynamics and strategic choices perpetuate conflicts without a military solution.
Foreign policy analysts
The full transcript provides a nuanced look at the cyclical nature of conflicts driven by power dynamics and strategies, underscoring the need for strategic shifts to break the cycle and resolve conflicts worldwide.
#ForeignPolicy #ConflictResolution #PowerDynamics #Strategy #Peacebuilding
Well, howdy there, internet people.
Let's Beau again, and welcome to the Roads with Beau.
So today is definitely going to be a little bit different.
We are going to talk about the roads
to understanding certain dynamics that
occur in foreign policy.
And we're going to go through how certain strategies work
and why different countries take the stances that they do,
and how it all plays out, and how it all fits together,
and how sometimes the solution that everybody wants to employ,
it won't work ever.
OK, so behind me on the whiteboard
is a, well, it's a mythical region.
I made it up.
None of these countries are real.
It's all fictitious.
But the dynamics that occur in our fictitious region here,
they are real.
They happen all the time, not just in whatever conflict
you're going to immediately think of.
It happens all the time.
OK, so first we're going to lay out the general geography
our fictitious region here. The countries that are most important are
red and blue because red and blue, they've got a long and bad history.
We'll start with blue. Blue, they worship the moon. They worship the moon. They are
a regional power economically and militarily. During the last hundred years
years of conflict between red and blue. Blue has come out on top, so it has elevated their status.
They have more power, economic power and military power. They're also a nuclear power.
They have allies, but their problem is that none of their allies are in the region.
All of their allies are up in the corner on a different continent.
continent, represented by those two squares up there.
OK, what about red?
Red, they don't worship the moon.
They worship the sun.
Different, obviously.
They, because they have been on the losing end of the fight,
they're weak, militarily and economically.
They are not a nuclear power, and they have allies, to some
degree.
And it's basically every other country in the region.
All the countries bordering red and blue, they're all,
well, they're more friendly to red than they are blue.
Now, what are their goals?
What are the goals that they want to accomplish?
Red's easy.
Red, they have been on the losing side.
They've lost territory.
They want that land back.
They even have slogans about it.
From the mountains to the hills.
They just want the land back.
Seems easy enough.
What about blue?
Their goals are a little bit harder to read, because lately
they've kind of been on the defensive.
At least it seems that way.
But they want what every other regional power wants.
They're the establishment.
They want the status quo, staying a regional power, and they want dominance.
Dominance right now.
So you hear that word and you're like, hey, they're the bad guys.
Nope, don't do that.
moral anything. It's foreign policy. It's not about morality. It's not about ethics.
It's not about ideology. It's not even about humanity. It's about power and
nothing else. Dominance is part of that. You don't like the word dominance? Use
national interests, economic stability, whatever term you want to use. It's all
the same. So that's what's going on. Now, if the goal is they want their land back,
why don't they just take it? What's the answer? They're weak, militarily and economically.
They don't have the power, right? There's no way they can do it. So, what about their
allies. Why aren't their allies going to help them? Well, blue, they're a regional
power and they've been planning for this. They've been waiting for this. They're
worried it's going to come because in the past it's happened before. So they
built their military to fight all of these countries at once. So the nearby
nations that are allied to Red, they don't really give them enough aid to help.
Some of them only give words. Some of them actually contribute military aid,
but not enough to win. And we'll get back to why here in a minute. So they have
some military strength, but not enough to win. What do they do? They adopt a
strategy that has been used for a really long time. Provocation. They provoke blue
over and over again into overreacting. Right now there's somebody making a
moral judgment. Don't do that. I promise you one of your heroes used this
strategy at some point in time. Especially if you are somebody who likes
the underdog. It's a strategy and it works pretty well most times. The way it
works is there's a provocation. So the reds, they go in and they attack. It's
militarily ineffective. They definitely don't get any of their land back, but they
cause an issue. So blue responds. Sometimes blue responds with just
overwhelming force and it provokes outrage. So, hopefully, sympathetic turns to active for Redd.
The problem Redd has is that really, even if they had everybody active, they still don't have the
power. So who's their audience? When they engage in a provocation and they await
the response, who are they hoping gets mad? Their allies. Because they can't
win without state support. They need one of those nearby allies in the region to
jump in on their behalf, otherwise they won't win. And they feel like they're
making progress because when they engage in a provocation and the response comes,
they see headlines, they see rallies, demonstrations, even on another continent,
continent, even in blue's allies' countries. They're convinced that victory is right around
the corner because eventually that outrage will be so much that their allies won't be
able to ignore it. And they've been trying this strategy for about half a century. So
So why have their allies ignored it?
This is what matters.
The allies nearby, they don't want red to win.
They want red to fight.
See blue being a regional power, they're also a competitor nation for every other nation
the region to include all of Red's allies. But Red constantly hitting them
keeps them off balance. If it wasn't for Red, Blue would be much more powerful. So
all those allies, they don't want Red to win. They want Red to stay in the fight so
So we'll stop here for a second and switch to blue.
Blue, what's their situation?
They are convinced that red will never stop.
So they take steps that they see as securing their people.
And when there's a provocation, they are more than happy to respond.
And sometimes they respond with that overwhelming force.
And they know it's going to generate outrage.
But they also know that so far it's worked.
And they think that if they can just do it long enough, just hit them hard enough, in
the right way, well eventually they'll give up.
If you can't win, you have to give up, right?
That's where blue's at.
They just say, we're not going to be on the losing end of this one.
And they keep hammering away.
Now we are talking about the governments here.
The civilians?
Oh, they're just caught in the crossfire.
So this dynamic has played out over and over and over again
in different places.
But this is where it gets kind of wild.
In this situation, in our mythical region here,
what happens if one day blue does something that is just
so overwhelming, so out of line, that it actually
creates the outrage necessary for the neighboring states to jump in, because
I mean after all they all worship the sun. They have to stick up for each other.
What happens then? In real life, Blue probably fights them to a standstill
because they built their military to do that, but let's say hypothetically
speaking, something happens and Red and their allies, they actually break through
and they start to cross into Blues territory. What happens then? We talk a
lot on the other channel about Ukraine. That's one of the conflicts we talk
about. And when people talk about Russia doing something so out of line that it
provokes a NATO response, where does the NATO response always stop? At Russia's
borders, right? Because they're a nuclear power. Because you cross those borders
and then that country might view it as an existential threat and they might
let those things fly. In fact, if they felt like their capital was going to
fall, if they felt like they were going to suffer too much in civilian loss, if
they felt like they were going to lose too much territory, they absolutely would.
Just like any other establishment power to include blue. In this scenario,
So, red provoking along finally gets the outrage, gets to the allies, and then the allies start
to win, they still lose.
What about the other side?
What about blue?
They continually respond and respond and respond.
Why doesn't that ever stop though?
What's the strategy being deployed by red?
They're hoping for the response.
They need that response because that response turns the bystander into somebody who's
sympathetic and the person who is sympathetic into somebody who's active.
Only one of those overwhelming responses is a recruitment drive for their opposition,
but they don't view it that way.
They view it as this time we'll be able to beat them.
This time it'll really end, but it never does because the strategies and the goals that
are paired. The strategy of responding, overwhelming force, paired with
establishment, status quo, maintain power and dominance. That is a recipe that
constantly allows for the outrage to be generated every time Red engages in a
provocation. Red, they're trying to be the anvil. They are trying to be the
anvil. Not the one who can dish out the most, but the one who can take the
most. So they keep taking the hits, keep recruiting, and it continues. But they
We just get used as pawns by neighboring nations who really don't want them to win.
Give them just enough to keep them in the fight.
This is cyclical and it never ends.
This is one of those examples where there is not a military solution to it.
There's no way either side can achieve their victory conditions using the strategy that
they're using.
Because blue, they're never going to get that status quo that involves peace.
Not with that strategy, not with using overwhelming response.
It'll never happen because they're just recruiting the next generation of Red combatant for them.
And Red will never get their territory back using provocation, partly because they don't
have the power and partly because the people who do that are their allies, they're not.
It is not in the allied nations interests for them to actually win and even if they
started to in this situation because blue is a nuclear power they still lose.
There is no military solution to this.
You have to change the strategy or the victory conditions, what each side wants.
It's the only way out.
If both sides stay locked in, well, it just continues, as it has for the past hundred
years in our mythical region.
That's how it plays out.
And it's played out all over the place.
Normally what actually brings it to a close, at least for some time, or it changes the
victory conditions that one side is willing to accept, it's normally something pretty
horrible.
Omar. That's generally what it takes to bring a close to it, but it's worth
noting that what actually brought the close was not the action, it was the
change in strategy. It was one side altering their strategy or their victory
conditions.
This dynamic plays out all over the world.
It's not just one place.
Whatever conflict you are currently thinking of, the same scenario, maybe different root
causes, maybe one side doesn't worship the sun, but the dynamics of the provocation and
the overwhelming response feeding into each other all over the world, all over the world.
The only way it ever stops is when somebody alters their victory conditions or somebody
changes their strategy.
And normally that is prompted by something horrible.
The bad part about that, the really bad part, is that the more horrible the conflict, the
thing that requires it to change, the thing that prompts one side or both sides to change
their victory conditions or their strategy, it has to be even more horrible.
It plays out over and over again.
And there are different little bits that go along with it.
Things that are common are for the establishment force to respond from the air.
Keep their people safe because their establishment, they want the status quo.
They're not trying to put too much out there because they have the power.
They don't want to risk losing it.
When you are talking about foreign policy, things become much clearer on why countries
do what they do if you remove all of the talking points and just look at it through their goals,
what their national interests are, and their power.
it pretty much always gives you a clearer picture. Talking about it like
this, it doesn't negate the horrible things that happen in these conflicts,
but it makes it easier to understand. The horrible things that occur, they still
occur but this helps people understand it and hopefully if the leaders of red
and blue were paying attention they would realize that the cycle does not
end. It just feeds. There is no end. There is no military solution to a conflict
like this. You have little things that they can try like realignment, which is
where the establishment force removes leadership elements, leaving those who
want peace or those who are not really good at not wanting peace, leaving those
behind but removing the rest. And that shifts. But that action, what does it
actually do, it shifts the strategy that's being deployed.
The military solution always leads back to either changing the other side's victory
conditions or altering the strategy.
This isn't me.
This is history, it's how it works.
The sad part is the leaders of red and blue, the various red and blue countries all over
the world, those leaders know this.
They're just hoping that the other side will change their strategy first.
That's why these conflicts last hundreds of years at times.
Anyway, it's just a thought, y'all have a good day.
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