Syria Crisis Reveals New Paradigm

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/world/europe/syria-crisis-reveals-new-paradigm.html

Version 0 of 1.

BERLIN — In the early 19th century, the German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz concluded that war is an act of politics pursued by other means. Two centuries on, a student of modern conflict might be forced to recast the doctrine for the globalized, 24-hour-news-cycle era: War is a political act pursued to the extent that politics itself permits.

In recent days, indeed, as Western leaders wrestled with claims of chemical weapons use on the outskirts of Damascus on Aug. 21, the balance between politics at home and the ability to project military power abroad seems to have shifted into a new and more circumspect era, as voters tire of fruitless wars overseas and of their leaders’ rationales for fighting them.

When the contenders for the German leadership in elections this month faced off in a televised debate the other day, for instance, the gathering showdown over Syria seemed almost a postscript.

Only when the 90-minute discussion between Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Social Democratic challenger, Peer Steinbrück, was in its final stages did it turn to the question of whether Germany should participate alongside the United States in any military intervention in Syria.

The encounter came just three days after the British Parliament rebuffed Prime Minister David Cameron’s quest for a mandate to join in the punishment of President Bashar al-Assad for what the United States says was the forbidden use of sarin gas.

That setback — unparalleled in the memory of latter-day British interventionism — molded President Barack Obama’s decision, announced two days later, to seek congressional consent for a military strike in Syria.

Even in France, where President François Hollande wields executive power to send his forces to war, opposition lawmakers clamored — albeit in vain — for the right to vote on a French deployment when they debated the issue on Wednesday.

“Can France seriously, without any European ally, charge into an adventure of this sort?” said the lawmaker Christian Jacob from the rightist opposition. “We don’t think so.”

The responses pointed to a broader hesitancy.

Despite, or perhaps because of, their numbers, their wealth and their ever-expanding ranks, the 28 nations of the European Union are far from any sense of common purpose — beyond risk aversion — in their collective response to the crisis in Syria.

In Germany, the journalist Daniel Brössler wrote in Süddeutsche Zeitung, “It is clear that the overwhelming majority of citizens utterly reject German participation” in military reprisals.

European analysts drew much the same conclusion when Parliament rejected Mr. Cameron’s blandishments — a defeat described by the columnist Moritz Schuller in the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel as “the symbol of an era in which Western powers are in retreat.”

“There is no sign,” he wrote, “of foreign policy that defines and pursues objectives, lays out and defends its options. Some are willing, many are not. But there is more or less no sign of a coalition of one side or another. Syria’s civil war is unfolding within this global power vacuum.”

So, compared with the resolve displayed by a limited, U.S.-led coalition in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or the breadth of NATO involvement in Afghanistan, where soldiers from Germany and many other nations are deployed, what happened?

Even in 2011, Ms. Merkel withheld support for the air campaign by Britain and France that hastened the demise of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya (although, paradoxically, German Patriot missile batteries are deployed to shield her country’s NATO ally, Turkey, from Syrian attack).

As elections approach on Sept. 22, Germany is far more preoccupied with matters closer to home — unemployment, the euro-zone crisis. Berlin’s own history, in any event, has left a powerful antipathy toward militarism.

In Britain, war fatigue was magnified by the sense that the invasion of Iraq was built on the false premise that Saddam Hussein was able at short notice to draw on an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

The echo of that untruth subverted Mr. Cameron’s effort to maintain Britain’s reputation as a global player punching beyond its weight.

For the first time in decades, Britain forfeited its familiar and cherished role as Washington’s plucky ally, supplanted by its prickly neighbor, France, once the archfoe of U.S. intervention in Iraq.

The vote in Parliament “could turn out to be the signal for a strategic shift in favor of insularity,” said Ian Bond, a foreign policy specialist at the Center for European Reform in London. British lawmakers risked “sending the message that in the future the U.K. will be content to stay on the sidelines, regardless of what is happening in distant lands.”

For Mr. Hollande, emboldened by his army’s thrust into Mali earlier this year, and seeking to eclipse the Libyan triumph of his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, more than glory is at stake.

“If the United States and France do not want to lose all credibility,” the journalist and politician Noël Mamère wrote on the Rue89 news Web site in Paris, “they are obliged to intervene.”

“The current chaos in Syria is hard for European citizens to understand,” he said, “but what is happening concerns us all,” threatening to swamp the stirrings of Arab democracy with resurgent dictatorships, both secular and religious.

The teachings of von Clausewitz, Mr. Mamère said, have “never been more relevant than now, on the eve of taking up arms in Syria.”