At Project Syndicate Richard Haass compares and contrasts Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine:
Last time around, the world rallied against aggression. Not now. For one reason or another, many countries are reluctant to oppose Russia. India buys its arms and oil, as do others.
Moreover, America’s ability to rally the world is much diminished, in no small part because respect for the US is much diminished, the result of its internal divisions and widespread global opposition to the US interventions in Iraq in 2003 and in Libya in 2011.
President Joe Biden’s administration didn’t help itself by insisting on framing the war as one of democracy versus authoritarianism. Much of the world is hardly democratic and may have responded more favorably had the US emphasized the threat to a country’s freedom from invasion, which most of the world’s governments do support.
What, then, is to be made of these differences? Geopolitics and great-power rivalry, common throughout history, are back, as is armed conflict between countries. The post-Cold War respite, the holiday from history, is over.
I’m really not the right person to remark on that since I opposed all three of those interventions (Kuwait, Iraq, Libya). It’s not that I had any particular fondness for Saddam Hussein—far from it. My preferences in descending order were a) a consortium of Middle Eastern countries should have removed Saddam from Kuwait; b) a UN force headed by France and Britain should have ousted Saddam; c) we should just let Saddam have Kuwait. BTW any claim that Muslim states are reluctant to fight one another is bushwah. Turkey has been at war with practically every Muslim state at one point or another.
And there’s a direct chain of causation between our involvement in the Gulf War and our invasion of Iraq. Don’t ask me to explain our activity in removing Qaddaffi from Libya—I can’t. I guess we did it because we could. But here’s my point: support our involvement in the Gulf War and you support our invasion of Iraq. The two cannot be separated. And for some reason he doesn’t include Afghanistan. Our lengthy sojourn there followed by a hasty withdrawal probably did as much to discredit us as Iraq and Libya.
I think that Mr. Haass’s explanation for the difference between the two cases ignores an important fact. In 1990 the U. S. share of world GDP (PPP) was 26%. Now it’s 16%. We’re just not as important as we used to be. As I’ve said before U. S. standing in the world is downstream from our economy.
