Disputing Global Dystopia:Phillips on “Our Dark Age Future”

Longtime reader Isaac recently alerted me to an important article in the most recent edition of PARAMETERS. Some excerpts:

“Deconstructing our Dark Age Future” by LTC. P. Michael Phillips

….This article suggests that the system of Westphalian states is not in decline, but that it never existed beyond a utopian allegory exemplifying the American experience. As such, the Dark Age thesis is really not about the decline of the sovereign state and the descent of the world into anarchy. It is instead an irrational response to the decline of American hegemony with a naïve emphasis on the power of nonstate actors to compete with nation-states. The analysis concludes that because the current paradigm paralysis places a higher value on overstated threats than opportunities, our greatest hazard is not the changing global environment we live in, but our reaction to it.

….The state as described in this article differs greatly from the ideal imagined in the Westphalian paradigm. States do not universally enjoy unrestricted sovereignty. Nor are they equal. In fact, the sovereignty of a great number of the states in the international system is merely ascriptive.27 Because these imperfect conditions have more or less existed since long before 1648, it may be more helpful to think of any observed chaos in the international system as the natural condition, rather than a decline into disorder. If the system is not melting down, are so-called nonstate actors as significant for the long-term as they appear to be for the present?

….For some observers, this so-called NSA victory over a modern state underscores their warnings of impending global chaos. But in making this declaration, they fail to appreciate the source of Hezbollah’s strength: its dependent relationship with Iran, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Syria. Hezbollah did not create out of whole cloth its impressive array of modern weapons, nor did it independently develop the tactics, techniques, and procedures to employ them. Instead, Iranian weapons completed Hezbollah’s impressive arsenal, and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps advisers created the command and control center that coordinated the militiamen’s missiles.

Read the whole thing here.

This was an interesting read for me; many points with which to agree and disagree. A few thoughts in no particular order:

I am sympathetic to Col. Phillips’ criticisms of the overly abstract and detached nature of IR in regard to the nature of international law and sovereignty. You can certainly see that “arid” and “imperialistic” attitude in many academics and NGO activists who like to present their novel theories and interpretations as “international law” when they lack any historical basis whatsoever (and are usually gamed to be highly restrictive on the authority of Western sovereign states to use force and permissive/exculpatory of the actions of Marxist/radical/Islamist terrorists or insurgents).  Much of Phillips’ condemnation of IR smacking of unreality from a practitioner’s perspective is spot on.

That said, while definitely fuzzy and spottily adhered to in practice international law is not entirely “illusory”, nor is it a byproduct of 20th century Wilsonian American exceptionalism as Phillips argued. Perhaps Hugo Grotius rings a bell? Or Alberico Gentili? Or the long history of admirality courts? Like common law or an unwritten tribal code, international law has evolved over a very long period of time and does exert some constraint upon the behavior of sovereigns. Statesmen and diplomats think about policy in terms of the impression it will make on other sovereigns, and international law is one of the yardsticks they contemplate.  Admittedly, at times the constraint of international law is quite feeble but in other contexts it is strong. An American military officer, who can see firsthand the effect of creeping JAG lawyerism on command decisions on the battlefield ( in my view, greatly excessive and harmful ) and in the drafting of byzantine ROE, should know better than to make such a silly statement.

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