The Syrian Airstrike and Geopolitics

Recently, President Trump initiated a bombing run on Damascus, justified as retaliation for a chemical weapons strike by Assad on his own people. It should be noted that Russia and its allies assert the chemical weapons attack in question was staged by the UK and, by extension, the US.

Everyone knew about the oil in Iraq, but it wasn’t as widely reported that Afghanistan had billions of dollars worth of undeveloped rare earth metals, including lithium, that we ‘liberated’ and developed for ourselves and our international allies at precisely the time businessmen were alarmed by the crisis caused by China’s near monopoly on rare earth metals. The US government had known about those resources since the late 1970s.

Whenever I see a geopolitical action justified by a moral position, since morally reprehensible things are ignored all over the world, the first question I ask myself is whether it’s for resources or geopolitical advantage. The US has a geopolitical stake in Syria since it’s cradled by Iraq, Turkey, Jordan and Israel and is within both Iran and Saudi Arabia’s sphere of influence. If you think about it like a game of risk, Syria is surrounded by the US coalition’s pieces on the board. If you were playing risk, you’d take Syria eventually. If Assad goes and a state emerges under the control of Saudi Arabia, the whole of the Middle East west of Iran is resistant to influence from Iran.

It makes sense to conquer or ally with the states in the Arabian peninsula because it cuts off the land route of East Asia to Africa, where the US and China are competing viciously over providing aid and development. Moreover, there are reports floating around that Qatar and Iran are currently in competition for whose oil pipeline will be able to be built across Syrian land to service Europe.

Everyone online is talking about whether or not this is a good action to take. To me, it boils down to a few questions.
1) Risk is the game of world domination — is playing the game of world domination something our government should be doing? In a perfect world, no. In the real world, as long as other state actors are engaged in this kind of geopolitical maneuvering, it’s necessary for the state to participate.

2) Is it a good thing for the world if the United States outperforms its competitors at this game? It’s really a set of imperfect options — in tens of thousands of years, is it more appealing for Russia, China or America to be the leading power? For all the criticism I have for America, which has its fair share of black marks, I would say I’d prefer American leadership. Yes, we had slaves, put the Japanese in camps and have a military industrial complex that’s doing horrific things all over the world. That’s bad. But Russia killed 25 million of its own citizens, has political dissidents jailed and assassinated and silences voices outside state run media. Sure our elections present an illusion of choice between two largely identical corporatist party officials, but China has a dictator who just eliminated his own term limits.

I enjoy our multiculturalism — even if many on the internet have gone off the deep end of politically correct histrionics, America is the least racist country of these three competing entities; Russia is 78% ethnically Russian with the remainder being almost exclusively caucasian, and China is 91% Han Chinese with the remainder being almost entirely other types of Chinese and Tibetan. China’s largest non-Chinese ethnic group is Korean — 0.13% of the population. Misguided notions about racial pride and ethnic superiority are widespread in both countries.

3) Is the United States competent to make this move successful? Here’s where the rub is. No, they are not. Their previous attempts at this have been famously bungled horribly and expensively. Refugees are pouring in all over the world and Europe is subsumed politically by debate about the Middle East as a whole. The American population is heavily fractured with only 28% approving of the government. Meanwhile Russia and China are united. In China 76% approve of the government, and in Russia the number is 87%. The timing is extremely bad to be making external moves; the focus needs to be on domestic development.

4) Do I have any control over any of this? No, I do not. Unless it turns out my 143 Twitter followers have super powers — extremely good, super OP super powers — there’s nothing I can do but watch and analyze for my own interest. I can read, I can try to keep my life from falling desperately into shambles, I can write and offer my insight, whatever it’s worth, to the world, but I can’t currently affect the geopolitical movements of international empires. Also, everyone knows the way to win at Risk is to hide out in Australia until everyone else destroys each other.

Who knows how this all plays out. I’ll be dead by the time it does, but I do think if there was a pie chart showing the military’s motivations for doing a thing, land control and resources would take up about 90% of it and noble humanitarian righteousness would take up a sliver.