Media Link: “AVFA” on the politics of desperation.

In this podcast Selwyn Manning and I talk about what appears to be a particular type of end-game in the long transition to systemic realignment in international affairs, in which the move to a new multipolar order with different characteristics than the previous one is marked by conflict, the inevitable friction that ensures from unregulated competition absent universal norms and boundaries of behaviour, and the unfortunate yet predictable turn to politics of desperation by actors who are personally or politically invested into status quos under siege. The consequences of this turn of events is both uncertain and yet likely negative in the end. We use Trump, Netanyahu, Zelensky, Putin, Maduro and Ortega as examples of desperate leadership, although the trend can be extended to other cases as well.

The bottom line is that little if any good can come from the politics of desperation.

Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies, Excerpt Five.

Military politics as a distinct partial regime.”

Notwithstanding their peripheral status, national defense offers the raison d’être of the combat function, which their relative vulnerability makes apparent, so military forces in small peripheral democracies must be very conscious of events happening in the world around them. At the same time, the constitution and deployment of military forces is a part and product of national political history and domestic considerations. Specifically, the dynamics of having to balance force flexibility, political ideology, popular consent and international security commitments constitute the crucible within which national military politics is forged. It is the vessel in which external strategic necessities give body to specific policy rationales and practices, or what can be called the military politics “partial regime” (Schmitter, 1993). 

In turn, this core area of state activity can be disaggregated into its component parts. Military politics involves three analytically distinct fields that, although addressed separately by the literatures on military science, sociology and warfare, are seldom examined together. At one level, lines of division are drawn between those who write as generalists versus those who write as specialists. Generalists focus on comparative civil-military relations, while on the other hand specialists focus on military organization and geopolitical strategy. One side looks at the relationship of the security community (mostly that of its military apparatus) with civilians holding positions in and out of power The other side looks at the logic and organization of the military apparatus itself. Comparative scholars who study civil-military relations operate at the macro level of analysis. Those who study military and geopolitical strategy focus on the meso-analytic level. Those who study military organization and tactics dwell on the micro-level of military politics. 

The generalist literature concentrates on issues of control, influence or relationship of the national security apparatus with civilian political society, the institutional features of which make for broad typologies of civil-military relations. The question of how specific civil-military relations impinge on organizational and strategic aspects of military politics is seldom addressed. Here we look at at the interrelated features of all three approaches in a cross-regional section of small peripheral democracies after the Cold War.The approach is novel for several reasons. The field of comparative politics is dominated by regional comparisons based upon linguistic, ethnic, constitutional, cultural, political or geographic proximity. The specialist literature on military affairs is divided into organizational and strategic analyses. In neither sub-field is it common to engage in cross-regional comparisons, much less coupled with an analytic perspective that cuts across the generalist versus specialist dichotomy. This project bridges the sub-disciplinary divide as part of an extended methodological and conceptual introduction to the case studies. 

The argument put forth is that military politics is more than the sum of its parts, nor is it just concerned with “military affairs.” Rather than a piecemeal treatment that highlights some features while ignoring others, the intent is to adopt a holistic approach that addresses the distinct aspects of military politics by dividing it into four issue areas instead of the three-fold division mentioned above. The four issue areas are civil-military relations (which examines the relationship of the military with the national political regime); force composition (comprised of organizational hierarchy, budget, personnel, training and equipment); geopolitical perspective (including geo-strategic context, strategic culture, threat perception, net assessment and risk projection); and force deployment (where, why and under what type of operational command and control). Having examined the particulars of each, the four issue areas can be summarized in order to provide an overview of the major features of military politics in each case. In doing so a more comprehensive picture can be drawn of the rationales and impact of the external security approaches adopted by the countries under scrutiny.

As an example of why a more integrated approach to the subject of military politics is necessary, consider briefly some of the issues involved in the study of one of its component parts or issue areas: civil-military relations. Most of the specialist literature on comparative civil-military relations focus on the relationship between military and civilian political elites, or on the relationship of the military as an institution with civilian political institutions. The impact of civil society on these relations is seldom and then only tangentially discussed. But the issue has more depth than conventional wisdom would suggest. 

Consider that New Zealand lost the protection of the ANZUS (Australia-New Zealand-United States) military alliance once it declared itself, over the objections of the military high command but riding a broad wave of popular support, a nuclear-free state in 1985. This forced reconfiguration of the New Zealand Defense Forces (NZDF), which now largely relies for military assistance and intelligence on Australia even if its military ties with the US have strengthened since 9/11. Today New Zealand reliance on Australia is expected in the event of external aggression against its national territory as well as seen in the military and logistical assistance for New Zealand troops deployed in regional theaters such as Afghanistan, Iraq, East Timor and the Solomon Islands. Although it is the cause of some professional embarrassment, the NZDF largely configures its forces to operationally mesh with Australian units. Beyond that, New Zealand has banked heavily on its strong commitment of troops to United Nations peacekeeping operations paying mutual defense dividends in the event that it is subject to external aggression. The government sees the Army as a peace keeping and humanitarian assistance force, with the Navy and Air Force largely confined to coastal defense and multilateral support roles (e.g., freedom of navigation exercises). The public remains largely disinterested in military-security affairs, and when it does focus on the subject it tends to be in reaction to civilian partisan disputes over defense policy.

In recent years Islamicist terrorism has dominated the threat perspectives the NZ intelligence community (NZIC) and military planners, leading to support for involvement in the anti-jihadist campaigns in Afghanistan (as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission authorised by the UN) and Iraq (as part of the post-Hussein effort to impose political order in Iraq and prevent the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in its territory). This orientation also dominated local security-intelligence perspectives, at least until the March 15, 2019 white supremacist terrorist attacks in Christchurch that killed 51 people and injured over 100 others. At that point the NZIC was forced to take a serious look at itself and the assumptions and methods (and biases) that underpinned their threat assessments until that day.

For its part, Portugal has a long tradition of alliance with the largest maritime power in the Atlantic, first the United Kingdom, then the United States, which influenced the military strategic perspective confronted by three different threat scenarios during the latter part of the twentieth century. These were the Portuguese colonial wars, the Cold War, and the War on Terror. The first scenario ran in parallel to the interests of the maritime patrons during the Cold War, and was prosecuted with their support because the colonial struggles in Lusophone Africa were seen as part of the global conflict between the Western and Soviet blocs (as proxy wars). This made for a relatively tight alliance in which Portugal recognized its role as a subordinate partner to the US and in which the US and other Western nations overlooked its authoritarian political features in exchange for military assistance to the declining empire. 

The Portuguese military perspective began to shift in the 1970s with the loss of the colonies and subsequent regime transition to democracy in the Portuguese “metropolis.” That was followed by the increased economic integration of Europe, the decline of the Soviet bloc, and the rise of Islamicist armed struggle flowing on the heels of greater economic and human interchange between Portugal and the Arab world. These shifting conditions made for a very different domestic and international context in which Portuguese military politics were formulated. The effects of these changes are ongoing but have, among other things, seen recent emphasis on land-based peace keeping roles that reversed the maritime interdiction priorities that had been the hallmark of the post-colonial Cold War strategic perspective. This led to disagreements between the Portuguese Army, on the one hand, and the Air Force and Navy, on the other, about the proper thrust of Portuguese strategic policy. The government wavers between territorial defense and extra-territorial mission orientation. 

In contrast, after a period of post-authoritarian hyper-politicization in the 1970s in which all issues of policy were the subjects of popular debate, the Portuguese public remains largely disinterested in the subject of national defense. The majority sees the proper role of the armed forces as humanitarian and logistical assistance at home and abroad, followed by multinational peace keeping duties. 

This raises a noteworthy point. In many democracies, civilians and the military high command responsible for defending them often do not share perceptions of threat. For peripheral democracies, the differences in threat perception can be acute. Portuguese and New Zealand public opinion sees very little in the way of direct external threats, especially if the countries steer clear of foreign entanglements such as the “War on Terror.” There is a strong current of neutralism in both countries in spite of their overwhelming identification with the West, and both have significant isolationist elements among the public at large. Civilian political leaders are more attuned to larger geostrategic and diplomatic realities, but these do not necessarily translate into convergence of perspective with military strategic planners. 

As an illustration, the Portuguese Navy wants submarines as a priority for maritime interdiction purposes while the Army wants more troops for multilateral operations, while the New Zealand Air Force similarly wants tactical combat aircraft for air defense and the Navy wants an upgrading of the blue water component of its fleet. The civilian political elite and public in both countries cannot see the reason why. This divergence of views between unformed personnel and civilians makes for a very different set of civil-military relations than in countries where threat perceptions or at least public opinion on the proper role of the armed forces coincide or are relatively proximate. 

Such is the case with Chile and, as an extended example, Fiji. In Chile the elected political elite installed after 1990 have insistently pushed for military re-orientation towards international peace keeping operations, whereas the military high command and public opinion continue to view territorial defense as a primary focus of the armed forces. In Fiji the political and military elite tend to agree on the international role but disagree on the domestic responsibilities of the armed forces, something that is reflected in the views of the ethnic groups from which each is in the majority drawn. The larger issue is that civil-military relations is a multi-faceted phenomena that operates both dialectically and synergistically, something that colors the other aspects of the military politics partial regime. 

A schematic representation of the military politics partial regime for any given country that covers the way in which the four issue areas (and their component parts) combine can be depicted as follows:

FIGURE 1: The Military Politics Partial Regime

The specific mix of the four issue areas makes for variations in military politics between regime types (authoritarian, democratic) depending on the way in which they are integrated and related. Changes in geopolitical conditions and geostrategic context have an impact on national civil-military relations. The latter are rooted in the specific power relationship between civil society, political society and military society. As a result, different types of civil-military relations respond differently to the external contextual shifts with specific security perspectives and institutional morphologies. This is seen in the organization, strategic doctrine, equipment and physical deployment of their respective militaries over time.

Variance is not just seen at the level of regime types. It also occurs within regime types, and across the sub-types of each (e.g. between parliamentary versus presidential democracies or between bureaucratic-authoritarian and national-populist regimes, to say nothing of post-revolutionary regimes such as Cuba, Iran or Vietnam). Although undoubtedly a worthy subject, here the focus is not on variations in authoritarian military politics. Instead, by examining a small-N cross-regional sample from Australasia, Southern Europe and the Southern Cone, the project seeks to demonstrate how historical and institutional factors at the national level combine with the geostrategic context to make for recent variation in the military politics of small peripheral democratic regimes. The general conclusions may turn out to be intuitive, but the specific process and nature of change makes for difference within the sample, which in turn makes for variance in the specific explanation for each. 

NEXT: The “double shocks” in international security affairs.

Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies; Excerpt Four.

Internal versus external security.

Regardless of who rules, large countries can afford to separate external and internal security functions (even if internal control functions predominate under authoritarian regimes). In fact, given the logic of power concentration and institutional centralization of coercive control that defines them, authoritarian regimes do not completely separate internal police and external military roles. Instead they prefer to overlap (if not fuse) the two (especially when confronted by mobilized internal dissent). In some cases the overlap or fusing is accompanied by an expansion of intelligence services with paramilitary capabilities, most of which are directed against domestic dissent. Conversely, small countries often find that the best way to achieve economies of scale in military matters is to combine some internal and security functions, such as through a national gendarmarie that merges police and paramilitary functions (border control, organized crime interdiction, counter-terrorism, etc.). However, a political problem makes the issue a bit more problematic for small democracies. That is because the combination of internal and external security roles may suit the political needs and threat perceptions of small country authoritarian regimes, but is at odds with the liberal democratic tradition with regards to the management of organized violence by the state.To wit: democratic regimes of all sizes prefer to administratively and legally separate internal police from external military security functions as part of the decentralization of economic, political and normative power that defines them as a system of rule. 

This has traditionally extended into the field of intelligence, although some small democracies such as New Zealand have historically centralized their intelligence gathering services as a matter of economy given their abject reliance on foreign patrons for external intelligence provision. More recently, some liberal democracies, led by the United States, have adopted more integrated approaches towards intelligence gathering in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks and subsequent acts of rightwing/white extremist terrorism.  For post-authoritarian regimes such as those of Chile and Portugal, the tension between the urge to centralize internal and external military and intelligence functions versus the normative preference for democratic decentralization became one of the major issues of civil-military relations after the restoration of electoral rule.

Regardless of size, the external/internal division of the combat function versus police duties has been the source of debate with regard to its impact on the ability to fight and win external wars. Some analysts believe that the ability to achieve victory in external wars is not a function of regime type, which means that the external versus internal security dichotomy only matters with regard to domestic control issues. What is most important for victory in conventional war is the relative size of the adversaries, specifically large size (see Desch, 1999). For other authors military preoccupation with domestic security, especially those such as the counter-insurgency operations that was the focus of Latin American national security doctrines in the 1960s-1980s, adversely impact of their ability to carry out external military missions. Here the diversion of resources towards internal warfare, especially when carried out by military authoritarian regimes with political agendas that involve the military as an institution remaining in power for extended periods of time, is a certain recipe for external combat weakness. The Greek invasion of Cyprus in 1973 and 1982 Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands, done for diversionary reasons by military regimes confronting rising socioeconomic unrest after extended periods of internal repression, are considered emblematic in that regard. 

It should be noted that the argument in favor of internal mission orientation being a drain on the external combat function is based upon the modern experience of recent military authoritarian, not democratic regimes. Even then, those who see no significance to the internal/external combat distinction point to other authoritarian regimes—the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, as well as Nazi Germany and Japan prior to 1942—to argue that the issue is problematic only when the military as an institution occupies the highest political decision-making roles in the regime. Military colonization of the state apparatus outside of its areas of professional expertise, coupled with the politicization of the officer corps that inevitably entails, is widely considered to be deleterious to military professionalism, particularly with regard to the external combat function. If for no other reason than this, many authoritarian regimes as well as all democratic regimes hold axiomatic that the armed forces as an institution, regardless of strategic focus, will subordinate to civilian political authority. The Peoples Republic of China, Cuba, Iran and contemporary Russia conform to this norm.

Whatever the truth of the matter with regard to the internal/external combat orientation and conventional warfare fighting ability, separation of external combat and internal security functions under democratic regimes is a normative preference rather than a practical requirement, even when logistical support infrastructures overlap to a significant degree. It is by no means an immutable norm, since the distinction between combat and police functions can be (and has been) blurred by democratic regimes in the event of major internal unrest or conflict.  In fact, concern with internal threats can and are often a focus of major attention by democratic regimes, as evidenced by Portuguese military concern well into the 1980s with so-called “indirect threats” (Marxist third columns) after the abortive Communist government take-over of 1975.  As a result, analysis of threat perception herein will not be confined to externally focused assessments, and will include internal threat assessment as well. But by and large, the combat function of militaries in democracies is an externally focused enterprise. After all, policing is about law enforcement and disciplining those who would violate universal standards of mores, norms and acceptable codes of social conduct; military combat is about killing foreign enemies of the state. Rather than maintaining domestic law and order, it is in carrying out the latter task where small democracies are at a disadvantage.

Because of the benefits conferred by size, the combat role of the armed forces in small democracies (demographically defined as those with populations under 20 million) is generally limited to being the junior partners of multi- or bi-national external military alliances, rather than the ultimate guarantors of national self-defense. Armed forces in small democracies most often serve as territorial and border patrols, be it at sea in the case of maritime nations such as Chile, Portugal and New Zealand, or on land as in the case of Chile and Portugal, or as an internal reserve should civil disorder assume mass proportions unmanageable by the police (as in New Zealand).  For most small democracies, contributions to larger security alliances pay dividends in the form of national defense being guaranteed by collective security reciprocities within those alliances. Some may choose to enhance value per soldier in the form of combat specialization, to include special operations (such as the New Zealand Special Air Services, or SAS, which often are attached to British or Australian SAS units when deployed overseas). Others may prefer to deploy troops for humanitarian and police operations such as nation building and peacekeeping under multinational aegis (where New Zealand has extensive experience with “blue helmet” deployments). In such missions the skills utilized are more akin to civil defense and disaster relief infrastructure. In any event, the nature of these commitments and missions differ, which brings up the question of political justification, mission definition, operational control–and of mission creep.

There is a two-fold external orientation among the militaries of small democratic regimes. The armed forces of small democracies tied to formal military alliance structures like NATO or ASEAN tend to specialize in defined combat roles (such as long range patrol and tracking) as part of joint force integration with their larger partners. In doing so they respond to the political justifications for the use of force offered by their larger allies, and seldom have their specific national interests at stake or used as a primary rationale for the deployment of troops abroad. This is sold to domestic constituencies as the necessity of burden sharing, where the protection afforded by larger allies is the return on the investment of troops in the larger conflicts those allies may be involved in.

On the other hand, the armed forces of small democracies with independence of mind and a non-aligned posture often seek refuge under the multilateral umbrella of United Nations mandates. Participation in “blue helmet” exercises such as peacekeeping and nation-building gives reason for keeping troops on the payroll, thereby offering a bureaucratic rationale of self-preservation for the military as an institution. Here the political justification for the external deployment of troops responds to the broader concerns of the international community as expressed through the United Nations or regional security agencies. It has a basis in self-interest because it reaffirms notions of mutual self-defense that smaller states embrace as a deterrent against the unilateral depredations of larger states. It also reaffirms the role of the armed forces in providing for the well being of others as well as being the last line of national defense. It is seen to encourage military professionalism via collaborative exposure to and interaction with other military forces. 

The international role of the armed forces in such cases is mostly directed towards engineering, medical and police support, often in concert with civilian non-governmental or multinational organizations. These not only can be deployed internally in the case of an emergency, but also serve as human resource training for skilled labor inputs to the domestic market (the two sides of its internal support role). The combat function, although trained for, is clearly subordinate to the humanitarian and other non-lethal functions of the military apparatus.

Next: The Military Politics “Partial Regime.”

Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Excerpt Three.

The notion of geopolitical  periphery.”

The concept of periphery used here refers strictly to what can be called the geopolitical periphery. Being on the geopolitical periphery is an analytic virtue because it makes for more visible policy reform in response to changing external conditions. It is defined as a situation where a nation is engaged in, but not central to the pressing military-security issues of the moment, be it through direct engagement in conflict or involvement in larger alliance decision-making. It does not refer to the core-periphery distinction commonly used by worlds-systems theory and its successors, and as the case sample shows, it is not a product of the global North versus South divide. It does not refer to economically peripheral countries in a context of regionalization and globalization of production, trade and exchange, although it acknowledges the overlap that may occur between economic and military integration processes. As used here “periphery” is not synonymous with “marginality.” The differentiation is based on the fact that these countries are involved, even if not by choice, in the overarching military-security engagements of recent times. They are not excluded from them. Moreover, when it comes to regimes, “marginal” implies instability or inconsequentiality of the regime. Yet the first criterion for selection used here is not the relative stability or consequence of the regimes in question (although democratic regime stability is a factor in the analysis of the case studies), but their relative distance from international military-security decision-making during fluid times. 

It is this commonality that binds the case studies together as a sample: their relative distance from the decision-making that governs the major conflicts of the last two decades. After all, none of these countries has a vital national interest at stake in these conflicts other than a commitment to international norms and principles and support for larger allies. This does not mean that they are inconsequential in the scheme of things, or as analytic subjects. To the contrary, as actors that must respond to changing external conditions without having decisive influence in the decision-making that created them, small peripheral democracies are excellent subjects for the study of policy reform in fluid times, be it in the field of military politics or others. This is due to what might be called the “ripple effect” of world politics: ideological and policy change in the center has a stronger impact the further from the center of decision-making, but still connected to it, that a country gets. As a result small peripheral democracies are, in a phrase, microanalytic barometers of larger international trends (see Buchanan and Nicholls, 2003).

What these countries all share is physical distance from the major political and military power centers around which issues of global security revolve, and physical distance from the military conflicts in which their armed forces are involved. Physical distance in large measure determined their traditional status on the geopolitical periphery. Portugal is located on the southwestern corner of Europe, Chile on the southwestern edge of the Western Hemisphere, New Zealand in the southwestern corner of the Pacific Rim. This has historically given them a measure of insulation from direct threats by larger adversaries (Portuguese concerns about Spain and Chilean concerns about Argentina, Bolivia and Peru notwithstanding), as well as physical distance from the major conflicts of the twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Even so, given the global reach of military power mentioned earlier, their relation to global conflicts has been more political than physical, in the form of neutrality or alliance with larger powers. 

That has been reflected in their approaches towards World War Two, the Korean War and Vietnam conflict. Remaining neutral in World War Two, Portugal spent decades on the outskirts of NATO decision-making in spite of its being a founding member of the alliance. Chile, another neutral in World War Two (although, like Portugal, its Axis sympathies were undisguised), was by 1970 no more than, in the words of Henry Kissinger, “a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica.” Militarily, New Zealand offered its subjects to a variety of UK and US-led wars during the twentieth century and well into the next. These make for different legacies when confronting the current context in which security politics are constructed. The bottom line is that it is, first and foremost, spatial location that makes these countries members of the geopolitical periphery, a situation that continues to do this day. From that point the political aspects of the military-security equation can be factored in.

The consequences of these legacies are discussed ahead. For the purposes of the argument, the focus here is exclusively on geopolitically peripheral democracies, nations that reside on the geographic fringe of the major military alliances and coalitions that have dominated the world scene in the last 25 years, although continuing to have ongoing involvement or engagement with them. As it turns out, the reasons for geopolitically peripheral status differ among the cases, something that in turn has an impact on the way in which each country has approached the changing international security environment of the last two decades.

Next: Internal versus External Security.

Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Excerpt Two.

A question of size.

Small size generally means large vulnerability. The perception of threat is broader and often more immediate for small countries. The feeling of comparative weakness, of exposure to risk, and of potential intimidation by larger powers often permeates the security perspectives of small states. Some even exhibit “garrison state” approaches to national security, including adoption of policies of preemption. Israel is the salient case of recent times, but in this sample Chile has a history of garrison state outlooks due to its narrow land mass and extensive land and sea borders (leading to a lack of strategic “depth”). Irrespective of the specific response, such concerns about relative weakness and vulnerability translate into a pressing need to accurately read evolving threat scenarios, changing geopolitical contexts and strategic circumstances. 

This is true regardless of physical location. As World War Two demonstrated, advances in military technology allow for global force projection by large military powers, something that even island states like New Zealand have experienced first hand. Thus, regardless of the lengths to which they are compelled to go in order to defend themselves, small countries often believe that they must be more vigilant than large countries against a variety of potential threats both near and afar. For example, domestic instability in Indonesia, the Solomon Islands or Papua New Guinea may hold relatively little concern to the United States, China or Russia beyond a potentially adverse impact on economic interests and the possibility of local proxies dragging them into direct conflict. The growing Chinese submarine presence shadowing its blue water fishing fleet in the South Pacific is of relatively low concern to European and African powers. But for New Zealand, instability in the Melanesian archipelago and Southwest Pacific or militarisation of the Antarctic constitute more immediate threats. That can either be by drawing New Zealand into direct military intervention, or from ethnic conflicts in the Solomons or New Guinea spilling over onto other island states in the Western Pacific and/or expatriate communities located throughout the region. For its part, the Chinese naval presence in the Southwest Pacific is seen as an emerging threat to important sea lanes of communication between East/Southeast Asia and the Antipodes. This has become a major concern for New Zealand as well as its larger security partners.

For its part, Chile has more to be concerned about Peruvian maritime territorial ambitions (and vice versa) than Brazil does with Peruvian land encroachment, while Portugal has more to fear from unchecked North African mass migration and the potential for backlash produced by its involvement in NATO deployments than does a similarly sized country like Austria. On the other hand many small nations do not exhibit undue preoccupation with external threats, either because they are seen to not exist, or more often, precisely because they are included in security alliances such as NATO. But that is exactly why they join: if they felt secure they would not feel the need to align with such umbrella organizations, or to seek the bi-lateral protection of larger defense patrons. To the contrary, the starting point for most small states is a quest for security that they find impossible to achieve on their own.  How they do so is secondary to the imperative that they do so. 

The issue, again, is a matter of size. Beyond the elements of discipline, motivation and will, a nation’s ability to defend itself, much less wage war, is determined by the size of its resource base. Size is physical, economic and human. Advantages in size translate into military strength, be it via economies of scale (production of basic military base materials such as iron and oil), population (ability to muster troops), or geography (that is, the concept of strategic depth (land mass and terrain under arms), the larger of which makes for difficult conquest by external aggressors (unless they adopt piecemeal warfare approaches such as those being employed by Russia in the Ukraine, which are susceptible to marshalling-of-force defensive strategies). Needless to say, the ability to translate resource advantages into war-fighting capability passes through a raft of other intervening variables such as political legitimacy, ideological motivation, technological sophistication and the like. But all things being equal, size confers military advantage. For those lacking in human and natural resource bases, sources of comparative advantage, or economies of scale and population numbers upon which to draw on, policies of complete self-defense are impossible. For them, neutrality, subordination or alliance are the strategic options. 

To be sure, the value of well-trained citizen militias like those of Switzerland in deterring aggressors by raising the costs of invasion cannot be discounted. When strategically organized into a prolonged armed resistance employing guerrilla (irregular, non-conventional) tactics, small states may even stand a respectable chance of prevailing in an asymmetric war of attrition against larger adversaries whose vital interests are not at stake and who choose not to wage wars of annihilation. Vietnam is a case in point, and Cuban defense strategy is premised on such a scenario (although the origins of the Stalinist regimes in both countries brought with it the help of larger military patrons, which, if lessened now, guaranteed their initial survival and consolidation). But for most small countries, foreign military assistance and mutual defense agreements are the most sought after key to national security.This makes small states, and their military planners, especially conscious of changes in the geostrategic environments in which they operate. 

Dependent as they are on their connections with larger powers, on the specific nature of these relations, on their internal political dynamics and on the ongoing relations between the larger powers themselves, security practitioners in small democracies must be able to respond quickly to changing geopolitical events and shifting strategic doctrines. This may not always be in accordance with the perspectives of civilian political elites or the public at large, who do not necessarily perceive security issues in a manner akin to those directly responsible for national defense. In fact, quite the contrary often occurs.

Absent dire, immediate and compelling threats to national sovereignty or physical integrity, the public in many small democracies see spending on external defense as a luxury that comes at the expense of other core areas of state endeavour such as health, education and welfare. The public perception often is that being small and insignificant on the world strategic stage means that these countries do not attract the unwanted attention of larger states, and when they do attract such attention, they can rely on others for protection.  Conversely, political and military elites in small democracies are more cognizent of the fact that it is the commitment of military forces to external security roles, be they multilateral or bilateral in nature, along with or beyond cultural-diplomatic or economic and trade ties, that secure them the protection of larger patrons.

Because of this difference in perspective, spending on external defense often translates into a losing election proposition for democratic governments in small countries. This is due to the fact that domestic policy areas (including domestic anti-crime efforts) are more vital than military security when it comes to the reproduction of the contingent mass consent that is the foundational stone of democratic regimes. In any political system based upon competitive elections and contingent mass consent, foreign military commitments are particularly susceptible to the vagaries of public opinion, especially in times of peace. In small democracies the issue is particularly acute given the limited resource base available, which means that military involvement in foreign theaters requires universally compelling rationales that transcend patriotic impulses exploitable–one way or the other–during electoral cycles. In most cases the comfort of a larger security umbrella is the preferred option, with unilateral external force projection being the exception to the norm. 

The was evident in Portugal in the 1980s and 1990s, where the slow process of post-authoritarian military reform towards new external missions was not so much due to ingrained corporate attitudes and bureaucratic entrenchment within the armed forces that favored continuation of internal security roles. Rather, it was more a product of two internal factors: inter-service rivalries over the strategic orientation to be adopted, and competing government priorities. The latter were driven by public concerns with domestic issues rather than military projection in the absence of immediate threats, especially given the “insurance policy” provided by Portuguese membership in NATO. (Vasconcelos, 1986; 1988). The former were driven by conflicts within the armed forces about which service branch should be given leadership priority and corresponding resources given the new strategic posture. The Army? The Navy? The Air Force? How should they be organised and how much should each be funded? That was at the core of the inter-service disagreements over future force composition and projection.

But are small democracies any more vulnerable or their concerns with military preparedness and projection any different than those of other small countries with non-democratic forms of rule?  The answer is yes, and the issue is one of internal politics rather than external threat realities. Small authoritarian regimes may at times divert scarce societal resources to external defense operations because domestic mass consent is not sought or put to legitimate tests of accountability. What this means is that unlike small democracies, which must make the case for external military involvement in a way that passes successfully through the filter of popular consent, small authoritarian regimes simply do not have to do so. The colonial defense strategies of authoritarian Portugal are emblematic in this regard, and Chile’s territorial sabre rattling against Argentina and Peru under the Pinochet dictatorship was a manipulation of rather than a response to genuine threats or nationalistic sentiment on the part of the Chilean population. The fore-mentioned cases of Cuba and Vietnam, however “popular” they claim to be, are further examples of small authoritarian regimes unconstrained by the filter of freely given consent. Moreover, under all authoritarian regimes, big or small, the military-security apparatuses are primarily used for internal control, with the difference between inclusionary and exclusionary dictatorships being read by their management of political opposition, ideological mobilization capabilities, control of productive investment and labor market conditioners. In all cases, public expenditures on security in small authoritarian regimes far outstrip those seen under small democratic regimes, and their capabilities of control of the domestic population often exceed even those of larger authoritarian brethren (e.g. Singapore versus Myanmar).

NEXT: The notion of geopolitical periphery.

Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Excerpt One.

This project analyzes security politics in three peripheral democracies (Chile, New Zealand, Portugal) during the 30 years after the end of the Cold War. It argues that changes in the geopolitical landscape and geo-strategic context are interpreted differently by small democracies with peripheral involvement in the major international security decisions of modern times, different geopolitical perspectives, foreign relations networks and dissimilar histories of civil-military relations (post-authoritarian versus post-colonial in this sample). These democracies react to but do not initiate changes in the strategic environment in which they operate. The specific combination of internal and external factors involved in security policy-making  translates into different strategic perspectives, institutional features and policy outcomes that combine the traditional interest in preservation of the nation-state with an understanding of the diplomatic as well as military and intelligence necessities of variegated partnerships in a fluid international environment in which the threat of traditional inter-state conflict shares space with asymmetric warfare involving state and non-state actors. 

The issue of how small states, and small democracies in particular, react to changes in the international security environment is especially salient during periods of global change such as the period following the end of the Cold War. During that time international security affairs suffered two appreciable modifications that required major adjustments on the part of a wide variety of actors, especially militarily and economically vulnerable countries such as those studied here. 

These milestones were the end of the Cold War and its attendant bi-polar security alliance structure at the beginning of the 1990s, the subsequent emergence of a unipolar international system in which the United States served as the world “hegemon” and systems regulator by acting as a global police force that intervened in a number of low intensity conflicts that were not existential in nature (to the US and its major allies), but which promoted regional instability that undermined the international system as a whole. 

This was manifest in the spread of Islamicist-inspired insurgencies in response to Western secular expansion after the decline of the Stalinist bloc. The latter saw its definitive pronouncement on September 11, 2001, which forced another turn of the international security “screw.” That was marked by the advent of global unconventional warfare in concert with ongoing conventional operations and increased preoccupation about the use of weapons of mass destruction by non-state as well as state actors. Notions of cooperative security, which had replaced collective security doctrines as the dominant Western security paradigm in the 1990s, gave way to global asymmetric warfare involving collective security partners. Multinational counter-insurgency operations in parallel with peace-keeping and nation-building (as operations other than war) became the dominant form of conflict until the mid 2010s, 

At the same time, while the US and various coalition partners expended blood and treasure fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Northern Africa, Syria, the Sahel and East Africa (and beyond), other powers directed resources into economic and military development unimpeded by the costs of those “small wars.” India, Russia and the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) poured resources into building the foundations for their rise to Great Power status (India and the PRC as emergent powers and Russia as a re-emergent former Superpower). From 2001 to the present the international system began a process of transition, as of yet incomplete, to a multipolar order in which the US is now just one of several Great Powers competing for influence using “hard” as well as “soft” (and “smart” and “sharp”) power in order to achieve strategic objectives. 

The move to multipolarity was accelerated in the 2010s by the end of many of the low intensity conflicts that preoccupied Western military leaders in the early 2000s. The US and its coalition partners withdrew from Afghanistan and Iraq and downsized their presence in other areas in which jihadism was present. The territorial defeat of the Islamic State (aka ISIS or Daesh) in Northern Iraq and Syria reduced armed disputes involving jihadists to localized encounters. Syria remains stalemated between the Russian-backed Assad regime, US-backed anti-Assad forces and ISIS remnants while post-Gaddafi Libya is rendered by sectarian violence unimpeded but armed by outside forces. The Taliban have regained control of Afghanistan. Shiite and Sunni militias vie with the post-occupation Iraqi defense forces for dominance. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, with the war ongoing, while Israel responded to the October 2023 Hamas attacks that killed 1300 people and in which 150 were taken hostage by engaging in asymmetrical collective punishment against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank that has resulted in over 40,000 deaths, mostly civilian non-combatants. The PRC has expanded its reach deep into the South China Sea, provoking clashes with its littoral neighbors, while at the same time pushing its land claims against countries on its western borders. The Sahel region has seen a rise of indigenous militant groups opposing local authorities and their Western partners (such as the Tuareg in Mali). Via proxies and directly, Iran has conducted attacks on Israeli and Western interests, and the Kim regime in North Korea continues to rattle its nuclear sword. In effect, by the end of the 2010s, the global “War on Terror” was effectively over but conflicts and wars, both conventional and unconventional, remained as a systemic constant.

In both East and West but more importantly, in the global North and South, the strategic gaze has returned to a “Big War” focus involving peer militaries in the emerging multipolar system. The PRC’s aggressive military diplomacy in the South China Sea, marked by island-building projects in disputed waters that defy international norms regarding territorial sovereignty and maritime laws, coupled with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, represent the two most obvious signposts that a return to “Big Wars” is now on the minds of strategic planners world-wide. The way in which peripheral democracies responded to these events and others therefore offers insight into the broader issues at play in the realm of comparative security politics in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. 

So why choose Chile, New Zealand and Portugal as case studies? The justification for their selection is made by the internal differences that underlie their geo-strategic commonality. All are small in population size and geographically distant from the major centers of international conflict and security decision-making. All are countries of the “West,” albeit of different ethnic and cultural traditions and democratic capitalist maturity. All have recent histories of UN-mandated peace keeping, and all have minor involvement in the larger conflicts of the early twenty-first century. Military forces from all of these countries are currently deployed overseas as part of UN-mandated multinational security commitments. All have seen their military politics transformed, to one degree or another, by the strategic-doctrinal and geopolitical shifts that followed the end of the Cold War. Yet, varying in length of democratic experience, institutional stability and levels of economic development, each has a very distinct set of civil-military relations, military institutional culture and strategic perspective that impact on their specific response to the changing global security context after 1990. It is the effects of these changes on national security politics across three geographic regions that are of concern here.

Why go “small, democratic and peripheral” when studying comparative security politics? The world strategic environment is dominated by large countries with substantial military resources and the nature of contemporary conflicts has taken on increasingly complex characteristics, so it appears counter-intuitive, if not inconsequential, to study countries that have no major impact on the strategic matters of the day. However, there is good justification to do so, because small democratic nations serve as weather vanes of larger global trends and the repercussive effects that they generate. It is equally clear is that there are few studies that systematically compare, on a cross-regional basis, the military politics of small, peripheral democracies. There are virtually none that do so with a specific focus on the way the post-Cold War move to unipolarity, subsequent rise of the War on Terror, followed by the shift to multipolarity and return of Big War strategising between peer competitors has influenced the evolution of military-security dynamics in them.

NEXT: A question of size.

Excerpting “Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies.”

In the late 2000s-early 2010s I was researching and writing a book titled “Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Chile, New Zealand and Portugal.” The book was a cross-regional Small-N qualitative comparison of the security strategies and postures of three small democracies on the global geopolitical periphery, both physically and in terms of their involvement in the major strategic decisions of modern times. I set the time frame for the study as the period 1990-2020 because it covered the end of the Cold War as a starting point and included 9/11, the so-called War on Terror and the transition from bipolarity to unipolarity to multipolarity in the International system (the latter which remains ongoing). Its original endpoint will require some extension to account for developments since 2020, but the conceptual apparatus and analytic framework underpinning the study remains valid as a methodological approach (more on this later).

As some readers may know, I departed NZ academia in 2007 and after spending three years at the National University of Singapore I returned to NZ to follow my wife (who took an academic job in her homeland) and to help raise a family. I resurrected and rebranded a consultancy that I had started in the US prior to my arrival in NZ and left academia for good. That was a bittersweet decision to make, since I enjoyed teaching and research, but I am told and have seen that the academic Taylorism and market-driven managerialism that I butted heads with in the 2000s has gotten much worse since my departure from the academe.

Unfortunately, without the institutional support of a university and needing to monetarize my knowledge and experience via the consultancy in order to help pay the bills, I had to abandon the book project. I already had 13,000 words written by way of an introduction outlining the rationale behind and methodological approach to the project, but needed follow up research funds to undertake field research in the countries being studied. That was impossible given my new “business” orientation, plus I had already been turned down for a Marsden Research Grant while still at the NZ university where I used to work (it turns out the Marsden Fund award committee at that time was uninterested in security topics, much less a cross-national comparative study in which NZ was just one case study rather than the focus of attention). In fact, even such basic things as not being able to access a university library greatly impended my ability to do the secondary research required for the book to be comprehensive and thorough in its analysis. If one thinks of the cost of buying specialised books and subscriptions to professional journals and other pertinent material (for example, a single individual subscription to one political science journal can cost US$400/year), then it should be clear that writing academic books involving in-depth research in a social science discipline requires institutional support that I no longer had. Confronted by that reality, I shelved the project even as I thought of resurrecting it later or at least eventually writing an academic article that summarised my findings.

Ten years or so later, I have started to look at what I wrote and decided that I am going to except the introduction here at KP in order to share the conceptual premises and analytic framework used in it. I am hoping that some readers will find the argument of interest and if so inclined, offer critiques, comments and suggestions. I am not sure that the book will ever come to fruition but perhaps I can get that academic article out or simply publish it on the consultancy website even if it is more of a think piece than a targeted assessment of a matter relevant to paying client interests. Most importantly, it gives me a reason to re-visit the original argument and make updates as part of the review and revision process.

The excerpts will begin to appear in the next post. I shall try to keep them relatively short but true to the original book narrative.

Choosing the lesser evil.

(With Kate Nicholls)

Presidential elections were held in Venezuela on July 28th, delivering an apparent victory for the Opposition headed by Edmundo Gonzalez of the Unitary Democratic Platform (PUD) but a declared victory for incumbent Nicolás Maduro of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). Gonzales was the hand-picked successor to businesswoman Maria Corina Machado, who was banned from running for president in the build-up to the election and who remains the power behind the PUD throne. Nicolas Maduro is the heir of Hugo Chavez’s “Bolivarian” legacy, something that sparked a resurgence amongst Latin American leftist movements at the turn of the 21st century but which has lost its promise and backtracked into decline and decay in the decades since then.

The election was held in the context of widespread claims and considerable evidence of electoral intimidation and fraud, against a backdrop of various restrictions on civil and political liberties, so the legitimacy of the declared outcome has been questioned from within Venezuela as well as abroad. In fact, wide-spread violent protests have broken out since the results were announced, and the possibility of civil war cannot be discounted as more evidence emerges that the election may have in fact been stolen by Maduro and his supporters. It remains to be seen whether he will remain power or face a coup, a domestic civil uprising, an escalation in regional or foreign intervention, or some combination thereof.

As even a causal observer will note, Venezuelan society has become especially polarized since the rise of former coup-monger Hugo Chávez to power in the 1990s (Chavez led two attempted coups before finally gaining power via electoral means). This polarization is not limited to Venezuelan partisan politics. Its echoes are heard as far away as New Zealand and elsewhere. Progressive left voices in particular, on social media and the blogosphere, are supportive of Maduro’s win, reject claims of electoral intimidation and fraud as right-wing disinformation, and highlight the potential for United States involvement should any coup eventuate. This championing of the Chávez-Maduro Bolivarian regime by the left is not new: Chávez’s brand of nationalist-Indigenous populism (cast as indigenous socialism) and its resistance to United States influence in Latin America gained much international attention in the early 2000s and continues to be supported today. For much of the Left in NZ and elsewhere, then and now, the historical sins of the US far outweigh the current crimes of contemporary Left authoritarians, Maduro included. For their part, Western media outlets see Maduro as a tin-pot dictator hell-bent on holding power at all costs, continuing in a long line of bad Leftist henchmen that extends back to Castro, Lenin, Mao and Stalin.

This framing poses a dilemma for political scientists. The discipline tends to prioritise regime type over left-right politics. That is to say, the discipline’s ideological preference is for democracy over dictatorship rather than the policy content of either type of regime. This is an obvious normative bias, one that is readily defended due to the fact that, despite all its limitations and contemporary flaws, empirically democracy does a better job at protecting basic human rights than any other regime type. The balance on how this is achieved (say, between individual and collective rights and responsibilities and between economic freedom, opportunity and equality) then becomes the stuff of quantitative and qualitative positive (objective) micro-analytic analyses rather than normative macro-analytic preferences. That allows political scientists to distinguish between specific types of dictatorship and democracy based on organisational features, public policies and socio-economic outcomes, including variants such as military-bureaucratic versus populist authoritarianism or social versus liberal democracy (which is also why political scientists can get very pedantic when words like “fascist” and “communist” are thrown around as epithets by mindless pundits).

The current situation in Venezuela underscores this dilemma all too well: from a democratic standpoint there is no comfortable way to back a winner given the nature of both sides, and the true loser in the game is likely democracy as an regime type and an ideal. Let’s examine why.

First, the Bolivarian regime. What began as a model for the “Pink Tide” of electoral socialism in Latin America in the late 1990s has devolved into a left-leaning nationalist populist authoritarian kleptocracy characterised by nepotism, corruption and incompetence. An increasingly shaky cadre of state managers, military leaders and Nicolas Maduro loyalists have stripped the country’s coffers nearly bare while allowing critical infrastructure to decay, including in the all-important oil sector. As a result, health, education and welfare indicators (including basics such as provision of transportation and potable water)  have dropped precipitously while poverty, unemployment and crime rates have spiked (a general assessment is provided here). Inflation is running at 130,000 percent per year, rendering the Venezuelan Bolivar worthless as a token of financial exchange. 8 million Venezuelans have migrated abroad, and the Venezuelan State has been hollowed out by bureaucratic parasitism and partisan agency take-overs and patronage. The result is country that has seen its GDP drop a staggering 80 percent in the decade since Maduro succeeded Chavez, even with considerable financial and material support from sympathetic foreign partners such as Cuba, Iran, the PRC and Russia. Truth be told, the country is ruled by thieves posing as anti-imperialist revolutionaries. In this they resemble Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua or Putin’s Russia more than post-Castro Cuba or Xi Jin-ping’s PRC. In short, the situation is dire. Under Maduro Venezuela has become a failed State.

The curse of Venezuela is that the PUD-led opposition is not a choirboy’s convention either. Besides the failed 2002 coup against Chavez and the 2018 drone attack against Maduro during a parade and its member’s history of dubious commitment to democratic practice (Gonzalez’s admirable personal traits as an academic and diplomat as well as his middle class roots notwithstanding), the current opposition has significant ties to Venezuelan ex-pats linked to rightwing Cuban and Nicaraguan exiles, who in turn have attracted the support of conservative groups in the US and other Latin American countries (some of which have connections to the military and oligarchical dictatorships of the 1980s and 1990s as well as contemporary political figures like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Millei in Argentina). Machado has been courted by and has extensive links to very conservative foreign actors, especially those in the US, for two decades. She also has direct social links to the pre-Boliviarian oligarchical past, as her parents were wealthy members of the old elite. For all of their talk of “democracy” and “freedom” and the gloss of respectability offered by Gonzalez, the unifying feature of the Venezuelan opposition led from behind by Machado is more about retribution and roll-back wrapped in a nostalgic vision of the pre-Boliviarian past and a desire to return the country to the old, albeit re-branded status quo. For all the public discontent about Maduro’s government, that is a non-starter.

For the PUD-led opposition the trouble is that, much like Cuba after the revolution, Venezuela is different for having undergone the Bolivarian experiment, especially when it comes to socio-economic and racial hierarchies. It therefore will not easily return to a past that was not always good for everyone. It is no longer the country of plastic surgery beauty queens, cheap petrol and affordable Scotch whisky for those who lived in the affluent Eastern Caracas foothill suburbs because if nothing else, economic and social decline and outward migration have made for a great leveller in Venezuelan society. In other words, the opposition yearns for a return to a political, social and economic status quo that no longer exists and which will be impossible to return to even if Maduro is forced from power. More importantly, a return to the pre-Bolivarian past is not only unrealistic, it is undesirable.

That is because Venezuela was no shining example of liberal democracy before the rise of Chávez. It is true, underpinned partly by the benefits of oil wealth, that it was one of the most stable polities in Latin America for much of the late twentieth century. The country did not experience the same pattern of populist authoritarianism and military rule that occurred in countries such as Chile, Brazil, or Argentina, or the kind of guerilla and para-military led violence that occurred in neighbouring Colombia or in Central America. Instead, the election-based two party-dominant regime that ruled Venezuela from 1958 until the late 1990s was what comparative politics specialists refer to as a limited, oligarchical or restricted democracy. The spoils of oil wealth and benefits of close ties with the United States were shared between two elite-backed political parties that allowed for relatively free elections, rotation in government office and key interest group cooptation via material incentives for favoured organisations. But that arrangement purposely left little room for truly leftist or authentic working class representation, thereby overseeing and perpetuating deep-seated socio-economic inequalities. Cheap fuel and commodity imports subsidized by taxes on primary (mostly petroleum) exports served as the opiate of the masses that maintained social peace. But as years passed after the 1958 tripartite agreement that founded the modern Venezuelan Republic (the Pact de Punto Fijo), the elite compact eventually turned into an increasingly distant and corrupt political duopoly unresponsive to popular demands for change, leading to outbreaks of protest and even episodic guerrilla violence.

Attuned to this discontent, Army officer Hugo Chavez led abortive “colonel’s coups” in the 1990s that paved the way for his eventually successful run for the presidency in 1999. His campaign was staunchly anti-elitist, anti-imperialist and redistributionist, with major state agencies expanded or granted control over previously private agencies. That contributed to the rise of the indigenous-socialist movement that came to be known as Bolivarianism and which continued after the eventual transfer of power from Chavez to Maduro (Chavez’s vice-president and former union leader) upon the former’s death in 2014. The trouble is that Chavez and his Bolivarian cohorts’ managerial skills did not match their ideological ambitions, and after much public spending at home and abroad–something that did lift basic domestic socioeconomic indicators and forged international solidarity links with foreign anti-Western regimes for the first ten years of the Bolivarian experiment–the wheels began to come off the Venezuelan cart. Graft crept into the public sector while investment declined and public spending continued unchecked even as it was increasingly untethered from hard currency earnings. The Boliviarians began to emulate their predecessors when it came to bourgeois lifestyles, the main difference being that they preferred to wear khakis and red berets rather than Liki likis, guayaberas and flowered polleras.

Occasional observers of Latin American politics tend to blame much of the region’s history of political instability, especially when it comes to worldwide attention-grabbing events such as military coups or foreign interference, especially on the part of the United States. While it is historically undeniable that the United States has supported various dictators in their rise to power, and withdrawn support when this no longer seems of benefit or, in true neo-colonial fashion, opposed revolutionary movements wherever they arose, other factors including political polarisation, democratic backsliding, bureaucratic corruption and military intervention cannot solely be explained by external factors. Domestic forces of one kind or another always play a role: from the problems of policy deadlock associated with forms of government that combine presidentialism with multi-party legislatures, to the failure to instil cultures of accountability and transparency in private and public institutions, to deeply ingrained social and racial hierarchies underpinned by institutional legacies, to historical patterns of land ownership and other forms of commercial exchange, and more. 

That said, foreign involvement, if not outright intervention, is already an element in the politics surrounding the Venezuelan presidential election. Cuba has sent para-military advisors to bolster the Maduro regime by helping organise the violent “colectivos” of armed young men intimidating election workers and demonstrators.These are modelled on the Cuban “turbas divinas” mobs that emerge as counters to episodic protests on the island. Hezbollah (and Iran) has had a decades-long presence in Bolivarian Venezuela, providing a criminal-ideological nexus that triangulates weapons, drugs and money smuggling activities that extend from the Levant to the Tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay and which launder criminal as well as ideological assets under the protection of the Bolivarian State. More recently, Wagner Group mercenaries have appeared as part of Maduro’s personal guard, essentially playing the role of foreign praetorians for the besieged leader. It is a sign of his insecurity and lack of trust in his own forces that he now depends on the protection of these Russian proxies.

But the Opposition is in no real position to remove Maduro on is own even if it has the material, political and logistical support of foreign agencies. Hence, given the disarray in post-election civilian politics, and the inability of the PUD to dislodge the Maduro regime by weight of popular sentiment (and votes), it will be left to the Venezuelan military to ultimately determine the outcome of the current crisis. However, the Venezuelan military is not monolithic and is rendered by cronyism and corruption. Guarantees will have to be made and assurances given if military support for regime change is to occur (which will likely involve immunity from prosecution for graft and other acts of official malfeasance). Otherwise, the default option is to repress, which remains as a default because it is highly unlikely that any external forces (including the US) will overtly intervene in the event Maduro’s forces dig in and crack down on dissent. That sets the stage for more covert forms of subterfuge and grey area machinations, which will only prolong the impasse even if in somewhat sublimated fashion. And we can rest assured that these covert options are already being explored by various interested parties.

Whatever the eventual outcome, it will involve foreign actors supporting each side as well as soft-and hardliners in the PUD and PSUV ranks. In that light Maduro is at best just one rock in the road to a peaceful transition. At worst, he is now a pawn in a larger game that is beyond his control. In that light it is others with skin in the game that now matter most, and that includes the armed forces and foreign actors aligned on opposing sides of the Venezuelan political divide.

In terms of potential transition scenarios, the best that can be hoped for is the formation of a unity government made up of moderate elements of the outgoing regime and Opposition who commit to a military or perhaps internationally-overseen transition project leading to “restorative” elections down the road. The transition would focus on erecting an acceptable framework for political contestation while revitalising critical infrastructure, attracting investment and cushioning the dislocating effects of the economic crisis via promulgation of foreign aid-supported safety net programs for the most disadvantaged. All of that means that a variety of foreign interlocutors will need to be engaged on multiple policy fronts, starting with the political negotiations over procedures and paths forward and then moving onto substantive discussions about economic and social recovery planning. The Organisation of American States (OAS) may prove helpful in this regard even if its criticism of the Maduro regime has seen its representation at the election curtailed and stonewalled.

Returning to the political science angle, one way to envision the process is as a type of stylised multi-actor “game” in which the objective is to restore an open democracy to Venezuela. Any peaceful transition scenario to this end assumes that longer-sighted moderates will dominate negotiations on both sides of the domestic crisis and that their respective foreign backers will support such moderation over hard-line entrenchment and ongoing confrontation. That is a very big ask given the deep animosities extant between the adversaries. Again, the Venezuelan military will become a major focus of pressure from all sides, and it will ultimately be them who give the nod one way or the other. That is because the Venezuelan armed forces have one thing that no other stakeholder has: veto power over what is agreed to.

In a sense, the Venezuelan transition “game” boils down to a choice of lesser evil. That is true for Venezuelan society as a whole but especially true for the military as veto welders over the entire post-election process. Does the military choose the evil that it knows and which feeds it while continuing as the defenders of a failed State propped by like-minded foreign authoritarians, or does it take a step into the unknown and go with a side that has very patchy democratic credentials, very dubious foreign rightwing connections, but which is popular and represents the possibility of national recovery and renewal? Is continuity or change the better option, both for the military as an institution and for the nation as a whole?

Which is to say that there is much yet to happen before the Venezuelan crisis is resolved, peacefully or not. Or in antiseptic political science terms, the transitional “game” has moved from iterative (outcomes do not change with each successive play) to extensive-form in nature (outcomes change with each play), with the ultimate “foundational” conclusion leading to the next Venezuelan regime being uncertain and not necessarily Pareto (both sides advance their interests without hurting the other, leading to mutual second-best outcomes), much less Nash-optimal (both sides achieve preferred goals) for all concerned. That is to say, negotiations between and within the competing political blocs are not so much about immediate choices and outcomes but about setting the terms and conditions for an eventual resolution to the political impasse on terms that may not be the preferred result for anyone but which are mutually acceptable given the circumstances. It could even be a Pacto de Punto Fijo 2.0 moment, one that could be considered as a historical referent for current negotiations. It may seem like over-intellectualised gibberish to phrase things this way, but there is a core truth in this parsing of words that the principals involved may want to heed.

Still the 5 Eyes Achilles Heel?

The National Cyber Security Centre (NZSC), a unit in the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) dedicated to cyber-security, has released a Review of its response to the 2021 email hacking of NZ members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC, a global organization of parliamentarians) and Professor Anne-Marie Brady, the well known China expert and critic. A number of problems were identified, both operational and (yet again) with regard to accountability and transparency, so I thought I would briefly summarise them.

The Review states that too much focus was placed by the NCSC on “technical” solutions to the email phishing probes instead of considering the “wider” context in which the hacking occurred. In layman’s terms that is akin to saying that the NCSC got busy plugging holes in the parliamentary server firewalls after breaches were detected without considering who was being targeted and what purpose the hacking may have served. This is remarkable because the hacking came from ATP-31, a unit linked to PRC military intelligence well known for having engaged in that sort of activity previously, in NZ and elsewhere. Moreover, the NCSC had to be alerted by a foreign partner that the email phishing efforts were part of a progressive hacking strategy whereby the ultimate target was not the emails of MPs but of the IP addresses that were being used by those MPs. In fact, the NCSC currently does not have procedures for how to respond to reports that foreign, including state-sponsored, actors are targeting New Zealanders. The NCSC found out about the parliamentary email servers hacking from Parliamentary Services in the first instance, and then from foreign partner intelligence that was passed on to it by the NZSIS.

This is of concern for several reasons, not the least of which is that it took a foreign 5 Eyes partner to alert the NCSC to something that it should have been well aware of itself (progressive hacking), and because the NCSC initially assumed, for whatever reason, that the phishing was done by ordinary criminals rather than foreign intelligence units. It also assumed that MPs were already engaged in providing their own security, even after Parliamentary Services flagged potential breaches of its email servers to the NCSC. In fact MPs were apparently told more by Parliamentary Services than the NCSC about their being targeted (albeit after the fact), and the University of Canterbury, Professor Brady’s employer, apparently was never contacted about potential security breaches of their servers.

Since MPs may have sent and received emails from multiple IP addresses attached to their official and personal devices, the security breach implications of the email hacks could be considerable given the potential cross-over between personal and official MP communications. Put bluntly, it is incredible that a dedicated cyber-security unit that is an integral part of the GCSB and through it the Anglophone 5 Eyes signals/technical intelligence network did not consider the membership of the targeted MPs in IPAC and that the phishing occurred at the same time that Professor Brady’s emails were targeted (Brady is known to have close contacts with IPAC). This is basic 1+1 contextual stuff when it comes to operational security in cyberspace, so one gets the sense that the NCSC is made up of computer nerds who have little training in geopolitics, foreign policy, international relations or how the world works outside of WAN and LAN (hint: these are basic computer terms). They simply approached the hacking attacks as if they were plugging a leaking dike rather than consider what may be prompting the leaks and red-flagging them accordingly.

The advice given by the Review was for the NCSC to engage more with the targeted individuals in real time, who only found out about their exposure long after the fact. Moreover, the Minister of Intelligence and Security was not briefed on these intrusions, much like the targeted MPs and Professor Brady were not. Again, this defies the notion of democratic oversight, transparency and accountability within NZ intelligence agencies. Worse yet, it follows on the heels of revelations that for a few years a decade ago the GCSB hosted a foreign partner “asset,” presumably a signals or technical intelligence collection platform, at GCSB headquarters in Wellington without the knowledge of the then Minister or even the GCSB Director-General. Operational control of that platform, including specific taskings and targets, were done by the foreign partner. Imagine if one of the taskings was to geotrack a foreign human target in order to eliminate that target. If word was leaked about GCSB’s hosting of the tracking platform, it might cause some diplomatic tensions for NZ. At a minimum it is a violation of both NZ’s sovereignty as well as basic notions of intelligence agency accountability in a democracy. It seems that, almost a decade later, the much vaunted reforms designed to increase intelligence community accountability embedded the 2017 Security and Intelligence Act had not filtered down to the NCSC dike-plugging level.

This is a very bad look for the GCSB, both in the eyes of its domestic clients as well as those of its 5 Eyes partners. NZ already had a reputation for being the “Achilles heel” or “weak link” of the 5 Eyes network due to its lax security protocols and counter-intelligence capabilities. This may only confirm that belief in spite fo significant efforts to upgrade GCSB capabilities and toughen up its defences, including in cyberspace. And, judging from the reactions of the targeted MPs and Professor Brady, domestic clients of the NCSC, who are both private and public in nature, may not feel too reassured by the Review and its recommendations.

It is known that the GCSB is made up of an assortment of engineers, translators and computing specialists. It has a remit that includes domestic as well as foreign signals and technical gathering and analysis, the former operating under the framework of NZ law under the 2017 Act (most often in a partnership with a domestic security agency).This brings up a question of note. If the staff are all of a “technical” persuasion as described above, then it follows that they simply adhere to directives from their managers and foreign partners, collect and assess signals and technical intelligence data as directed by others, and do not have an in-house capacity to provide geopolitical context to the data being analyzed. It is like plugging leaks without knowing about the hydraulics causing them.

In that light it just might do good to incorporate a few foreign policy and comparative political analysts into the GCSB/NCSC mix given that most of NZ’s threat environment is not only “intermestic” (domestic<–>international) but “glocal” (global and local) as well as hybrid (involving state and non-state actors) in nature. Threats are multidimensional and complex, so after the fact “plugging” solutions are temporary at best.

Given their diversity, complexity and sophistication, there are no “technical” solutions that can counter contemporary threats alone. Factoring in the broader context in which specific threats materialise will require broadening the knowledge base of those charged with defending against them or at a minimum better coordinating with other elements in the NZ intelligence community in order to get a better look at the bigger picture involved in NZ’s threat environment.

The NCSC in-house Review is silent on that.