Washington's 'Fashoda' moment

[unhappycamper]

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-04-231213.html

The US reversal of alliances: Comparative perspectives

Washington's 'Fashoda' moment
By Robert M Cutler
Dec 23, '13

It is rare that a great power in world politics, after decades of hostility with another country, turns around and suddenly seeks to embrace that country as a friend, if not an ally. Yet this is what the recent United States demarche towards Iran represents, unilaterally overturning years of carefully crafted economic sanctions laboriously conceived and implemented, and breaching numerous UN Security Council resolutions voted following Iran's repeated violations over the years, in bad faith, of its obligations to the International Atomic Energy Agency under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The term of art for such a turn of events in diplomatic and military history is renversement des alliances (reversal or overturning of alliances), and it is so rare that one can find only a few examples in the last three centuries. This essay seeks to comprehend the present, still-evolving situation, by reason of such historical analogies. Analogies can never prove anything, but they can point in directions fruitful for understanding.

Historians canonically divide the "modern era" into the "early modern" (from the early 16th to the early 19th century) and the "late modern" (from the early 19th to the mid-20th century). Before the modern era, such reversals of alliances were not altogether unusual, whether in the consecutive systems of Mongol and Central Asian conquerors or in those of the Italian city-states, or elsewhere and at other times.

With the Treaty of Utrecht (1715), however, the European States system, formerly an unintegrated collection of international systems, became a truly comprehensive international system. This meant not just that any change in power relations in one geographic region entailed implications for power relations in other geographic regions, but moreover that every state became involved in every conflict among the members of the system. As a result, reversals of alliances became less frequent. In the modern era there are still two examples that are most notable.

[bemildred]

1. Gloomy fellow.

I think I follow his argument pretty well, and yet I find myself often unconvinced. Too many of his analogies seem stretched. So in that sense, I'm critical.

But I think he has some good points too, what we are seeing is very unusual, it raises a lot of questions. And I think the danger of regional war(s) is transparently real and in motion already.