Week signals: December thaw
Plus: watch points for South Korea, Romania, France, Israel, and Iran.
This week:
IN REVIEW. Fault-lines in Syria, Georgia and South Korea, the consequences of American absence, and the other conflicts that could unfreeze.
UP AHEAD. A reckoning in Seoul, an annulment in Bucharest, a by-election in Ardennes, a trial in Jerusalem, and nuclear brinksmanship in Tehran.
The Week in Review: Unfreezing conflicts
The week began, as last week, with a series of threatening posts from Donald Trump. It ended, also as last week, with more failed attempts at peace in the Middle East. In between, a government fell in France, an election was annulled in Romania, Joe Biden pardoned his son, and China rattled sabres from the Baltic Sea to the Taiwan Strait.
But most of all, we saw a proxy invasion of much of northern Syria, a president in Georgia refusing to step down, and a president in South Korea impose then retract martial law in the space of six hours. What’s going on?
A theme linking these last three events is that in each we have a society still grappling with the legacy of frozen conflict. Whether since 2016, 2008 or 1953, the sovereignty of Syria, Georgia and South Korea are in varying degrees of dispute. At one end (Syria), we have a near-failed state, with captagon, an amphetamine substitute, its top industry. At the other (South Korea), we have an advanced, tech-focussed economy. Little would normally group them, except that they’re each at the fault-lines of global order and face a particular vulnerability should the US become absent.
Syria’s fault-line runs from Ankara to Tehran. Multi-denominational and the product of a previous geopolitical rupture (the French mandate at the end of the Ottoman Empire), it’s been held together by the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad family, himself from a religious minority, the Alawites. Yet since its civil war, which continues but was largely settled after 2016 when Russia intervened, much of Syria’s territory has been held by nationalist, Kurdish, and jihadist groups. The (re-)invasions of Aleppo, Hama and now possible Homs weren’t expected but nor were they unpredictable.
Georgia’s fault-line runs from Russia to Europe, and sits astride an Armenian-Azeri fault-line to the south and broader fault-lines between the Slavic, Turkic and Persian worlds. Georgia, like Syria, is an ancient land but an immature state. It’s split between a faction that wants to pivot to the EU and NATO, and one that doesn’t necessarily wish to pivot to Moscow (which invaded in 2008, stripping Abkhazia and South Ossetia), but nonetheless worries about the example of Ukraine. This faction also happens to enjoy lucrative trade ties with Russia. That pro-EU groups would protest the outcome of a disputed election is thus unremarkable. But it is remarkable that a French-born president would join in.
Korea’s fault-line runs along its demilitarised zone. There since the 1953 armistice, it’s largely held, but greater Russian-fuelled belligerence from the North has spooked the South. Fears of Pyongyang may seem a feeble pretext for Yoon Suk-yeol’s declaration of martial law, but for many in Seoul, the trauma is real. Add in South Korea’s political polarisation and social dislocation, and Yoon’s decision of Tuesday night may still shock but it might not surprise.
And atop them all, another fault-line runs through Washington. That these events and more are happening during Biden’s lame duck period show the consequences of a missing superpower, and the risks of a multipolar order. Trump will need all his dealmaking bravado to close these widening fissures, but with a domestic focus, a pledge to shrink costs, and an isolationist base, it’s a big task. We may thus only be at the beginning of a broader thawing of frozen conflicts. And as various actors seek to test Trump, and establish facts on the ground, what else threatens to reheat?