Illusions of a stable world order

The reading of geopolitics, therefore, also requires some reasonability. 

Over time, the man on the Clapham omnibus came to define the normal working-class man who follows world affairs, is reasonable, knows the way this world works, and travels on a London public bus.

There is a chance that this term may be derived from the phrase: “Public opinion is the opinion of the bald man at the back of the omnibus”, which was coined by British journalist Walter Bagehot.

I kept thinking of this term while reading Jack Watling’s Statecraft: The New Rules Of Power In A Divided World. The reasonable person is not an average person but a normative benchmark; it is how society expects a citizen to behave.

The question at the heart of Watling’s book is when hybrid warfare, disinformation, and societal disruption target the foundations of governance, what standard of resilience should we expect from ordinary citizens, institutions, and the state itself? For ordinary citizens, nation-states exist as heroes and villains; for states, however, strategic interests drive rationality in foreign policy. 

Watling, a fellow at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), who focuses on issues of land warfare and works closely with the British military, says that the nature of warfare in modern times has gone far beyond the boundaries of the battlefield. 

The book is structured as a journey through three live fires: Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel-Palestine. He travels through each theatre, pulling lessons on how states can survive hybrid warfare through conversations with military planners. It shapes how nation-states think. This work arrives when democracies of the West realise the changing face of warfare.

He posits that modern conflict focuses on the social fabric that comprises a nation. Based on his vast experience studying conflict through fieldwork in Ukraine as well as Russian tactics in hybrid warfare, Watling proves that the “battles of the future” will be won through “legitimacy and information”.

The Ukrainian section is the strongest. Watling knows the ground. He shows how Russia’s 2014 invasion wasn’t a conventional victory but a trailer for what was to come by capturing Crimea, fomenting separatism in Donbas, then weaponising energy dependence to paralyse decision-making.

Europe’s reliance on Russian gas, Ukraine’s economic vulnerabilities, and the entanglement of political elites all became levers. This aligns with what Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman have described as “weaponised interdependence”, where global networks can be turned into instruments of coercion.

He argues that nation-states use other interactions to create dependencies on other states and alter the state of their foreign policy. He cites numerous personal anecdotes of conversations with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) commanders, who are helping sustain the fight in Ukraine. This book gives a peek into Europe’s security dilemma, the rift between Europe and the United States over Ukraine, and the future of Nato.

The author highlights how Ukraine, despite being an underdog, has managed to hold lines against a much stronger adversary like Russia through ingenious methods and strategies, despite taking heavy blows. His perspective, however, I often found was very eurocentric in the sense that it only discusses Ukraine’s resilience but does not cite Russia’s reasons to go to war.

A particularly interesting moment comes when Watling visits Taiwan and discusses the battlefield situation with military planners there, and how they were interested in how small nation-states like Ukraine can take on big powers and hold ground. He discusses how Taiwan, like Ukraine, is preparing for an eventual standoff with China. 

The Israel-Palestine section is where things get uncomfortable. While Watling is advising British politicians on their stance on Gaza post-October 7, 2023 attacks, nearly all his predictions have come true to a certain extent. Gaza is decimated; Israel has launched aggressive attacks on Lebanon, and very few analysts could have foreseen that what started on October 7 would turn into a full-blown war with Iran. 

He also discusses his time with Reuters, how he discovered the chemical weapons attack in Ghouta and his conversations with chemical weapons specialists to verify how Sarin nerve gas agents were used on civilians.

The full brutalities of the Assad regime would only follow later. Watling discusses how Russia played a key role in helping Assad stay in power because it was in their strategic interests.

Here is my problem with Statecraft. Watling writes about state resilience as if the only threat to trust comes from external enemies — Russian disinformation, Chinese coercion or Iranian proxies. But he never asks whether the state might have made itself untrustworthy on its own. The financial crisis of 2008 was not a Russian operation. The torture of Abu Ghraib was not due to intelligence failure. It was the state’s wrongdoing, and the state failed repeatedly.

If a state is rendered untrustworthy by its own actions, no amount of strategic communication will be able to restore its credibility entirely. Indeed, efforts to portray such incidents as perception could serve to exacerbate the lack of trust. We can take Israel as a prime example in all of this, despite boosting its credibility abroad as having the “most moral army in the world”. The actions of certain soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces have caused worldwide condemnation by human rights organisations. This has severely tarnished its image worldwide, and Israeli leaders have acknowledged this. A debate that comes up in the book is what a nation-state is as a concept. Hamas, as he rightly said, is not a state even though it has administrative control in Gaza, and the same is the case with the Houthis in Yemen, but he does not sufficiently interrogate the political vacuum that allows such actors to dominate.

Nor does he enquire about the consequences when the entire notion of the nation-state loses its substance, not because it is negated, but because it defies a clear definition.

A product of field research and policy involvement, the book contains many examples taken from firsthand accounts and observations, which sometimes create redundancy. It is certainly not for a general reader as there are references in the book that only an informed reader can understand and there is information that will not be found anywhere else.

By the end of the book, however, it does not provide answers but gives a different way of looking at the same set of problems. If modern conflict is about legitimacy, then the question is not just how states defend themselves from external threats, but whether they can remain worthy of the trust.

The Clapham omnibus may still be running. I am not very certain about the man sitting in it. 

  Book details:

Statecraft: The New Rules Of Power In A Divided World

By Jack Watling

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 368, Price: ₹649

The next book that Blueprint will feature: General Brasstacks: The Sundarji Story by Probal Dasgupta