In Constantine Cavafy’s poem Waiting for the Barbarians, the much-feared barbarians never turn up.
“Now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?” the poem asks. “Those people were a kind of solution.”
People seem to have become addicted to useful “barbarians.” From terrorists and drug lords to human smugglers and even refugees, politics increasingly revolves around simplified threats and facile solutions.
For example, congressional Republicans tell Democrats they will not support more military aid for Ukraine unless something radical is done to stem the flow of migrants and asylum seekers at the US’ southern border.
Lost in these debates is an appreciation of the larger game that is being played. The “war on terror,” the “war on drugs” and the fight against irregular migration all exhibit a pattern that we call “wreckonomics”: a state of functional dysfunction in which the purported threat worsens as politicians, contractors and enforcers exploit it for their own ends.
A spoof personal ad, taped to a wall in the Pentagon at the end of the Cold War, captured this pattern perfectly: “ENEMY WANTED: Mature North American Superpower seeks hostile partner for arms-racing, Third World conflicts, and general antagonism. Must be sufficiently menacing to convince Congress of military financial requirements.”
One way or another, the barbarians duly appeared. By 2008 (adjusted for 2010 dollars), annual US defense spending had hit US$696.5 billion, compared with an average of US$517 billion during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s. NATO, rather than disappearing, was expanding.
Meanwhile, the fight against drug traffickers, smugglers and migrants has been the gift that keeps on giving — at least from the perspective of defense contractors, detention conglomerates and security agencies. The US Border Patrol budget has grown more than tenfold in the past three decades and European border-security expenses have similarly rocketed. The war on terror has cost a staggering US$8 trillion.
In addition to all the Western politicians and companies that have benefited from hyping these threats, “partner” states quietly gamed the system. When Guatemala’s civil war ended in 1996, shadowy counterinsurgency structures signed up to the war on drugs, but soon became complicit in the very criminal enterprises they claimed to be countering.
Similarly, late Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi found that he could ease his international isolation by threatening to “turn Europe black” and promising to rein in the international terrorism that he himself had suborned. Soon enough, many others learned to sell their cooperation in the “fight against migration,” sometimes stoking the threat to maximize the price.
This is an old game. In the early wars on drugs and alcohol a century ago, enforcers were often in cahoots with the gangs that profited from prohibition.
Double-gaming took a different form in Vietnam, where one US general said South Vietnamese forces kept the war going “at the appropriate level” to prolong US support. In the war on terror, Afghan warlords fueled threats against the foreign occupier while offering to remedy them. Regimes in Sri Lanka and Syria used the same pretext to pursue local vendettas.
In each case, the threat only worsened, but these “wars” proved remarkably enduring, because confronting an endless stream of “barbarians” can be a politically and economically rewarding enterprise.
Gaming the information environment has become a key part of this process in the US. While the costs have piled up in the form of mass incarceration, soaring drug use, stronger smuggling networks, countless border deaths and almost 1 million fatalities in the war on terror, the public is subjected to a hall of mirrors.
Like the “body count” metric used by the US in Vietnam, these grisly statistics are distorted to look like evidence of success.
Under the influence of New Public Management — a school of thought aiming to make public administration more businesslike — budget-conscious bureaucracies increasingly compete to demonstrate “good metrics.”
The US’ wars are no exception. In the war on terror, tallies of killed insurgents buttressed claims of “wins” against late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. In the drug wars, statistics capturing the acreage of poppy fields destroyed or soldiers deployed signal “success.”
This positive spin feeds people’s collective astonishment when things go spectacularly wrong — when Saigon falls to the Viet Cong or Kabul to the Taliban.
In the political gaming of barbarians, fear has been a faithful friend. As US General Douglas MacArthur said in the 1950s: “Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up” unless we rallied behind the government.
Today, former US president Donald Trump says immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” while British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak plays his own lurid migration game by saying that “our enemies” are using migration as a “weapon” to destabilize Europe.
There are ways out of wreckonomics. One important step is to recognize the true costs of “wars.” Encouragingly, the drug war has started to give way in many countries to more health-centered approaches as its costs and failures have grown more evident.
Elsewhere though, it is tempting to say that failure has become the new success. Politicians compete to promise “security” in the face of new crises that are feeding on one another. Pointing to a deeply disorienting “polycrisis,” Adam Tooze of Columbia University wisely suggests that a single fix is no longer possible.
Yet disorientation seems only to have boosted the appeal of the quick fix.
People need to get over their simplistic obsession with violently reducing supply, whether through fighting migration or waging war on drugs or terror. Instead, they must start tackling demand. People must also recognize how the gaming of endless “wars” is feeding the polycrisis.
Relying on dodgy metrics and a politics of distraction, leaders continue to fiddle while the world burns. If we cannot end our addiction to fighting useful barbarians, the real barbarians might turn out to be us.
David Keen is a professor of conflict studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Ruben Andersson is a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford. They coauthored Wreckonomics: Why It’s Time to End the War on Everything.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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