During the writing of this book, while the Islamic State was setting the Middle East on fire, the Umbrella Revolution—yet another uprising of young people crying for democracy—paralyzed Hong Kong. Are these event somehow related? And what is the link between the Arab Spring and a brutal terrorist organization that has successfully morphed into a state and is redrawing in blood the map of the Middle East?
The democratic uprisings of the last decade and the Islamic State are both products of the current multipolar world disorder, a phenomenon that has been taking shape since the end of the Cold War. The Arab Spring and the Islamic State, in particular, are a modern Janus head, two responses to the same problem: a corrupt middle eastern leadership. Why is the latter successful where the former has failed?
As we have seen, the Islamic State presents not just a new breed of terrorism, but a truly modern phenomenon. Could this be the main source of its success? It is possible. While the West and its Muslim allies refused to acknowledge the advent of a new international political landscape, the Islamic State has not only adapted, but has fully exploited it.
The emergence of a multipolar system, where the power of the United States is kept in check by rising powers overseas like China, has made older models of foreign policy obsolete. Western intervention in Syria under a UN mandate remains improbable because of China’s and Russia’s opposition. But even with the ostensible legitimacy of the grand coalition assembled by President Obama, intervention against the Islamic State will be limited to Iraq and confined to aerial bombing in support of local troops. In other words, the coalition will back anybody willing to fight the Islamic State on the ground, broadening the already huge diameter of the modern war by proxy. This approach risks encouraging other groups to follow the path of the Islamic State and use the arms and the money supplied by their sponsors to carve out their own states, further destabilizing the Middle East.
The American and European decision to arm the Peshmerga and the PKK, still listed as terrorist organizations, has already redrawn the battle lines in the fight for an independent Kurdistan in Turkey, a nation where 20 percent of the population is of Kurdish origin. Violent clashes between the Kurds and the Turks have already broken out in several Turkish towns, and demonstrations in favor of an independent Kurdistan have been staged all over Europe. Among these was a brief occupation of the European parliament.
Meanwhile the question of military intervention continues to baffle Coalition forces. Aerial bombing seems insufficient to stop the advance of the Islamic State’s army; hence the question of whether to redeploy ground troops to Iraq may soon come up for debate. Whatever the outcome, it is clear that foreign intervention will not halt the destabilization of the region—it never has and it never will—and that a fresh and more pragmatic approach is badly needed to prevent further deaths and destruction. This approach must acknowledge the existence of a new power in the region and must recognize that war by proxy is a strategy doomed to boomerang. Accordingly it must seek to address this new power using instruments other than war.
The emergence of this multipolar system has opened novel opportunities for those who understand the new rules of the game. We have seen how the Islamic State has exploited the Syrian war by proxy to its own advantage, and how it is exposing,, through its powerful propaganda machine, the surreal contradictions of Obama’s grand coalition.
As well as modern politics, the Islamic State has mastered modern technology to proselytize, recruit, and raise money, and this is a clear sign of modernity. The nation-building successes of its digital campaign offer a textbook example of the power of communication. The same cannot be said of the several democratic protest movements of the last decade.
The Iranian street uprising of 2009 was fueled by Twitter. In 2011 the Arab Spring’s use of Facebook made what was happening in Cairo visible to the world. A year later the Occupy movement broadcasted its protests on YouTube. Today, the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong is using Bluetooth to bypass Internet censorship. Yet none of these movements has brought about political, economic, and social changes of the magnitude of those achieved by the Islamic State.
Modern technology and a clear understanding of how our multipolar world functions, however, are not enough to succeed. Is it possible that the “smartphone uprisings,” including the Arab Spring, failed where the Islamic State has succeeded because the latter is managed by a professional elite, which guides the rank and file, while the former finds itself at the mercy of their constant interaction and participation? If so, is the Islamic State’s model of nation-building more modern than that of the Arab Spring? This are frightful questions that democracies and legitimate states must address if they want to prevent the proliferation of a new wave of authoritarianism.
Is there a third option besides the failure of the Arab Spring and the successes of the Islamic State? Yes, there is, and it involves education, knowledge, and an understanding of the changing political environment we live in—the same instruments used in the past to bring about political change without bloodshed but with consensus, something that both the young warriors of the smartphone and the gray suits of politics still fail to understand.