Manama: Mahmood Rafique, Editor: The efforts of the Kingdom of Bahrain for successfully Combating Coronavirus COVID-19 have won accolades as three-day global security summit with Ministers and top officials from 20 countries from around the world attended the opening of the ‘IISS Manama Dialogue’ on Friday.
“Owing to the tremendous work done by this country in combating Covid-19 and the excellent co-operation between the IISS and the authorities in Bahrain, we are able to hold this Manama Dialogue with key delegates from some 20 countries attending in person, Dr John Chipman, Director General and CEO of IISS, in his opening remarks said.
Dr Chipman thanked His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa bin Salman al Khalifa, His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Crown Prince and Prime Minister and the Government and people of Bahrain for again helping us to host this unique international security and regional diplomatic summit.
“We have foreign ministers, state secretaries, national security advisers, chiefs of defence staff and heads of prestigious international and regional organisations all safely, physically, present with us over the next two days. They will be able to conduct multiple bilateral and multilateral meetings, socially distanced, but face to face, for the first time in many months. We have also invited here in Bahrain a diverse group of some 15 young leaders from North Africa, the Gulf and the wider Middle East to participate in this Manama Dialogue, and engage the government leaders who we have convened. In addition, we have gathered over 350 delegates in our hybrid format who can debate with those whom we have assembled here in Manama.
Headquartered in London, with offices, in Singapore, Bahrain, the US, and soon Germany, the IISS has developed dynamically as the Institute has generated facts, produced analysis and exerted influence on the great strategic questions of the day with an international perspective, international composition and international reach. Last year, at this summit, we presented special dossiers on ISR in the Gulf and Iran’s influence networks.
“They remain very relevant. Since then, we have generated extraordinary data and analysis on strategic issues. Our Military Balance Plus database containing detailed information on the military holdings of 171countries has become an ever more agile defence analysis platform. We have added impressive defence economics analytic and predictive capability, and are increasingly able to identify key defence industrial supply chains. It is a great product. The Institute’s Missile Defence Initiative, run with the German Foreign Ministry, involves all P5 countries and senior figures in the wider expert community, and is framing the debate on this urgent issue. The IISS Russian Military Modernisation Dossier we published was judged ‘the best net assessment of its kind.”
One major NATO government said: “It added to our internal assessments with new data and analysis.”
“Our Cyber Dossier, which will reveal a new methodology for measuring cyber power, is nearly complete with 15 national net assessments. We have developed a brand new and impressive IISS digital data product called –‘China Connects’–with over 1,400 data points on China’s Digital Silk Road activities in 133 countries.
“No one wishing to understand the new Digital Great Game that is being played can do without it. The IISS Armed Conflict and Strategic Survey(s) released this year contain expert analysis on Latin America, Africa and the drivers of strategic change in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The Institute’s Conflict, Security and Development programme is being re-modelled to provide the sharpest analysis possible on issues of geopolitical and geo-economic resilience. We are arranging a Fullerton Forum in January 2021 in Singapore that will assemble some 100 senior officials from 25 countries to prepare for our major Shangri-La Dialogue in 2021 that will convene, as always, the defence ministers and senior officials from some 40 countries to debate Indo-Pacific security. Coming back to today, we have released for this Manama Dialogue a special report on the Strategic and Geo-Economic Implications of the Covid-19pandemic.All our work at the IISS is aimed at analysing the relationship between War, Power and Rules.
“Thinking strategically requires understanding the realities of these three nouns. Power is being wielded in new ways and through different means; wars appear shapeless and without clear end, and rules seem fragile or out of date. This year we bore witness to a ‘co-operation deficit’ in international affairs. Any new multilateralism to improve on things needs to be intelligently designed and placed on sound legal foundations. For those so-called ‘like-minded’ states that are concerned about the evaporation of the ‘rules-based order’, there is a need to re-focus efforts on international legal diplomacy to refresh a legal order that is fit for the strategic times. “The ritual call to revive, reinvent, or create new multinational institutions is not enough on its own. As urgent, is the need to debate openly the rules that should obtain in this new era, where the structures of the ‘Westphalian system’ that generated modern public international law are under threat, and the actors that have claims to strategic effect are so often non-state groups or private corporations. States need to shape the international legal environment while they can. States that think of the global public good, need to revive their extrovert skills to enhance the international legal order through deliberate diplomacy. The practice of carefully designed and well-explained statecraft can still serve to modernise international law and make it more attuned to the nature of contemporary challenges. However, that can only healthily take place when there is an open debate about how best to address the new requirements that have emerged in public international law because of the changing nature of international relations. We at the IISS argue that legal diplomacy should be conducted to embed carefully considered principles of international law and such diplomacy is needed across a number of fronts. Just as domestic law can become out of step with an emerging social consensus, so international law (that is reformed at a slower pace), can find itself out of sync with the evolving needs of legitimate statecraft. The champions of a liberal international order might usefully embrace the thought that good statecraft, democratically rooted, creates sound law; outdated law, left untouched, imprisons ethical statecraft. Legitimate and ethical actions to deal with emerging threats need to be conducted within a strong international legal context, but that legal environment cannot be allowed to ossify so much that it renders ultra vires ethically sound responses that states need to consider within their strategic repertoire. Transnational actors, in particular, are acting increasingly outside the scope of modern international law. They ignore the state system, and the state system passes them by. They have sought to colonise the spaces between the law, and the state system has not responded with a symmetrical effort to render illegal their violent transnational activity. A requirement has, therefore, arisen to refresh the laws of armed conflict to engage more effectively with non-state transnational armed groups and to endow responsible states with the legal powers to contain and defeat them. In the past, transnational armed organisations became familiar enough in their structures and composition to be penetrated and dismantled. Now, and in the near future, transnational terrorist ideas and methods will travel through emulation and inspiration, and may not display obvious ‘command and control’ features. Such threats are more difficult to counter and interrupt. Opportunities to do so will be fleeting and may require remote intervention to prevent attack.
“Modernising legal appreciations of when, in the digital age, a threat may be considered imminent and how authorities are to be generated to deal with them should be an emerging priority. But other elements of international law may also need review, including asylum and refugee law, cyber, space, and the regulation of private military companies and their activities.
“The treaty-based ‘regulatory infrastructure’ of international security would also benefit from more attention. The progressive dismantling of much of the arms-control architecture of the Cold War period leaves too much to a strategic game of chance. Balances of power are harder to maintain if there is no accounting of them available, no audit that is done, and no effective limits that are set. Perhaps, too, the principles of global public health have to be subject to a more widely accepted range of norms, if not actual law. The experience of the Covid-19 pandemic has invited understandable calls for more transparency about sources and transmission. There may be a new need for an international agency, for example, to help regulate the flow and supply of personal protective equipment and vaccines to ensure that health nationalism does not defeat global health security. Tending to the legal and institutional structure of international society is important. The last year has shown again the power of the national approach and impulse in geopolitics. Strategic self-determination is fuelling more efforts by states to stand out and develop their own strategic identity, rather than have one shaped for them by regional or institutional affiliations. Often this can have malicious effects on the state system. On other occasions, it can lead to outcomes that may break some taboos, but open up new opportunities. The decision by the UAE and Bahrain to establish diplomatic relations with Israel in September 2020 falls into this category.
“It is not an admission of agreement with Israel on the delicate and vital Palestinian issue, nor an endorsement of all its policies. It is instead an appreciation that direct contacts assist co-operation where strategic interests are aligned, and supports more effective dialogue where differences remain.
There is an important lesson here for international relations as governments come to office eager to shape international relations along lines with which they are domestically familiar. Some may wish to define the like-minded in narrow terms. It is normal to start classic diplomacy and legal diplomacy with those who have similar instincts and share the same reasoning. Agreement is easier to reach with those with whom you already agree on most everything else. But those who argue passionately about inclusion in domestic politics, should take care to avoid being too exclusive in their international relations. “Universal accord on delicate questions of international governance is an elusive and quixotic goal. Starting from a narrow base must still have the goal of achieving a wide platform of support. Assuming that one’s own domestic model of governance is for everyone displays a missionary zeal that is unbecoming in modern times. Throughout the world there are unhappy examples of states wishing to export their government, economic and other models to others without regard for the specific conditions that exist elsewhere. Principles of good governance, both domestic and international, can arise from a variety of legitimate sources. I say all this as we swing perilously on the hinge between an old rules-based order that seems poorly maintained for contemporary purposes, and a new order yet to be well-engineered and strategically designed. This Manama Dialogue will consider many of these issues against the background of the new power shifts, turbulent conflict and dramatic diplomacy of 2020.”
