We are in 2013. That year, cartoonists used their magenta pencils extensively to splash their sketches of the Middle East with red lines – zigzag, dotted, knotted – mocking Obama’s famous red line. The one that Bashar al-Assad should never cross: that of the use of chemical weapons. This same red line that the American president had drawn on August 20, 2012, exactly one year earlier. The very one that the Syrian president skipped several times, until that terrible night of August 21, 2013, in Ghouta. This line which the American president was going to renounce, backing down on his commitments, in September 2013. Marking people’s minds and coloring his last mandate with an air of defeat.
To the point where, in a post-Obama Washington, we had banned this notion. There would be no more red lines.
It must be said that a year after the Ghouta massacre, the Russian president took another step by entering Crimea. And again six years later, crossing the borders of Ukraine. The cartoonists were not mistaken, linking all these events with the same line. They once again grabbed their bucket of red paint to paint a picture of Putin mocking this red line coming from Syria. Whether they depict him crossing it, erasing it, or indicating to the American president that he probably didn’t have enough credit (and paint) left to draw a new one. Neither here nor elsewhere. And yet.
Red line diplomacy has long been practiced in the Middle East. Coercive diplomacy, even if the term has a certain ambivalence. Paradoxically, its outline establishes a gray zone much more than a line, a space where abuses are tolerated, and at the end of which an ultimate, insurmountable threshold is established.
Because on the one hand, it makes it possible to contain tensions if we cannot completely curb them. In practice, it is partly this red line diplomacy which still makes it possible today to keep the lid on the Middle Eastern pot, particularly in the Iranian-American relationship. Drawing a complex set of boundaries helped limit escalation in an increasingly tense context. Professor Arash Azizi cites as proof the fact that even when the United States assassinated Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Iraq, the retaliation carried out by Tehran remained limited. Below a red line. That even during the assassination of three American soldiers by militants trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (another red line), the American response was held outside Iranian soil.
Red line diplomacy is clearly a paso doble, which must be danced within the limits of this gray zone.
On the other hand, the whole art of the red line is based on deterrence: the credibility of the government which draws it depends on the certainty that it will act. And the uncertainty about the intensity of the measures he will take. This is also why the drawing of red lines in the South China Sea has real significance. This is also why Finland and Sweden hastened to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It is a red (political, strategic) line which could seem more dissuasive to them than the mesh border barrier that Helsinki is currently erecting on its border.
So, on the one hand — and counterintuitively — Barack Obama’s greatest foreign policy failure is actually a great success. “In 2013, says General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, in a documentary by Frontline, we had our finger on the trigger,” ready to reframe the Syrian regime after the Ghouta massacre. “Everything was ready, just the order to go. » But this order never came, and John McCain then raged that this red line was “drawn in erasable ink”. But now, two months after the bombing of Ghouta, the Syrian regime renounces its chemical weapons program and its arsenal (with the support of Russia, it is true), the United States has not returned to a another war in the region: it is a success.
If, today, this episode is still considered “Obama’s biggest mistake”, it is because the success of diplomacy is not always measured in terms of achievements or effective maintenance of peace. The failure is due to the fact, for some, that this renunciation marked the beginning of the rebalancing of the world, disrupting the global balance, as Professor Bruno Tertrais explains. The French president agreed with this, believing that the abandonment of the red line had given Russia free rein in Syria first, then in Ukraine. Also redefining alliances for the benefit of China, which observes these fluctuating red lines with interest. Reshuffling the cards through a domino effect, explains Professor Eliot A. Cohen, by redefining the links between Iran and its occasional allies all over the region, as well as those of Saudi Arabia and Israel, or the role of Qatar.
Therefore, we cannot ignore the infinite complexity of a region whose centrality is constantly reminded by those who are involved in it. Each decision, each movement on the chessboard is likely to permanently redefine the region, but with it the global balance. This is perhaps the reason why the idea of a red line has resurfaced in Washington and why the American president, like his secretary of state, continues to reiterate the need to avoid an escalation towards conflict. global.