Why The Wars On Terror, Drugs And Migration Never Succeed

 

War rhetoric is everywhere in our volatile politics: from Ukraine to the resurrection of the war on terror in Gaza, from the ‘wars’ on human smugglers, drugs and crime, through to more metaphorical culture wars, ‘war on motorists’, on a virus – even on climate change. Keir Starmer accuses Rishi Sunak of prosecuting a ‘one-man war on reality’ while ‘anti-woke’ campaigners decry a war on Christmas. Some of these wars are spurious (last time we looked, Christmas is still happening). Others are all too real.

What’s clear is that war rhetoric is attractive either to rally one’s troops or to smear one’s opponents. No surprise: war mobilises. If a politician were to proclaim ‘a mild push on climate change’ or ‘a moderately important attempt to curtail migration,’ they’d get few plaudits from the ranks. But, as my colleague Ruben Andersson and I found in our book Wreckonomics, our addiction to waging (or announcing) war on everything has brought underhand benefits for politicians and massive problems for the rest of us.

For a start, politicians frequently use the spectacle of war to direct attention away from their deeper failures. Israel’s Gaza onslaught, after major security failings, may be a notable example. In the more metaphorical war on smugglers, we might think of Sunak’s renewed noises over small boats in face of record immigration figures. Diversionary tactics abound. Just two weeks after 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld suggested: ‘Look, as part of the war on terrorism, should we be getting something going in another area, other than Afghanistan, so that success or failure and progress isn’t measured just by Afghanistan?’ The Iraq invasion followed, with New Labour support. Amid the subsequent quagmire, one former Foreign Office worker told me of pressure to ensure things were seen to be working in Afghanistan so as to provide a distraction from things going so badly in Iraq.

Another problem rears its head here: war – whether in rhetoric or practice – tends to create more enemies. When politicians sought to frame measures against Covid-19 as a just war of sorts, opponents reacted and belligerence grew. As for real war, figures from the Global Terrorism Index show that in the context of the multi-trillion dollar global war on terror, the number of terrorist attacks rose rapidly: from around 3,300 in 2000 to almost 30,000 by 2015. Israel would do well to heed the warning.

War creates rich opportunities for those who want to game it for purposes of their own. The classic case is Vietnam, where American General William Corson observed that the South Vietnamese government’s power was ‘based on the US presence, and since that in turn is based on the level of violence it is to their advantage to orchestrate the war at the appropriate level.’ More recently, regimes from Syria to Sri Lanka and China have used the idea of a ‘war on terror’ as convenient cover for repressing their own populations. Meanwhile, from Gaddafi’s Libya to Turkey and Niger, ‘partner states’ have been able to use the threat of mass migration to leverage aid money and to carve out immunity for repression.

To these perverse incentives, we can add one more: the ease with which its costs can be exported to others. In 1935, another US general, Smedley Butler, denounced war as a racket ‘in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.’ Consider the war on drugs, which in the words of one report, has generated ‘mass incarceration in the US, highly repressive policies in Asia, vast corruption and political destabilisation in Afghanistan and West Africa, immense violence in Latin America, an HIV epidemic in Russia, an acute global shortage of pain medication and the propagation of systematic human rights abuses around the world.’ And all this at huge expense to the public purse.

War ushers in a self-righteousness that quashes dissent and constrains debate over its real costs. For years, the staggering failure in Afghanistan and Iraq was effectively hidden away. ‘We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,’ admitted Douglas Lute, the Afghan war czar under the Bush and Obama administrations. For too long, no one dared call the emperor naked while he was leading his troops into battle. We see a similar pattern in rhetorical wars too – including in the fight against Covid-19 via lockdowns, whose highly unequal distribution of costs worldwide was frequently seen as beyond the scope of civilised discussion. ‘Net zero’ risks reproducing this, fuelling an unsavoury politics of grievance. Both those on the left and right would do well to dial down their righteousness and listen.

More insidious than the quashing of dissent is the manipulation of the information environment that war invites. In the war on terror, beating Isis became a ‘win’ – even though Isis owed its existence to the war itself. In the war on drugs, policymakers reel off metrics on narcotics intercepted and smugglers arrested, but the trade keeps growing. At the borders, each crackdown (at Calais, in the Mediterranean) promises a political pay-off but also stores up future trouble (the small boats, the Atlantic crossing). When wars are declared, politicians need to point so a ‘win’, but all too often this means we frequently end up in a hall of mirrors where underlying problems are renewed and where failure becomes a peculiar kind of success.

In all the war talk lurks the danger, too, of crying wolf. When a real war happens, whether in Ukraine or the Middle East, we may not fully recognise it for what it is — not least when it comes to the dangers of escalation and the quashing of dissent.

We must wean ourselves off the war fix. By opening our eyes to the real costs and ill-gotten benefits from both rhetorical and real wars, we have a chance to ditch the addiction. That will help us to focus on the more peaceful solutions that only emerge when dissent and debate are allowed a proper place in politics. 

Wreckonomics: Why It’s Time to End the War on Everything, by Ruben Andersson and David Keen, is out now

Why are politicians fixated with declaring war? By David Keen. The Spectator December 22, 2023. 

Just like the war on drugs and the war on terror, efforts at stopping population movement by force often just fuel the problem. But for many claiming to confront the perceived threat, that suits all too well

Look at the business of tackling the migration crisis in Europe, and you will find evidence not of some one-off failure to plan ahead, or a policy initiative gone wrong through unexpected circumstances. Rather, you face something akin to a complex crime scene where the damage, the ostensible “mistakes”, and the cover-ups have all been systematic. The perverse outcomes of the war on smuggling – including thousands of border deaths, escalating political brinkmanship and the professionalisation of the human smuggling business itself – are more than a blip or an anomaly. When policies persistently fail, we need to look not only at “what went wrong” but also at “what went right”– and at who is benefiting from the wreckage.

 The habit of waging “war” on everything has spread from the early days of the war on communism and the war on drugs to “fights” against crime, terrorism, irregular migration and many more complex political problems. These wars never seem to be won and often have disastrous results, yet politicians continue to declare them. What keeps such disastrous interventions and policies ticking over? What renders them acceptable? Why do they get reinvented from one era to another? And why do we never seem to learn? Using our backgrounds in anthropology (Ruben Andersson) and history/sociology (David Keen), over recent years, we have sought to get to the bottom of these questions. Nowhere illustrates the failure of “the war on everything” approach better than the fight against migration.

In 2010, when Ruben first arrived in Senegal to study migration to Europe, he was struck by something people kept telling him. Four years earlier, in one of Europe’s earlier “migration crises”, 30,000 west-African migrants had arrived at the Spanish Canary Islands in wooden fishing boats, sparking a large-scale deportation campaign. On the outskirts of Dakar, the capital of Senegal, one of those deported from the Canaries told Ruben that he was, as an anthropologist studying migration, part of a system that was profiting from the migrants’ misery. “There’s lots of money in illegal migration,” said the deportee, pointing out, on long walks through his seaside neighbourhood, all those who fed off this system: academics, journalists, NGOs and European and Senegalese maritime forces stationed just beyond this fishing community.

At the time, the word on the street was that Senegalese politicians, both locally and nationally, were using Spanish aid money – meant to ensure Senegal’s collaboration in deportations and border patrols – for their own private or political gain. In coming years, the pattern would be replicated as major partners in European immigration control – such as Libya, Turkey and Sudan – leveraged their promised cooperation, not just for a windfall of aid, but also for wider strategic and economic ends.

Seeing this system in action, we developed an analysis of the political economy of war and of security operations such as deportation and border patrols – asking the old question “Cui bono” (Who gains?), as well as “In whose wider interests are the operations staged?” There was an intriguing, if disturbing, challenge of joining the dots between various disastrous interventions, from the wars on drugs and smugglers to the war on terror, where we had observed a very similar pattern. In a variety of war-like interventions, regional powers have been gaming ostensible attempts to eliminate a perceived threat, carving out impunity and making a profit. At the same time, pursuing these various wars and fights has routinely fuelled – or simply displaced – the problem. For a wide range of actors who claim to confront the perceived threat, things keep going wrong in the right way.

Escalating the fights, escalating the demands

One of the most important gamers was Libya’s Col Muammar Gaddafi. By the early 2000s, he had already discovered that he sat on a prize possession. Amid the international arms embargo, the Brotherly Leader had turned his eyes to his African neighbours: sleeping in a great Bedouin tent in New York before the UN general assembly was all of a piece with his newfound role as chief spokesperson for downtrodden African nations breaking free from old colonial shackles. He had established close business links with states in the Sahel and invited African workers into Libya’s booming economy.

 As Italy and its northern neighbours anxiously began considering the Mediterranean for signs of migrant boats, however, Gaddafi started seeing his country’s African workers as a double asset. On the one hand, workers could still be exploited; on the other, they could be weaponised. By 2008, a Friendship Treaty had been struck between Gaddafi and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, which was worth $5bn over 20 years. Supposedly aimed at addressing colonial wrongs, it smoothed the path for outsourced border patrols in the central Mediterranean. Even so, Gaddafi, who had by now fully grown into Reagan’s caricature of him as the “mad dog of the Middle East”, escalated the rhetoric and threatened that Europe would “turn black” unless more favours were forthcoming. And come they did: Libya emerged from the international cold thanks in no small part to Gaddafi’s migration manoeuvres. He also succeeded in presenting himself as someone who could help in the “war on terror” – not least because of his role in stirring up terror.

Then came war. Amid the Arab spring, Nato and assorted Middle Eastern countries intervened militarily in the scramble for power in Libya. The violent removal of Gaddafi and the conflict that followed led to a cascade of displacement and migration; it also escalated the gaming and brinkmanship. Nato missiles had ended his previously cosy relationship with European leaders, but Gaddafi did not give up on his threats and cajoling in the dying days of his regime – quite the opposite. Europe would be “invaded” by migrants, he said, unless Nato backed down; his troops tried to make good on his threat, forcing African workers to board unseaworthy vessels at gunpoint.

In the following years, assorted warlords have kept up this tradition by simultaneously combating and facilitating migration, taking handsome rewards while threatening Europe with further “invasions”. In one notable episode, one militia leader in the north-western Libyan city of Zawiya, known as Al Bija, was found by journalists to be managing the smuggling market by taking a substantial cut from any departing boats before promptly “rescuing” those who had not paid, towing them back to land and imprisoning them in brutal detention centres run by his own tribe. The double game of migration control – extracting cash and impunity by issuing threats, while simultaneously offering to remedy them – was, by the time of Libya’s conflict, a high-stakes scramble for profit and power.

Gaming Europe’s migration fixation

The stakes were to rise higher still. In 2015, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was in a tight spot: he had called snap elections and was under siege from all sides. But Erdoğan held the trump card: migration. Though the details were to remain murky, by spring 2016 it was becoming clear that threatening to turn on the tap of onward migration was an important tactic for the Turkish leadership. (Questions still remain over Russia’s role in fomenting the crisis as part of its Syria manoeuvres.) The 2015-16 border crisis would strengthen Erdoğan’s grip on power as he extracted promises from the EU – only partially met, but that did not particularly matter for short-term electoral purposes – on visa-free travel for Turkish citizens and billions of euros of financial support for Turkey’s refugee operations.

Selling yourself as an unreliable bulwark against migration had by 2015 become big business. “Weapons of mass migration” is how one scholar, Kelly Greenhill, has labelled this use of migrants as a geopolitical tool. Whatever we call this gaming of migration and forced displacement, it is a remarkably effective way for less powerful states to exert pressure on their stronger counterparts. One further example comes from Morocco, which in 2022 managed finally to shift Spain’s policy on occupied Western Sahara in its favour in exchange for further migration enforcement – halting, at least temporarily, the brinkmanship that had fomented politically motivated “border crises” at the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, as well as in the strait of Gibraltar, over previous decades. The costs of this bargaining were regularly borne by migrants; for instance, in June 2022 at least 37 migrants died between the Spanish and Moroccan fences at Melilla, where they had been trapped and teargassed in a security operation subsequently covered up by both sides.

In her study, Greenhill argues that certain features of liberal democracies – including respect for rights and open democratic debate – make them particularly vulnerable to being played. However, we have seen in Libya and Turkey how the illiberal tendency of treating migration as a threat has been a key part of the game. Once fighting migration has come to be seen as a paramount political objective in destination states, and once huge resources are being spent on this endeavour, buffer states will spot vulnerabilities and opportunities to play on this perceived existential threat, selectively closing and opening the gates.

UNHCR figures as of 2023 confirm a broader trend: 83% of refugees worldwide are hosted by low- and middle-income countries, and 72% by countries neighbouring conflict zones. Turkey, topping the list of global refugee hosts, can reasonably argue that it has done its “fair share” in hosting more than 3.6 million refugees, mostly from neighbouring Syria. When larger refugee hosts leverage human displacement, they are using the “weapons of the weak”, to use anthropologist James Scott’s term, against a more powerful counterpart. While border security has spectacularly failed to address international migration (and has generated a raft of destructive consequences), it has nevertheless “succeeded” in keeping refugees away from the protection that might have been provided by the richest states, at least for some time. Yet this is far from the only shortsighted gain for destination states. Another comes from the potent politics of distraction and drama that border control provides.

The burgeoning business of border security

It is worth reflecting on how swiftly borders became bulwarks against unwanted migration. The end of the cold war once promised, to optimistic liberal thinkers, a borderless world; instead, it gifted us an increasingly globalised border business. Not only are more and more partner states being enrolled in border security, but many countries are also instigating their own border security fixations. Barriers are today separating neighbours not just in the west but far beyond. While there were 15 walls at nation-state borders around the world at the end of the cold war, the total had risen to more than 70 barely three decades later. Unlike older border fortifications, the new ones are not built to keep state enemies away (or to keep citizens in, as in the case of the Berlin Wall): they are aimed at keeping people out.

Calls for “security” and “border protection” justify not just the building of walls but also a wider architecture of control, separation and surveillance at national borders, and well beyond them. Drones have been repurposed from the “war on terror” for border surveillance in the US and the Mediterranean; complex offshore detention and sea patrolling agreements have been rolled out from Australia to the Atlantic; advanced radar equipment and satellite surveillance have proven a boon for Europe’s defence industry; and in the increasing number of border security “expos”, security firms have presented their customers with ever more intrusive technologies– heartbeat scanners, oxygen detectors, ground sensors, online surveillance – in a market that, according to one estimate, will soon be worth more than $65bn. Meanwhile, the budget of the EU border and coast guard agency, Frontex, shot up from €19m in 2006 to more than €750m by 2022, a year in which it was facing mounting scandal over support for illegal Greek “pushbacks” at sea.

The US, as so often, has led the way in this trend while actively heating the global border security market – with the budget of the US Border Patrol increasing almost tenfold in the past three decades, from $363m in 1993 to nearly $4.9bn by 2021. While these sums are still small relative to military expenditure, the remarkable growth rate of the US Border Patrol’s budget is strongly related to the wider security marketplace, with great scope for synergies, “dual-use” technology, seed funding and more, across civilian policing and military sectors. At the heart of this complex sits the vast Department for Homeland Security bureaucracy.

Besides the escalating border security investments, politicians have put huge amounts of time, money and effort into the complicated business of getting tough on migration – and being seen to get tough.

Yet this has massively backfired on a practical level. Douglas Massey, a leading migration scholar, has found that, since the 1980s, vast expenditure on border security has gone hand in hand with a large growth of undocumented migration within the US.

The reason is remarkably simple: as it became much harder for seasonal migrant workers to circulate back “home”, owing to harsh border controls and barriers, people stayed. So why, if border controls were backfiring so spectacularly, were successive administrations so committed to them?

The political profits of fighting migration

The gap between rhetoric and reality in migration policy has been especially notable when it comes to fighting migration. The political gains from a strong stance on borders are clear, even when politicians fail to achieve the outcomes they seek. Some years ago in the US, the political scientist Peter Andreas described this as a “border game” with various layers: from the spectacle – and distraction – of border enforcement on the political level, to the institutional funding game, through to the cat-and-mouse game at the border itself.

Racism came to play a prominent role here, reflecting a longer history of racial exclusion, fed by a fear-based narrative. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan said undocumented migration was “a threat to national security”, with “terrorists and subversives ... just two days’ driving time” from the Texas border, and communist agents ready “to feed on the anger and frustration of recent Central and South American immigrants”. Massey is among those who have pointed out how, over the decades that followed, a racialised “Latino threat narrative was manufactured and sustained by an expanding set of self-interested actors who benefited from the perpetuation of an immigration crisis”. This new migration pattern also had clear winners within the wider economy, as an undocumented and deportable labour force was even more exploitable than its legal predecessors.

A large part of the incentive to keep escalating the fight, in the US and Europe, concerned the gains to be had from fixating on and fighting illegal migration. Especially in the US, border closures have brought economic gains in rendering the cross-border labour force increasingly exploitable. Meanwhile, the political gains are twofold. On the one hand, a tough nationalist message attracts voters; on the other, it provides a distraction from problems that governments cannot or do not want to solve, including inequality, economic insecurity and environmental catastrophe. Irregular migration by land and sea was a boon for this kind of politics in Europe. Yet the numbers have in general been relatively small, 2015 excluded. Most irregular migration in Europe occurs when people overstay their visas, as the European Commission itself acknowledges, while regular immigration dwarfs land and sea arrivals.

Governments and interior ministries have seen fit, for their own political and institutional reasons, to treat some human movement as a security problem to be solved with force. Instead of looking at the complex drivers of migration – including persistent demand for workers – all politicians had to do was to be seen to address the arrivals. Meanwhile, new actors spotted an opportunity.

How the war on migration feeds the smuggling business

European leaders have been keen to frame their border security efforts as a war on smugglers, especially since 2015, when smugglers (frequently mislabelled as mafia or traffickers) were conveniently assigned the blame for a set of horrific shipwrecks near the Italian and Maltese coasts. Of course, we shouldn’t paint smugglers in a rosy light; theirs is usually a cut-throat business. Yet it is a business that has grown larger and more violent on the back of border enforcement, not just in Europe but worldwide.

In north Africa and the Sahel, the small-scale smuggling of earlier years, often run by migrants themselves, has increasingly given way to organised criminal gangs. In Libya, smugglers have held migrants and refugees hostage and even tortured them until their families pay release fees. The taller the barriers, the more captive your market, as “customers” have nowhere left to turn except into the hands of professional criminal organisations.

We can put this in economic terms, as Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials in the US are keen to do themselves. In presentations, CBP economists have asserted, like their European counterparts, that the aim of enforcement is to destroy the smugglers’ business model. This involves increasing the cost of smuggling to the point where revenue takes a hit, making it a less attractive business. Yet what this does in practice is favour smuggling economies of scale. A systemic view, if officials had wished to consider it, would tell them that the fight against migration and the war on smugglers would produce more of precisely that which they said they wanted to curtail: more dangerous migration scenarios and stronger criminal smuggling operations.

This is precisely what happened in Libya, after the fall of Gaddafi. As one report noted in 2017, “The coastguard, detention centres and key branches of the fragile Libyan state’s security apparatus are largely run by militias, some deeply involved in the illicit economy,” with these militias “creating a protection market around human smuggling before eventually taking over the business directly”. The political and economic games around European – especially Italian – relationships with the militias have been complex and murky. However, it was becoming clear around this time that external involvement and encouragement were strengthening the power of the militias, who, like many border guards, could play the dual role of poacher and gamekeeper along Libya’s coasts. The strengthening of militias and the ensuing turf battles among them were contributing to Libyan instability.

 In impoverished Mali and Niger, various political leaders have sent clear signals that unless they receive the required political support and economic capital, a migratory crisis will ensue. States such as Morocco and Turkey regularly turn on and off the migratory tap to strengthen their hand in negotiations with the EU. In all these cases, authoritarian leaders, interior ministries, and abusive security forces have been the big winners in the fight against migration – gaining power, recognition and money. Those who have suffered most have been migrants and citizens in these countries, while regional stability has been weakened.

In 2020, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus – despite his regime’s incipient working arrangement with the Frontex border agency – was channelling refugees to a frontier no-man’s-land where Polish guards fought them back. By this stage, EU leaders and the European Commission had cottoned on to what they called the “instrumentalisation” of migration. Their argument, probably quite correct, was that Lukashenko was seeking to destabilise the EU through uncontrollable migration flows. Yet instead of accounting for its own role in the blatant gaming at the borders, the EU used this incident to propose what amounted to pushbacks in cases where migration was being “instrumentalised”.

On the central Mediterranean migration route, it is not only Gaddafi’s successors who have continued to instrumentalise migration. So have Italian politicians, who have used these threats at face value to ramp up anti-migration rhetoric, to rally the voter base, and to put blame on the EU – and human smugglers – for the debacle.

This kind of crisis politics has been accompanied by a growing tendency to shift blame on to rescue initiatives on the open sea, with repeated shipwrecks and deaths as a result. On the southern border of the US, while Mexico has often been less willing to stoke the problem in the way Europe’s neighbours have done, this has in no way dented the political appetite in Washington DC for manipulating border crises and finding new groups to blame. A wide range of wars and fights – whether in relation to migration, terrorism, drugs or crime – has created perverse incentives. One is tempted to say that failure has become the new success.

This is an edited extract from Wreckonomics: Why It’s Time to End the War on Everything, published by Oxford University Press, 2023.

‘Weapons of mass migration’: how states exploit the failure of migration policies. By Ruben Andersson and David Keen. The Guardian, December 14, 2023. 

Oxford University Press

Oxford Academic

Security is one of the most important and challenging issues in the 21st century. It is the ability to protect and promote the well-being and dignity of people and communities, and to prevent and resolve conflicts and threats. But what does security really mean? And how can we achieve it in a complex and uncertain world? In this article, we will review the book Wreckonomics: Why It’s Time to End the War on Everything by Ruben Andersson and David Keen, two professors of international development and experts on conflict and security. The book is a critical and provocative analysis of why various wars and security interventions have persisted and prospered despite their disastrous failures and costs, and how we can end the war on everything and create a more peaceful and prosperous world.

If you want to learn more about security and development, and how to challenge and change the destructive policies and practices that fuel the war on everything, you should read this book. It will give you a new and holistic perspective on security and development, and help you find effective and ethical ways to address the complex and interrelated challenges and opportunities that we face in the world.

Recommendation

War is hell, the saying goes. For professors Ruben Andersson and David Keen, the truism evokes a different kind of hellscape. In this insightful analysis, they dissect the “war on everything,” by which they mean misguided fights against problems like terror, illicit drugs and illegal immigration. In every case, the warriors oversimplify the threat, use bogus metrics to measure their progress and then duly claim victory where none exists. Andersson and Keen focus not just on the hypocrisy of political leaders but also on the unintended victims of these wars. You’ll find that their thought-provoking work casts many of society’s issues in a new light.

Take-Aways

“Wreckonomics” is a perverse process by which a misguided policy targets an intractable problem.

Wreckonomics policies consist of five parts that describe the process.

The Cold War set the stage for decades of unwarranted wars.

The War on Terror played on fears while botching the broader mission.

Wreckonomics policies create their own destructive momentum.

The fight against illegal immigration contains echoes of the other wars.

The War on Drugs is the longest of the wreckonomics misadventures.

Four strategies can help make wreckonomics policies less devastating.

 

 

Summary

“Wreckonomics” is a perverse process by which a misguided policy targets an intractable problem.

In recent decades, Western governments have embarked on a variety of well-funded fights against various scourges. There was a War on Drugs and a War on Terror, along with fights against illegal immigration. But the cures proved worse than the diseases. These wars created unintended consequences without fixing the underlying problems. Despite the obvious failures of these wars, politicians keep fighting them and finding new enemies. Indeed, politics in the United States seem to be dominated by a never-ending search for new foes and a demand from the warriors that everyone become more indignant.

“This habit of waging ‘war on everything’ has spread from the early days of the war on Communism and the war on drugs to ‘fights’ against crime, terrorism, migration and many more complex political problems.”

One theme in these wars is that they underestimate the complexity of the challenge at hand. Politicians view themselves as crime scene investigators – they’re looking for the single culprit responsible for the problem. That mindset led to the manhunts for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. In wreckonomics, the good guys need one evil actor to blame, even if the underlying issue has many protagonists. In truth, any social issue is multifaceted and difficult to fix.

“One way of summing up this habit of wreck-and-fix is the old saying ‘If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail’.”

That leads to another common theme: Wreckonomics policies often are championed by right-wing politicians. While conservatives aren’t entirely to blame for wreckonomics policies, the right has specialized in simplifying and weaponizing complicated issues.

Wreckonomics policies consist of five parts that describe the process.

The wreckonomics ethos can be summed up with the acronym WRECK:

W is for “war fix” – Warriors sell the miracle of the kill shot. In every wreckonomics policy, an ill-conceived notion that the targeted threat is simple and can be remedied through force dominates. Hitting the problem with a magic bullet will neutralize the threat, the warriors promise. Wreckonomics also provides a fix in that the misguided actions soon become addictive. Once the war starts, stopping it is nearly impossible.

R is for rigged – Wreckonomics policies are gamed to benefit certain players. In the war on everything, the fix is always in. No one ever comes out and says it, of course, but those crucial players speaking most loudly against the threat at hand are the ones who benefit most from the focus on it.

E is for externalization – Wreckonomics policies are expensive in terms of blood and treasure, but the interventions never hit the powerful as hard as they hit everyone else.

C is for cascade – The first three letters of WRECK set the stage for unexpected, unpredictable results. Just as an avalanche starts small and escalates quickly, the wreckonomics cascade is a result of the unacknowledged complexity of the task at hand. Costs quickly balloon, as do the opportunities for players to further corrupt the process.

K is for “knowledge fix” – Once the war is under way, its proponents set about twisting the truth: Any victories are exaggerated, any setbacks are downplayed. The distortions include overlooking the true costs of the intervention, and ignoring failures and unintended consequences.

The Cold War set the stage for decades of unwarranted wars.

The Cold War wrote the script for the wreckonomics policies that followed. The globe’s two great powers were embroiled in nonshooting wars against the other. Gaming became endemic. In the United States, huge sums flowed to defense contractors. The Soviet Union also ramped up its own armaments industry. Like all wreckonomics policies, the Cold War launched with a real conflict and sincere intentions: Two great powers aimed to spread their divergent ideologies. However, things quickly spiraled. Over the decades, the Cold War turned hot in proxy wars, perhaps most notably in Vietnam, but also in El Salvador, Indonesia and Angola. The specter of colonialism loomed over many of these hot spots, adding complexity to the system. What’s more, the architects of the Cold War lived in Washington, DC, and Moscow, places unburdened with the high body counts that were racked up in shooting wars in the developing world. One US infantry officer wrote the memoir Kill Everything That Moves, a title that summed up how a poor person living in Vietnam experienced the Cold War.

“Seen as a whole, the Cold War involved a very particular – and very skewed – distribution of costs”

As the Cold War sprawled across the globe, propaganda took over. Neither side gave an honest accounting of its victories and defeats; instead, both turned to spin and obfuscation. What’s more, America and the USSR assembled allies who were gaming the Cold War agenda not out of ideological purity but for their own advantage. The end of the Cold War underscored the addictive nature of wreckonomics: Optimists hoped for a “peace dividend” in the 1990s as the huge sums funneled toward arms, soldiers and spies could be redirected to schools and health care. Instead, the United States and Europe continued to spend heavily on their militaries, with the argument that cutting defense budgets amounted to a surrender to global threats.

The War on Terror played on fears while botching the broader mission.

The post-September 11, 2001, fight against global terrorism quickly devolved into a particularly effective version of wreckonomics. A defining feature of this policy was its appeal to emotion, particularly fear. Terror warriors became adept at manipulating public emotions to get what they wanted. The emotional appeal serves as an inoculation against uncomfortable questions – if the war pits good versus evil, then no right-minded person would question how it’s being waged or how widely it’s proliferating. The US War on Terror turned into an all-encompassing effort, as evidenced by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, a bureaucracy that fought not just terror but also drug trafficking and border security.

“In our wars and fights, strong emotions have also effectively been stirred up and manipulated by political and security actors.”

 The Cold War created the prime conditions for the War on Terror that followed. A hot war in Afghanistan sowed the seeds of future insurgency. Then, when the Cold War ended and communism faded as an enemy, terrorism moved into the role. Terrorism didn’t become Public Enemy No. 1 until the 9/11 attacks. Then, the war machine sprang into action, with the United States invading Afghanistan and then Iraq.

Wreckonomics policies create their own destructive momentum.

Neither invasion was clearly supported, but both illustrated a reality of wreckonomics: The wars perpetuate themselves. A clear goal of the 9/11 terrorists was to provoke the United States into a heavy-handed response, which then served as evidence that America really was the iron-fisted power that the terrorists had portrayed all along. Afghanistan and Iraq, meanwhile, saw spikes in terror attacks after US troops arrived, acts that only seemed to reinforce the rationale for the American invasion and ongoing presence. As Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said of George W. Bush, “Iraq was not even close to the center of the War on Terror before the president invaded it.”

“Many of the state actors we have considered – in Washington, Moscow, Damascus and Colombo – can cynically claim their wars have been ‘won’.”

As billions flowed into Afghanistan, the country remained unstable. A task force headed by General David Petraeus estimated $360 million in US aid had wound up in the pockets of the Taliban or Afghani criminals. To the credit of the terror warriors in the United States, one goal has been achieved: No attacks have occurred on US soil since 2001. But to hold up this fact as the only measure of success is to miss the broader failures. These include massive spending and a globally disruptive wave of violence not just in Afghanistan and Iraq but in Syria, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.

The fight against illegal immigration contains echoes of the other wars.

For decades, the United States had been trying to stem illegal immigration across the Mexican border. Brazen incursions across the frontier near San Diego in the 1990s led American authorities to build fences, which then pushed migration paths into more remote, hazardous terrain. Similarly, in the 2000s, an influx of illegal migrants into Spain led that country to build more fences. The migrants in turn took even more circuitous and dangerous routes to Europe. In true wreckonomics fashion, developing nations bordering wealthy powers figured out how to make money from their geographic position. Mexico partnered with the United States to crack down on illegal entries through Mexico’s southern border. Mauritania accepted investments from Spain, while Libya partnered up with Italy.

“Libya emerged from the international cold thanks in no small part to Gaddafi’s migration maneuvers.”

For opportunists south of the border, the fight against immigration is a lucrative leverage point. Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi grasped Europe’s fears of African migrants streaming in, and he threatened to allow Europe to “turn black” unless he received compensation. The gambit worked. Libya received billions in European aid. One scholar even labeled the strategy “weapons of mass migration.” As the Arab Spring and the Syrian war spurred a crisis, the wreckonomics playbook was in full force. Conservative policymakers embraced overly simplistic solutions that were doomed to fall short. Meanwhile, shrewd actors in the developing world figured out how to make the wreckonomics policies work for them. In Libya, for instance, a militia leader exacted a toll from each boat heading north. Those who declined to pay would be “rescued” at sea – and the boat’s occupants sent to prison camps. The spoils weren’t just for strongmen. Frontex, Europe’s border patrol agency, saw its annual budget soar, going from less than $22 million in 2006 to more than$750 million by 2022.

The War on Drugs is the longest of the wreckonomics misadventures.

In wreckonomics, the protagonists of the misguided policy invariably focus on the wrong measurements of success. In the Vietnam War, the US military leadership concentrated on body counts. In the drug war, the short-sighted focus is on arrest numbers. In both cases, the putative leaders of the policy initiatives are like gambling addicts pulling the lever over and over on a slot machine that’s rigged against them: They believe they’re on the verge of victory, even as the defeats pile up. In other words, the drug warriors themselves are addicted – not to narcotics but to the never-ending cycle of fighting a losing war. The Philippines provides an especially macabre version of the drug war. In 2016, President Rodrigo Duterte urged his citizens to kill drug addicts. In Duterte’s first six months in office, Amnesty International estimated, his regime killed some 7,000 people for drug offenses. In a bizarre twist, Duterte himself was addicted to fentanyl.

“The incentives of the environment in which the drug warriors operate keep pushing them toward compulsive behavior.”

Duterte upped the ante, claiming he wanted to unleash a holocaust that would kill millions of addicts. He paid bounties to police officers who murdered drug users. In a bromance between strongmen, US president Donald Trump praised Duterte’s “unbelievable job.” Duterte’s simplistic, brutal fight took a page from the early days of the drug war in the United States. Policymakers and law enforcement made no effort to understand why some people became addicted or why others entered the drug trade. Instead, they focused on mass arrests and heavy-handed tactics, often racially tinged. It was Richard Nixon who coined the phrase “War on Drugs” in 1971, a thinly disguised jab at his predecessor Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. A decade later, Ronald Reagan doubled down. The result was soaring levels of incarceration, particularly for Black Americans. The uneven penalties for crack cocaine, seen as a drug favored by Black users, were clearly racist.

Four strategies can help make wreckonomics policies less devastating.

The wars on everything are costly. Here’s how to mitigate the damage:

Encourage dissent – A society on a war footing has a clear enemy, and no space for dialogue nor room for debate. But in the war on everything, the enemy is never clear-cut. That’s why it’s crucial that warriors make way for dissenting voices. Policy debates shouldn’t be stifled by an environment that mimics martial law.

Honestly assess the true costs – Those who fight wars on everything relish confusion and obfuscation. The “hall-of-mirrors” effect makes it difficult to tell how the war is progressing. To combat this syndrome, societies need robust and honest analyses of who’s really winning and losing in any given war.

Broaden the inputs – In Colombia, policymakers have shifted that nation’s costly war on drugs only after decades of experience and a willingness to listen to various voices, ranging from drug users and coca producers to academics and intellectuals. Groupthink and willful ignorance are part of wreckonomics; bipartisan solutions are a way to create “coalitions against complicity.”

Acknowledge complexity – As part of its rhetoric, every misguided policy war boils down the enemy to one overly simplistic factor. Never mind that drug addiction and mass migration are complicated, systemic issues. The warriors want to make it simple and then ignore every factor outside their narrow view.

About the Authors

Ruben Andersson is a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford. He is the author of No Go World and Illegality, Inc. David Keen is a professor of conflict studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of The Benefits of Famine and Useful Enemies.

Genres

Nonfiction, Politics, International Relations, Security, Development, Sociology, Economics, History, Philosophy, Ethics

Review

The book Wreckonomics is a critical and provocative analysis of why various wars and security interventions have persisted and prospered despite their disastrous failures and costs. The authors, Ruben Andersson and David Keen, are both professors of international development and experts on conflict and security.

They examine four cases of long-running and futile wars and fights: the Cold War, the war on terror, the fight against migration, and the war on drugs and crime. They argue that these wars and fights are not only ineffective and harmful, but also profitable and advantageous for various actors and interests, such as politicians, corporations, media, NGOs, and even criminals and terrorists.

They show how these actors and interests have exploited and manipulated the fears, emotions, and incentives of the public and the policymakers, and have created a system of feedback loops, distortions, and games that sustain and justify the wars and fights.

They also show how these wars and fights have eroded the values and principles of democracy, human rights, and justice, and have undermined the prospects of peace and development. They call for a radical change in the way we think and act about security, and propose a four-step approach to end the war on everything: 1) recognizing the costs and benefits of the wars and fights, 2) breaking the cycles of fixation and gaming, 3) creating space for dissent and dialogue, and 4) building alternative coalitions and solutions.

Wreckonomics is an insightful and compelling book that covers a wide range of topics related to security and development. The authors write in a clear and engaging style, using anecdotes, examples, and metaphors to illustrate their points and make them relevant and relatable to the reader. They also write in a balanced and nuanced manner, acknowledging the complexity and diversity of security and development issues, and avoiding simplistic or prescriptive solutions.

 The book is well-organized and well-researched, with references, notes, and a glossary at the end. The book is not only a valuable and authoritative source of information, but also a motivating and empowering story of how we can challenge and change the destructive policies and practices that fuel the war on everything.

The book is suitable for anyone who is interested in learning more about security and development, whether they are students, professionals, or curious readers. The book is also a useful resource for anyone who wants to understand the broader social and economic issues and trends that affect and shape security and development.

 

Summary: Wreckonomics: Why It’s Time to End the War on Everything by Ruben Andersson and David Keen. By Alex Lim. Paminy December 2, 2023. 

Wreckonomics, a study by two academics, argues that vested interests need ‘forever wars’. That may be true, but is there a solution?

Almost five years ago, it was reported that, according to some metrics, the United States of America had been at peace for only 17 years since 1776. It had thus, at that point, been at war for 93.5 per cent of its existence. What constitutes war – whether there must be nation-states on opposing sides; whether it includes covert or non-military operations – has long been a source of debate, but perpetual war is today the reality. One sobering indicator is the fact that, for several years now, a child born on September 11 2001 has been eligible to enlist in the “war on terror” that ensued. The latter is one of many ill-defined and catastrophic wars being waged in perpetuity around the world.

The human and financial cost of these wars, which are not limited to armed conflicts, is the subject of a new book by Ruben Andersson, a professor of social anthropology at Oxford, and David Keen, a professor of conflict studies at the London School of Economics. Wreckonomics is a deeply-researched and wide-ranging account of how, despite manifest failings, the wars on terror, drugs and migration are entrenched in Western policy as a kind of perma-crisis for which its principal architects are never held responsible.

The invasion of Afghanistan by the United States, where the war on terror and the war on drugs have converged, was a failure on a remarkable scale. The authors steadfastly demonstrate how the war on terror has done nothing but foment what it ostensibly sought to combat: the number of global terrorist attacks ballooned from a reported total of 3,300 so far in 2000 to almost 30,000 by 2015 – despite the spending of nearly $8 trillion dollars between 2001 and 2021.

Central to Wreckonomics is the question of identifying exactly who benefits from these wars going poorly. Beyond arms manufacturers wanting orders and bellicose senators wanting publicity, this includes aid groups and local authorities, whose under-scrutinised flow of funding depends on conflict and instability. To stay with Afghanistan, Andersson and Keen point, in relation to the war on drugs, to the example of poppy-growing areas under the protection of local warlords, in which the job of police chief could be sold for $100,000 despite paying $60 a month. If you then consider a recent UN report stating that since the Taliban declared a drug ban in April 2022, opium cultivation in Afghanistan has declined by 95 per cent, you’re left with two equally damning conclusions: either the US-led intervention into the drug trade was ineffectual, or it was never a true priority.

Time and again, this pattern repeats around the world, wherever local governments are disincentivised from bringing conflict to an end. In Mali and Sudan, foreign aid is tied to fighting Islamic insurgents, who are in fact working in concert with the military to prolong the discord and keep the money flowing. Through the example of the civil war in Sri Lanka, the authors show that even when a conflict ends, the spending may not: rather than demobilising, the army recruited 50,000 more soldiers, in large part to protect a system of kickbacks from arms contracts.

The Covid-19 pandemic – another “battle” the world had to win – provides a telling counterpoint. As early as May 2020, the IMF estimated that $9 trillion worldwide had been allocated to the fight. But as we enter the northern winter of 2023, governments have long since lost their appetite for spending in this area. One of the conditions of perpetual war, suggest Andersson and Keen, is that its active theatres, the locales where the death and turmoil are most keenly felt, must be at a remove from the nation waging them. Think of Turkey and Mauritania as chosen bulwarks against migration to Europe. By contrast, it was impossible to outsource the suffering of Covid-19 – which created a real desire to bring that crisis to an end.

Wreckonomics’s desire to present its subject as systematic and somewhat cyclical does, at times, hit a limit. For instance, the recent series of coups in west African nations would have benefited from a more nuanced, regional-specific approach. While it’s true, per the authors, that in some of those nations, there has been a change in leadership rather than a change in regime, in the likes of Burkina Faso, led by 35-year-old firebrand Ibrahim Traoré, something more radical may be afoot.

Andersson and Keen close a little quixotically, suggesting some steps towards ending the state of affairs they bemoan. They point to the need for strong dissenting voices, dialogue, and proper cost-and-benefit analyses before actors engage in new wars; they call for coalitions against the kind of complicity that makes war profitable, and stress the need to “unfix” the issues that originate them: overly simplistic (and often false) understandings of conflict that become the fixed terms of debate. It’s hard to disagree with any of these proposals – though it’ll remain much harder, you feel, to have such a dialogue over the roar of exploding bombs.

Why the wars on terror, drugs and migration may never succeed. By Samuel Rutter. The Telegraph, December 1, 2023.