On Aug. 20, 2012, at the tail end of a news conference that focused mostly on domestic politics, President Barack Obama fielded a question about the expanding civil war in Syria. The president condemned the violence by the regime of Bashar al-Assad and detailed his administration’s efforts to provide humanitarian aid. He noted pointedly that he had not ordered military involvement, but he did add a caveat. Chemical weapons were a “red line,” and their use “would change my calculations significantly.” Almost exactly a year later, Syrian government forces bombarded a Damascus neighborhood with a nerve agent.
The Obama administration’s deliberations in the wake of that attack have been worked over now by pundits, journalists and, more recently, former administration officials writing memoirs. The basic story is familiar: A president who came into office criticizing military deployments in the Middle East drew back from the brink of military action, surprising many of his advisers. In “A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen,” David Andelman, a CNN columnist and veteran correspondent for the New York Times and CBS News, proffers his own version of that episode.
Andelman, who divides his time between the United States and France, pairs the Obama administration’s debates with those playing out in Paris. He describes a French government that was ready, even eager, to punish the Assad regime for its brutality. When Obama abruptly turned against the military option, French leaders were “hung out to dry.” The American volte face left French President François Hollande “astonished, disappointed, almost humbled.” For Andelman, the episode was Obama’s “single greatest failure,” one that dealt a blow “to the effective establishment and utility of virtually any red line in modern diplomacy and warfare.”
The Syria imbroglio looms large for Andelman, but it is just one part of a book with much broader ambitions. He wants to explore the phenomenon of red lines, track their past and present use, and distill some understanding of when they work and when they fail. As he moves from the particular to the general, he sketches a mostly dystopic world where dangerous lines are proliferating as the existing international order collapses. “There have never been more red lines at any one point in history than today.” It is an arresting claim, but the author does not explain how he reaches it. He employs the term “red line” profligately but without a clear definition. It refers to physical borders in some contexts. At other times, he uses it to mean strong national interests or zones of influence. In still other situations, it seems to refer to international rules and norms.
One constant in Andelman’s account is a focus on military conflict, actual and potential. It is tempting therefore to view his fixation on multiplying red lines as a claim that the world is more conflict ridden or violent than in the past. If that is indeed the argument, it’s not necessarily correct. The world is definitely more bloody than a decade ago (in large part because of the Syrian war), but scholars have also noted a decline in the death toll from armed conflicts since 2014. In any case, there is a vibrant debate about patterns of conflict that Andelman leaves almost entirely untouched, and he evinces little interest in the parts of the world that have become more peaceful and where talk of red lines has quieted.
At its best, the book serves as a competent and thorough primer on conflict or potential conflict zones around the globe, from North Korea to Iran to the eastern provinces of Congo. After historical chapters on the appeasement of Hitler (where a succession of red lines collapsed ignominiously) and the Korean War (which the author describes as a costly but effective defense of a red line) come treatments of the South China Sea, North Korea, several African conflict zones and Iran. He considers Vladimir Putin’s mischief in the “near abroad,” including the absorption of Crimea and cyber-meddling in Estonia. In all these areas, Andelman condenses history and current events into digestible form. His chapter on Africa, for example, effectively describes the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria and the broader upsurge in jihadist violence in a bloody belt across the continent. There are a few surprising omissions in his tour of the horizon. In considering China’s proliferating red lines, for example, Andelman spends pages on South China Sea reefs and rocks but barely mentions Taiwan.
Along the way, Andelman weaves into the narrative several episodes from his remarkable journalistic career. To his credit, he is sparing with these autobiographical interludes and does not oversell them. He might have coasted on his decades of reporting, but he dives into the details of the hot spots he identifies, often taking the reader back centuries before moving at a sprightly pace through contemporary events.
This commendable work aside, the author’s use of the term “red line” is so imprecise that his analytical project founders. We are left with aphorisms that are more anodyne than revelatory. Red lines must be firm; they must be clearly delineated and supported; there must be detailed consequences for crossing them. Even these unsurprising conclusions do not really jibe with many of the situations he describes. Andelman makes no effort to demonstrate that Syria would be better off today had Obama loosed the cruise missiles that were on standby. (President Trump did respond to subsequent chemical strikes without appreciably altering the trajectory of the Syrian conflict.) Nor is it evident that clearer and more vigorously enforced red lines would produce a better outcome in the South China Sea. In certain contexts, ambiguity and delay may be more valuable than vivid line-drawing.
By the book’s last chapter, which centers on the pandemic’s geopolitical impact, Andelman seems to have wearied of the effort to analyze the efficacy of red lines. The virus, after all, “will transcend all red lines.” What is required are healthy doses of “multilateralism, internationalism, and liberalism.” Lines are everywhere in this book, but the bottom line is hard to find.
A Red Line in the Sand
Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History
of Wars That Might Still Happen
By David A. Andelman
Pegasus.
432 pp. $29.95
