World war: four scenarios: ethnic strife and "engineers for hire" among the...

International

Ethnic strife and "engineers for hire" among most-dangerous scenarios

The end of the Cold War did not end all wars--it merely changed the paradigm in which conflicts arise and escalate, says military scholar Russell Ramsey, a distinguished visiting professor

"Although the former East-West Power World died politically in 1989, its old paradigmatic rival, the North-South Economic World, is pragmatically alive," Ramsey writes in the Reserve Officers Association report, The Officer. "The central notion in this array . . . [is] the Southern Constellation's complaint that their lesser economic development is the fruit of unjust Northern Constellation policy." This paradigm is further complicated by religious alignments that cross political, economic, and military parameters, as demonstrated by the Persian Gulf War, he notes.

Ramsey identifies four major challenges to world peace through the year 2025, in order of likelihood:

1. Regional Ethnic Conflict. The world will comprise some 200 nation-states by the early 2000s, whose sovereignty and authority will increasingly be challenged by 4,000 ethnic minorities. "Non-acceptance of the nation-state fuels perhaps 20 armed conflicts in 1993 and is the greatest threat to world peace until 2025," says Ramsey.

2. Arms and Engineers for Hire. This scenario appears very likely due to the "flood" of arms and experts in the former Soviet Union, together with "contract-hungry" arms producers in the West and ongoing regional conflicts around the world. Ramsey believes that the new North-South Economic World paradigm will tend to fuel this trafficking in arms and engineers for hire.

3. Regional Pariah Regimes. Panama's Manuel Noriega, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, North Korea's Kim Il Sung, and Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic are present examples of pariahs who are able to gain support and to initiate and sustain armed conflict.

4. Focused Economic Grievance Syndrome. A single economic issue such as famine, control of a natural resource, or tariffs and government subsidies could become both a catalyst and a sustaining force behind a major conflict, says Ramsey.

Despite these gloomy scenarios, Ramsey believes that the world is less conflict-prone at the end of the twentieth century than it was at the beginning. "Mechanisms for arms control, collective security alliances, and the spread of political democracy with privatized economies all militate toward less probable conflict. So does the rise in technically competent, constitutionally obedient armed forces in many regions," he says. He suggests that a permanent World Peacekeeping Force operating under the United Nations Security Council could help avert the start and spread of these and other potential world conflicts.

Source: "World Systems, Challenges: 1993-2025" by Russell W. Ramsey, The Officer (April 1993), Reserve Officers Association of the United States, 1 Constitution Avenue, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002-5624.