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President-elect Joe Biden’s Biggest Foreign Policy Challenge: Irredentism

President Donald Trump and his supporters applaud his legacy as the first president since Jimmy Carter not to embroil U.S. forces in a new foreign conflict. Certainly, after almost two decades in Afghanistan and almost fifteen years in Iraq, the American electorate values military restraint. There is a fine line, however, between restraint and abandonment of global leadership. Trump sprinted across that line, and global security may pay the price.

The United States was never the catalyst for conflict but rather was the lid on the pressure cooker. America’s retreat opens the door to dictators and despots to pursue their own revanchist ideologies.

President-elect Joe Biden’s Biggest Foreign Policy Challenge: Irredentism

The problem is irredentism, countries laying claim to former territories and willing to enforce such claims with military force. It is the notion that led late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait in 1990 and which Argentine military dictator Leopoldo Galtieri used to justify Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982.

With multiple regimes challenging the post–World War II and the United States either ill-equipped or unable to confront them, the challenge is formidable. Consider the number of irredentist or revanchist challenges that now loom:

Turkey: Former Foreign Minister and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu was the main theoretician behind President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s previous policy of neo-Ottomanism. In its most benign sense, neo-Ottomanism might have been envisioned as something akin to the British commonwealth. But Erdoğan was not benign; he instead sought to leverage past Ottoman ties in favor of enhancing Turkey’s power and influence on the world stage. The problem was that the Ottoman Empire’s former subjects had quite a different memory of Turkish imperialism than did most Turks. As neo-Ottomanism collapsed, Erdoğan abandoned any pretense and questioned the legitimacy of Turkey’s borders. Pro-government media unveiled maps which showed Turkey absorbing the entirety of both Armenia and Cyprus, and incorporating chunks of Iraq, Syria, Greece, and Bulgaria. That Turkey now appears to act on such ambitions raises concern, especially as Erdoğan may instigate conflict to distract the Turkish public from his increasing tenuous economic stewardship.

Azerbaijan: Azerbaijan caught not only Armenia but also the United States by surprise when it invaded Nagorno-Karabakh on Sept. 27, 2020. While diplomats and pundits can excuse the move citing UN Security Council Resolutions recognizing Azerbaijani sovereignty over the region, both the timing of the attack—on the centenary of the Ottoman Turkish attempt to conquer the region during the first Turkey-Armenia War—and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s victory speech delegitimizing Armenian nationhood and claiming Armenia’s capital Yerevan as Azerbaijani should raise alarms. Indeed, Aliyev’s repeated claims to Armenian territory should lead analysts to ask not whether there will be a new war, but when. That such a conflict could draw in Russia and Turkey should raise alarm bells given Turkey’s continued membership in NATO.

Venezuela: Economic implosion often precedes irredentist adventurism. Saddam’s claims on Kuwait were not new. What had changed was that the Iraqi dictator had presided over a war, which had bankrupted the country. For Saddam, an invasion of Kuwait was simply a short-cut to solvency. A parallel situation now arises with Venezuela. For more than two decades, first Hugo Chávez and then Nicolás Maduro have transformed Venezuela from South America’s wealthiest countries to among its poorest. Rather than acknowledge their own culpability for Venezuela’s situation, Chávez and Maduro voice fantastic plots and conspiracies. For example, after Exxon Mobil signed an agreement with neighboring Guyana to extract oil from the Stabroek in Guyanan waters, Maduro declared, “There is a great and serious campaign against our country . . . that could justify at any time escalation of events against the country.” To justify his saber-rattling, Maduro sought to dismiss an unfavorable 1899 arbitration ruling on the grounds that Venezeula’s lawyers at the time were part of an American-led, multi-century plot against Venezuela. His position, however, ignored that Venezuela had again buried the hatchet a half-century previously when it signed the 1966 Geneva Agreement which accompanied Guyana’s independence from Great Britain. As Maduro grows more desperate, he might believe that reasserting claims to part or all of Guyana could district Venezuelans with national fervor and give a quick fix to some of Venezuela’s fiscal problems.

China. The problem is not limited to small countries. China is an imperialist power. It seeks to project its power further abroad while eliminating non-Han populations at home. Chinese leader Xi Jinping unilaterally abrogated Hong Kong self-rule decades early and now threatens Taiwan, a country which, despite Beijing’s claims, has seldom been subordinate to mainland Chinese rule.

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