Diplomacy on the Rocks

In his recent column on the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands dispute between China and Japan, Carter Johnson raises several interesting points. I agree with most of them, and after reading the article I found myself thinking on a historical analogy of the conflict. I am aware that historical analogies of this dispute are more than abundant. But most of them make epic comparisons, like the Peloponnesian War or the outbreak of WWI.

I can see why the WWI analogy is appealing. China, Japan, and the US are the world’s three largest economies, and risk jumping the gun just as European powers did in August 1914. There is also the issue of China’s rising power, usually compared to Germany’s after its unification. But in this case we are talking about war over a bunch of rocks. So perhaps a humbler analogy, one that is also about a bunch of rocks and features Washington as a successful mediator, might come in handy. I am referring to the 2002 Parsley crisis: a spat between Spain and Morocco over the island of Perejil/Leila.

The conflict hardly qualifies for the backdrop of a James Bond movie (although it was featured in a West Wing episode, with Spain playing Greece to Morocco’s Albania). More than an island Perejil is a rock the size of a soccer field, eight hundred feet away from the coast of northern Morocco. There are no permanent residents. There are no oil or gas prospects. There is nothing in the island, other than parsley growing on its surface (hence its Spanish name, perejil). Parsley, the occasional goats who turn up to eat it, and the woman who herds them. She claims ownership of the island in her goats’ name.

Perejil belongs to Spain, at least officially. It is claimed by Morocco, as are a few other worthless rocks, the cities of Ceuta and Melilla in the country’s northern coast, and the Canary Islands in the Atlantic. So when a dozen Moroccan soldiers occupied Perejil on July 2002, the Spanish government reacted in order to avoid further territorial demands.

There were several options on the table. Spain could wait until Morocco was shamed into leaving. Or launch a military intervention. Or hand Perejil to the woman and the goats. I find the third option by far the most appealing, but the Aznar government went for the second.

First came an official condemnation of Morocco’s move from the European Union. A week later, and in light of the fact that the soldiers were still camping in the island, presumably inventing parsley goat stew, Spain launched a military operation. Five warships, two submarines, three helicopters, several fighter jets, a squad of special operations forces, and seventy-five legionnaires were sent to reestablish our protectorate evict the twelve soldiers. They managed to do this peacefully, but Morocco qualified the intervention as “an act of war.”

I know this story is hard to take seriously, but please try. The nearby strait of Gibraltar is the gateway to the Mediterranean, making it a strategically sensitive area. And in The Post-American World (one insightful book, published in May 2008 and foreseeing an “expansion of the global economy”), Fareed Zakaria makes the humble claim that “when historians try to understand the world of the early twenty-first century, they should take note of the Parsley crisis.”

Since both the EU and UN played the hot potato, it fell upon the US to mediate over a spat that could spiral out of control. Spain is a member of NATO, and was then run by a government that took pride in its subservience to Washington. Morocco, on the other hand, is a major non-NATO ally ruled by a King who claims descending from Muhammad. Given the difficulty of backing either Spain or Morocco, Colin Powell took the wise decision to support neither. In a statement drafted over the course of an afternoon, Powell got both sides to compromise on an immediate withdrawal of Spanish forces and a return to the status quo ante. Within a few days, the agreement was fully enforced. Morocco’s claims on Spanish territory were frustrated, and the Aznar government remained disappointed with what it considered insufficient American support. But the dispute ended there.

Now for the morals of this petty, pathetic squabble. A conflict involving China and Japan will obviously prove harder to handle. Unlike both countries in the Parsley example, China is no US ally and is increasingly seen as its greatest rival –leaving aside the fact that it foots a sizeable amount of America’s deficits. Having said that, there is a case to be made for refusing to support either party, or at least playing hard to get. The US has lost much of its clout during the past decade, but its navy is still bigger than the next thirteen combined. China, in spite of the brouhaha, is building aircraft carriers that cannot carry aircraft. So the dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands does not pose an existential threat to US foreign policy, and should not be an excuse to hand Japan a blank check.

It is sometimes argued that unless the US constantly reassures its allies, they will align with whoever is pressuring them. I think this concern is exaggerated. Should the US let its allies handle their own problems, perhaps they will contribute more to a common defense policy and reduce their dependency on an American military umbrella that is too expensive to maintain. Nor do I think that a less hawkish foreign policy requires yielding East Asia to China, as Carter suggests. On the contrary, if Beijing continues to throw its weight around the area (the Senkakus follow a similar dispute with the Phillipines) it will only generate opposition, from Delhi to Tokyo and even Moscow. To most states in the region, an American offshore balancer is bound to remain more attractive than China breathing down their necks. Precisely for this reason, the Obama administration should try as hard as it can to not get dragged into any dispute that involves military action against China.