Transcript

THOMAS MARTIN

Hello, my name is Thomas Martin. I’m a lecturer in International Studies at The Open University.

I’m very fortunate to be joined by Professor Michael Clarke. Michael is a visiting professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and was previously Director-General of the Royal United Services Institute, or RUSI, the world’s oldest and one of the UK’s leading defence and security think tanks.

Thank you so much for joining us, Michael.

MICHAEL CLARKE

Yeah, nice to be here, Tom. Always happy to do something for The Open University.

THOMAS MARTIN

So, in this discussion, I wanted to ask Michael to share his thoughts on terrorism and how it has shaped international relations. Michael, first, how would you say international terrorism has affected and changed international relations?

MICHAEL CLARKE

Well, it’s changed it a lot, in recent years, but only in recent years. International terrorism, as most people understand it, only really goes back to the late nineteenth century, you know – the anarchists – and before that, governments and armies behaved in a terroristic way. Terror was used, I mean it goes back to the beginning of warfare. But the idea of a terrorist group, private group, or a state-sponsored group who were acting individually to try to create terror using this old idea of kill one, frighten a thousand, that actually is relatively modern, it’s really only a twentieth-century phenomenon. And I can say with some confidence, I think, it didn’t have any great strategic impact until 9/11, until 2001. And then the idea of jihadist terror set a trend in which international terrorism, and international terrorism is not now all jihadist terror, but that jihadist terrorism of that particular event had a significant strategic impact, mainly because of the way the United States and the Western world reacted to it. In other words, it was strategic because it was such a big attack. It was so shocking that we reacted to it as if it was a strategic threat. And so that’s what it became. It was strategic, but it’s quite a modern phenomenon. And we’re still really digesting the, the consequences of all of that.

THOMAS MARTIN

Thank you. That’s really interesting. Just to explore that a little bit further, what effects do you think the war on terror had for international relations?

MICHAEL CLARKE

In very specific terms, it drew the United States and some of its allies, including Great Britain, into the sort of wars that the jihadist groups that were behind 9/11, they particularly wanted – al-Qaeda, of course, was the group that promulgated 9/11, but lots of derivatives of that have arisen since. But they pulled the Western world into effectively unwinnable wars. In Afghanistan, then in Iraq, and then back in Afghanistan again. And that spread into North Africa and Sinai and the Sahel. And so, in a political sense, a direct political sense, a lot of jihadists would now say that we have pulled the West into the sort of conflicts in which they lose and we win just by continuing to exist. And I think that’s objectively been true over the last 25 or so years.

But there’s a deeper issue there, because since terrorism has been regarded as strategically important, it’s been used as a sort of hold-all phrase for anything that governments want to do. And so, when Putin’s Russia, President Putin’s Russia, suppresses all internal opposition, they call it counterterrorism. They say, no, it’s terrorists that we’re operating against, because somehow that’s okay in the modern world.

When the Chinese practise what most of us think is effectively genocidal policies in Xinjiang province, in northwest China, they call it anti-terrorism. In Argentina, both in the 1970s, but now in particular with radical government in Argentina, when that government, as it goes against its opponents, it says it’s acting against terrorists or potential terrorists. And some governments do have a point to make, and then they extend it. So, take Erdoğan’s Turkey. I mean, they do have a terrorist issue with the Kurdish terrorist PKK. There is also other Kurdish groups like the YPK, or youth group, who are not regarded as terrorists by the outside world, but as far as the Turkish government is concerned, they’re all terrorists.

So, they do have a genuine terrorist problem, certainly with the PKK, to worry about, but they use that as an excuse to suppress internal dissent as well. So, anything they don’t like, they call it operations against terrorists – it’s all counterterrorism. And that’s one of the problems, that since we’ve allowed terrorism over the last 25 years, since 2001, to become some sort of strategic challenge to governments, unscrupulous governments or governments behaving unscrupulously in this aspect of their behavior, this aspect of their policy, governments have used it as a way of justifying some of the less legal and less justifiable things that they really should be doing.

THOMAS MARTIN

Thank you, Michael. That’s fascinating. Just maybe if we could reflect on how terrorism is likely to emerge and evolve in the near future. How do you see the challenge of terrorism as shaping international relations in the near- and medium-term future?

MICHAEL CLARKE

Well, it both shapes the future and it’s shaped by it, I think, Tom. In a funny sort of way, it shades into international criminality because, of course, terrorism is extremely criminal and a lot of criminal gangs use terror themselves. The Mafia use terror all the time in order to create compliance and fear to give them the power.

When you look at the history of terrorist groups and criminal groups, certainly in the last half a century, but particularly since 2001, you see that they sort of perform figures of eight. They come together and cooperate, and then they depart from each other and then come together again and cooperate. Because both of them, they know, that they can’t stick together all the time, but they have a lot of things in common.

We are moving into a world in which the autocratic powers, the autocracies, the dictatorships, are on the rise. Liberal democracy is very much on the defensive now. And as those autocratic powers, as it were, become more influential in the world, so criminal groups, the gangsters, also find that they’ve got more space to operate because the autocratic powers are quite happy for gangsters to operate in Asia and Africa, in various parts of Europe. They undermine liberal democracies pretty efficiently and terrorist groups work with them. So, the growth of terrorism and gangsterism are part of a broader phenomenon whereby the world is moving towards the greater influence for autocratic powers. And I, to be honest, you know, maybe this is not really the moment for this discussion, but I worry. I really worry that whereas the twentieth century we defined as the century of decolonisation and the triumph of liberal democracy, I suspect, I worry, that the twenty-first century may come to be seen as the century of the decline or even the collapse of liberal democracy into a world of autocracy and gangsterism. And in that world, terrorist groups will be one of the factors which shape the environment. Not irrelevant in the way that they were in the twentieth century, but all too relevant in the tweny-first. I hope I’m wrong about that, but that is the path that we seem to be on at the moment.

THOMAS MARTIN

That’s really interesting, and maybe just to explore that a little bit further, in this context that you set out, what sort of terrorist groups or dynamics would you expect to see emerge or become more important?

MICHAEL CLARKE

Good point. What we’re seeing is the ubiquity of communication. I mean, we live in the era of the revolution in cyber power, in all the ways that we’re, you know, we’re well aware of. And that really is a mature revolution now, even after 10 or 15 years. I mean, quite honestly, 20 years ago, cyber didn’t make much difference to the terrorist challenge that governments face. So, they faced a jihadist challenge that we’ve spoken about, but terrorists are very imitative. So, the imitate each other as well as they imitate each other’s techniques and technologies. And so, as al-Qaeda made good use of the power of the internet, so they all started to do it. And so, we see other sort of groups, separatist terrorist groups, modern anarchist terrorist groups, there are many of them in the world, there are several hundred, if you try to list them all as, say, the American CIA do, they all use cyber power.

Now, at one time, this cyber power used to be their vulnerability because it meant that they could be chased around the internet, they could be identified, and they still are. I mean, Britain’s GCHQ down at Cheltenham does amazing work at triangulating information based on phone records, phone calls, internet access – and they can identify very often individual people exactly where they are and so on – that’s what they do.

So, it was a vulnerability, but increasingly it’s now become a real form of power accelerator for terrorist groups. Twenty years ago, when I was doing some work on counterterrorism and I was doing some work for the court and a little bit for government, we used to assume two things:

one is anyone who joins a terrorist group never does it only by the internet. There’s always somebody. There’s always a flesh-and-blood person that helps them, that works with them, even though they get a lot of stuff off the internet. We used to assume that.

And the second thing we used to assume is you can’t make a bomb only off the internet. You can’t learn how to do it. You have to know something about chemicals and explosives and the real world of steel and metals in order to make a bomb. Those truths were genuine. In the era from, say, 2001 to about 2010, but no longer. It is the case now that people are radicalised in their bedrooms, sitting, just drawing on cyber power, on the internet, communicating with people that they never actually meet. And it has become true that people have learned how to make bombs and explosives. And, you know, goodness help us, actual handguns and weapons through 3D printing. These things are now genuine, and so they’re part of the revolution of cyber power, and of course, the, the police and the counterterrorist authorities, they chase terrorists through the cyber domain all the time, but by and large, in the last few years, the terrorists are getting further away from the police, and that’s the reality that we live in at the moment.

THOMAS MARTIN

That’s fascinating. Michael, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. This discussion has, I think, highlighted the important effects that terrorism has had upon international relations and the likely ways in which it will continue to do so.

Thank you again, Michael, for your time. I’m sure you’ve given our students a lot to think about.

MICHAEL CLARKE

My pleasure entirely, Tom.