I'd be happy to get enemies to become friends. But the process has to be our enemies becoming friends and not America resigning itself to the enemy's behavior.
That's great as a general concept:
It would be beneficial for the United States if it could drive wedges among its various adversaries.
It's in the details that we get problems.
Flips were engineered since World War II for a number of states. But why did they flip?
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia freed itself from Nazi Germany without Soviet help. Soviet efforts to pull Yugoslavia into the USSR's orbit created a limited common objective of keeping the Soviets out.
Egypt
Egypt was defeated in a war with Israel, and the avoidance of a bigger loss was due more to American restraint of Israel than Russian support for Egypt.
China
We did not engineer the split between Russia and China. We recognized and exploited a split based on our now-common enemy, Russia.
Iraq
Iraq was desperate for Western help as it found itself stuck in a long, bloody war with Iran after its short and glorious war failed to emerge. We had a common enemy.
Russia
The Soviet Union was defeated in the Cold War and the Russians initially saw themselves as a victim of the USSR. Very briefly the USSR was the common enemy.
Vietnam
Vietnam soon found that China was a threat to it and no longer an ally. America became a convenient counterweight--and the only one after the USSR collapsed.
Libya
Libya lost its patron the USSR and believed surrendering to American power was the superior strategy for survival to cope with jihadis.
Plus efforts that have basically failed with Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela.
Why did those efforts fail? Because none of them were defeated by us and none had a common enemy with America to focus a new relationship on. Essentially the efforts were about accepting these enemies as friends with no real concessions by them. The potential friendships were imaginary as long as the existing governments ran their countries. Eventually, enough people here reacted against rewarding enemies who remained enemies in every aspect except accepting our concessions.
Oddly enough, India isn't mentioned at all. This has been a major shift of a non-aligned state with extensive relations with the USSR/Russia because of the rise of an enemy that is common to India and America and its Asian allies--China.
Driving wedges between adversaries is clearly defined by that initial author as America getting a state to switch to our side by abandoning our friends or interests.
Successful flips happen after an enemy is defeated in war or when splits develop without our help that we recognize and exploit based on the "enemy of my enemy" motivation.
China stopped being our ally when the common enemy, the USSR, evaporated. We retained hope that trade and economic progress would create a motive for friendship. But that failed.
Iraq stopped being our friend when it defeated our common enemy Iran on the battlefield*, ending a conventional threat to Iraq. Ultimately Iraq was flipped again after the Iraq War based on common anti-jihadi objectives and a growing Iraqi realization that Iran was a threat.
Libya lost its bargain perhaps because by 2011 we had won in Iraq and it seemed as if the jihadi threat was insufficient to tolerate Libya as a scummy anti-jihadi ally. And civil war in Libya was an excuse to abandon the flip.
I'm not arguing that even temporary flips can't be useful. But clearly friendship between America and bad actors is not durable absent a common enemy to sustain it.
I have long wanted to flip Russia away from China based on the common threat America and Russia face.
But I have not wanted to throw victims to the Russians to get a "flip" because it would not be lasting and the moral stain would be too much. This is a case where we can flip Russia only if it splits with China first.
Yet I've held on to hope that defeat in its war against Ukraine might be a large enough shock to Russia to motivate Russia to make that split with China from fear of China and hope that America will provide more help than China has proven willing to give to Russia at war.
Don't pretend that America is the only actor with agency and that we must find the right form of highly calibrated outreach to convince an adversary to learn to love us. Sometimes adversaries have to decide on their own not to be raging a-holes to us for their own self interest. Then we can think about making a new real friend. Not an imaginary one.
*Iraq won on points. After a failed Iraqi invasion of Iran, a long stalemate holding off Iranian offensives took place. A late-war Iraqi offensives that cracked the Iranian ground forces gave Iraq a narrow "win" and the conventional war finally ended.
NOTE: The meme is just the template with no need to add anything.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
