MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Damascus in 2011 was the equivalent of Sarajevo in 1914. Let me read that again. Damascus in 2011 was the equivalent of Sarajevo in 1914. The reference being to the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the spark that led to World War I. Well, comparing that upheaval to the capital of Syria a century later - that's one of the more provocative arguments in a new book by Hannah Lucinda Smith titled "Hinterlands." Smith is a veteran foreign correspondent for The Times of London and The Economist, among others. She's spent years reporting from the Middle East and the Balkans. Her book explores whether it's in hidden conflicts unfolding right now in little-noticed border areas that a new world order may be taking shape. Hannah Lucinda Smith, welcome.
HANNAH LUCINDA SMITH: Thank you very much for having me.
KELLY: Define hinterlands.
SMITH: So the hinterlands that I go to in the book are places that sort of sit on the fringes and have always sat on the fringes previously of empires - and in particular the Ottoman, Russian, Persian, to an extent British Empires - and now on the fringes of spheres of influence. So the two spheres in particular that I look at in the book are the Russian sphere of influence under Vladimir Putin and the Turkish sphere of influence under Recep Tayyip Erdogan but also the West as well - broadly, imperfectly the West. I would say the West as in sort of centered around two organizations, which are the European Union and NATO. The hinterlands are, like, places that are sort of pulled between for a number of reasons.
KELLY: Yeah. I kept - as I was reading, I had my pen out and I was circling words like overlooked, neglected, backwaters. They keep appearing over and over in your pages. But you argue that we overlook or neglect these areas at our peril. Why?
SMITH: Precisely for the reason that they are dynamic. They're the kind of weak spots. They're where the geopolitical edges fray. It doesn't take much in these places for small conflicts to start. And anyone who kind of looks at geopolitics and studies conflicts knows that small conflicts can be incredibly dangerous. Places like Nagorno-Karabakh. This is a territory in the Caucasus. Some of your listeners probably will have heard of it, actually, because it was in the news in recent years because the conflict reerupted there between Armenia and Azerbaijan. But it's a conflict that's been sort of ongoing, on and off, since the fall of the Soviet Union. It's never been solved.
And a lot of these hinterlands are in similar conditions, particularly places in the Balkans, in Bosnia and in Kosovo. Obviously, there was the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the very bloody breakup of Yugoslavia. Peace still stopped those wars, but they didn't actually create peace. They created this sort of, you know, very imperfect stasis, which is just really, really sort of fertile ground for leaders like Vladimir Putin or, to a certain extent, Recep Tayyip Erdogan to go and kind of make mischief and cause the West problems.
KELLY: Yeah. So when I introduced you, we laid out the comparison - Damascus, Syria, in 2011 is Sarajevo in 1914. Just take me there. Remind us what was happening in Damascus in 2011.
SMITH: So it feels a very long time ago now, doesn't it?
KELLY: Yeah.
SMITH: Fifteen years, but it sort of feels like a different era. At the end of 2010, there was this eruption of popular protests across the Arab world, starting in Tunisia, then going into Egypt, then into Libya.
KELLY: The Arab Spring
SMITH: And Syria was a bit of a holdout. You know, people thought, OK, the regime of Bashar al-Assad is a strong one. It won't crumble in the same way. In early 2011, those protests came to Damascus. I was actually there. I witnessed some of those first protests in the Syrian capital. And very, very quickly, that descended into a civil war and from there, again quickly, into a global proxy war in a way that the conflicts in other places such as Libya hadn't. What happened very, very quickly was that Russia and Iran came behind Bashar al-Assad very forcefully and very openly.
While on the side of Assad's opponents, both political and armed, you had various countries, but mainly Turkey, Qatar, the U.S. to a certain degree, the U.K., France. And it became this confrontation, this global confrontation, of the type that we really haven't seen since the end of the second world war. Of course, we've had conflicts. We've had conflicts in Europe. But if people want to try and understand where the invasion of Ukraine came from in 2022, look back to 11 years earlier in 2011. That's where it started.
KELLY: Fascinating. So that's the parallel to the period before the first world war, that this was the moment, and then suddenly the whole world is going to fracture along fault lines that we weren't even looking for.
SMITH: Exactly. And, you know, things - it's not as if Vladimir Putin suddenly in 2011 decided that he was going to start, you know, pursuing a muscular policy to try and regain what he sees as, you know, Russian territories or that, you know, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey was suddenly going to become a whole lot more problematic for NATO, which, of course, Turkey is a member. You know, these things have been building for a while. You know, new alliances had been forming. Russia had been building its kind of, you know, sphere of interest and its own almost rival bloc to the West. You know, Putin had been complaining for some years about NATO's expansion.
But this was, I would say, the spark. This is what really brought that war into the open. And when we talk about war in the 21st century, there's a whole other dimension - what we term hybrid war. Things like cyberattacks, misinformation, the use and abuse of sanctions, the use of sanctions busting. These are all things that really started escalating after the outbreak of the Syrian conflict.
KELLY: I mean, this is impossible to answer, impossible to predict, but how different might the map of all of the hinterlands that you track in your book, how different might it look, say - I don't know - 25 years from now?
SMITH: It could look completely different. And here's the thing. Like, this is what, as humans by nature, we tend to do. We look at our current situation and we sort of think that that's a permanent situation. You know, particularly a country like the U.S., which has been, you know, in terms of its borders, very stable for a very long time. The U.K. as well. And we forget that, actually, borders can be very dynamic things. And the problem is, redrawing borders is not just drawing a new line on the map. It's changing the realities for people on the ground. Border changes are never without trauma, without tension and potentially without conflict.
KELLY: That's the journalist Hannah Lucinda Smith. Her new book is "Hinterlands: The New Cold War Brewing At The Peripheries Of The West." Thank you very much. This was fascinating.
SMITH: Thank you so much.
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