In diplomatic parlance, the term "frozen conflict" generally refers to unresolved disputes affecting countries of the Black Sea region. But in the post-ideological, non-interventionist age that dawned with the fall of George Bush and Tony Blair and the rise of new, ruthlessly pragmatic, self-interested great powers such as China and India, a widening range of intractable conflicts, from Somalia, Kashmir and Kurdistan to Kyrgyzstan, Burma and Tibet might fairly be described as frozen, too.
In many if not most of such cases, external conflict-resolution efforts are underpowered, stalled, failing, or nonexistent. The appeals of pressure groups, thinktanks and activists increasingly fall on deaf ears. The US and its junior partner, Britain, no longer actively seek to spread freedom and democracy across the globe. Instead, Washington has "reset" relations with authoritarian Russia, sought a strategic accommodation with communist China, moved to cut its losses in still shambolic Iraq and Afghanistan, and is aggressively arming Middle East autocrats.
What George Bush Sr called the "vision thing", exemplified by his bid to build a post-Soviet, post-cold war "new world order", is almost wholly lacking now. Today's more blinkered emphasis is on trade, oil and security, not self-determination or human rights. Diplomacy, in its highest form of independent, impartial mediation, is out of fashion. Only the current American-led peace efforts in Israel-Palestine contradict the overall trend. Even there, Barack Obama was obliged to justify his intervention by redefining the conflict as a threat to US national interests.
The UN, ever a convenient scapegoat, is blamed more often than not for failures in tackling outrages such as the murderous treatment of Tamils in Sri Lanka or Tibetans in China. But, as always, it is the member states, and particularly the security council's veto-wielding permanent five, that carry prime responsibility for collective action or, more commonly, inaction. Thus, for example, the major powers have put expediency before principle in tacitly agreeing not to pursue Sudan's indicted president, Omar al-Bashir, for alleged war crimes, at least until the looming issue of southern Sudan's secession is settled. Likewise, the Darfur peace talks are on the backburner.
Muhammad Farooq Rehmani, chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir People's Freedom League and former convenor of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference opposition coalition, bears eloquent witness to the invidious consequences of such neglect. A journalist, author and political activist, he has spent nearly 10 years in jail, on and off, since first being arrested by Indian security forces in 1968. Kashmiris want the withdrawal of the Indian army and a plebiscite on self-determination, as promised repeatedly by the UN since 1947, he said. They are still waiting.
"If the killing of innocents continues, the violence could get worse," Rehmani, who lives in exile in Islamabad, said in London this week. This summer's clashes, curfews and security crackdowns in the state capital Srinagar and elsewhere might only be termed an "uprising" that could be exploited by Islamist jihadis. Yet powers such as the US and Britain were reluctant to pressure a newly important India for a deal, he said. There was no peace process, no peace, and no prospect of it.
Sadly, Kashmir's plight is unexceptional. Attempts by Turkey's Kurds to win greater autonomy have stalled in the past year, mirroring the bigger problems facing an unrecognised Kurdish nation straddling Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. But there is zero international appetite for tackling the Kurdish question. Despite years of western hand-wringing over terrorism, piracy and immigration, Somalia remains a de facto no-go area for international diplomacy; likewise long-suffering Zimbabwe; likewise Thailand's disadvantaged southern Malay minority; the much put-upon Uighurs of China's Xinjiang province; and the Muslim peoples of the Russian Caucasus.
Even where the international community has stepped in, lack of leadership, selfish calculation, and a craven reluctance to make a stand increasingly characterise much of what is happening now. Georgia's South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions remain under Russian occupation, despite the French-brokered 2008 deal for a troop withdrawal; Burma's criminal generals carry on regardless of international sanctions; and even Kosovo, that great test-bed of liberal humanitarian interventionism, is still too weak and divided to leave to its own devices, more than 10 years after its "liberation".
It may be this apparent diplomatic drift, this reluctance of individual governments and collectives such as the EU to risk new international entanglements or enforce existing rules and standards, comes in reaction to the ideologically driven excesses of the Bush years. Perhaps it is linked to the economic downturn in the west, with falling business confidence matched by falling diplomatic and political confidence. But perhaps, more than anything, it is the product of a new, narrow, self-serving national self-interestedness – a sort of Tea Party philosophy writ large in which charity begins at home, the weak go to the wall, and the devil take the hindmost. Whatever the reason, it's all very short-sighted, and dangerous, too.
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