• Election 2008
• National RCP Average
• Electoral Maps
• Battleground States
• Latest Polls

SEND TO A FRIEND

|

PRINT ARTICLE

|

Russia and the U.S. in a Post-Aug. 8 World

"There are two dates that have changed the world in recent years," Russia's envoy to NATO said last month: "Sept. 11, 2001 and Aug. 8, 2008."

According to Dmitri Rogozin, 9/11 revealed to Americans that defending U.S. national security means taking the fight to the bad guys beyond the country's borders. This Aug. 8, he argued, Russia learned a similar lesson and launched military operations in the Caucasus to repel Georgia's military advance into the disputed enclave of South Ossetia.

This is classic bluster, a self-serving attempt to portray Russia's increasingly confrontational foreign policy as a matter of necessity and of self-defense. But Rogozin is right about one thing: 9/11 and 8/8 are the most important post-Cold War dates for the evolution of international politics.

For Americans, 9/11 revealed the heavy political, economic and military cost that the world's only superpower must always be prepared to pay. Over the past seven years, a reversal of economic fortunes, a substantial transfer of American wealth toward emerging powers and energy-rich states, political push-back from some of its traditional allies, and a nuclear challenge from Iran have eroded Washington's self-confidence and generated demand from many Americans that others share the burdens of international leadership.

The United States can no longer lead on free trade if a growing number of Americans lash out over its long-term economic impact and as lawmakers change the rules that have traditionally encouraged foreign investment in U.S. assets. It cannot claim to lead on nuclear nonproliferation as Iran ignores U.S. threats and moves full speed ahead with uranium enrichment. It cannot lead on climate change when it offers little beyond political hot air.

Yet, despite the erosion of America's ability and willingness to play a dominant global role, the underlying vulnerability of the post-Cold War U.S.-led international order remained a relatively well-kept secret. That's largely because no potential challenger had emerged to test the strength of the system. Like a house sitting peacefully atop a fault line, there had been no quake large enough to reveal its instability.

That false sense of security ended on Aug. 8, when Russian air strikes on Georgia exposed Washington impotence in the face of a genuine international crisis. The political standoff that followed -- and Kremlin defiance of U.S. criticism -- has revealed just how far U.S. influence has diminished.

The next shock to the U.S.-led order will come when the international conflict over Iran comes to a head. That will happen when Iranian scientists achieve a technological breakthrough that pushes its nuclear development past the point of no return or when the U.S. or Israel calculates that military strikes on its nuclear sites will create fewer dangers than a nuclear-empowered Tehran. In either case, Americans will again face the limits of Washington's power in the 21st century international system.

Some will continue to treat China as the greatest long-term threat to U.S. hegemony and the current global order. That's a mistake, because Beijing has far too much to gain from the existing international system. The Chinese Communist Party knows well that the country's domestic tranquility will depend for the foreseeable future on steady economic growth. That growth will depend on strong and predictable commercial relations with the United States, the European Union and Japan -- China's most important commercial partners. As China has grown, it has become a status quo player.

For the moment, Russia and Iran are the world's only significant revisionist powers. The Kremlin means to right what it believes are the wrongs visited upon Russia following the humiliation and chaos of Soviet collapse. The five-fold rise in oil prices over the past several years has provided Russia's leadership with the self-confidence and the cash to reassert Moscow's influence at the expense of its former adversaries in the West.

Iran has seen the United States invade two of its neighbors in recent years, removing two of the Islamic Republic's most dangerous rivals -- Saddam Hussein and the Taliban -- and encircling the country with U.S. troops. Iran may prefer a form of nuclear ambiguity to a public test of a future nuclear weapon. But even the mere suspicion that Tehran might constitute a nuclear threat will fundamentally shift the balance of power in favor of a Shiite-dominated republic surrounded by Sunni Arab rivals.

But as Rogozin warned, the Russia challenge is already here. Recent disputes over U.S. missile defense plans in Eastern Europe, Russian military ties to Venezuela and Cuba, claims to energy-rich territory north of the Arctic Circle, and independence for Kosovo make clear that Moscow means to assert its interests in areas that extend beyond the boundaries that have defined its influence over the past decade and a half. But the likeliest arena for near-term U.S.-Russian conflict is probably in Ukraine, where the Kremlin may well try to use its already considerable influence to upset the delicate balance that Kiev has tried to strike in its relations with East and West.

Russia is in no position to replace America as a global power. It lacks the resources, ambition and ideological clout to compete with Washington in areas well beyond its neighborhood. But as a challenger to the existing order, Moscow appears poised to generate plenty more challenges.

---

Facebook

|

Email

|

Print

|

---

Related Topics: 9 11 | europe | foreign policy | national security | russia |

Sponsored Links