Strategic Paradigms by Ehsan Ahrari

The confluence of the waning months of the Bush presidency—when the lameduck factor is looming large— the continued insistence of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that the U.S. set a timetable of withdrawing from Iraq, the Russian invasion of Georgia, and the forced resignation of General Pervez Musharraf—President Bush’s favorite strongman in Pakistan—are creating a new buzz globally.  That buzz can be highlighted along the lines that “Washington is forced to watch other powers shape events,” that a superpower is reborn (in reference to Russian military action against on Georgia), that a new world order is emerging, and that America’s decline will not easily be reversed.

Such hyperbolic suggestions aside, it is apparent that the global power structure is moving from the post-Cold War unipolarity, when the United States dominated world affairs, to multipolarity.  Under this arrangement, Russia and China will have an increased say about a number of global issues.

The emergence of multipolarity is not exaggerated or overstated.  It has nothing to do with the fact that the administration of President George W. Bush will only be in office for a few more months.  It has to do with a number of mistakes made by the United States during his presidency, especially in terms of some of the decisions associated with the terrorist attacks on America’s homeland.  

The U.S. invasion of Iraq caused an enormous amount of resentment, not only in the Muslim world, but also in other parts of the globe.  Between 2003 and 2006, Iraq emerged as the chief battlefield between the insurgents and Islamists and the Western occupation forces.  As a result, the entire issue of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq was not even a serious issue for discussion and debate.  However, as Iraq is seemingly calming down, the U.S. appears quite intent to remain there as an occupying force.  Even during the American presidential campaign, Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, is using the palpable success of the “surge” in Iraq as a ticket to indefinitely occupy that country.  The Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, on the contrary, favors a phased withdrawal.  However, even for Obama, America’s military presence in Iraq is open-ended.

Russia’s invasion of Georgia, more than anything else, has established the fact that Moscow’s assertiveness in its immediate neighborhood is likely to intensify in the coming years.  Since the implosion of the Soviet Union, the United States has used every opportunity to its advantage regarding Russia.  All the promises that George H. W. Bush made to Russia–that NATO would not expand eastward–were systematically ignored.  As Russia protested the NATO expansion, Russia was consistently told by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush that it should not be wary of NATO; that NATO no longer envisages itself as an anti-Russian alliance.

Those assurances notwithstanding, Russia always regarded the NATO expansion as a continuation of America’s design to contain it.  NATO’s role in the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts left no doubt in the minds of Russian leaders that, even if NATO is not intended as an anti-Russian alliance, it will certainly be used to establish American hegemony in Europe, especially in the countries bordering Russia.  That was not acceptable to Moscow.

Most recently, NATO’s invitees included Georgia and the Ukraine, two bordering states of Russia.  Georgia’s President, Mikheil Saakashvili, misread NATO’s overtures toward his country and, despite American pleas against it, was audacious enough to send troops into South Ossetia in order to bring about its forced integration into Georgia.  That was a provocation that Moscow was not about to take lightly.  The result was Russia’s retaliatory response, which seems to have created a permanent fissure in the geographic map of Georgia.  Now, the United States has to figure out how to calculate and respond to the long-term implications of the impetuous action of an insignificant ally, who did its very best to create tensions between the U.S.-Russian ties.

Then there is another simmering issue of America’s stationing of missile defense shields in Poland and the Czech Republic.  Once again, Washington dismissed Russia’s objections by pointing out that those systems are aimed at defending Europe from Iranian attack.  Moscow never accepted the explanation that Iran would attack any European country when Tehran knows the resultant enormity of a U.S. retaliatory response.  Now Russia has threatened to include those two East European countries on its list of missile targets.

General Pervez Musharraf’s ouster from office has created a serious power vacuum in Pakistan.  He managed to stay in office in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States by conducting a duplicitous policy of confronting the Islamists to please Washington, but also of cooperating with them whenever it suited his purpose.  While he stayed in power, Washington, despite its ambivalence toward his Janus-faced role regarding Bush’s war on terror, depicted him as a major ally of the United States.  Now that he is gone from the political scene in Pakistan, the United States is groping to find another approach to its counterterrorism-related policies there.  Washington has a clear preference for Asif Ali Zardari (since he is expected to continue the pro-American policies that his late wife, Benazir Bhutto, was expected to carry out), but is wary of becoming as much dependent on him as it became on Musharraf.  In the meantime, both Pakistan and Afghanistan remain unstable and volatile.

As the preceding analysis indicates, the United States’ global stock is currently low.  However, there is no other major power to take its place in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.  Of the three major powers—The U.S., Russia, and China—neither Russia nor China is capable of playing a major role in attempting to resolve the world’s major problems. 

The lowering of American prestige in different regions of the world has not resulted in the escalation of clout of any other great power.  Russia is manifesting its resolve to assert itself in its immediate neighborhood.  However, it has very little clout to influence major regional conflicts.  China is making a visible presence in the Middle East and Africa, but the chief focus of that presence is to gain access to oil.  It is not interested in becoming a major party in any attempts to resolve key regional conflicts.

The United States, on the contrary, is still capable of creating momentum in the PLO-Israeli conflict, largely because of its special ties with Israel, and also because it is the chief provider of military and economic assistance for the Jewish state.  Iran, another major anti-American country, is very much interested in reaching a rapprochement with the lone superpower, and so is North Korea. 

In the resolution of all major global crises, such as food and oil price hikes and global warming, the United States can still play a leading role in at least creating a new momentum toward their resolution. However, the unipolar global order is slipping away. In the coming years, Russia, China, the EU, and India are likely to play a visible role.  The multipolar global power arrangement is clearly in the making.  From the vantage point of conflict resolution, that is a good thing.