Strategic Paradigms by Ehsan Ahrari

If the United States is the declining hegemon, then who will replace it?  Are we entering an era when another global hegemon will replace the U.S., or will we witness the emergence of power blocs?  There are two schools of thought in the West on this issue.  The first school of thought suggests that the alternative is the emerging alliance of autocracies—China, Russia, and the oil states—that will challenge the hegemony of the lone superpower.  American neocons, who represent the second school of thought, suggest an alliance of democracies is evolving as a countervailing force to the aforementioned bloc.  These debates are interesting and thought provoking.  But how relevant are they in reflecting the emerging global realignment of power?

There are many autocracies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.  But there is no real basis for unifying them into a bloc.  There is no common agenda and no common “enemy” bringing them together.  What might have initiated the forecasts of bloc formation, and even inter-bloc competition, is the contemporary nexus between China and Russia, which is finding ample regional and global reasons to cooperate with each other, while challenging the United States. 

The recent use of oil and gas as one tool of national power—by Russia, vis-à-vis its immediate neighbors and the EU, by OPEC’s intermittent attempts to jack up the price of oil, by China’s exercise of neo-mercantilism in the Sudan, and by Iran’s ensuring access to oil and gas—are used as examples of a potential formation of a bloc among autocracies.  However, as real as those practices are, they do no point to any evidence of collusion between autocracies.

The discussion of long-standing cooperation between Russia and China understates, if not ignores, the fact that China also has more than enough reasons—the most predominant being the enormously growing trade ties—to cooperate with the United States.  At the same time, as much as the United States and Russia have experienced reasons to pull away from each other or raise the level of criticism of each other’s policies—for instance, Russia being critical of seemingly unrelenting NATO enlargement and the United States’ criticism of the recent Russian invasion of Georgia—both countries are making sure that these strained ties remain well within the bounds of manageability. 

No one can be certain that the Sino-Russian nexus will last indefinitely.  Both those countries have enough strategic reasons to cooperate with the U.S., even at the expense of putting strains on their own cooperative arrangement, which most observers deem as potentially enduring.  In fact, there are ample reasons for both of them to become strategic competitors, if not outright adversaries.

At the same time, there are no compelling strategic reasons for the creation of an alliance between the mostly autocratic OPEC states, China, and Russia.  OPEC and Russia have been exploiting the international oil market by escalating prices, but they are doing so not as an outcome of any collusion.  On the contrary, Arab members of OPEC have a lot more in common with the U.S. than with either China or Russia.  Only the United States possesses ample clout to bring the Arabs and the Israelis to the negotiating table.  Only the United States has economic capabilities to create incentives for a negotiated settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The concept of alliance of democracies is more fiction than a reality.  The staunch opposition of France and Germany of the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq is a glaring example of that reality.  All European democracies agreed that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator.  However, the unilateral decision of the Bush administration, on the basis of trumped-up charges, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was entirely unacceptable to those countries.  It also worth noting that opposition to the U.S.’s unilateral decision to bring about regime change in Iraq was quite intense in Europe.  Even in countries like the U.K., Spain, and Italy, the sitting governments committed troops to Iraq against popular sentiment that then prevailed within their borders.

Most recently, in response to Russia’s military retaliation against Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili’s imprudent decision to send troops into South Ossetia, the EU agreed to increase assistance to Georgia, but shied away from threats to impose tough sanctions against Moscow.  The EU’s heavy reliance on Russia’s energy supplies served as the primary reason for that reticence.  So much for the proposition related to the countervailing nature of the alliance of democracies to thwart aggressive actions of a major autocracy against its small and weak neighbor.

The American neocons’ concept of the countervailing alliance of democracies, in reality, is a reflection of their expectations (or even a wishful thinking) that the U.S. dominance in the global arena will not only be reinstated, but it will become pervasive as it was in the post-World War II era.  In reality, however, in the closing years of the first decade of the Twenty-First Century, that mode of U.S. dominance is not likely to reemerge.

China and India, as rising powers, are looking for their respective regional and global niches.  China is way ahead of India in its quest for spheres of influence in Asia, Africa, and, to a lesser extent, in South America.  The EU’s prospects of leadership are dim in the sense that its aspirations that “the inexorable advance of the rules-based system that it represents as a model to the world” will catch on has not found takers in any region of the globe.  What is important to note is that this EU model may be worth emulating in the future.  However, it does not serve as a source of inspiration for China and India as two aspiring regional and global leaders.  

Only the United States and the USSR provided widely opposing models of leadership in the global arena during the Cold War years.  With the implosion of the USSR in 1991, the American leadership model—which was based on the global promotion of multilateral economic growth and democracy—remained a viable one.  However, George W. Bush abandoned that model in the post-9/11 era. 

As the United States is faced with two rising powers of Asia, an assertive Russia, and suddenly-rich OPEC states, the desire for the return of multilateralism inside the United States, especially on the part of the neocons, is a deft move aimed at restoring America’s global leadership.  But the rest of the world—most specifically the developing countries—is entirely too clever to return to something familiar, old, and even archaic.  What intrigues them is the proposition that, in a globalized world, they must seek new alignments and power arrangements that enhance the prospects of their sustained economic growth and prosperity.  In this quest, the question of whether the United States should lead the world, whether there are prospects for the emergence of an alliance of autocracies, or whether the countervailing alliance of democracies is a better or a worse alternative is totally immaterial to them.  While the global distribution of power remains in a state of flux, it is hard to imagine that a single actor or hegemon will lead the world, even if it happens to be the lone superpower.