In any event, in this mental exercise, I consider the example of the United States and China. The United States became a superpower in the aftermath of the Second World War. Retrospectively, it took over the role of a great power from the U.K. and then it progressed to becoming a superpower. China is emerging as a superpower, but there has not been any war to facilitate its transformation into a superpower. Equally important, there is not likely to be a willing transfer of superpowerdom from the United States to China, as was the case in the transfer of British hegemony in the Middle East to the United States in the aftermath of World War II. One scenario that China-watchers may be ignoring is the possibility of the emergence of a bipolar global power arrangement where the two poles are likely to be the United States and the PRC.

The common variable between the United States’ emergence as the superpower and in China’s rise is a high degree of dynamism manifested by their two economies. In the case of America, its economic system did not experience the ravages of two World Wars, a reality that contributed to Great Britain’s demise as a great power. In the 21st Century, Chinese economics exhibit a high degree of resiliency, even while the world economy was experiencing a meltdown.

The record of the United States’ domination of the globe is indeed impressive and cannot be easily emulated, if at all.

The United States became a superpower unintentionally, if not reluctantly. It did not have a great design or a strategy to become one. It had tremendous resources, but President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to drag his country out of a powerful legacy of isolation and get it involved in winning the Second World War. After that victory, the United States was faced with the awesome task of rebuilding Western Europe and Japan.

The Cold War created new tensions between the U.S. and the USSR, which had become communist little over twenty-eight years prior to the end of World War II in 1945. The United States’ leadership of the non-communist world had become a profound reality by then. In that capacity, it played a crucial role in creating the non-communist global economic order by creating global institutions that were to govern world trade and other economic arrangements, in order to create a stable global peace. That order guaranteed that America’s leadership would remain unchallenged as long the global economic institutions worked well to enhance the scope and nature of economic progress and well-being. Because the U.S. economy remained highly vibrant, it could also bankroll its military strength by building a military that could project power to the remotest corners of the world. It also built military alliances in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and established a powerful legacy of treating the Latin American nations as its vassals.

The resilience of the American superpowerdom stemmed, most importantly, from the durability and dynamism of its economy, which could also bankroll its alliance systems. The American-led global economic system also showed a high degree of resilience over the Communist economic arrangements under the leadership of the Soviet Union. In fact, when one examines the entire history of the Cold War, there never was much economic competition between the two superpowers of that era. The superiority of the American-led capitalistic economic arrangement has been proven by the fact that still it exists even today.

The second most crucial reason for the durability of the American-dominated alliance systems is that its members not only remained beneficiaries as a result of their membership, but they were able to pursue their national objectives as sovereign states. There is no suggestion here that U.S. allies were at liberty to undermine the alliance systems by adopting reckless policies. They had the option of disagreeing with the U.S. without any threat of losing membership or other side benefit of the alliance. New Zealand’s decision to deny U.S. ships entry into its ports in 1985 might have been an exception to that rule. The Kiwis insisted that no nuclear-armed ship would be allowed to visit their ports. The United States, whose naval vessels were widely known to be armed with nuclear weapons, did not want to admit or deny that possibility. Consequently, it abrogated its ANZUS security treaty responsibilities toward New Zealand in 1986. However, New Zealand never formally withdrew from that alliance.

China’s emergence as a superpower is a reality, as long as its economy shows its present strength of sustained growth. It has no record of building an alliance system a la the United States, and it has no record of building regional alliance systems, save the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). But it is cashing in on the worldwide publicity given to its awesome “rise” through its deft use of building regional trade and aid systems in Africa and Latin America. It has also been playing a highly visible role, along with the United States, in finding solutions to pull the world economy out of the doldrums created by the economic meltdown of 2008-2009.

Wherever Chinese companies are busy signing up long-term oil contracts in Africa and Latin America, they also are offering highly lucrative contracts to a number of oil states for infrastructure development. As a result of these contracts, Chinese companies will build civilian infrastructures over a period of the next or more decades. Such arrangements will become the chief basis of China’s assiduous endeavors of building spheres of influence on those two continents.

Another Chinese strategy is to do business with countries that are on America’s list of so-called sponsors of terrorism or who have been given other nefarious monikers. That list includes Iran and the Sudan. What is ironic is that the Western states have made an art of doing business with autocrats and dictators of Third World countries throughout the 20th Century. However, a similar type of behavior from Chinese leaders in the 21st Century has generated ample denigration in the West. Still, considering that China’s oil and gas appetite will remain horrendous in the coming decades, it does not seem to be paying much attention to the Western exercise of double standards.

China is using its awesome economic resources in financing its major plans of military modernization. That reality is creating ample apprehension among its East Asian neighbors. China has had a record of militarily challenging the United States during the Korean War. It audaciously backed North Vietnam during its war with the United States in the 1960s, a war that the superpower lost. China, under Mao Zedong, showed a perverse brazenness about pooh-poohing a nuclear conflict in the 1950s and 1960s in his psychological warfare with the United States. That headstrong attitude toward belittling the awesome destructive nature of nuclear power might be one important reason why China’s East Asian neighbors look at its highly discernible military modernization with nervousness. Even though the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan during World War II, it does not generate the same kind of fear anywhere in the world.

The major reason for that lack of fear is that the United States has had a long history of playing a crucial role in building a variety of regimes of international influence, from the World Bank to the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). More to the point, it has not coveted the territory of any country in modern times (the purists, I am sure, will remind me of the Mexican territories that the United States incorporated into its boundaries in 1847).

However, that almost unblemished record was tainted when the United States invaded and occupied two countries in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on its territory: Afghanistan and Iraq. At least in the case of Afghanistan, the United States invaded it because it was from there that al-Qaida planned the 9/11 terrorists attacks on its territory. In the case of Iraq, the American invasion was based on an unending series of misstatements, lies, and cherry-picking of the intelligence. Still, there are indications that it will not remain in those countries for long.

East Asian nations have no idea about the real purpose underlying China’s military modernization and the blue water capabilities of its navy. They know that it will not create an alliance system emulating the Warsaw Pact. They also know that the era of implementing another Brezhnev Doctrine – whereby the Warsaw Pact countries were neither allowed to abandon that alliance during the Cold War years, nor did they have any option to leave the Socialist camp – has gone forever. Still, they want to know how benign a superpower China is likely to be in the coming years. This is a very important issue, because it will determine whether China’s superpowerdom would be welcomed by its East Asian neighbors, or would at some point be “ganged up” on in order to bring an end to its hegemony and, indeed, its superpowerdom.

In this brief conceptual exercise, the primacy and durability of economic power emerges as probably the most crucial precondition for a country’s emergence as a superpower. Needless to say, the term “economic power” is an umbrella phrase that also includes excellence in education, primacy of technological research and development, topnotch civilian infrastructural development, good governance, and transparency in trade, to mention just a few other characteristics. Of these traits, China’s record regarding transparency is shabby. If good governance were to mean responsiveness to its citizens’ needs and demands, the government in Beijing is highly sensitive. However, that sensitiveness revolves around keeping citizen dissatisfaction and dissent at manageable levels. From the perspective of Democratic theory, that type of governmental performance is far from satisfactory. But then, China is not a democracy.

Second, the exercise of creating numerous spheres of influence in different regions of the globe emerges as the next most critical precondition because, by playing a visible role in creating such arrangements, an emerging superpower enhances its international prestige and clout. Moreover, such institutions and regimes are vital for implementing the kind of trade and other important policies that a superpower wishes to establish.
The third significant precondition is the willingness of a superpower to follow the American model of hegemony, which covets no country’s territory or threatens its sovereignty. That is a very important ingredient of creating viable regional as well global alliances.

As the old saying goes, “No one can argue with success.” It seems that the United States has proven itself to be the most successful and equally resilient superpower. The next superpower – even if America were not to lose its superpowerdom – will have little choice but to by-and-large emulate the American blueprint. If that is true, then the greatest challenge that China will face as a superpower is to persuade its weaker and smaller neighbors in East Asia that its continuing rise will be nothing but peaceful. That persuasion would require the PRC to create unending streams of policies and international regimes and institutions that would palpably lower, if not totally eliminate, any apprehensions on the part of smaller nations related to its rise.

1. Leonid Brezhnev spelled out this doctrine following the crushing of the “Prague Spring” of 1968 as follows: “…each Communist party is responsible not only to its own people, but also to all the socialist countries, to the entire Communist movement. Whoever forgets this, in stressing only the independence of the Communist party, becomes one-sided. He deviates from his international duty…Discharging their internationalist duty toward the fraternal peoples of Czechoslovakia and defending their own socialist gains, the U.S.S.R. and the other socialist states had to act decisively and they did act against the antisocialist forces in Czechoslovakia.”

http://europeanhistory.about.com/od/glossary/g/glbrezhnevdoct.htm

President Barack Obama decided to show his “outrage,” since some so-called pundits were upset that he was not showing the kind of passion that George W. Bush had shown after the 9/11 attacks. But, Bush’s record in his so-called “war on terrorism” has been a miserable failure. During his regime, the United States became an occupier of two Muslim countries. That might be one reason why the lone superpower under Obama is facing such an uphill battle in dealing with “violent extremism.” If Obama were to follow Bush’s example, then the United States is likely to face future quagmires and inertias.

Another dim-witted statement that was uttered by one of the “pundits” is when he wondered out loud why Muslims are not condemning what the young Nigerian tried to do. Statements of that nature imply that all Muslims, until every one of them yells at the top of his/her lungs condemning such action over and over again, are condoning terrorism. At no time in the history of human kind was such a reckless notion deemed worthy of air time.

What happened to America’s dealing with terrorism is that, under a new president, another country (Afghanistan) became the focus of it, as if by “winning” in that country the current administration would defeat terrorism once and for all. What the United States is not considering is that there cannot be any victory against the terrorist forces unless it develops comprehensive anti-terrorism policies. Firing cruise missiles or using UAVs to shoot a group of terrorists here and there, or sending Special Forces to take out a few terrorists is not the solution. Actions of that nature only intensify feelings of hatred and revenge against U.S. personnel all over the world. If the United States’ invasion of Iraq taught anything to America, it is that the use of military power (“hard” power) alone is no guarantee of victory.

As President Obama is busy developing some sort of blueprint (I will not call it a strategy, because there is no such thing up to this time), Pakistan and Afghanistan look increasingly precarious places. In both those countries, Islamist forces are on the offensive. Iran, totally unrelated to the latest episode of terrorism, is getting increasingly unstable. The Iranophobes in America are eagerly waiting for the Islamic regime to fall, hoping that the next government will be pro-Western. No one is considering that the alternative to the Islamic Republic might be chaos, which might have its own deleterious spillover effects in Iraq.

Across the Persian Gulf, Yemen is boiling over as another failed state. Northern Yemen and areas of Saudi Arabia contiguous to it have become the new battleground between forces of those two countries and al-Qaida, with the United States increasing its pressure on both of those countries to let loose their hard power on them. America’s answer to problems of al-Qaida is: kill, kill, kill, never mind what happens to Yemen or Saudi Arabia in the process. Farther East to the Arabian Peninsula is the Horn of Africa, which contains Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eretria. Somalia is already the poster child candidate for a failed state, while Ethiopia and Eretria are right behind it.

The question of the hour—indeed, of the decade—is what should be done about all these countries that are steadily becoming havens for al-Qaida. Does the United States have enough cruise missiles to shoot at all of them, ensuring the eradication of all supporters of al-Qaida? Does it have enough drones to fly them on a 7/24 basis on all the aforementioned countries?

In the last presidential election, there was no debate about how to win against the terrorists worldwide. Terrorism as an issue had already fallen way down on the list of American voters’ concerns during that presidential campaign. Candidate Obama made his electoral fortune by banging the drum of the failed policies of Bush, and then insisting that he would go after al-Qaida and would do everything to eradicate it in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. Who could have argued against that without having his/her patriotism questioned? What bears repeating here is that the 2008 presidential election campaign was totally devoid of any debate regarding how to be victorious over global terrorist forces because, by then, the 9/11 attacks were fading in American memories.

That fading process would have continued if not for the fact that Obama remained true to his promise and started the use of hard power in Afghanistan and Pakistan, assuming that he would win where his predecessor had failed.

The widening popularity of al-Qaida on the Arabian Peninsula and on the Horn of Africa, and its sustaining capacity in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, should intensify the feeling in the U.S. that the need of the hour is to develop comprehensive anti-terrorism policies, and not to solely rely on killing (counterterrorism emphasis) and hope that such a measure would also eradicate terrorism. But right now, examining the public debate, one gets the feeling that the American government is in the process of reinventing the wheel. There is the usual blame game that various agencies are still not cooperating; or the process of terrorist monitoring has become so cumbersome that it does not work even when a young man’s father reports to the American embassy that his son might have joined the ranks of the terrorists, yet that young man is allowed to travel to the United States.

Watching the process of recrimination, looking for fall guys, the blame game that is currently in progress in Washington, one wonders whether the lone superpower would ever become invulnerable to the actions of those who attach no value to life, neither of their own nor of others.
If there is a fall guy inside the United States in this whole process of countering terrorism, it is the cumbersomeness related to securing America that has become the chief culprit of making America unsafe. The strength of the terrorists stems from the fact that they operate on the basis of simplicity: one person or a few persons specialize in or invent new ways of creating death and mayhem. All they have to do is to find just one or more loopholes in the cumbersome security processes. At least in incidents of this nature, the culprit is the incompetence of the intricate bureaucracies, which promise to become even more intricate and, in all likelihood, more incompetent in the coming months.

The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission of creating an intelligence czar was a wise one. Instead, Congress diluted most of the recommendations of that Commission by playing politics. Today, we have eight or more intelligence agencies. All of them are busy fighting budget and turf battles and performing the redundant tasks of collecting intelligence. Those types of redundancies are also contributing further to the aforementioned cumbersomeness. As the co-Chairs of the 9/11 Commission observed in their OpEd of January 11, 2010, “The DNI [Director of National Intelligence] has been hobbled by disputes over its size, mission and authority, but forcing information-sharing and enabling the NCTC’s [National Counterterrorism Center] best analysts to do their work should not be subject to dispute.”

What America needs is an anti-terrorism strategy that is geared toward homeland security, but a strategy that also deals with causes of global terrorism that is focused on Africa, the Middle East, and South, Central, and Southeast Asia. Of these regions, Africa—the Horn and the trans-Sahel region, North and West Africa—is where terrorism is likely to run rampant during the next decade. South Asia and the Middle East will remain hotbeds of terrorism from now until at least the middle of the next decade. Central Asia appears calm; however, we know so little about that region because countries of that area are governed by autocrats who want absolutely no outside scrutiny of their tyrannical rule. So, it is a safe bet that one or more countries of Central Asia is likely to experience internal turbulence or even violent regime change. In all likelihood, such change would not result because of terrorist groups, but such groups are most likely to take every advantage of the resultant political turbulence.

If the prognostications of increased transnational turbulence are correct, then it behooves the United States to have trans-regional strategies to counter such events. Merely appointing “czars” and “special envoys” is not enough. However, considering how unprepared the United States has shown itself to be about dealing with terrorism last December, one has little reason to remain optimistic.

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. 

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.     

The end of history will be the end of human civilization.  Ideas of all sorts—even the noble ones like liberal democracy, and the pious ones, like all religious beliefs—only underscore the twists and turns of history, its ups and downs, or even its evolution.  However, world historians and strategic thinkers, out of their respective idiosyncrasies or cultural hubris, regard an idea, an ism, or a religion so important that the beginning and the end of the world is interpreted through their upsurges and failures.  The reality is that the success of an idea is just that, its temporary success until another idea comes along  to challenge it.

The end of the Soviet Union did not guarantee the endless triumph of liberal democracy–a Western idea.  To be sure, in terms of human participation and the will of the governed, it was (and remains to be) an idea superior to the non-democratic ones.  However, non-democratic systems prevail in Africa, Central Asia, East Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.  More important, they are not likely to disappear anytime soon.

Even when democracy emerged as a “victorious” system over the communist totalitarian system at the end of the Cold War, there was no chance that the country that was the worldwide champion of that system—the United States—would have an easy time promoting it. 

The Bush administration did promote democracy in the Middle East in the aftermath of its invasion of Iraq, at a time when the United States was desperately searching for a cause to rationalize the invasion of Iraq, especially when it failed to find weapons of mass destruction.  But that strategy (which was more of a convenient tactic than a strategy) was abandoned in the aftermath of the February 2006 Samarra Mosque bombing.  That dark event led to the “Sunni cleansing” by the Shia militia.  The U.S. occupation officials of Iraq correctly concluded that they had to adopt a strategy promoting heavy participation of Sunni groups in the emerging power structure of Iraq.  At that time, it also became crucial to gain the political support of the Sunni neighbors of Iraq, who were quite concerned not only about the deteriorating political situation in Iraq, but also about the rising tide of clout and influence of Iran in Iraq.  The U.S. and Sunni Arab states had to fall back on the old-style symbiotic politics of the Cold War years, which became highly relevant especially from the U.S. point of view.  Consequently, the preference for democracy was traded in by Washington for the conventional politics of supporting autocratic regimes.  In other words, the conventional politics of giving preference to pragmatism over the principle of promoting democracy reemerged as a driving force. 

As the political situation seems to be improving in Iraq, while it is deteriorating in Afghanistan, the great power relations are becoming important, but not to the extent that is claimed by Robert Kagan.  Kagan is also wrong in suggesting that China and Russia have not become more pragmatic.  But he is right in arguing that the autocratic rulers of those countries “believe in the virtues of a strong central government and disdain the weaknesses of the democratic system.”  In this sense, the great power relations are likely to follow a different path from now on than they did in the past.

The quest for superpowerdom is driving China and Russia.  China has adopted the market-style capitalistic system as its blueprint for emerging as a world-class economic power.  However, it has remained a firm practitioner of totalitarian politics.  The Communist Party of China is least interested in loosening its control of political power, even when the world was visiting China to watch the Olympic Games.  For the rulers of the PRC, their management of the Olympic Games was to become further “proof” of the “superiority” of China’s management system.  It also complements their perception of governance, which is all about management.  For them, a system should be judged on its pragmatic ability to handle large and complex issues and, most important, for its adaptability.  They don’t wish to be bothered by the nuisances related to democracy or the will of the people.  They have invariably preferred stability and have never understood the concept of legitimacy, which is at the heart of democratic governance.

Russia is similarly driven by its aspirations to become a superpower.  Its current preoccupation with de-democratizing itself stems from the fact that it envisages—no matter how wrongly—its post-Soviet romance with democracy as a reason for its loss of superpowerdom.  Its invasion of Georgia is another example—a crude one, but an example nonetheless—of its resolve to shape events to even the dynamics of the balance of power in its immediate neighborhood.

It is possible, as Kagan argues, that China and Russia will return to a liberal democracy someday.  But, if both countries emerge as superpowers in the next decade or so by remaining totalitarian or semi-totalitarian, what other reasons would they have to become a democracy, unless pressured by internal demands?  However, if they can suppress such demands for liberalizing their systems now, why should they reconsider them in the future? 

Where do the Islamists fit into this debate?  Their role in Iraq might have faced a setback for now.  But there is no reason to believe that they have accepted defeat and will fade away in that country.  In Afghanistan, however, the tide of the battle is very much in favor of the Islamists for now.  Any serious victory over them has to include wiping out their power in Pakistan.  However, knowing that reality does not enable either Pakistan or the United States—the chief partisan for stabilizing Pakistan and Afghanistan—to develop a strategy aimed at acquiring a convincing victory over them.  In addition, the rest of the Muslim countries must develop their own respective strategies to fight the Islamists within their borders, co-opt them, reintegrate them, or eradicate them.

These are all twists and turns of history, not its end or its return.  The only constant is the struggle on the part of some countries to rise to the top of the hierarchy of nations, while those at the top strive to stay there by best utilizing the technological and intellectual strides at a given time, and then enabling their institutions and their forces to adapt accordingly.  In this realm, the United States has done quite well.  Now, it seems China promises to do even better.  But that is just an expectation.  It has not yet become an inexorable reality.  In the meantime, history continues to march on.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), defined the rising global crisis most presciently when he stated, “If agricultural commodities prices continue to rise, even if oil prices remain stable, ‘some governments will no longer be able to feed their people and at the same time maintain stability in their economies.’”  World leaders are beginning to study this newly escalating threat from the perspectives of its impact on global economic and political stability.  The quest is for solutions before a number of countries—including Pakistan and Indonesia—reach a “tipping point.”  Pakistan is a place where the fight between forces of order and chaos is continuing with much ferocity; and Indonesia is where the fledgling democracy—if continued to progress unperturbedly—holds a huge promise of stability and order.

Another sign of the approaching vexing time is apparent in the accelerating spirals of inflation in Asia, which remains the home to “two-thirds of the world’s poor,” and where “protests over soaring prices are threatening to weaken further governments that are struggling to contain unrest, such as ethnic tensions in Malaysia and protests over beef imports in South Korea.”  Inflation in Thailand is around 8.9 percent; consumer prices in South Korea are 5.5 percent higher than a year ago; while inflation in Kazakhstan is around 20 percent; and Sri Lanka is around 28.2 percent.

As oil prices continue to spiral, OPEC states have called for a “solution,” which would include a systematic examination of the role of speculators as well as that of the consuming nations.  However, there have not been any serious attempts on the part of major oil consumers to look into the matter at this point. 

A major source of uncertainty is the widely divergent expectations from OPEC and from the Western institutions that specialize in the future modalities of energy supply and demand regarding the future of energy markets.  OPEC states are of the view that, as a result of major conservation measures that are already being implemented in the industrialized countries, demands for oil and gas will drop sharply in the coming years.  That was why Saudi Arabia did not want to expand its production capacity beyond 12.5 million bbl/d.  The oil states are also unsure how much a variable the biofuels use is likely to be in the global figures of supply and demand.  The Energy Information Administration of the United States is predicting a doubling in the use of biofuels from 2010 to 2030.  Qatar assigns considerable significance to such forecasts, and has postponed expansion of its oil and gas production for now.

The intensification of global economic problems necessitates the emergence of an economic super-structure of nations that can develop serious plans of attack.  We have to move away from the archaic frame of mind that forces us to think that the lone superpower or even a group of major industrial countries (the G-8) alone should play an inordinately significant role in the management of global economic affairs or in finding solutions to current crises.  

Similarly, we have to think seriously about a radical restructuring of the institutions of world governance that were created in the aftermath of World War II.  Those entities are known more for ineffectiveness than for their timely and efficient performance.  As the recent issue of the Economist noted:

The G8 is not the only global club that looks old and impotent. The UN Security Council has told Iran to stop enriching uranium, without much effect. The nuclear non-proliferation regime is in tatters. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the fireman in previous financial crises, has been a bystander during the credit crunch. The World Trade Organization’s Doha round is stuck. Of course, some bodies, such as the venerable Bank for International Settlements, still do a fine job. But as global problems proliferate and information whips round the world ever faster, the organisational response looks ever shabbier, slower and feebler. The world’s governing bodies need to change.

The winds of change aimed at bringing about iconoclastic changes are accelerating their pace, however.  Today’s powers-that-be—i.e., the five permanent members of the UNSC and members of the G-7 plus Russia, that are referred to as the G-8—are not about to give up their privileged status stemming from membership of that institution and grouping.  Still, some noteworthy progress has been made in the form of the “Heiligendamm” summit between the members of the G-8 and the G-5 (Group of five comprised of China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and Mexico).  However, there is little hope that the agenda-promosted G-5 will have much air time during the G-8 summit meeting in Japan on July 7-9, 2008.

Japan is not interested in giving high visibility to the G-5 countries for fear of enhancing the status of China, which is more eligible to be a member of the G-8 than most of its current members.  The Sino-Japanese regional rivalry is the driving force against Japan’s resolve of not only denyng China its legitimate visibility, but also disallowing it a permanent membership in the G-8.  It should also be noted that the PRC has adopted a similar behavior about ensuring that India does not become a permanent member of the UNSC, of which China is a permanent member.

The Helligendamm agenda of the G-5 countries resembes the one promoted by the developing countries in the 1970s under the rubric of the “new international economic order.”  Because it was  perceived as a threat to the privileged status of the industrialized nations at a time when OPEC states were also accumulating “petrodollars” related to intermittent escalations in the prices of oil, it  was not given any serious consideration.  Even though the Helligendamm agenda of the G-5 is somewhat similar to the NIEO agenda of the 1970s, it is not perceived as an ominous one by the G-8 states. 

The G-5 countries want transfer of technology from the developed to the developing countries.  They are promoting the development of an equitable solution to global warming—which is seriously threatening the global eco-system—and advocating the creation of improved health care systems for developing countries.

As previously noted, the chances of launching a serious dialogue between the G-8 and the G-5 counties during the G-8 summit of July 7-9 are mimimal.  Given the fact that the world is facing high oil prices, Saudi Arabia’s participation as the largest oil producer of OPEC is a necessity.  However, if such a participation is expected to be meaningful, OPEC states have to develop their synchronized agenda first, or better still, members of G-5 and OPEC states should first agree on their agenda as a basis for conducting a dialogue with members of the G-8.

Meaningful institutional changes governing the global order is hard to bring about.  Radical changes in that direction are even harder to come by.  However, if the world stands a fighting chance of coming out of the current “double-jeopardy” of food and fuel crises, precisely those types of changes are unreservedly unavoidable.