The Dialectics Confrontation – Thirty Years After
Emergence of the multipolar world order and the role of the USA
Von Chas W. Freeman, Jr., United States Foreign Service (USFS), Ret.; Senior Fellow at Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, USA*
(7 February 2022) The dissolution of the USSR ushered in a two-decade-long period of unchecked U.S. global supremacy. Two centuries earlier, American political engineer, James Madison presciently warned that, to avoid abuses of power, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The post-Cold War period has provided ample proof of how correct this insight is.
Moscow’s default on its Cold War rivalry with Washington signalled the suspension of the Russian ambition to achieve global hegemony. But the momentum of past antagonism continued to drive U.S. policy.
Washington sought in effect to make the entire world beyond the borders of China and the Russian Federation an exclusive American sphere of influence, in which the interests and standards espoused by the United States would have priority.
NATO might have become a cooperative Europe-wide security architecture linking Russia to the rest of Europe as the Concert of Europe once had. The Partnership for Peace and the NATO-Russia Council embodied this possibility. Instead, Cold War attitudes buttressed by ancient European animosities ensured that NATO retained its character as an instrument of collective security directed at excluding Russian influence from the rest of Europe. Denying any great European power a role in the subcontinent’s governance is a strategic mistake, as the post-World War I exclusion of both Germany and the USSR illustrated by producing first a second world war and then a Europe-cantered Cold War. But Europe remains divided, and its governance contested.
Encouraged by Western neoliberal theorists and carpetbaggers, Russia underwent a demoralizing transition from a command economy to predatory plutocracy and capitalism. Then, as it reformed and rebounded, Russia restored its pre-Soviet status as one of the world’s great exporters of petroleum and wheat. Its economy recovered. Its wealthier citizens became a fixture of the world’s most travelled tropical resorts. Moscow remedied the post-Soviet ineptitude of its armed forces. Russian military technology resumed its advance.
As an American folk saying has it, those who can’t live by their wallets or weaponry must live by their wits. Russia had been reduced from a global to a battered but still great European power.
Astute Russian diplomacy, backed by competent applications of military power, has now made it once again a credible geopolitical player in West Asia, if not yet elsewhere.
For reasons only militarist ideologues in Washington can explain, the United States has pursued policies that drive Beijing and Moscow together in opposition to American global and regional ascendancy and dictation. This has eased the emergence of an increasingly robust entente (a limited partnership for limited purposes) between the two great Eurasian states, based on shared interests in countering American hostility, eroding American hegemony, and forestalling perceived American policies of regime change.
Like Washington before the Soviet collapse, both Beijing and Moscow now advocate a multipolar world order in which multilateralism plays a significant role. Under the confused leadership of Donald Trump, the United States suddenly espoused the opposite: an international system defined by “great power rivalry” and regulated by bilateral tests of strength. The Biden administration has embraced this rightist strategic posture and added a leftist supposition that history is driven by a mortal struggle between democracy and an imagined ideology of authoritarianism that animates and unites the world’s autocrats. “Great power rivalry” and demagoguery about foreign threats to democracy appeal to audiences in the Anglosphere but lack credibility beyond it, where reality continues to refute both conceits.
The post-Soviet world is no longer “unipolar” or “bipolar” but “multipolar”. Middle-ranking and smaller powers seek their own identities and roles in shaping their international environments. The elements of interstate interaction are no longer unidimensional or dominated by hierarchies of military power. They are multidimensional. National security, economic, political, and ideological orientations no longer necessarily coincide.
Nations may be aligned with each other on some issues and against each other on others. Even as they cooperate economically, they may oppose each other politically or militarily. Ideological affinities no longer dictate alignments.
The world created by the Soviet collapse and the American triumphalism that followed it remains a work in progress. But the arc of history now bends towards multiple power centres simultaneously competing in different arenas. What remains to be seen is whether the great power participants in this new international disorder can achieve peaceful coexistence within it.
| * Charles "Chas" W. Freeman, Jr, born 1943, retired US diplomat and author. He served for thirty years in the United States Foreign Service, the Department of State and the Department of Defense in a variety of capacities. He worked as chief interpreter for Richard Nixon during his 1972 visit to China and served as US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War from 1989 to 1992. He is a past president of the Middle East Policy Council, co-chair of the U.S. China Policy Foundation and a lifetime director of the Atlantic Council. Freeman has always advocated the diplomatic route. (https://chasfreeman.net/biography) |
Source: https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/the-dialectics-of-confrontation/, 13 December 2021