Ibne Siraj :
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, an era has ended and its confrontation with the United States has defined the Cold War period that has divided the whole world and put it into an unstable state. According to the political analysts, that confrontation was framed by the collapse of Europe, occupied both by the Soviet and the American armies after the World War II. Both the superpowers towered over the remnants of Europe’s forces. After the collapse of the European imperial system, the emergence of new states and a struggle between the Soviets and the Americans for domination also defined the confrontation. There were, of course, many other aspects of the confrontation, but the cold war finally appeared as a struggle built on Europe’s decline. The global politics saw many changes and shifts in its system, which accompanied the end of the Cold War. The Japanese economic miracle ended while China after Tiananmen Square inherited Japan’s place as a rapidly growing economy with continued pre-eminence of the Chinese Communist Party. The Maastricht Treaty was formulated subsequently creating the European Union, a vast coalition dominated by the United States that reversed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
The world has seen that three things have defined the post-Cold War world, the first being the United States as a power, second: rise of China as the center of global industrial growth based on low wages and the third: re-emergence of Europe as a massive, integrated economic power. Meanwhile, Russia, the main remnant of the Soviet Union, reeled while Japan shifted to a dramatically different economic mode.
The initial phase of the post-Cold War world was built on two assumptions. The first: the United States as the dominant political and military power but that such power was less significant than before, since economy was the new focus. The second phase still revolves around the three Great Powers-the United States, China and Europe-but involves a major shift in the worldview of the United States, which then assumes that pre-eminence has included the power to reshape the Islamic world through military action while China and Europe single-mindedly focused on economic matters.
Since the Soviet Union’s fall, the world people have been challenged by the so-called dominant superpower. That means the United States have deployed military assets around the world, with a specific focus on key regions and surrounded the Russian landmass with military assets and a coordinated defense alliance through the NATO.
The United States have also built a network of bases along China’s coastline from the Sea of Japan to the South China Sea and a network of military assets surrounding Iran. Besides, a network of bases was kept in place by Washington to defend the US interests in the Middle East and also have aircraft carrier battle groups deployable across the world.
The doctrine of shock and awe-a metaphor for Washington’s ability to subdue conflicts through intimidation before they turn into full fledged wars that has been essential to the US notion of military power in the world-died in Iraq. Perhaps the limits to what the United States was willing to do in war were first manifested in Vietnam. And perhaps it was what Ronald Reagan realized when he considered his choices in the aftermath of the bombing of the military barracks in Beirut in 1983 and chose to pull out.
But in the wake of Iraq, Americans now know instinctively that, whether for moral, financial or practical reasons, they are not willing to use the military capability that they have so carefully built for so many years. They are no longer interested in pursuing military action as a solution to each new conflict that the world turns to them to solve, but having built their credibility around the military power, they have neither the capability nor the respect for alternative paths to conflict resolution.
While for domestic political reasons, the United States have been unable to have a serious national discussion about this new underlying reality, their increasing disinclination to use the military capability that constitutes so much of their identity in the world, thus becoming inherently destabilizing. Russian President Vladimir Putin understands this and he also understands that he has great latitude to pursue Russia’s strategic interests in Ukraine before he will risk seeing any American military response.
Chinese President Xi Jingping understands this as well and also understands that China has great latitude to impose its will and territorial ambitions in the South China Sea before America will consider any serious military response.
If war is politics by other means, and the United States have effectively taken the use of its full military capacity off the table, it is time that Washington has a real discussion about the implications of this for its foreign policy and how it engages in the world. So far, the US Congress has been willing to seriously engage the question of where Washington goes from here, which the US Senate made clear when it refused to hold a debate on launching military strikes against the ISIS.
The cornerstone of American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War has been the deployment and implicit threat of disproportionate military capacity. But now the veil has been lifted and the world knows that the days of shock and awe are behind Washington.
In the US political discourse, Washington continues to posture as though nothing has changed. But, as a matter of fact, the US government is only fooling its people, and its adversaries have already figured it out. Some observers believe that the American era is coming to an end, as the Western-oriented world order is replaced by one increasingly dominated by the East. Historian Niall Ferguson has written that the bloody 20th century witnessed “the descent of the West” and “a reorientation of the world” toward the East.
The rise of China will undoubtedly be one of the great dramas of the 21st century. China’s extraordinary economic growth and active diplomacy are already transforming East Asia, and future decades will see even greater increases in Chinese power and influence. But exactly how this drama will play out is an open question. Will China overthrow the existing order or become a part of it? And what, if anything, can the United States do to maintain its position as China rises? Realists go on to note that as China gets more powerful and the United States’ position erodes, two things are likely to happen: China will try to use its growing influence to reshape the rules and institutions of the global system to better serve its interests, and other states in the system-especially the declining hegemon-will start to see China as a growing security threat. The result of these developments, they predict, will be tension, distrust, and conflict, the typical features of a power transition.
In this view, the drama of China’s rise will feature an increasingly powerful China and a declining United States locked in an epic battle over the rules and leadership of the international system. And as the world’s largest country emerges not from within but outside the established post-World War II international order, it is a drama that will end with the grand ascendance of China and the onset of an Asian-centered world order. That course, however, is not inevitable. The rise of China does not have to trigger a wrenching hegemonic transition. The US-Chinese power transition can be very different from those of the past because China faces an international order that is fundamentally different from those that past rising states confronted. China does not just face the United States; it faces a Western-centered system that is open, integrated, and rule-based, with wide and deep political foundations. The nuclear revolution, meanwhile, has made war among great powers unlikely-eliminating the major tool that rising powers have used to overturn international systems defended by declining hegemonic states. Today’s Western order, in short, is hard to overturn and easy to join.
(Ibne Siraj is a regular contributor for The New Nation)
