By Dilip Hiro and Tom Engelhardt
Last week in Afghanistan, the Taliban, once almost
lacking a presence in the northern part of the country, attacked Kunduz, a
northern provincial capital and held parts of it for days (as they had in
2015). At the moment, that movement also has two southern capitals under siege,
Tarin Kot in Helmand Province and Lashkar Gah in Uruzgan Province, and now
seems to control more territory and population than at any time since the U.S.
invasion of 2001-2002. Mind you, from an American perspective, we’re talking
about the war that time forgot. Amid the hurricane of words in Election 2016,
neither presidential candidate nor their vice presidential surrogates has
thought it worth the bother to pay any real attention to the Afghan War, though
it is the longestin our history. It’s as if, 15 years later, it isn’t even
happening, as if American troops hadn’t once again been ordered into combat
situations and the U.S. Air Force wasn’t once again flying increased missions
there.
Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be this way, not for
the planet’s “sole superpower,” its “hyperpower,” its last remaining “sheriff”
bestriding the globe with military bases in close to 80 countries, its Special
Operations forces in almost 150 nations annually, and its Navy’s 10 aircraft
carrier battle groups patrolling the seas. On paper, it’s been a hell of a new
century for the United States. Only reality, it seems, has begged to differ.
As TomDispatch regular Dilip Hiro points out today, if
you’ve noticed the growing assertiveness of China and Russia (and perhaps, one
of these days, India will become more assertive, too), you’ll know that we’re
on an increasingly multipolar planet. In reality, I suspect it’s always been a
significantly more multipolar place than anyone in Washington cared to imagine.
In a sense, our world is not only becoming more multipolar but also more
helter-skelter, a place filled with low-level insurgencies and terror outfits
that simply can’t be crushed, amid failing and collapsing states and vast
refugee flows, on a globe that is ever more subject to the overheated,
rampaging pressures of nature. It’s not exactly the picture of a tidy imperial
planet nor one that Washington had ever imagined possible. ~ Tom
A Snapshot of a Multipolar World in Action
By Dilip Hiro
In the strangest election year in recent American
history – one in which the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson couldn’t even
conjure up the name of a foreign leader he “admired” while Donald Trump
remained intent on building his “fat, beautiful wall” and “taking” Iraq oil –
the world may be out of focus for many Americans right now. So a little
introduction to the planet we actually inhabit is in order. Welcome to a
multipolar world. One fact stands out: Earth is no longer the property of the
globe’s “sole superpower.”
If you want proof, you can start by checking out
Moscow’s recent role in reshaping the civil war in Syria and frustrating
Washington’s agenda to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. And that’s just one
of a number of developments that highlight America’s diminishing power globally
in both the military and the diplomatic arenas. On a peaceable note, consider
the way China has successfully launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment
Bank as a rival to the World Bank, not to speak of its implementation of a plan
to link numerous countries in Asia and Europe to China in a vast multinational
transportation and pipeline network it grandly calls the One Belt and One Road
system, or the New Silk Road project. In such developments, one can see ways in
which the previously overwhelming economic power of the U.S. is gradually being
challenged and curtailed internationally.
Moscow Calling the Shots in Syria
The Moscow-Washington agreement of September 10th on
Syria, reached after 10 months of hard bargaining and now in shambles after
another broken truce, had one crucial if little noted aspect. For the first
time since the Soviet Union imploded, Russia managed to put itself on the same
diplomatic footing as the U.S. As Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
commented, “This is not the end of the road… just the beginning of our new
relations” with Washington. Even though those relations are now in a state of
suspension and exacerbation, it’s indisputable that the Kremlin’s limited
military intervention in Syria was tailored to achieve a multiplier effect,
yielding returns both in that war-ravaged, devastated land and in international
diplomacy.
In August 2015, by all accounts, President Assad was
on the ropes and the morale of his dwindling army at rock bottom. Even the
backing of Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah had proven
insufficient to reverse his faltering hold on power.
To save his regime from collapse, the Kremlin’s
military planners decided to fill the gaping hole left by Syria’s collapsing
air force, shore up its air defenses, and boost its depleted arsenal of tanks
and armored vehicles. For this, they turned one of Russia’s last footholds
abroad, an airbase near the Mediterranean port of Latakia, into a forward
operating base, and shipped to it warplanes, attack helicopters, tanks,
artillery, and armored personnel carriers. Russia also deployed its most
advanced S-400 surface-to-air missiles there.
The number of Russian military personnel dispatched
was estimated at 4,000 to 5,000. Although none of them were ground troops, this
was an unprecedented step in recent Russian history. The last time the Kremlin
had deployed significant forces outside its territory – in December 1979 in
Afghanistan – proved an ill-judged venture, ending a decade later in their
withdrawal, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
“An attempt by Russia and Iran to prop up Assad and
try to pacify the population is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire, and
it won’t work,” said President Barack Obama at a White House press conference
soon after the Russian military intervention. He should have been an expert on
the subject since a U.S.-led coalition had been bombing targets in Syrian
territory controlled by the terrorist Islamic State (ISIS) since September
2014. Nonetheless, the Pentagon soon signed a memorandum of understanding with
the Kremlin over safety procedures for their aircraft, now sharing Syrian air
space, and established a ground communications link for any problems that
should arise.
During the next six months in a sustained air
campaign, Russian warplanes carried out 9,000 sorties, claiming to have
destroyed 209 oil production and transfer facilities (supposedly controlled by
ISIS), and enabled the Syrian army to retake 400 settlements spread over 3,860
square miles. In the process, the Russians lost just five men. As the prospect
of Russia playing an ongoing critical role in Syria grew, the mood in the White
House started to change. In mid-March 2016, Secretary of State John Kerry met
Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. The implication, even if
through gritted teeth, was that the U.S. recognized the legitimacy of the Russian
position in Syria, and that closer coordination between the two leading players
was needed to crush ISIS.
A year after the Russian campaign was launched, most
major Syrian cities were back in government hands (even if often in rubble),
and rebel-held eastern Aleppo was under attack. The morale of the Assad regime
had improved, even if the overall size of its army had diminished. It was no
longer in danger of being overthrown and its hand was strengthened at any
future negotiating table.
No less important to the Russians, just reemerging on
the Middle Eastern stage, all the anti-Assad foreign players in Syria had come
to recognize the pivotal position that the Kremlin had acquired in that
war-torn land where a five-and-a-half-year civil conflict had resulted in an
upper estimate of nearly 500,000 deaths, and the bombing of hospitals had
become commonplace. On the first anniversary of the Russian campaign, Putin
dispatched more planes to Syria, which made getting into a quagmire a possibility.
But there can be no question that, in the interim, Putin’s strategy had served
Russia’s geopolitical goals well.
Putin Sought Out by the Anti-Assad Arabs
Between October 2015 and August 2016, top officials
from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Turkey all
held talks with Putin at different venues. The first to do so, that October,
was the Saudi defense minister, Prince Muhammad, a son of Saudi King Salman.
They met at the Russian president’s dacha in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
Saudi Arabia had already funded the purchase of CIA-procured TOW anti-tank
missiles, which had largely powered a rebel offensive against Assad in the
summer of 2015. Now, the two agreed that they shared the common goal of
preventing “a terrorist caliphate [ISIS] from getting the upper hand.” When
Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir mentioned his concern about the rebel
groups the Russians were targeting, Putin expressed readiness to share
intelligence, which meant future cooperation between their militaries and
security services.
Later that day, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan,
the deputy supreme commander ofthearmed forces of the United Arab Emirates,
called on Putin. “Ican say that Russia plays avery serious role inMiddle
Eastern affairs,” he stated afterwards, adding, “There is no doubt that we have
aprivileged relationship.”
The ruler of Qatar, Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani,
went a step further after meeting Putin at the Kremlin in January 2016.
“Russia,” he declared, “plays a main role when it comes to stability in the
world.” Along with Jordan, Qatar had been providing the CIA with bases for
training and arming anti-Assad insurgents. A month later, the next Gulf chief
to call on Putin in Sochi would be King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa of Bahrain,
which has hosted the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet since 1971. He presented a
“victory sword” of Damascene steel to the Russian leader. After their talks,
Foreign Minister Lavrov reported that the two countries had agreed to boost
economic and military ties.
In August, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
traveled to St. Petersburg to meet “my dear friend” Putin. Their relations had
fallen to a low point when the Turks shot down a Russian warplane over northern
Syria. Unlike Western leaders, however, Putin had personally called Erdogan to
congratulate him on aborting an attempted military coup in July. “We are always
categorically opposed to any attempts at anti-constitutional activity,” he
explained. After three hours of talks, they agreed to mend their strained
economic relations and, in a striking reversal, Erdogan suddenly stopped
calling on Assad to step down.
In sum, thanks to his limited military intervention in
Syria, Putin had acquired enhanced leverage in decisions affecting the future
of the Middle East, which helped divert international attention from Crimea and
the crisis in Ukraine. To Putin’s satisfaction, he had succeeded in offering an
on-the-ground rebuttal to Obama’s claim, made after Moscow’s seizure of Crimea,
that “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate
neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness.”
As an added bonus, Putin had helped solidify his own
popularity at home, which had spiked to a record 89% approval rating in the
wake of events in Crimea and eastern Ukraine at a time when U.S. and European
sanctions, combined with low oil prices, had led to a recession that would
shrink the Russian economy by 3.7% in 2015. It was a striking demonstration
that, in domestic politics, popular perception about a strong leader trumps –
if you’ll excuse the word – economic realities. This year the Russian economy
is expected to shrink by perhaps another 1% and yet in recent parliamentary
elections, the Putin-backed United Russia party won 54% of the vote, and 343 of
450 seats.
Chinese and Russian Geopolitical Interests Converge
As a result, in part, of Western sanctions, Russia has
also been tightening its economic ties with China. In June 2016, Putin made his
fourth trip to Beijing since March 2013 when Xi Jinping became the Chinese
president. The two leaders stressed their shared outlook mirroring their
countries’ converging trade, investment, and geopolitical interests.
“President Putin and I equally agree,” Xi said, “that
when faced with international circumstances that are increasingly complex and
changing, we must persist even harder in maintaining the spirit of the 2001
Sino-Russian strategic partnership and cooperation.” Summing up relations
between the two neighbors, Putin offered this assessment: “Russia and China
stick to points of view which are very close to each other or are almost the
same in the international arena.” As co-founders of the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization in 1996, the two countries regard themselves as Eurasian powers.
During his visit to Beijing last June, Putin cited 58
deals worth $50 billion that were then being discussed by the two governments.
Russia was also preparing to issue yuan-denominated sovereign bonds to raise $1
billion and discussing plans to link China’s national electronic payment
network to its own credit card system. The two neighbors were already partners
in a $400 billion deal in which the Russian energy company Gazprom is expected
to supply China with natural gas for the next 30 years.
As an example of the Sino-Russian geopolitical
convergence in action, Rear Admiral Guan Youfei, head of China’s Office for
International Military Cooperation, recently visited the Syrian capital,
Damascus. He met with Syrian Defense Minister Fahd Jassem al-Freij and held
talks with the Russian general coordinating military assistance to that
country. Guan and al-Freij agreed to expand Chinese training and humanitarian
aid in order to counter religious extremism.
During Putin’s June visit, Xi called for closer
cooperation between their news agencies so that both countries could “together
increase the influence” of their media on world public opinion. Each has
actually already made significant forays into the global information stream. In
China, the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television started its
“going out” project in 2001 through China Central Television. By 2009, its
foreign language section was broadcasting programs globally via satellite and
cable in Arabic, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.
In 2006, Putin set up RT as a brand of TV-Novosti, an
autonomous non-profit organization financed by the Russian news agency, RIA
Novosti, with a budget of $30 million, and gave it a mandate to present the
Russian point of view on international events. Since then, RT International has
been offering round-the-clock news bulletins, documentaries, talk shows,
debates, sports news, and cultural programs in 12 languages, including English,
Arabic, Spanish, Hindi, and Turkish. RT America and RT UK have been airing
locally based content since 2010 and 2014 respectively.
With an annual budget of $300 million in 2013-2014, RT
still lagged behind the BBC World Service Group, with its $367 million budget
and news in 36 languages. During a visit to RT’s state-of-the-art studios in
Moscow in 2013, Putin urged its employees to “break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on
global information streams.”
China’s Global Power Projection
In 2010, President Obama launched his “pivot to Asia”
strategy to contain China’s rising power. In reply, within six months of
becoming president, Xi Jinping unveiled a blueprint for his country’s ambitious
One Belt and One Road project. It was aimed at nothing less than reordering the
geostrategic configuration of international politics, while promoting the
economic reconstruction of Eurasia. Domestically, it was meant to balance
China’s over-reliance on its coastal areas by developing its western
hinterlands. It was also to link China, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central
Asia to Europe by a web of railways and energy pipelines. In February 2015, the
first cargo train successfully completed a 16,156-mile round trip from the
eastern Chinese city of Yiwu to Madrid, Spain, and back – a striking sign of
changing times.
In 2014, to implement its New Silk Road project,
Beijing established the Silk Road Fund and capitalized it at $40 billion. Its
aim was to foster increased investment in countries along the project’s various
routes. Given China’s foreign reserves of $3.3 trillion in 2015 – up from $1.9
trillion in 2008 – the amount involved was modest and yet it looks to prove
crucial to China’s futuristic planning.
In January 2015, the Chinese government also
established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in Beijing. Two
months later, ignoring Washington’s urgings, Great Britain became the first
major Western nation to sign on as a founding member. France, Germany, and
Italy immediately followed its lead. None of them could afford to ignore China’s
robust economic expansion, which, among other things, has turned that country
into the globe’s largest trading nation. With $3.87 trillion worth of imports
and exports in 2012, it overtook the U.S. ($3.82 trillion), displacing it from
a position it had held for 60 years.
China is now the number one trading partner for 29
countries, including some members of the 10-strong Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN). This may explain why ASEAN failed to agree to
unanimously back the Philippines, a member, when the Arbitral Tribunal at the
Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruledin July in its favor and
against China’s claims to rights in the South China Sea. Soon after, China
announced the holding of a 10-day-long joint Sino-Russian naval exercise in
those waters.
Reflecting its expanding gross domestic product (GDP),
China’s military expenditures have also been on the rise. According to the
Pentagon’s annual report on the Chinese armed forces, Beijing’s defense budget
has risen 9.8% annually since 2006, reaching $180 billion in 2015, or 1.7% of
its GDP. By contrast, the Pentagon’s 2015 budget, $585 billion, was 3.2% of
U.S. GDP.
Of the four branches of its military, the Chinese
government is, for obvious reasons, especially focused on expanding and
improving its naval capacity.
A study of its naval doctrine shows that it is
following the classic pattern set by the United States, Germany, and Japan in
the late nineteenth century in their quest to become global powers. First comes
a focus on coastal defense of the homeland; second, establishing the security
of its territorial waters and shipping; and third, the protection of key
sea-lanes it uses for its commercial interests. For Beijing, safeguarding the
sea-lanes used to bring Persian Gulf oil to the ports of southern China is
crucial.
The ultimate aim and fourth stage of this process for
an aspiring world power, of course, is power projection to distant lands. At
present, having reached the third stage in this process, China is laying the
foundation for its final goal with a Maritime Silk Road project, which involves
building up ports in Burma, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan.
The medium-term aim of China’s navy is to curtail the
monopoly that the U.S. has enjoyed in the Pacific. It is rapidly building up
its fleet of submarines for this purpose. Meanwhile, as a sign of things to
come, China acquired a 10-year lease on a 90-acre site in Djbouti in the Horn
of Africa to build its first foreign military outpost. In stark contrast,
according to the Pentagon’s latest Base Structure Report, the U.S. has bases in
74 countries. The respective figures for France and Britain are 10 and seven.
Obviously, China has a long way to go to catch up.
The Realistic Aims of China and Russia
At the moment, Chinese leaders do not seem to imagine
their country openly challenging the United States for world leadership for,
minimally, decades to come. Ten years ago, the Beijing-based Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences, the country’s most prestigious think tank, came up with the
concept of “comprehensive national power” as a single, carefully calculated
number on a scale of 100. In 2015, the respective figures for America, China
and Russia were 91.68, 33.92, and 30.48.
At 35.12, Japan was number two on the list. At 12.97,
India was number 10, although that has not deterred its prime minister,
Narendra Modi, from declaring that his country has entered “the age of
aspiration,” and insisting that the latter part of the twenty-first century
will belong to India. To any realist, Modi’s claim lies in the realm of
fantasy, but it is a reminder of just how multipolar the coming decades could
turn out to be. (When it comes to distant power projection, India has done no
better than to start building a radar network in Mauritius, the Seychelles, the
Maldives, and Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean to keep tabs on Chinese merchant
shipping and warships.)
The global scenario that the down-to-earth presidents
of China and Russia seem to have in mind resembles the sort of balance of power
that existed in Europe for a century after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. In
the wake of that fateful year, the monarchs of Britain, Austria, Russia, and
Prussia resolved that no single European country should ever become as powerful
as France had been under Napoleon. The resulting Concert of Europe then held
from 1815 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
China and Russia are now trying to ensure that
Washington no longer exercises unrestrained power globally, as it did between 1992
and summer of 2008. In early August 2008, overwhelmed by the mounting
challenges of its war in Afghanistan, and its military occupation of Iraq, the
Bush administration limited itself to verbal condemnations of Russia’s military
action to reverse gains made by the pro-western president of Georgia, Mikheil
Saakashvili, in an unprovoked attack on the breakaway region of South Ossetia.
Think of that episode as a little-noticed marker of
the end of a unipolar planet in which American power went mostly unchecked. If
that is so, then welcome to the ninth year of a multipolar world.
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* http://www.defenddemocracy.press/american-power-crossroads/