Events since the composition of these essays have set off, as often since the seventies, another wave of laments in the Western media and American political class that US power is ebbing, amid criticisms of the Obama administration for irresolute handling of new threats to international security. The developments that have aroused the latest round of anxieties are too recent, most still lacking any clear-cut outcome, to permit more than brief comment. They divide into two main zones, the larger Middle East and Europe. What is to date the balance sheet in each?
At the centre of the Muslim world, the military overthrow of the elected government in Cairo, replacing unkempt rule by the Muslim Brotherhood with a return of the Mubarak regime under new management, has stabilized US positions in the country of greatest political importance to it, on which the tranquility of Israel as victor state depends. With the Sisi regime in place, closing tunnels to Egypt more completely than Mubarak did, Palestinian resistance in Gaza could once again be garotted, Israel launching a punitive invasion of the enclave, while American weapons and aid continue to flow to the signatories of Camp David. In Syria, on the other hand, US orchestration of the Gulf monarchies and Turkey for proxy warfare to dislodge Assad has so far proved less militarily effective than the Hezbollah fighters and Iranian supply-lines defending him along the critical axis from Damascus to Aleppo. With the rise of a radical Sunni insurgency in the vacuum to the east, extending into northern Iraq and seizing Mosul, the calculus in Washington has shifted—attention swivelling back to Baghdad. There adult supervision had proved too lax: the Maliki regime, flouting US counsels, now rested exclusively on a Shi’ite army and security system, both riddled with corruption. With jihadis installed in Fallujah and Ramadi, and threatening Erbil, the Obama administration wasted no time in removing Maliki for a more respectful instrument of American will and arming the new government with aerial attacks on ISIS positions. In Iraq, pacification of Sunni opinion, along the lines of the Bush administration’s ‘Anbar Awakening’ of 2006–2007, is the next requirement. In Syria, much heavier bombing has been unleashed to halt the spread of ISIS control across the north of the country, in another advertisement of the president’s indifference to domestic law.1 Mustering its Arab clients into a coalition against jihadi forces fighting the regime in Damascus, while continuing to aim for the ouster of Assad himself, Washington has launched its fourth war of the century in the region.
Domestic fatigue precluding for the moment a return of ground troops to Iraq or the Levant, the lesson learnt in Washington is the mistake of letting them depart altogether, rather than leaving a residual force for emergencies behind. In Afghanistan, where Karzai showed no more eagerness than Maliki to accept such a fail-safe provision, Obama has made it clear the US is not to be trifled with. But securing a smooth passage to a more accommodating successor has not proved simple, with rival candidates mired in mutual electoral fraud—each professing the need for American troops to remain—needing to be spatchcocked together by US emissaries, and the Taliban undefeated. At the other end of the region, the dissolution of Libya, the showcase of humanitarian intervention by the West, into a maze of internecine feuds has underlined the difficulties of arm’s length rather than direct control in revivalist and neo-tribal contexts. In these variegated theatres of conflict, American paramountcy has yet to find its equilibrium.
But on the strategically decisive front in the region, the Obama administration has reason for provisional satisfaction, as the current clerical government in Iran, buckling under the pressure of implacable sanctions and covert sabotage, signals increasing resignation to the American diktat that Israel must continue to enjoy a nuclear monopoly in the region, in exchange for a lifting of the blockade of the country. Common interests in shielding the recycled Shi’a government in Baghdad from ISIS hold out the prospect of wider cooperation, for which quiet Iranian help for the original American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq offer a precedent—this time more openly and on a grander scale, with the aim of reconciling Teheran with Riyadh to make the Middle East safe for all its elites. Reintegration of Iran into the global economic order over which the United States presides would in all logic—policy-makers in Washington explain—spell a drawing down of Teheran’s support for the regime in Damascus, and once ISIS is crushed, the decommissioning of Assad by another route. The Rouhani government, though plainly seeking an entente with the US, is not so immune to domestic criticism or the delphic directives of the supreme leader that any of this is a foregone conclusion. The dual objective of the talks in Geneva is not yet attained. But it has come closer.
In Europe the scene has been dominated by a political tug-of-war over Ukraine, where the weakness of a successor state, default product of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has created a power vacuum of a classical kind—the West seeking to draw the country into a forecourt of the European Union, Russia seeking to check a further NATO expansion, encircling it from the South. In early 2014, the last-minute rejection by the corrupt Yanukovich regime, based in the eastern regions, of a trade pact with the EU, in favour of one with Russia, triggered its overthrow by a popular rising in the capital and the west of the country, followed by the rapid deployment of American diplomatic and security personnel to construct a reliable partner for Washington and Brussels in its place.2 Riposting with the annexation of Crimea, regarded by virtually all Russians as attached to Ukraine only by recent accident, Putin has lifted his popularity at home. But by subtracting its population from the east of the country, he lowered Moscow’s longer-term leverage in Ukraine itself, tempting him to cut his losses—any hope of regaining influence at the centre—by stirring Russian irredentism in the Donbass, attached to Ukraine some thirty years earlier. The result has been a rising against Kiev across much of the east, part-spontaneous, part-instigated by Moscow, issuing into localized civil war in which rebel militias have been saved from defeat at the hands of the Ukrainian army, with unofficial assistance from American intelligence, by the arrival of undeclared Russian troops and armour. As of the time of writing, in prospect is a military standoff, of relatively low intensity.
In the contest to gain the upper hand in Ukraine, the US and EU have the trump cards of pliable oligarchs, a favourable electorate, and in extremis a Western capacity for economic checkmate. For if Ukraine depends on Russia for its energy supplies, Russia depends for its capital investment and financial stability on a global banking system controlled by America, interlocking vulnerabilities likely to exclude major escalation of hostilities by either side. These are not symmetrical. The ability of the US and EU to damage Russia exceeds the ability of Russia, short of an outright invasion, to damage Ukraine. Though Europe itself stands to suffer in some degree from the sanctions so far imposed on Russia, as the United States does not, American determination to punish Putin has once again shown how limited is the autonomy of any European capital when American primacy is on the line.
The crisis in Ukraine is a logical end product of the Clinton administration’s decision to ignore the promises of its predecessor, and press NATO expansion to the East, against which many an unimpeachable veteran of the Cold War warned it. The prospect of a tacit Western protectorate in Kiev and the political model it would offer poses an unnerving threat to the Russian regime, as its reaction to the Orange Revolution had already made clear. Putin knows the cost of defying American will, and for over a decade bent to it. But after enduring one humiliation after another at the hands of a West ungrateful for Russian accommodations, it was always likely that in the end the worm would turn, and defensive reflexes acquire an aggressive edge. Classically, in such situations, rational calculation risks going by the board. But the demonstration effect of the sanctions against Iran stands as a warning to Moscow, a barrier against which it cannot afford to collide. In the great power conflict around the Black Sea, US protestations about Crimea, long a part of Russia, will pass. Ukraine remains the larger prize, even if it will be expensive to sustain, now within its grasp. A hegemon can sacrifice a pawn to gain a castle.
In the long run, more important for Washington than these skirmishes along the edge of the EU are two theatres of operation where deeper and more encompassing interests are at stake. The first is economic. For global capitalism as a whole, there is still no escape in sight from the logic of productive over-capacity relative to weak, debt-dependent demand. But within this system, the Treasury–Wall Street complex continues to control the diplomatic and monetary levers. To refloat the financial sector, Tokyo and Frankfurt are taking up the burden of quantitive easing, as the Federal Reserve moves towards its taper. But the structural priorities for the US are the free trade pacts it is pressing on the European Union at one end of the globe, and on Japan at the other end, to create a single commercial ecumene from the Atlantic to the Pacific, centred on North America. Neither is speeding to a conclusion, though if Obama does not shepherd them to the finish, they will remain on the agenda of the next administration. In the Far East, at least, where gains are potentially greatest for the US, the performance of the Abe government has been particularly encouraging: not only signalling readiness to dismantle Japan’s traditional devices of economic protection, but to extend its diplomatic and investment reach from Southeast Asia to India, in a common wariness of China.
The second theatre is military. There, largely unnoticed, with a dramatic upgrading in the variety and accuracy of its nuclear armoury, the United States has regained something like the absolute strategic superiority in weapons of mass destruction it enjoyed for a time after the Second World War. In a further signature initiative, Obama has launched a ‘nationwide wave of atomic revitalization that includes plans for a new generation of weapons carriers’, which will cost up to a trillion dollars.3 With the erosion of the Russian nuclear arsenal, and the much greater limitations of the Chinese, the US is not far from a first-strike capability that could in theory wipe out both without fear of retaliation.4 If any such scenario remains beyond imagination, it continues to figure in the computations of what was once called deterrence. Such is the actual—technological—proliferation, of which the Non-Proliferation Treaty is a fig leaf.
20 November 2014
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1For reflections from an impeccably mainstream jurist, see Bruce Ackerman, ‘Obama’s Betrayal of the Law’, New York Times, 13–14 September 2014.
2For documentation of this move, and analysis of the crisis in Ukraine, see Susan Watkins, ‘Annexations’, New Left Review 86, March–April 2014, pp. 5–13.
3See William Broad and David Sanger, ‘US Ramping Up Major Renewal of Nuclear Arms’, New York Times, 21 September 2014, and the NYT editorial the next day, ‘Backsliding on Nuclear Promises’.
4See the successive studies of Kier Lieber and Daryl Press: ‘The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy’, Foreign Affairs, March–April 2006, pp. 42–54; ‘The End of MAD? The Nuclear Dimension of US Primacy’, International Security, Spring 2006, pp. 7–44; ‘The Nukes We Need: Preserving the American Deterrent’, Foreign Affairs, November–December 2009, pp. 39–51; ‘Obama’s Nuclear Upgrade: The Case for Modernizing America’s Nukes’, Foreign Affairs, July 2011 (postscript); ‘The New Era of Nuclear Weapons, Deterrence and Conflict’, Strategic Studies Quarterly, Spring 2013, pp. 3–14.