The New Multilateralism
Last year Vladimir Putin was Time magazine’s man of the year, a choice which led to severe criticism from some quarters, complaining that Time was honoring a politician who was stifling freedom and grabbing quasi-dictatorial powers. In a future blog I’ll explain why, looking at Russian history, the criticism of Putin in the West may be misplaced. He is no liberal democrat, but his rule is more in the line of reforming Czars than repressive ones; one needs to look at Russia in the context of Russian history and culture, not by measuring them against western standards. Today, however, I want to discuss Putin’s foreign policy – a kind of pragmatic realism – and what that means for the US and EU.
Putin has emerged as a tough defender of Russian national interest, unwilling to bend when pressured by the US or EU. While this has put off the Bush administration, with prominent neo-conservatives claiming that Russia is “lost,” comparing Putin to past Communist dictators, his foreign policy style is potentially a very promising development as it points to the possibility of successful multilateralism. The caveat is that the US must give up its neo-conservative belief that we can use American power to shape the 21st century in our image. Iraq has shown that kind of thinking to be built on two false assumptions: a) that American power can be projected without great cost and can successfully reshape global politics; and b) that the international system is one where military power is a major determinant of national strength. In a global era where markets dominate and where military threats to advanced industrialized states are not other armies but subversive terror organizations, a huge military is virtually irrelevant — and as Iraq demonstrates, relatively impotent.
So where does that leave Russia? Clearly Putin seems to recognize that Russia can’t regain a Soviet style empire, and that Russian national interest is indeed Russian, and relates to Russia’s status and role in the world. That means that we do not need to fear that Russia will become an expansive imperial power the way people feared Communism. That said, Russia has strategic interests in parts of the world important to the United States, most notably Iran, the Mideast, Europe and China. In Iran and the Mideast, Russia seems to be not only directly challenging the US, but doing so effectively, undercutting American efforts to isolate Iran, and forging better ties with states like Syria. This is one reason why neo-conservatism has become unviable — Russia has proven not only able to resist our efforts, but to be effective at countering them. At the same time, Russia has successfully done what the Soviet Union failed to do — decouple America and Europe. To be sure, President Bush made Putin’s job easier by going to war in Iraq and letting Secretary Rumsfeld make derisive comments about the “old Europe,” leading to dramatic summits with Chirac, Schroeder and Putin in 2002 and 2003, but even as the US has repaired transatlantic ties, Russia remains a major partner to Europe and supplier of natural gas.
For their part, the Europeans realize that in the post-Cold War world their choice isn’t between the US and Russia, but involves relations with both. Russia is on the EU’s border, and a growing Russia is a lucrative market. Russia’s vast oil and natural gas reserves are as important as ever, while the profits from the sale of these reserves spark a Russian economic boom (and, unfortunately, a boom in corruption as well). China, of course, is also in the mix, and playing a similar game of pragmatic politics with both the EU and Russia. The United States, slowly recognizing that the unipolar moment is over, is having to adjust to its limited ability to call the shots. No longer leading the West, but certainly still the world’s largest military and economic power, the US is trying to adjust to a multipolar reality that at first blush seems to threaten the US in ways that were unimaginable ten or fifteen years ago. In this new order where military power has limited value, America’s economic vulnerabilities (which are greater than a lot of people imagine) are exacerbated, and the US ability to shape global affairs weakened. While that may seem to be bad news, especially to idealists who dreamed about US power reshaping the globe with fantasies of a pax americana, it is in reality good news.
Pax Americana was never feasible in an era of globalization when the main threat is terrorism rather than war. The good news is that the other major actors, China, Russia and the EU, are all pragmatic. They are focused on their own interests, defined more by economic factors than anything else. None of them have the desire to expand or fundamentally alter the system, and all are willing to work with each other on points of common interest. All have an interest to help prevent Islamic extremism from posing a real threat to the system, all will be hurt badly if there is a sharp downturn in the world economy. Not since the concert of Europe have the world’s powers been on a pragmatic same page like this, and at this time no one seems ready to play the role of a rising imperial Germany to break that apart. Like all moments in world politics, this one won’t last forever. But it does create the possibility that the emerging multipolar world order might be able to handle the challenges of the 21st century through acting together on mutual interests. That is good — not only for the world, but for Americans as well.
