Brash and swashbuckling new Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte has boldly pronounced a "pivot to China" by the longtime US ally in his just concluded summit meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing, going so far as to declare that "America has lost" in its military and economic competition with the People's Republic.
But what's really going on here? Is the US really going to get kicked out by Manila? Will the latter really revoke its official mutual defense treaty with Washington dating back to the aftermath of World War II? Will this really be replaced by some kind of new security pact with China and/or Russia (to whom Duterte has also just reiterated his intent to deal with Putin)?
There's little doubt that Duterte feels far more at home with fellow strongmen Xi and Putin than with Obama - let alone his likely successor, the first woman president of the US. He's clearly impressed by their trappings of authoritarian imperial power exemplified by the grand squares of Beijing and Moscow, tailored as they are for unabashed displays of vast and intimidating formations of military troops and hardware. One can only imagine how his ego was stroked - quite consciously by his Chinese hosts - at being given special red-carpet treatment in the very visible nerve center of the middle kingdom; it must feel great for the sheriff of a comparatively puny tropical archipelago to be treated as a fellow resolved and responsible leader of men.
But Duterte knows better than to write off the US just yet. He relishes the chance to play off the superpowers against one another - magnifying the Philippines' and his own personal importance well beyond what it would be were it still firmly in the American camp. This is his way of not only hedging his bets, but making him doubly important to please or at least mollify in Washington.
In the end, it's precisely because he wants the unprecedented moral legitimacy that only the US can confer on his controversial leadership so much that Duterte is going so far as to entreat a rival suitor. He knows just how fickle is political popularity - he may have plenty of it in this "honeymoon phase" with the Filipino people, but if he somehow wins American approbation both of his policies and his underlying governance philosophy, that gives his administration a far bigger boost to its ambitious program, greatly weakening any opposition to it.
That being said, perhaps an even bigger reason the US-Filipino alliance isn't about to be terminated is a counterintuitive one: China itself doesn't want Manila to give Washington the boot - at least not for a while. In the first place, doing so would give too strong a message of of Chinese hostility to the US that would hurt Beijing's interests. No less than Duterte, Xi is also seeking American acceptance of his nation's and specifically his own personal indispensability to any Asia-Pacific policy or initiative. In large measure he already has it; but a public pivot towards China by a close US ally, however largely symbolic, serves the purpose of lightening up the dark view long peddled by some corners of official Washington that Beijing's become all about bullying its way to regional hegemony and demonstrating American decline.
It also serves China better for the Philippines to remain in the regional US alliance network than leave it because this now potentially gives Beijing a sympathetic voice at the table of America's Asian security coalition - a welcome dissenter from the confrontational faction led by Japan. Duterte is now to Xi what president Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is to Putin: a key US partner holding a pivotal link in Washington's chain of strategic influence that has acquired a mind of its own. Over time, this could even encourage other American allies to behave more autonomously of Washington, as well.
There's little doubt that supplanting the US as the linchpin of the security order in Asia is China's long-term goal; but with the wind already blowing so favorably in its direction, Beijing needn't push the envelope now and jeopardize its recent gains. Conceding Filipino rights in Manila's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) - as long as it's done gradually and quietly, without publicly acknowledging the Filipino victory at The Hague's South China Sea ruling in July - will be a small price to pay for getting a foot in the door of one of the mainstays of America's presence in the Western Pacific. And eventually, if and when the US does actually cede regional hegemony to China, Chinese leaders would much prefer that it do so of its own accord - recognizing the obsolescence of its old alliances in a new Sinocentric environment, anyway - rather than feel it's being shoved out. In more ways than one, Duterte's reciprocated outreach to China is setting the tone for the coming realignment of maritime Asia.
Thursday, October 20, 2016
Monday, October 17, 2016
How America's becoming polarized like Syria
One can't help but notice how life often imitates art, or even more tellingly these days, how an advanced society supposedly at the forefront of universal human harmony is beginning to uncannily resemble a very traditional one torn apart by primeval sectarianism.
What we clearly have nowadays in America - for those bold enough to call it out for what it really is - is the polarization between the cosmopolitan city and the parochial country; between progressive universal values and conservative exclusivist ones; between gender fluidity and rigid patriarchy.
Sound familiar? It's the exact kind of polarization which has violently cut a knife across the heart of Syria since the Arab spring erupted in 2011, killing up to nearly half a million in that country's subsequent civil war which has also displaced over 10 million others.
The notable difference, of course, is that our own sharpening identity-driven partisan divide is highly unlikely to turn physically bloody: our laws and institutions are far too entrenched and stable to allow that. But in the absence of a sober acknowledgement of the nature of the problem now making a mockery of our democratic process, even the most trusted and enduring features of the American system risk becoming weapons of increasingly destructive culture warfare.
Our democracy - and every society, in fact, whether democratic or undemocratic - can only properly function and attain its potential when its conflicting poles complement rather than repel each other. America surely doesn't have to descend into another civil war or anything even close to it to suffer the consequences of its deepening and ossifying division - and the entire world will be worse off for it, too.
Saturday, October 15, 2016
The election lost, Trump pivots to making country ungovernable
It's obvious that Donald Trump has lost the election. Even his diehard supporters know it - in fact, his diehard supporters in particular should be aware of what's truly happening. They've consciously essentially given up winning the race, because their goal is radically shifting to something far more negative but carrying potentially far greater long-term impact: making the country ungovernable from status-quo Washington.
If the political establishment still manages to hang on with Hillary becoming president, so they reason, it's time to punish the whole rotten lot of them by permanently burning the bridges of trust between the heartland and the ruling apparatus, thus rendering the latter so paralyzed and impotent that it will eventually crumble of its own atrophy into uselessness.
Trump's role now is to personify in one body the pent-up rage felt by anywhere from one to two-fifths of the American populace: the predominantly lower middle-class and working class whites of the geographically vast but largely socioeconomically stagnant interior of the lower forty-eight. In fact, as a number of surveys have demonstrated, this hostility isn't primarily economic but cultural, even borderline racial: poverty and income levels may indeed improve in the coming years to mitigate the deepening polarization, but the overwhelming structural character of a permanent shift to a diverse and multicultural coastal elite as against a still largely homogeneous middle America (literally) could well defy any quick or resounding healing of an alarmingly ossified national division.
The silver lining of this descent into partisan, even sectarian darkness in American politics is that it leaves a victorious Hillary Clinton little room to maneuver on wedge issues that she is known for lightning-rod views on, like immigration, gun control, or religious restrictions or prerogatives. Once in office, she will be confronted with a Republican electorate seething from the prospect of a third Obama term; even with a narrowly regained Democratic majority in the Senate, she will still almost certainly face a residual if reduced GOP majority in the House - to mention nothing of the Republican advantage in state governorships. That potentially forces her into key concessions lest her presidency be hobbled by even worse gridlock than Washington has already grown semi-accustomed to. If she wants to actually govern, she may well have to slow down at least somewhat the left flank of her party from carrying on its ambitious social engineering agenda.
But neither will it be easy to run the country in the old manner of the political elite and its wealthy patrons, who one way or another are widely perceived - on both ends of the electoral spectrum - as having looked out too exclusively for their own interests by shafting everyone else. Now that the microscope will be turned on her and her family's every move, Hillary can no longer sell favors and access as she so blithely did at State, and this could have a ripple effect across the entire establishment. And if nothing else, the fact that she's been so cozy with the big bankers on Wall Street could severely constrain the financial industry lobby in Washington merely by association with the White House.
Thus, even assuming a Hillary win, the country probably isn't governable anymore in the way it's been for a while, anyway. That at least is probably something Americans of all backgrounds and persuasions shouldn't be too disappointed by.
If the political establishment still manages to hang on with Hillary becoming president, so they reason, it's time to punish the whole rotten lot of them by permanently burning the bridges of trust between the heartland and the ruling apparatus, thus rendering the latter so paralyzed and impotent that it will eventually crumble of its own atrophy into uselessness.
Trump's role now is to personify in one body the pent-up rage felt by anywhere from one to two-fifths of the American populace: the predominantly lower middle-class and working class whites of the geographically vast but largely socioeconomically stagnant interior of the lower forty-eight. In fact, as a number of surveys have demonstrated, this hostility isn't primarily economic but cultural, even borderline racial: poverty and income levels may indeed improve in the coming years to mitigate the deepening polarization, but the overwhelming structural character of a permanent shift to a diverse and multicultural coastal elite as against a still largely homogeneous middle America (literally) could well defy any quick or resounding healing of an alarmingly ossified national division.
The silver lining of this descent into partisan, even sectarian darkness in American politics is that it leaves a victorious Hillary Clinton little room to maneuver on wedge issues that she is known for lightning-rod views on, like immigration, gun control, or religious restrictions or prerogatives. Once in office, she will be confronted with a Republican electorate seething from the prospect of a third Obama term; even with a narrowly regained Democratic majority in the Senate, she will still almost certainly face a residual if reduced GOP majority in the House - to mention nothing of the Republican advantage in state governorships. That potentially forces her into key concessions lest her presidency be hobbled by even worse gridlock than Washington has already grown semi-accustomed to. If she wants to actually govern, she may well have to slow down at least somewhat the left flank of her party from carrying on its ambitious social engineering agenda.
But neither will it be easy to run the country in the old manner of the political elite and its wealthy patrons, who one way or another are widely perceived - on both ends of the electoral spectrum - as having looked out too exclusively for their own interests by shafting everyone else. Now that the microscope will be turned on her and her family's every move, Hillary can no longer sell favors and access as she so blithely did at State, and this could have a ripple effect across the entire establishment. And if nothing else, the fact that she's been so cozy with the big bankers on Wall Street could severely constrain the financial industry lobby in Washington merely by association with the White House.
Thus, even assuming a Hillary win, the country probably isn't governable anymore in the way it's been for a while, anyway. That at least is probably something Americans of all backgrounds and persuasions shouldn't be too disappointed by.
Thursday, October 13, 2016
Uh-oh: Is Obama finally blundering into a suicidal confrontation with Russia?
Tomorrow, president Obama will once more get grilled by his national security team to finally order an utterly insane strike against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, despite the clear warning that a nuke-brandishing Vladimir Putin has now given him that this would certainly draw Russia into direct military conflict with the US.
In some sense, this isn't at all surprising. With the Syrian regime - aided by stepped-up Russian airstrikes - closing steadily on liquidating the last rebel urban stronghold of Aleppo, it's becoming obvious that Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus want to deal Mr. Obama the devastating defeat of the virtual final eradication of the Syrian revolution by the time American voters choose their 45th president on November 8.
Where he had earlier hoped that either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would be left to deal with the Syrian mess come January 20 - or at the very least he himself wouldn't have to until after Hillary secured the White House with her probable win next month - now Obama is staring down the very real prospect of a catastrophic strategic defeat that could reverberate thousands of miles beyond the ruins of a shattered historic Levantine city.
What makes his choice doubly more nerve-racking is the growing (day by day) ugliness of the US presidential election, as the deepest darkest dirt of both candidates is systematically unearthed by the two sides to further feed the flames of partisan polarization and acrimony. Perhaps for the first time ever, Obama is feeling a small bug nagging existential threat to his very psyche: a fear that a Trump victory now means nothing less than the utter evisceration of his legacy.
Defeat in Syria could give the election a considerable eleventh-hour jolt in that appalling direction. It would end US hopes of fostering a democratic alternative to the authoritarian brutality of Assad and his ruthless sponsors, Putin and Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei. By default, that's a huge victory for ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other violent jihadist extremists across the entire Middle East and potentially the wider Islamic world, as well.
So will Obama finally risk it all? On balance, it's highly unlikely - at least tomorrow. Hillary's lead over Trump seems big enough to not lose sleep. A new round of Syrian ceasefire talks this weekend (in a new regional-multilateral as opposed to US-Russia bilateral format) can buy some more time. With just 26 days to go until decision '16, Obama and Hillary alike will now try to run down the clock.
But the Syrian vise may be closing on the Democrats even faster. Given the intensified Russo-Iranian-Syrian assault on Aleppo as we speak, it's difficult to avoid the impression that the West and its Sunni Muslim regional allies will simply be asked to effectively capitulate Aleppo in order to save civilians this weekend. Leaked pro-Russian and pro-Syrian reports are claiming that on-the-ground talks are already underway between the regime and less fanatical militants to evacuate the latter and their families out of the city's besieged eastern sector; if true, the weekend truce discussions will likely involve Russian pressure on the US and its Western allies to throw their weight behind the proposal. The problem? Even if Washington finally surrenders - a big if in itself - its Saudi and other Gulf Sunni allies who with arch-nemesis Iran form the Syrian conflict's most intractably partisan foreign fomenters will probably scuttle it.
That's where the latest developments in the third front of the Sunni-Shia regional sectarian war (the first two being Syria and Iraq) - Yemen - are particularly alarming and potentially a destructive powder keg.
As of yesterday, the US has officially entered the civil war in Yemen on top of the civil wars in Syria and Iraq, throwing its firepower behind the Gulf Sunni coalition led by Saudi Arabia against the Shia Iranian-backed Houthi rebels by launching cruise missiles against coastal Houthi radar installations that had earlier directed anti-ship attacks on US destroyers. Iran's response? The enraged ayatollahs have dispatched two warships to patrol the neighboring Gulf of Aden.
Even as the prospects of US-Iranian hostile engagement remains low - both sides have too much riding on the 2015 nuclear deal - it's now obvious that the Saudis have recently intensified their own brutal air campaign against heavily civilian Houthi targets in Yemen in revenge for the humiliations that Sunni Arab civilians have suffered in Syria at the hands of Russian and Syrian regime air power. So obvious a rat race to kill noncombatants has this become - you bomb my friends' hospitals, and I'll bomb your buddies' funeral processions - that the US is now torn between standing by its Saudi allies and trying to avoid the appearance of double standards that would taint the whole Western coalition.
So even though a US-Iran blowup in Yemen is unlikely, not only does this escalation to the far south give Secretary John Kerry that much less maneuvering room as he tries to restrain Saudi vindictiveness over Syria this weekend, but quite dangerously it opens the door to a hitherto much muted Western assertiveness against Tehran. And that's where all hell could break loose.
As the lack of Western mainstream media coverage of Iran's regional role has made clear, the Western policy and ruling elite have become so preoccupied with Russian actions and something of a negative obsession with Putin specifically that they've badly neglected the ayatollahs' calculus. Few in Washington or Western European capitals seem aware that Tehran may now be driving Moscow's regional policy more than the other way around. And all along it has actually been Iran - not Russia - which has most dramatically restricted American freedom of action in the region along with that of its allies. A tipping point may finally be approaching: having delayed (by no means truly eliminated) the Iranian bomb, the West and Western-aligned Sunni powers are now finding the price of this extra time possibly intolerably high to pay - as it gives the ayatollahs far too much leverage to escalate their sectarian agenda throughout the Middle East with only ineffective pushback.
The mere fact that the very possibility of military confrontation with Damascus and thus Moscow is back on the table in the White House betrays how dangerously the whole regional situation could be reaching the threshold of just boiling over. Barack Obama himself - the community organizer whose whole presidency has been premised on the principle that there are no military solutions in geopolitics - is perhaps finally being confronted with a stark choice. If he doesn't act decisively now - for peace or for war - then whatever peace or war comes to the Middle East will not be determined by liberal democrats or reformers, but by sectarian extremists and cutthroat Machiavellian strongmen who alternately bargain with and war with them. Either way, democracy and human rights suffer and regress; either way, the danger of a newly retrograde world existentially threatens his legacy.
If you're an optimist, you could say that the newest war talk is just that - talk. And better yet, prudent contingency planning: no good leader waits until military action is actually absolutely necessary to plot it. But with Obama, this must be weighed against something more troubling: an apparent indecisiveness that has come to define his entire foreign policy record.
In the past, great American statesmen on the world stage - think Kennedy or Reagan - staved off destructive war and achieved great victories for global stability and cooperation precisely because they did not shy away from armed confrontation, even nuclear confrontation. That's because they effectively convinced their counterparts in the Kremlin that whatever terrible price America would pay for an actual direct military conflict, Moscow's empire would suffer even more and likely far more. Without this leverage, they simply could not have dialed down the standoffs they navigated in a way that secured, let alone promoted, vital American interests.
Obama, however, projects the image of an American and general Western society that to many cynics has fundamentally lost any sense of higher ideals or values worth shedding even a single drop of blood for, let alone buckets or rivers of it. Reduced to minimalist "extend and pretend" tactics without any grand strategy of peace through strength, this ironically makes it more likely - however improbable still - that the streak of luck will finally run out; namely, that at long last a halfhearted response to crisis is judged as preferable to continuing to do nothing at all. If and when such a devastating miscalculation occurs with the outgoing 44th president, he will have nudged the free world he leads over onto a slippery slope that can only end in judgement by fire.
In some sense, this isn't at all surprising. With the Syrian regime - aided by stepped-up Russian airstrikes - closing steadily on liquidating the last rebel urban stronghold of Aleppo, it's becoming obvious that Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus want to deal Mr. Obama the devastating defeat of the virtual final eradication of the Syrian revolution by the time American voters choose their 45th president on November 8.
Where he had earlier hoped that either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would be left to deal with the Syrian mess come January 20 - or at the very least he himself wouldn't have to until after Hillary secured the White House with her probable win next month - now Obama is staring down the very real prospect of a catastrophic strategic defeat that could reverberate thousands of miles beyond the ruins of a shattered historic Levantine city.
What makes his choice doubly more nerve-racking is the growing (day by day) ugliness of the US presidential election, as the deepest darkest dirt of both candidates is systematically unearthed by the two sides to further feed the flames of partisan polarization and acrimony. Perhaps for the first time ever, Obama is feeling a small bug nagging existential threat to his very psyche: a fear that a Trump victory now means nothing less than the utter evisceration of his legacy.
Defeat in Syria could give the election a considerable eleventh-hour jolt in that appalling direction. It would end US hopes of fostering a democratic alternative to the authoritarian brutality of Assad and his ruthless sponsors, Putin and Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei. By default, that's a huge victory for ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other violent jihadist extremists across the entire Middle East and potentially the wider Islamic world, as well.
So will Obama finally risk it all? On balance, it's highly unlikely - at least tomorrow. Hillary's lead over Trump seems big enough to not lose sleep. A new round of Syrian ceasefire talks this weekend (in a new regional-multilateral as opposed to US-Russia bilateral format) can buy some more time. With just 26 days to go until decision '16, Obama and Hillary alike will now try to run down the clock.
But the Syrian vise may be closing on the Democrats even faster. Given the intensified Russo-Iranian-Syrian assault on Aleppo as we speak, it's difficult to avoid the impression that the West and its Sunni Muslim regional allies will simply be asked to effectively capitulate Aleppo in order to save civilians this weekend. Leaked pro-Russian and pro-Syrian reports are claiming that on-the-ground talks are already underway between the regime and less fanatical militants to evacuate the latter and their families out of the city's besieged eastern sector; if true, the weekend truce discussions will likely involve Russian pressure on the US and its Western allies to throw their weight behind the proposal. The problem? Even if Washington finally surrenders - a big if in itself - its Saudi and other Gulf Sunni allies who with arch-nemesis Iran form the Syrian conflict's most intractably partisan foreign fomenters will probably scuttle it.
That's where the latest developments in the third front of the Sunni-Shia regional sectarian war (the first two being Syria and Iraq) - Yemen - are particularly alarming and potentially a destructive powder keg.
As of yesterday, the US has officially entered the civil war in Yemen on top of the civil wars in Syria and Iraq, throwing its firepower behind the Gulf Sunni coalition led by Saudi Arabia against the Shia Iranian-backed Houthi rebels by launching cruise missiles against coastal Houthi radar installations that had earlier directed anti-ship attacks on US destroyers. Iran's response? The enraged ayatollahs have dispatched two warships to patrol the neighboring Gulf of Aden.
Even as the prospects of US-Iranian hostile engagement remains low - both sides have too much riding on the 2015 nuclear deal - it's now obvious that the Saudis have recently intensified their own brutal air campaign against heavily civilian Houthi targets in Yemen in revenge for the humiliations that Sunni Arab civilians have suffered in Syria at the hands of Russian and Syrian regime air power. So obvious a rat race to kill noncombatants has this become - you bomb my friends' hospitals, and I'll bomb your buddies' funeral processions - that the US is now torn between standing by its Saudi allies and trying to avoid the appearance of double standards that would taint the whole Western coalition.
So even though a US-Iran blowup in Yemen is unlikely, not only does this escalation to the far south give Secretary John Kerry that much less maneuvering room as he tries to restrain Saudi vindictiveness over Syria this weekend, but quite dangerously it opens the door to a hitherto much muted Western assertiveness against Tehran. And that's where all hell could break loose.
As the lack of Western mainstream media coverage of Iran's regional role has made clear, the Western policy and ruling elite have become so preoccupied with Russian actions and something of a negative obsession with Putin specifically that they've badly neglected the ayatollahs' calculus. Few in Washington or Western European capitals seem aware that Tehran may now be driving Moscow's regional policy more than the other way around. And all along it has actually been Iran - not Russia - which has most dramatically restricted American freedom of action in the region along with that of its allies. A tipping point may finally be approaching: having delayed (by no means truly eliminated) the Iranian bomb, the West and Western-aligned Sunni powers are now finding the price of this extra time possibly intolerably high to pay - as it gives the ayatollahs far too much leverage to escalate their sectarian agenda throughout the Middle East with only ineffective pushback.
The mere fact that the very possibility of military confrontation with Damascus and thus Moscow is back on the table in the White House betrays how dangerously the whole regional situation could be reaching the threshold of just boiling over. Barack Obama himself - the community organizer whose whole presidency has been premised on the principle that there are no military solutions in geopolitics - is perhaps finally being confronted with a stark choice. If he doesn't act decisively now - for peace or for war - then whatever peace or war comes to the Middle East will not be determined by liberal democrats or reformers, but by sectarian extremists and cutthroat Machiavellian strongmen who alternately bargain with and war with them. Either way, democracy and human rights suffer and regress; either way, the danger of a newly retrograde world existentially threatens his legacy.
If you're an optimist, you could say that the newest war talk is just that - talk. And better yet, prudent contingency planning: no good leader waits until military action is actually absolutely necessary to plot it. But with Obama, this must be weighed against something more troubling: an apparent indecisiveness that has come to define his entire foreign policy record.
In the past, great American statesmen on the world stage - think Kennedy or Reagan - staved off destructive war and achieved great victories for global stability and cooperation precisely because they did not shy away from armed confrontation, even nuclear confrontation. That's because they effectively convinced their counterparts in the Kremlin that whatever terrible price America would pay for an actual direct military conflict, Moscow's empire would suffer even more and likely far more. Without this leverage, they simply could not have dialed down the standoffs they navigated in a way that secured, let alone promoted, vital American interests.
Obama, however, projects the image of an American and general Western society that to many cynics has fundamentally lost any sense of higher ideals or values worth shedding even a single drop of blood for, let alone buckets or rivers of it. Reduced to minimalist "extend and pretend" tactics without any grand strategy of peace through strength, this ironically makes it more likely - however improbable still - that the streak of luck will finally run out; namely, that at long last a halfhearted response to crisis is judged as preferable to continuing to do nothing at all. If and when such a devastating miscalculation occurs with the outgoing 44th president, he will have nudged the free world he leads over onto a slippery slope that can only end in judgement by fire.
Monday, October 10, 2016
American global leadership will be fundamentally reset by January 20
Aleppo has pretty much fallen, says Donald Trump in last night's second presidential debate: at least one presidential candidate seems to be getting sensible advice and intelligence from the military and intelligence community concerning the true state of affairs now unfolding in Syria as the Obama administration decides conclusively to sit on the sidelines of the main theater of the Syrian civil war, even though that all but means conceding victory to the despised regime of Bashar al-Assad in the nearly six-year-old conflict.
He goes on to reiterate the rather obvious: Just who do we think we're really backing over there? And who are we to think that we can't or shouldn't work with the Russians against ISIS? The subtext is obvious: True, the Russians haven't been focused on ISIS in their campaign in Syria to date, but that's because they see the Assad regime in Damascus as the legitimate entity that should regain control of all of Syria by eventually reclaiming what ISIS now holds in that country. We don't have to pretend we like Assad at all - or Putin for that matter - but isn't it about time we just come to grips with reality already?
From last night's debate, it's obvious that whoever replaces Obama in the White House on January 20 will inherit a reshuffled world order (or disorder you might say) in which reduced American leverage and influence in key strategic hot spots will be a solidly established fact on the ground. This will have happened with very little notice by the American public precisely because we never perceived it our vital interest to remain the top dog in those regions indefinitely anyway.
This doesn't at all mean the end of our superpower status; rather, it heralds a reset of the scope and nature of American global leadership.
We used to be the world's undisputed police officer - the universal enforcer of rules and standards which we ourselves largely created in the first place. In the post-Cold War era (1989-2014), this was largely because our military and economic supremacy over everyone else was so overwhelming that we could impose with ease a grave price for defying our edicts.
Going forward, however, we won't be primarily responsible anymore for military security or even economic stability in some of the most important geopolitical regions.
In the Middle East, it's already become clear that a Russo-Iranian axis has supplanted our own traditional alliance with Saudi Arabia as the most vigorous and dynamic dual partnership shaping the regional security equation. The Saudi-Iranian proxy wars in Syria and Yemen since 2013-14 have left little doubt as to which of the sectarian archrivals is the stronger and rising party in the heart of the Islamic world. One can argue that this is in no small part because Moscow has thrown its own weight behind its own client in Tehran far more than we have behind ours in Riyadh; yet the cool and cunningly calculating Vladimir Putin would not have done this had he not dispassionately assessed that the regional sectarian wind has been blowing strongly in Shiite Iran's favor to begin with.
Tellingly, simply staving off Iran's short-term acquisition of a small nuclear arsenal by no later than this year has forced the Western and Gulf Sunni alliance to concede so much strategic headway to the ayatollahs that it's easy to dismiss - per Mr. Trump - the whole nuclear deal of 2015 as an unqualified disaster even worse than the conflagration of preemptive war that it's temporarily averted. Even so, this all shows how deep is the structural strategic shift: because nobody dares invade Iran (invasion and occupation being the only sure way to end Iran's existentially dangerous nuclear weapons ambitions once and for all), we're left with a bargain that basically buys a little extra time to prepare for the likely eventuality of a nuked-up Islamic fundamentalist regime anyway; but thus far, it's the hardliners of Tehran who have seemingly made far more of the concessions granted them than we have of the reciprocal allowances they've made in return.
The lack of US and Western strategic leverage is far more glaring with regards to Russia itself: since Moscow's military might is so fearsome, the West's containment strategy against its aggressive backlash towards the liberal post-Cold War order has always been exclusively based on economics; but this is where the entire mercantilist calculus has arguably been irrevocably altered by the rise of China.
As its advanced remodernized arms industry shows, Russia retains plenty of technical and industrial prowess to sustain a sword and shield befitting a great power with worldwide interests; its economy looks puny only largely to the extent that it's measured by a Western consumerist yardstick to begin with. If one instead takes the view of Russia as a quintessentially militarist state whose economy is naturally primarily geared towards a massive armed posture anyway, in some sense Moscow has rarely appeared more formidable to its Western rivals than it does today. And the key to this is its budding alliance with Beijing.
China has utterly cornered global heavy industry and manufacturing. Its recent slowdown has if anything highlighted just how predatory its stranglehold on the smokestack mining and metals sectors has become vis-à-vis the global economy at large. Far from the old creaky economic engines of yesteryear, these as ever remain the backbone of any economy's tangible underlying strength and hard power. Where the West and the US retain their advantages in cutting-edge innovation, this advantage has been systematically eroded by the sheer economy of scale that China has brought to bear in virtually all traditional industries - it is scale itself that has become innovative and disruptive with Beijing now playing for keeps.
Russian and Chinese core military technology has closed the gap with American superiority enough over the past decade that long-term US arms dominance is no longer a given; yet even more troubling than the closing of the qualitative hole is the fact that the US seems to suffer more acutely than either of its near-peer counterparts in cost efficiency of producing and procuring the newest weapons systems. The bureaucratic waste and lard that chokes and clogs the Pentagon is now seemingly more problematic for Washington's aims of maintaining global strategic dominance than is any particular slowdown in technical innovation: a quite natural result of the gutting of American heavy industry (read: metals and mining) that can be laid squarely at the feet of Sino-mercantilist aggression since the dawn of the century.
So the US and Western Europe now have economies geared so much towards consumerist excesses and dissipations - cheap pleasures of the flesh and even cheaper vanities of the spirit (i.e. the social media-voyeurist phenomenon) - that it's little wonder they appear so soft and ineffectual in their response to robustly expanding Sino-Russian (even Iranian) spheres of influence.
The US military used to be able to deploy with credible force all over the world - even in the immediate neighborhood of traditional great powers - because its military-technological advantage could ensure quick and easy victories largely devoid of casualties. Since that is no longer the case, American military power has been reduced to the mercy of the general willingness of its populace to stomach the very real risks and costs of warfare in both human and economic capital; it thus follows that simply because the American public still doesn't even know where places like Ukraine or Syria are on the map, Washington is left with virtually no capacity to back up its diplomacy in these contested zones with any plausible threat of waging war.
The Philippines under its new loose-cannon autocratic president Rodrigo Duterte already sees this: his sudden indication of realignment with China and Russia in the defense realm isn't so much to spite the US as it is to prudently hedge bets. With Moscow now reactivating its long-range strategic assets in the Far East and joining Beijing in naval exercises in the disputed China Seas, little confusion can remain for long as to the purpose of such saber-rattling: to ultimately decouple even South Korea and Japan from their American protector and compel them into making separate strategic accommodations with the Eurasian giants. This of course on top of Russia's similar aggressive posturing which has recently intensified in Europe: by dangling the threat of a new nuclear arms buildup against NATO, Moscow means to raise the price of the Western alliance's pledge to protect its new eastern upstarts in the former Soviet bloc so high that it can strain the internal politics of these far more socially conservative (and hence potentially hostile to Washington and Brussels) countries to breaking point. And that's not even accounting for the increasingly likely hostile takeover of even core EU members France and Germany by right-wing neo-fascistic and xenophobic political forces and parties; to add to the preponderance of both extreme right and left-wing movements now becoming chronic on the EU periphery (Italy, Spain, and Greece).
The creeping reality of a reset of American power and leadership will firmly and quite automatically restrict whatever the future president will be able to accomplish or even declare as goals. Whereas Donald Trump seems to grasp the depth of the change already occurring, Hillary Clinton will before long be confronted with it in no uncertain terms as well.
Thus, on January 20, the 45th chief executive will just as likely acknowledge a new world calling for a new style and even substance of American leadership, as he or she will merely repeat the stale old mantras of "strengthening our alliances" and "rebuilding our military." What Washington will likely have to offer the American people by that date goes far beyond refreshed diplomatic and defense contacts across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and shiny new toys for our troops: the country needs to recalibrate its very mission in the world. That world is already resetting in a way that will never again respond to the standard post-Cold War playbook, because the new post-post-Cold War period is truly upon us. If America will not reset the modus operandi of its still enormous power of its own accord, the world will have forced a reboot on it anyway.
He goes on to reiterate the rather obvious: Just who do we think we're really backing over there? And who are we to think that we can't or shouldn't work with the Russians against ISIS? The subtext is obvious: True, the Russians haven't been focused on ISIS in their campaign in Syria to date, but that's because they see the Assad regime in Damascus as the legitimate entity that should regain control of all of Syria by eventually reclaiming what ISIS now holds in that country. We don't have to pretend we like Assad at all - or Putin for that matter - but isn't it about time we just come to grips with reality already?
From last night's debate, it's obvious that whoever replaces Obama in the White House on January 20 will inherit a reshuffled world order (or disorder you might say) in which reduced American leverage and influence in key strategic hot spots will be a solidly established fact on the ground. This will have happened with very little notice by the American public precisely because we never perceived it our vital interest to remain the top dog in those regions indefinitely anyway.
This doesn't at all mean the end of our superpower status; rather, it heralds a reset of the scope and nature of American global leadership.
We used to be the world's undisputed police officer - the universal enforcer of rules and standards which we ourselves largely created in the first place. In the post-Cold War era (1989-2014), this was largely because our military and economic supremacy over everyone else was so overwhelming that we could impose with ease a grave price for defying our edicts.
Going forward, however, we won't be primarily responsible anymore for military security or even economic stability in some of the most important geopolitical regions.
In the Middle East, it's already become clear that a Russo-Iranian axis has supplanted our own traditional alliance with Saudi Arabia as the most vigorous and dynamic dual partnership shaping the regional security equation. The Saudi-Iranian proxy wars in Syria and Yemen since 2013-14 have left little doubt as to which of the sectarian archrivals is the stronger and rising party in the heart of the Islamic world. One can argue that this is in no small part because Moscow has thrown its own weight behind its own client in Tehran far more than we have behind ours in Riyadh; yet the cool and cunningly calculating Vladimir Putin would not have done this had he not dispassionately assessed that the regional sectarian wind has been blowing strongly in Shiite Iran's favor to begin with.
Tellingly, simply staving off Iran's short-term acquisition of a small nuclear arsenal by no later than this year has forced the Western and Gulf Sunni alliance to concede so much strategic headway to the ayatollahs that it's easy to dismiss - per Mr. Trump - the whole nuclear deal of 2015 as an unqualified disaster even worse than the conflagration of preemptive war that it's temporarily averted. Even so, this all shows how deep is the structural strategic shift: because nobody dares invade Iran (invasion and occupation being the only sure way to end Iran's existentially dangerous nuclear weapons ambitions once and for all), we're left with a bargain that basically buys a little extra time to prepare for the likely eventuality of a nuked-up Islamic fundamentalist regime anyway; but thus far, it's the hardliners of Tehran who have seemingly made far more of the concessions granted them than we have of the reciprocal allowances they've made in return.
The lack of US and Western strategic leverage is far more glaring with regards to Russia itself: since Moscow's military might is so fearsome, the West's containment strategy against its aggressive backlash towards the liberal post-Cold War order has always been exclusively based on economics; but this is where the entire mercantilist calculus has arguably been irrevocably altered by the rise of China.
As its advanced remodernized arms industry shows, Russia retains plenty of technical and industrial prowess to sustain a sword and shield befitting a great power with worldwide interests; its economy looks puny only largely to the extent that it's measured by a Western consumerist yardstick to begin with. If one instead takes the view of Russia as a quintessentially militarist state whose economy is naturally primarily geared towards a massive armed posture anyway, in some sense Moscow has rarely appeared more formidable to its Western rivals than it does today. And the key to this is its budding alliance with Beijing.
China has utterly cornered global heavy industry and manufacturing. Its recent slowdown has if anything highlighted just how predatory its stranglehold on the smokestack mining and metals sectors has become vis-à-vis the global economy at large. Far from the old creaky economic engines of yesteryear, these as ever remain the backbone of any economy's tangible underlying strength and hard power. Where the West and the US retain their advantages in cutting-edge innovation, this advantage has been systematically eroded by the sheer economy of scale that China has brought to bear in virtually all traditional industries - it is scale itself that has become innovative and disruptive with Beijing now playing for keeps.
Russian and Chinese core military technology has closed the gap with American superiority enough over the past decade that long-term US arms dominance is no longer a given; yet even more troubling than the closing of the qualitative hole is the fact that the US seems to suffer more acutely than either of its near-peer counterparts in cost efficiency of producing and procuring the newest weapons systems. The bureaucratic waste and lard that chokes and clogs the Pentagon is now seemingly more problematic for Washington's aims of maintaining global strategic dominance than is any particular slowdown in technical innovation: a quite natural result of the gutting of American heavy industry (read: metals and mining) that can be laid squarely at the feet of Sino-mercantilist aggression since the dawn of the century.
So the US and Western Europe now have economies geared so much towards consumerist excesses and dissipations - cheap pleasures of the flesh and even cheaper vanities of the spirit (i.e. the social media-voyeurist phenomenon) - that it's little wonder they appear so soft and ineffectual in their response to robustly expanding Sino-Russian (even Iranian) spheres of influence.
The US military used to be able to deploy with credible force all over the world - even in the immediate neighborhood of traditional great powers - because its military-technological advantage could ensure quick and easy victories largely devoid of casualties. Since that is no longer the case, American military power has been reduced to the mercy of the general willingness of its populace to stomach the very real risks and costs of warfare in both human and economic capital; it thus follows that simply because the American public still doesn't even know where places like Ukraine or Syria are on the map, Washington is left with virtually no capacity to back up its diplomacy in these contested zones with any plausible threat of waging war.
The Philippines under its new loose-cannon autocratic president Rodrigo Duterte already sees this: his sudden indication of realignment with China and Russia in the defense realm isn't so much to spite the US as it is to prudently hedge bets. With Moscow now reactivating its long-range strategic assets in the Far East and joining Beijing in naval exercises in the disputed China Seas, little confusion can remain for long as to the purpose of such saber-rattling: to ultimately decouple even South Korea and Japan from their American protector and compel them into making separate strategic accommodations with the Eurasian giants. This of course on top of Russia's similar aggressive posturing which has recently intensified in Europe: by dangling the threat of a new nuclear arms buildup against NATO, Moscow means to raise the price of the Western alliance's pledge to protect its new eastern upstarts in the former Soviet bloc so high that it can strain the internal politics of these far more socially conservative (and hence potentially hostile to Washington and Brussels) countries to breaking point. And that's not even accounting for the increasingly likely hostile takeover of even core EU members France and Germany by right-wing neo-fascistic and xenophobic political forces and parties; to add to the preponderance of both extreme right and left-wing movements now becoming chronic on the EU periphery (Italy, Spain, and Greece).
The creeping reality of a reset of American power and leadership will firmly and quite automatically restrict whatever the future president will be able to accomplish or even declare as goals. Whereas Donald Trump seems to grasp the depth of the change already occurring, Hillary Clinton will before long be confronted with it in no uncertain terms as well.
Thus, on January 20, the 45th chief executive will just as likely acknowledge a new world calling for a new style and even substance of American leadership, as he or she will merely repeat the stale old mantras of "strengthening our alliances" and "rebuilding our military." What Washington will likely have to offer the American people by that date goes far beyond refreshed diplomatic and defense contacts across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and shiny new toys for our troops: the country needs to recalibrate its very mission in the world. That world is already resetting in a way that will never again respond to the standard post-Cold War playbook, because the new post-post-Cold War period is truly upon us. If America will not reset the modus operandi of its still enormous power of its own accord, the world will have forced a reboot on it anyway.
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