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.
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