by Lee Smith
Hat Tip: Darrell Simms
When the secretary of state holds a joint press conference with Moscow’s foreign minister after Russia has decimated American proxies bearing American arms, we are not witnessing anything like a return to the Cold War. Rather, we’re witnessing a new order being born.
The United States, President Obama said at
the U.N. General Assembly last week, “worked with many nations in this
assembly to prevent a third world war—by forging alliances with old
adversaries.” Presumably, the president was not referring to his deeply
flawed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the recent agreement that the
White House has marketed as the only alternative to war with a
soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. Rather, it seems he was referring to the
post-World War II period, when the United States created and presided
over an international order that prevented an even larger, potentially
nuclear, conflict with the Soviet Union. Now, that Pax Americana may be
ending.
Indeed, Russia’s airstrikes against CIA-vetted
Syrian rebels last week looked like a punctuation mark. When the
secretary of state holds a joint press conference with Moscow’s foreign
minister after Russia has decimated American proxies bearing American
arms, we are not witnessing anything like a return to the Cold War.
Rather, we’re witnessing a new order being born. It is an order that is
being designed by others, without any concern for American interests.
Its cradle is not the conference rooms of the
U.N., but the killing fields of Syria. After four and a half years, the
Syrian civil war and the refugee crisis it has spawned threaten to
disrupt two zones of American vital interest, the Persian Gulf and
Europe.
America’s Cold War prosperity depended on our
ability to trade with the rest of the world across both oceans. The
United States built a powerful blue-water navy and far-flung bases as
tokens of our willingness to protect our allies and stand up to their,
and our, adversaries. What facilitates both trade and the movement of a
military as large as America’s is access to affordable sources of
energy, which is why the security of the Persian Gulf has been a vital
American interest for 70 years.
The nuclear agreement with Iran signals that
Obama doesn’t see things this way. From his perspective, no core
American interest would be threatened by either the domination of the
Gulf by revolutionary Iran or the likelihood that other regional powers
will go nuclear. The JCPOA told American partners in the Middle East
that the old alliance system was finished. Israel and Saudi Arabia would
get stiff-armed, and Iran would get to call plays in the huddle. What
Obama sought, as he said in a New Yorker interview, was a “new geopolitical equilibrium.”
Vladimir Putin understood Obama’s rhetoric and
actions as confirmation of what he’d already surmised. Putin showed NATO
to be a paper tiger when he moved against Georgia, then ordered a
Russian crew based in Syria to shoot down a jet flown by NATO member
Turkey, then annexed Crimea, to little response. In July, the JCPOA
opened the way for Russian and Iranian cooperation in Syria. The
Americans, Putin understood, had no stomach for a fight. But the White
House may have helped create the conditions for a conflict much larger
than the war already underway in Syria, a conflict that could someday
force the United States to defend its vital interests.
“There already is a third world war underway,”
says Angelo Codevilla, professor emeritus of international relations at
Boston University. “It’s the war between Sunnis and Shiites. It’s a
world war because it engages people all around the world who happen to
be Muslims.”
Codevilla thinks it unlikely that the war will
expand past the Middle East but notes that Pakistan, a nuclear Sunni
power, could present problems. In any event, the Obama administration
has little ability to shape outcomes. “Once you seize a position by
force, as the Russians have,” says Codevilla, “you are in the diplomatic
driver’s seat. Putin is schooling the U.S. foreign policy establishment
in foreign affairs. He has put his armed forces not at the service of
Bashar al-Assad, but at the service of Russian interests.”
And Obama? The White House believes in a balance
of power without winners and losers, an abstract international system
with room for every nation to pursue its rational interests. But this is
fantasy: Whatever order exists belongs to the power that imposes it.
The Syrian war threatens two of the pillars of the order we formerly
led.
“At what point does the Syrian conflict create
political instability in places like Saudi Arabia and other
oil-producing states in the Persian Gulf?” asks Walter Russell Mead,
professor of foreign policy and humanities at Bard College. “As long as
nothing is happening to block the oil flow, it’s the refugee flow that
makes Syria an international issue.”
But even before the refugees, European security
services were overwhelmed trying to keep tabs on potential jihadist
recruits traveling from Europe to the Middle East and back. The influx
of hundreds of thousands more migrants from the region is likely to
generate political instability and could carry the war between Sunnis
and Shiites into Europe.
To stem the refugee crisis, the White House is
broadly hinting it is willing to go along with Tehran and Moscow and let
Assad stay in power, at least for now. But it is Assad and his
allies—not, as the administration seems to suggest, the Islamic
State—who are responsible for the vast majority of the refugees. If the
Obama administration accommodates Russia and Iran on Assad, it will be
acquiescing in a plot to extort and destabilize Europe.
In the Gulf, Mead says, “if the Sunnis continue
to feel that they’re losing an existential conflict with Iran, they may
move toward a closer relationship between governments and radical
groups. Keeping oil money out of the hands of truly radical jihadists
has been a core U.S. interest since September 11, but if the Gulf states
don’t feel we are keeping our part of the bargain by providing
security, they could take matters into their own hands.”
Of course, another option for the Gulf states
would be to enlist Russia, which, unlike the Obama administration, has
shown its willingness to act on behalf of its own interests. Now that
Obama has forsaken America’s post-World War II patrimony, life is more
dangerous for America and its allies. This won’t be easy to reverse, no
matter who succeeds Barack Obama.
Lee Smith is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
Source: http://m.weeklystandard.com/articles/end-pax-americana_1039617.html
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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