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Commentary No. 241, Sept. 15, 2008
"The New World Geopolitical
Order: End of Act I"
It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of the agreement on
September 8 between Nicolas Sarkozy of France in his capacity as current
president of the European Union (EU) and Dmitri Medvedev, President of Russia.
It marks the definitive end of Act I of the new world geopolitical order.
What was decided? The Russians agreed to withdraw all their troops from what
are called "central Georgian areas" or "Georgia proper," that is, those parts of Georgia the Russians recognize as Georgia. These
troops are being replaced by 200 monitors from the EU. This is done on
guarantees by the EU that there will be no use of force against South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The issue of Russian recognition of the independence of South
Ossetia and Abkhazia has been left entirely open. Sarkozy and the
EU's Foreign Minister, Javier Solana, "hope" that Russia will
agree in the future to allow EU monitors into these two areas. Russia's Foreign
Minister, Sergei Lavrov, said they had made no such promise and that "all
future monitoring arrangements would require ratification by the Abhaz and
South Ossetian governments." Lavrov said that Russian troops would remain
in the two areas "for the foreseeable future." And the secretary of Georgia's National Security Council, Alexander
Lomaia, while applauding the clear deadlines for Russian withdrawal from Georgia proper,
did note that "the bad news is that [the agreement] doesn't refer to
[Georgian] territorial integrity."
This accord was reached between Europe and Russia,
and the United States
played no diplomatic role whatsoever. Medvedev charged the United States with having given its blessing to
the original Georgian action of entering South Ossetia.
He said that, by contrast, the Europeans are "our natural partners, our
key partners." Georgia's
president received the strong encouragement of John McCain, and Vice-President
Cheney flew there to say that the United States was giving $1 billion
in aid for Georgian reconstruction. But Secretary of Defense Robert Gates,
explaining why this aid would not include military aid and why there would be
no economic sanctions against Russia,
said that "if we act too precipitously, we could be the ones who are isolated."
So, what is the bottom line? Russia
has gotten more or less what it wanted in Georgia. Its
"irrevocable" recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia could well be
something it might trade in the future for a basic turn-around in Georgia's relations with Russia. If not,
not. The fact is that Europe believes it needs to come to terms with Russia, and has
ruled out renewing what the Chinese call "the European civil war."
The United States
finds it has no real cards to play. Meanwhile, in the Middle
East, it finds itself publicly rebuffed by its closest allies. In Iraq, Prime Minister al-Maliki is being a very
tough negotiator about the continued presence of U.S.
troops, and it is not impossible, barring further major U.S.
concessions, that the current agreements that terminate on December 31 will
simply run out.
In Afghanistan, President
Karzai is so exasperated with the bombing missions of U.S. special troops that he has demanded "a
review of the presence of U.S.
and NATO troops in the country," in what CBS News calls a "harshly
worded statement." The immediate provocation was an air raid in Azizabad
that the U.S.
army said had few casualties and attacked a Taliban group. The Afghans insisted
there were no Taliban there and a large number of civilians were killed. When
UN officials and others gave credence to the Afghan version, the senior U.S. general in Afghanistan,
David McKiernan, back-tracked on the U.S.
position and called for a further high-level U.S.
investigation by a general who would come from the United States.
And in Pakistan,
President Bush authorized U.S.
hot pursuit of Taliban from Afghanistan
into Pakistan
against the advice of the National Intelligence Council who said it would carry
"a high risk of further destabilizing the Pakistani military and
government." The incursion brought what the New York Times called
"an unusually strong statement" by the chief of the Pakistani army,
Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, who said his forces would defend Pakistan's sovereignty "at all
costs." Since the U. S.
government has been looking on Gen. Kayani as its strong supporter in Pakistan, this is not exactly what the United States
has been hoping to hear.
So, ignored in Georgia
and under attack by its closest allies in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Pakistan, the United States is somewhat unhappily
entering the realities of the post-Cold War world, in which it has to play by
new rules that it seems to find rather unpalatable.
Meanwhile, as an ironic but not unimportant footnote, on September 10, a
major development in particle physics was celebrated in Geneva when the European laboratory called
CERN achieved a scientific breakthrough after 14 years of work and $8 billion
in expense. This was such a major moment in world science that their U.S. counterparts at the Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois
opened the champagne bottles at 4:38 in the morning to celebrate. Nonetheless,
Pier Oddone, the director of the Fermilab, admitted this was a
"bittersweet moment." Until 1993, the United States ruled particle
physics. That year, the U.S. Congress, flush with the self-confidence of having
"won" the cold war, believed it was too expensive - and no longer
geopolitically necessary - to build the kind of supercollider needed for this
new advance in particle physics. The Europeans made a different kind of
decision, and the United
States now finds itself in second place here
too.
I call this the end of Act I because it has sealed the reality of a true
multilateral geopolitical arena. Of course, there are still further acts to
come. And any faithful playgoer know that Act I merely establishes who are the
actors. It is in Act II that we see what really happens. And then there's Act
III, the denouement.
by Immanuel Wallerstein
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