chellaney148_MANDEL NGANAFP via Getty Images_bidenxi

أميركا تركز على العدو الخطأ

Feb 14, 2022 Brahma Chellaney

نيودلهي ــ يـود قسم كبير من العالم الديمقراطي لو تظل الولايات المتحدة القوة العالمية المتفوقة. ولكن مع التزام الولايات المتحدة على ما يبدو بالتوسع الاستراتيجي المفرط، فسوف تصبح هذه النتيجة بعيدة الاحتمال.

تبدأ مشكلة القيادة العالمية الأميركية في الداخل. تتسبب السياسات المفرطة التحزب والاستقطاب العميق في تآكل الديمقراطية الأميركية وإعاقة المساعي الرامية إلى تحقيق أهداف بعيدة الأمد. في السياسة الخارجية، يتجلى الانقسام الحزبي بوضوح في التصورات بشأن المنافسين المحتملين للولايات المتحدة: وفقا لاستطلاع آراء أجري في مارس/آذار 2021، تُـعَـد الصين أكثر ما يثير قلق الجمهوريين، في حين يشعر الديمقراطيون بالقلق إزاء روسيا في المقام الأول.

ربما يفسر هذا سبب تعامل الرئيس الأميركي جو بايدن مع روسيا "المارقة" على أنها منافس نظير، في حين أنه يجب أن يركز على التحدي من جانب نظير أميركا الفعلي، الصين. بالمقارنة مع روسيا، يعادل عدد سكان الصين عشرة أمثال عدد سكان روسيا، واقتصادها يعادل عشرة أمثال حجم اقتصاد روسيا، وإنفاقها العسكري أكبر بنحو أربعة أضعاف. الواقع أن الصين ليست أعظم قوة فحسب؛ بل إنها تسعى صادقة إلى أن تحل محل الولايات المتحدة باعتبارها القوة العالمية المتفوقة. على النقيض من هذا، تسعى روسيا، مع حشدها العسكري على حدود أوكرانيا، إلى التخفيف من تهديد أمني متصور في جوارها.

To continue reading, register now.

As a registered user, you can enjoy more PS content every month – for free.

Subscribe now for unlimited access to everything PS has to offer.

Already have an account? Log in

Subscribe to Project Syndicate

Enjoy unlimited access to the ideas and opinions of the world’s leading thinkers, including long reads, book reviews, topical collections, short-form analysis and predictions, and exclusive interviews; every new issue of the PS Quarterly magazine (print and digital); the complete PS archive; and more. Subscribe now to PS Premium.

Xi’s Olympic Trials The Big Picture
Lars Baron/Getty Images
Subscriber Exclusive

Xi’s Olympic Trials

Chinese President Xi Jinping sees the Beijing Winter Olympics as a chance to tout the success of his model of authoritarian rule. But will Xi’s bullying at home and abroad deliver sufficient economic growth to secure him a third term in power later this year?

0
Global Silence on China’s Gulag Politics
Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images

Global Silence on China’s Gulag

Brahma Chellaney sees President Xi Jinping's crackdown on Muslims as a key feature of a totalitarian political project.

8

new comment has been posted. new comments have been posted.

0 Comments on this paragraph, 15 Comments on this article

Henry Rech Feb 25, 2022

Chellaney's proposition holds no water in the face of events in Ukraine.

The US and others have both the despotic regimes in Russia and China to deal with.

But the US's greatest enemy is the one within - a polity and society irreconcilably polarized.
- Henry Rech Feb 25, 2022
  
  And of course Chellaney's view is consistent with the view of the Indian government which reflects the fact that Russia is India's largest supplier of military arms and has not joined in the condemnation of Russia's invasion of the Ukraine.
  
  Complicating the picture for India is that Imran Khan has just been in Moscow discussing the supply of gas to Pakistan.
  A new reply to this comment has been posted.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Warren Wimmer Feb 21, 2022

V. Putin "warns US leaders not to allow the Ukraine crisis to distract them from the graver threat posed by China."
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Ian Maitland Feb 21, 2022

Brahma Chellaney has got it backwards. And his false dichotomy may have disastrous results for the world.

One of the basic lessons of geopolitics is that there is no greater provocation than weakness. Hasn't it occurred to Chellaney that one of the things that encouraged Putin to take the gamble in Ukraine was Biden's bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan? And, by parity of logic, if the U.S. (and its NATO "allies") demonstrate that they lack the will to stand up to Putin in Ukraine, won't that encourage the hawks in China to conclude that the time may be ripe to invade Taiwan?

Ukraine and Taiwan are two sides of the same coin. Don't make the terrible mistake of small minds and think that the opposite of war is peace. Wrong! The opposite of war is more and bigger wars.

After WW2, the U.S. abandoned isolationism. What happened? For the answer, compare the first half of last century with the second half. In the first half, an isolationist America became involved in two world wars. In the second half, an interventionist America became embroiled in a series of smaller wars. Whatever you think of some of the smaller wars were, they were a bargain. "Pax Americana" saw the greatest period of unbroken prosperity in human history. As Nobelist Angus Deaton said a few years ago, “Life is better now than at almost any time in history. More people are richer and fewer people live in dire poverty."

As the Romans learned, "Si vis pacem, para bellum." Let's not forget that lesson, or we will find ourselves having to learn it over again -- if we live long enough.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
ndeychak Feb 20, 2022

The author is sadly mistaken. For one, Russia IS a rogue state (no need to put quote marks). Secondly, Russia remains a significant threat, it is not just China. A Russian invasion of Ukraine cannot and should not simply be ignored by the US, which the author seems to imply. Thinking that an autocratic Russia can be pulled away from China by the US and the West ignoring its revanchist imperialist expansionism into Europe is naive. Yes, China is a threat, but Russia is the more immediate one.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Jose Oyola Feb 20, 2022

Author’s statement regarding China-Russia’s new strategic relationship will be tested soon.

If China invades Taiwan at the same time Russia invades Ukraine, the World will see the re-emergence of a powerful military alliance of two communist dictatorships, similar to Hitler’s Axis alliance with Japan. We’ll soon be in a new Cold War, or worse, the beginning of the III WW.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Radhakrishnan Raman Feb 16, 2022

Prof Brahma Chellaney's comments are very insightful and highlights the realistic approach towards the threats to the world order. The present scenario has witnessed a display of a very ham-headed approach resulting in alienating some nations at a different juncture. It is but prudent to identify the real adversaries, who are a threat to the present world order and not Russia when it is dealing with the increasing footprints its neighbourhood, of an outdated NATO, which has outlived its mandate and needs to rework its priorities. Moreover it is the rise of China and its attempt to replace the USA, which should be the cause of concern.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Adrian Wu Feb 15, 2022

The author's premise that US should "contain" Russia and China, and prevent China from supplanting it, presumably because he feels somehow that a US that is no longer the single dominant world power is detrimental to the rest of the world. He is offering the naive view that the US, being a "democracy", is only a force for good, and acts in the interest of humankind. In reality, the US is an oligarchy, with a system that ensures the handful of elites will always stay on top and continue to siphon off the rest of the population. Just take one look at the tremendous and ever increasing inequality in US society, and the egregious dereliction of duty by successive leaders in the executive and legislative branches is all one needs to do to understand where the US is coming from. As we Chinese say, we must first live a righteous life before we can raise a healthy family, which is the basis for the proper governance of a country, and the maintenance of global peace and harmony. If the US elites cannot even govern their own country properly, what right do they have to tell other countries how to run their affairs ? Everything the US has done since WWII, such as the myriad wars, the engineered regime changes in unfriendly countries, the unlawful application of sanctions etc. were all for one purpose only, and it is not world peace. It is for the purpose of ensuring that the elites will always remain on top and reap the most benefit. Having powerful countries such as Russia and China that can act as a counterbalance and restrain these elites can only be a good thing for the rest of the world.
- lt lee Feb 18, 2022
  
  Western democracy as currently practiced would degenerate into oligarchy. Not a matter of if, the question is when. Simple reason. Two guys running from a bear. Neither has to out run the bear or having the capability to solve the problem of the nation, he only has to out the other guy.
  
  In the U.S. the two party system has transformed itself into the political industry. Interested readers could read "The Political Industry" written by Kathrine E Gehl and Michael E Porter.
  For India, its so called democracy is likely to degenerate into some kind of theocracy.
  A new reply to this comment has been posted.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Mirek Fatyga Feb 14, 2022

I think Mr Chellaney suffers from Indian centric focus.

Lets first deal with alleged "western triumphalism" in Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. We will add, for a good measure, "legitimate security interests of Russia".

NATO westward expansion served its purpose of stabilizing Eastern Europe following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It also provided a security blanket for these countries which was obviously needed given the events of the last decade, or even earlier. The expansion was an insurance against a failure of any meaningful reform in Russia and a reversion towards a revisionist, revanchist successor to the Russian and Soviet empires. NATO and EU expansion has clearly worked for its intended purposes. This is why Ukraine would like to join NATO and the EU. In the absence of this expansion, Donbas would be happening in eastern Poland and in the Baltics. Even with NATO expansion we witnessed staged refugee crisis in Eastern Poland and the Baltic States, staged by the newest Russian puppet state, the Belarus, no doubt with an encouragement from the Kremlin. As far as the "failure to integrate Russia" goes, this is another nonsense derived straight from Kremlin propaganda. The West cannot unilaterally integrate Russia any more than India can unilaterally integrate China into anything. Russia needs to reform herself. Russians need to do this, not the West. As long as Russia devolves back into a violent kleptocracy, the West can't do anything other than containment.

The problem we are facing today is a familiar one. This is the problem of rising Fascism due to generational amnesia. Russia is now a full blown Fascist state that emerged from the collapse of the Russian empire in WW1 with a transition period of Bolshevism, Stalinism and the late Soviet Union. China is in the late Soviet Union stage, having modernized in their version of the "New Economic Plan", now regressing in a backlash and fear of loss of control by the Communist Party.

The newer factor today is re-emergence of Fascism in the West. In my private estimation this emergent Fascism is more dangerous to western Democracies than Communism ever was, simply because it proposes to "preserve" the old society, "Make us Great Again", rather than radically transform the society into something unfamiliar and thus scary as Bolshevism promised to do. It is likely to win more converts.

The focus of the West has to be on preserving it's own Democracy first and then containment of Russia and China. Even if some sort of an alliance emerges between these two, it is likely to be temporary, as the alliance between Hitler and Stalin proved to be. Simply take a look at the map. Russia east of Ural mountains is mostly empty of people. There are plenty of people just south of the border and, more importantly, there is an acute need for natural resources. This is where the natural conflict is, and the West needs no part in it. If Russia becomes a temporary gas station for the Chinese, so much for the better. Fossil fuels are a dead end anyway, there is not enough of them, the civilization needs to evolve away from this source of energy or it will perish.

Time is running short in the world full of nuclear weapons. We will run out of luck eventually if the world keeps having escalating conventional conflicts under the nuclear umbrella.

This is not to excuse what the US did in Iraq. Unfortunately, in it's moment of triumph, the US acted like Russia would. Having done so, the US helped accelerate the devolution we are now facing and made it harder to contain. You can't have the rule based world if you are not willing to play by the rules yourself. We are paying the bills for this catastrophic error in judgment, full of hubris, today. The solution is to admit to the gravity of the situation, admit to the past hubris, and move on trying to spare the world an experience of violent, inhumane dictatorships fighting over carcasses of smaller nations around them, quite likely coming to nuclear blows over their spheres of interests.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Paul Martin Feb 14, 2022

The US-led international order has no future. It is gone. Why do you do a post mortem ?
- Mirek Fatyga Feb 14, 2022
  
  I confess to having the same feelings in my moments of weakness. But then I remember some history. US did not emerge as a "bastion of Democracy" because it really was one. Here is a glaring example, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/what-america-taught-the-nazis/540630/ , and it is by no means the only one.
  
  US emerged as a bastion of Democracy by comparison with the others. This can happen again.
  A new reply to this comment has been posted.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.

https://prosyn.org/Zijotryar

أميركا تركز على العدو الخطأ

Subscribe to Project Syndicate

Xi’s Olympic Trials

Global Silence on China’s Gulag

New Comment

Email this piece to a friend

Contact us

Log in/Register

أميركا تركز على العدو الخطأ

Subscribe to Project Syndicate

Edit Newsletter Preferences

Set up Notification