Читать книгу America's Great-Power Opportunity - Allison Graham, Ali Wyne - Страница 10

Even as these horrors raised questions about America’s willingness to deploy military force where it did not have vital national interests at stake, they did not change the prevailing perception that it was far and away the world’s foremost power. Indeed, as Richard Haass summarized shortly before the turn of the century, during the 1990s Washington had accumulated sufficient military and economic strength as to be not quite sure how to apply it: “What to do with American primacy?” was the question.²⁵

An answer appeared to come with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which made it seem self-evident that counterterrorism should be—or perhaps had to be—the new ballast for US foreign policy. In his 2002 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush declared that the United States would commit itself to “the pursuit of two great objectives. First, we will shut down terrorist camps, disrupt terrorist plans, and bring terrorists to justice. And, second, we must prevent the terrorists and regimes who seek chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons from threatening the United States and the world.” The president warned that America’s counterterrorism efforts had only begun.²⁶ Vice President Dick Cheney supported that judgment in early 2004, venturing that fighting al-Qa’ida and other terrorist organizations would burden the United States indefinitely.²⁷

While counterterrorism proved to be the Bush administration’s central focus, it did not ultimately gain enough traction to serve as an enduring basis for US foreign policy. The prospect of a terrorist organization’s acquiring a nuclear weapon was—and remains—sobering, but it did not represent the kind of existential threat to the United States that the Soviet Union did. Elite and public opinion increasingly questioned the strategic rationale for open-ended interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the notion of a “global war on terrorism” lumped together the distinct threats posed by state actors such as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea and by non-state actors such as al-Qa’ida.

America’s emphasis on counterterrorism also seemed increasingly disconnected from the challenges of accelerating globalization and thickening interdependence. In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, Senator Barack Obama observed that, in the past, “America’s greatest threats came from expansionist states like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, which could deploy large armies and powerful arsenals to invade key territories, restrict our access to critical resources, and dictate the terms of world trade.” But he argued that the landscape was now different; citing terrorism, pandemic disease, and climate change, he concluded that “the fastest-growing threats are transnational.”²⁸ Richard Haass offered a comparable assessment in mid-2008, noting that the primacy of those threats marked

a fundamental change from much of modern history, which … was shaped by great-power competition and often great-power conflict. This is now a different world … because the fact that great-power competition and conflict is no longer the driving force of international relations means that the world has opened up the possibility of meaningful cooperation between … the major powers of this era, including the United States and China.²⁹

Shortly before the 2008 presidential election, Robert Kagan concluded that “very few nations other than the United States consider terrorism to be their primary challenge.” Indeed, he continued, to most of the United States’ allies and partners, “it has been at best an unwelcome distraction from the issues they care about more.”³⁰ If counterterrorism was too narrow a basis for US foreign policy, no self-evident successor appeared to be in the offing—though a brief episode in the fall would hint at one that would emerge as a linchpin of US foreign policy a decade later.

Russia and Georgia went to war in August 2008: it was the culmination of tensions that had emerged in the waning days of the Cold War and escalated sharply in 2003, with the Rose Revolution in Tbilisi that brought to power a pro-western president, Mikheil Saakashvili. The fight itself lasted only five days, concluding on August 12, 2008. President Saakashvili signed a French-brokered ceasefire agreement on August 15, and Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, followed suit the next day, marking the official end of the conflict. Ten days later, though, President Medvedev signed an order that declared the Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to be independent. Mercifully the conflict did not result in a third world war, despite some anxious speculations at the time. Still, Michael Kofman assesses that it “presaged the return of great-power politics and the end of the post-Cold War period. In 2008, Moscow demonstrated the will and ability to … challenge Washington’s design for a normative international order where small states can determine their own affairs independent [sic] of the interests of great powers.”³¹

Despite its symbolic significance, the war was overshadowed by the summer Olympics, which took place in Beijing from August 8 through 24. It was a spectacle that spotlighted China’s growing stature. And the war faded further into the recesses of global consciousness with the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, which precipitated the world’s severest macroeconomic crisis since the Great Depression. Given how sharply relations between the United States and China have deteriorated in the intervening years, it is hard to believe that these two countries coordinated as vigorously as they did in late 2008 and early 2009, spurring the G20 into action and helping to arrest a fastmoving recession. Their cooperation offered preliminary evidence that strategic distrust between the world’s lone superpower and a rapidly emerging power need not preclude partnership during global crises or marginalize existing international institutions. Reflecting on that result, Daniel Drezner notes that, “[d]espite initial shocks that were more severe than those of the 1929 financial crisis, global economic governance responded in a nimble and robust fashion in 2008.”³²

The Obama administration’s initial experience of dealing with China imbued it, understandably, with confidence about the potential for US–China cooperation. For some time Washington and Beijing even expressed a shared interest in developing a “new model” of great-power relations—a nebulous but attractive call to elevate cooperative imperatives over structural tensions.³³ The logic was compelling: the world would be unable to address pressing challenges without robust collaboration between its only superpower, which possessed the largest economy, and its principal driver of growth, which commanded the second-largest. Even so, the construct did not gain enduring support; the United States was reluctant to suggest that it regarded China as a peer, and China, though agitating for greater sway in prominent international fora, did not want to imply that it bore as much responsibility for maintaining the postwar order as the United States did. Still, the two countries undertook several joint efforts, launching the US–China Clean Energy Research Center in November 2009, signing a landmark climate change agreement in November 2014, and inking a deal to promote greater trust in cyberspace in September 2015. So, even as strategic frictions between them intensified, the two countries seemed able—and, as importantly, willing—to prevent competitive dynamics from crowding out the cooperative ones.

The Obama administration notched a number of cooperative successes with Russia as well. Washington and Moscow partnered to shore up the Northern Distribution Network, which played a key role in routing supplies to US troops when they were deployed in Afghanistan. On February 5, 2011, the two countries signed New START, a major nonproliferation agreement that was effective for ten years and restricted each signatory to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads. Russia joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the end of the year, becoming the last G20 member to do so. In late 2013 and early 2014, Washington and Moscow worked together to secure and transport out of Syria 1,300 tons of its chemical weapons. Finally, they collaborated on the negotiations that would ultimately result in a breakthrough deal to constrain Iran’s atomic activities: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).