The world continues to hold its breath as Russia plays diplomatic chicken with the West over the fate of Ukraine. Russia has threatened “military-technical” action should the U.S. fail to keep Ukraine out of NATO, and any remaining doubts about the possibility of an invasion are vanishing. But why Russia may have chosen this moment to invade is not entirely clear. Some believe Russia is responding to America’s unstable politics; others look to the Cold War for answers. Some even look back centuries: After Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea, then-Secretary of State John Kerry said it was “behaving in a 19th century fashion.”
Instead of looking backward, America should, ironically, heed one of its Cold War icons, President John F. Kennedy, who said that “those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.” Russian President Vladimir Putin is not looking to the past. With an eye on the present, he is keeping the future in his peripherals. In doing so, he seems to have made a discovery: The world is in the midst of a 30-year transition from the bipolar world order of the 20th century to a new multipolar world order in the 21st. And he is maneuvering Russia to be well-positioned for it.
The 20th century’s bipolar Cold War is long gone, as is the brief aftermath of unipolarity when America stood unopposed. China has become America’s main adversary and Russia has recovered from its 1990s doldrums. Even the European Union has the makings of superpowerdom: nuclear weapons, a flourishing arms industry, a GDP approaching America’s, and nearly 450 million people.
The U.S. should be preparing for these rising powers. Instead, America has spent the last 30 years jamming Cold War-era institutions like NATO (created to reflect the bipolar early 1950s) into a period where they do not fit in an attempt to preserve as much 1990s unipolarity as possible. While such an impulse was understandable, in trying to hold back time the U.S has essentially become a nation of political Luddites.
Meanwhile, far from wishing to bring back the 1990s, Russia has been desperate to move on. Post-Cold War, Moscow could barely keep from descending into anarchy. In Russia’s telling, the West took advantage of this weakness and pressed into Russia’s sphere of influence by expanding NATO and the E.U. until American tanks were only hundreds of kilometers away. But America saw it differently: The more Russia was exposed to the West, the more it would democratize. As late as 2009, when it should have been apparent that this was not happening, the Obama administration still thought that relations could be reset by simply pushing a button. Which was why they were so shocked in 2014 when Russia “[behaved] in a 19th century fashion.” But Russia was not acting like a 19th century power. It was acting like a power.
The USSR would never have permitted the West to come so close, nor would have the Russian Empire. Crimea was a crucial deep-sea port, and …read more
Via:: American Conservative
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