With growing indications that Obama personally wants a détente with the Kremlin to reverse the descent into a new cold war, even as NATO forces prepare to stare down their Russian counterparts on Russia's own frontier for the very first time, the stakes are running high on a turn of events that could well determine the new global order in the 21st century.
How Obama and Putin spar and deal on Syria, ISIS, Ukraine, and nuclear security between now and January 20, 2017, will set the tone for how the liberal democratic Western world and the conservative autocratic East will seek to coexist for possibly the next generation.
For starters, the very fact that Obama is even considering such an ambitious diplomatic push is a concession of the urgency for a positive breakthrough between the big powers: it's an acknowledgement in itself that his presidency will have left the world a worse place than it found it should Russian and American forces find themselves trained directly on each other in a new stalemate on NATO's eastern frontiers as Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump takes the oath of office.
Such a troubling bequeathal to either successor is highly unpalatable to Obama. On the one hand, the hawkish Hillary - the neocon interventionist war party's unabashed favorite in November - is likely to ramp up US military pressure on Russia so much in the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, and of course Syria, that it could well prompt preemptive Russian strikes, with even the use of tactical nuclear weapons not entirely out of the question.
On the other hand, populist-nationalist insurgent Donald Trump - who has just overruled his own Republican party establishment's stance of arming Ukraine against Russian separatists - stands to capitalize from a huge propaganda victory at the expense of not merely Obama, Hillary, and the Democrats, but of the entire US and Western political class, should he be the one to pull off a historic reconciliation with the strongman for whom he has all but gushed out with personal veneration.
That leaves the cool-headed but, to his opponents and critics, aloof and abrasive, 44th US president with a brief window of opportunity as he approaches the twilight of his eight-year tenure: to hesitate now would be a final abdication of historic, providentially assigned responsibility as the one-time chosen messiah of the free world. He can sit back and watch as liberal democracy walks ever more blindly into the jaws of an aggressive and angry revanchist despotism from the East that it has no hope of overpowering; or worse yet, allow that very anti-liberalism to infect even the West itself by ironically appropriating for itself the anti-interventionist - read: antiwar - mantle. The only alternative is to strike out boldly - possibly virtually alone - to seize the narrow middle way while it's still just open.
It has gradually dawned on Obama that the entirety and totality of his foreign policy - that is to say, his eventual place in world history - boils down to how he finally comes to terms with the one man who has a comparable arsenal of weapons of mass destruction at his fingertips as himself. If there's one lesson that the idealist community organizer has learned from the cutthroat KGB man, it's that politics ultimately boils down to naked hard power.
Yes, first in the desert sands of Libya, then more dramatically on the balmy shores of Crimea and wooded plains of Donetsk province, but finally and conclusively in the devastated rubble of the towns and cities of Syria, the revelation of a primeval reality - eloquently described long ago by such varied luminaries from Sun Tzu to Machiavelli - has at last broken out as plainly and unreservedly as the noonday sun.
Democracy - yes, even the great liberal ideal of democracy - must always remember and come back to its fundamental practical concern in this imperfect world before the arrival of that nirvana of everlasting peace: namely, a more perfect capacity for and exercise of actual power.
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