Post Prague and the war against terrorism: the prospects of American/ European/Russian co-operation
Af Christopher Coker, London School of Economics and Political Science
In his much acclaimed book Paradise and Power Robert Kagan argued that the split between the US and Europe is more profound than at any time in history because it involves a clash between a Hobessian state (the US) and a number of European powers embracing a Kantian cosmopolitanism. Strangely to an outside audience they share much in common:
“It is more than a cliché that the US and Europe share a set of common
Western beliefs. Their aspirations for humanity are much the same even if their vast disparity of power has now put them in very different places”
The very fact, of course, that Kagan can talk of a Hobessian system versus a Kantian one is a reflection of a common political culture. But it is because their values are so similar that they find themselves in disagreement. Both are ‘humanitarian’ and universalistic by instinct; and both believe in order. But the attempt to instrumentalise the values they share is producing serious, indeed critical, rifts which transcend differences of administration in Washington or changes of government in Paris or Berlin.
From Mad to Nomad
The differences between the two systems were highlighted by September 11 when our conceptual framework of security was shattered: when we moved from a world of Mutual Assured Destruction to one of Mutual Assured Vulnerability. To appreciate the extent of that change let me begin with a brief disquisition on the history of war to which I am indebted to the military historian, John Keegan. Keegan has reduced the history of conflict to a three-act drama which involves a long-term struggle between ‘have-nots’ and ‘haves’.
Act 1: At the outset of history war involved a series of predations by the horse-peoples of the Central Asian Steppe on the great civilisations of the world. This phase in the history of war was greedy, parasitic, primitive and destructive and it ran its course until the fifteenth century when the Europeans learned to put gunpowder (the chemical rather than muscular source of power) to the service of their own culture.
Act 2 : In the second act the ‘haves’ fought each other. In the course of the struggle the Europeans conquered most of the world but in a parallel move they turned on themselves until they reached a terrible end game in 1945: the prospect of nuclear war. At that point the greatest ‘have’ of all, the United States, found itself powerful enough to impose peace on all the others, beginning with Germany and Japan in 1945 and its most formidable enemy, the USSR in 1991.
Act 3: The third act was one in which the ‘haves’ went out of the war business with each other. Instead five million people died in the course of the 1990s in internecine struggles across the world in which the ‘have nots’ turned on one another. Thirty or so conflicts worldwide took place in miserably poor regions where up to 80% of people lived below the UN subsistence line. Most of them were fought in the world’s most remote and resource-less regions: in Afghanistan, the poorest part of South West Asia; in Bosnia, the poorest part of Europe; in the Caucasus, the poorest part of the old Soviet Union; and in Somalia and Angola, the poorest part of the poorest continent in the world.
If the conclusion of the second act of history helped forge a western security community, one that was at peace with itself for the first time, the third act found the western powers anxious to police the post Cold War world. In Bosnia Somalia, Kosovo and the Gulf the western powers engaged in an unprecedented series of peace keeping/peace enforcement operations in what appeared for a brief moment to be a historical cycle of humanitarian interventionism. Most of these operations were on sub contract to the United Nations although one notable exception, Kosovo, was not.
Act 4 But we must add a rider to Keegan’s historical account which was written before September 11, 2001. Up to that period it was possible to draw comfort, like Adam Smith from the fact that the ‘haves’ had finally found the answer to the depredations of ‘have-nots’. Before the invention of gunpowder, Smith reminded his readers in the Wealth of Nations (1776), the West had been on the defensive. Now everything had changed. “In ancient times the opulent and civilised found it difficult to defend themselves against the poor and barbarous. In modern times the poor and barbarous find it difficult to defend themselves against the opulent and civilised”.
Is this any longer the case? Keegan argues that the intervention of the United States in World War II “imposed what we may suppose and hope will be the final peace between the gunpowder nations”. But that’s also a problem. The fact that the ‘haves’ are out of the war business with themselves does not mean that war is disappearing. The West makes up only 15% of humanity, after all. The fact that it inhabits what the National Security Strategy (2002) calls “a zone of security” is not necessarily a source of consolation. As Martin van Creveld writes, “the West is ‘rather like a besieged castle, the waves battering against the walls. They will certainly batter them down if we continue to have capitalism without equity and justice. ”
Recent events, in fact, would suggest we are living through a new act of the history of war in which the ‘have-nots’ can once again target the ‘haves’. In today’s world peoples or societies that feel victimised by globalisation can now target Western Europe and the United States, the two most globalised societies in the world. The problem is that globalisation amplifies the strategies of the discontented. The new nomads have been re-empowered by history. And now, unlike the old, they can breach our defences with weapons of mass destruction.
To take the analogy further we would do well to remember that the nomadic attacks in the past took two forms. First there were those mounted by micro-parasites who fed off settled, civilised societies from which they demanded tribute in return for staying at home. In that sense nomads and citizens belonged to exclusive systems and they both knew it which is why blackmail was often so successful.
In today’s world the parasites are states like North Korea or Iraq (one already holds the West to ransom, the other aspired to). Other nomadic tribes would descend on the civilised world destroying a way of life they neither understood nor valued. Should today’s wreckers like Al-Qaeda ever obtain weapons of mass destruction they would be able to inflict enormous damage, both material and psychological on the civilised world.
What gives rogue states their power is their willingness to give succour to terrorist movements whose reach extends far beyond the frontiers of the host state. In the case of Al Qaeda its ‘occupation’ of Afghanistan gave rise to a new concept: not ‘state sponsored terrorism’ but the ‘terrorist sponsored state’. As long as states did not export violence they were not a problem, whatever their oppressive or genocidal policies at home. As long as they were ‘sedentary’ international stability knew no rules of humanity or rules against lawlessness. Sovereignty indeed guaranteed stability. In the case of states such as North Korea it does so no longer.
Act 4 has had a profound impact on the way the western powers collectively and more recently independently perceive security.
The first is that their enemies are now mobile. The western powers no longer live in world defined by flanks (North/South) or fronts (Central) or even hinterlands (the Middle East). Security is no longer ‘in area’ any more than it is ‘out’. The Western powers now confront despacialised social networks (Al-Qaeda); despacialised challenges (refugees/asylum seekers); despacialised threats (WMD) and despacialised communities which are in touch with each other across the world.
Secondly, the old world of security communities has given way to risk communities whose membership is as fluid as the challenges they face. What surprised and disconcerted many Europeans after 9/11 was the speed with which the United States aligned itself with allies of convenience. It appears to have lost interest in policing the international order as it did in the 1990s through traditional alliance systems. Instead the post 9/11 world seems to be one of shifting alignments, ad hoc coalitions and floating friendships. Today’s enemy can rapidly become tomorrow’s friend, a pattern reminiscent of the Wild West where only the weak - the farmers who fenced in their land against robber barons and bandits alike, needed regulation or state support, or legally enforced rules. On today’s frontier it’s the weak states who need fixed alliances. Others can reach their own agreements in a world where enmities like allies and alliances appear to be in constant flux.
Thirdly, it is the nature of risk communities to coalesce around abstractions. Rather than wars against distinctive threats they engage in wars against generic threats: such as terrorism, or crime or AIDS, or environmental degradation. No longer can concrete threats be dealt with by bringing errant regimes into ‘new world orders’, or regional security regimes. Insecurity can now only be managed.
Both the United States and Europe are driven less by impulses than events. No one necessarily desires imperial adventures. In the Balkans the EU was driven by ethnic crises and Milosovich’s ambition. In Iraq the US was driven by the ambitions of another intractable leader though one who showed greater skill in surviving. In both cases the overriding interest of the US and Europe (as well as Russia) is crisis management. All three have empires; all three are very different.
Empire
In the sense of the word we use today, however the American Empire can trace its origins back to 1917 when the US sought under Woodrow Wilson to construct for the first time “a community of power”. And it is just such a community that the American empire should be seen though it is not the first such community in history. Another was the Athenian empire, the Delian League familiar to us from the writings of Thucydides.
(1) What distinguished the Delian League, an alliance between Athens and lesser powers, was that with the exception of three members (Chios, Lesbos and Samos) all were democracies. This was more of an imperial system rather than an informal empire and the homogeneity of political culture was intended to bind it together, to paraphrase Woodrow Wilson “to make the Aegean safe for democracy”. Since 1917 the United States too has had a preference for a democratic style of government.
That vision, as the great French commentator Raymond Aron recognised in his book The Imperial Republic (1973) , was ‘imperial’, not ‘imperialist’. And the difference is extremely important. When Aron distinguished the United States from the Soviet Union calling one an imperial and the other an imperialist republic, what he meant by the distinction was that the US maintained a different kind of empire, one based on an idea: not territory. This was the essence of Wilsonian interventionism at Versailles (1919) when the Americans tried to put forward a security paradigm based on making the world safe for democracy. Instead of territorial expansion, the best form of security, Wilson argued, was to export one’s own ideas or ideology. Interestingly, at the end of both World Wars the US found itself in conflict with its allies who preferred to insure their own security through the traditional method: territorial expansion. In 1919 it came into conflict with Britain and France who wanted to expand their empires, and after 1946 with the Soviet Union which wanted to over- insure itself in the traditional fashion: by securing an empire of its own in Eastern and Central Europe. The imperial vision is an ideological one: the imperialist vision is one based on a territorial imperative.
(2) The Delian League was a very special empire in a second respect, in the imagination at least of the Athenians themselves. In his famous Funeral Speech Pericles declares :
“ In virtue too we are contrary to most. For not by receiving benefits but by conferring them do we acquire our friends. Now the one who has acted is the firmer friend of the two, so that through goodwill to him to whom he has done the favour he may perpetuate the indebtedness. The one thus indebted is less keen seeing that such virtuous action as he may offer in return will not oblige the other but merely clear his own indebtedness. We alone confer benefits fearlessly: not from calculations of advantage but with confident liberality”.
What makes the US empire different again is that is has exercised its power for the benefit of its allies through a multilateral framework Bill Emmott in his book 20/21 Vision calls the USA a ‘cooperative empire’, rather than a coercive one for membership is perceived as being mutually advantageous to its individual members. It’s a phrase that reminds one of another, Gert Lundestad’s quip that the US operated ‘an empire by invitation’.
Even so the US is running an empire not a hegemony: and the difference is crucial. It’s about power. As Michael Doyle adds the difference does not lie ultimately in mechanisms of influence (such as multilateral rather than territorial mediums) but the dimension of power. Imperial control is distinguished by its domain: its penetration. In the case of the United States we see its extraordinary influence over the political economy of its dependencies or client states, the extent of its economic penetration through multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF. The ‘Washington consensus’ as it is derisively called is real. This is real power, not influence. It shapes economic society and political systems. It is also at one with last year’s National Security Strategy which talks of the need to “shape the international environment”. In the war against terrorism, especially in the Middle East, the US is not shaping it to European preferences. Not much is likely to come of the new Middle East ‘road map’.
(3) What also distinguished the Delian League was the use of soft power as well as hard. And just as Athens was admired for its culture, its integration of other city states into the Athenian market and its suppression of piracy in the Aegean , so the United States is widely admired for its cultural pull, its economic success and the good it provides as the ultimate guarantor of international peace and security.
“We are the attractive empire”, writes Wall St Journal columnist, Max Boot “the one everyone wants to join”. But as the extent of American power has grown so has anti-Americanism. Many non western intellectuals hate globalisation as much as they hate the US, indeed sometimes they confuse the two. There is no disguising the fact that however appealing may be the American ‘franchise of empire’ the US is widely distrusted and disliked. Soft power is, if anything, more objectionable still – to quote one Indian writer: “its marauding multinationals [who] are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink and the thoughts we think”. The way the US is prosecuting the war against terrorism is adding to this stereotype.
The American Empire and Military Power
In that war the US is using a way of warfare first pioneered in the closing years of the Vietnam War which is one reason why the conflict itself should not be judged an unmitigated disaster. Indeed, without the lessons learned in Vietnam the war against terrorism would have been fought in a much less effective manner.
For it was in the final stages of the war that the Americans tested the tactics and technology that have since become familiar: the helicopter gun ship, the application of SMART and fuel-air bombs, the targeting of troops on the ground (not cities) by B52s. The crunch came in the Easter offensive in 1972 when the US totally obliterated an invading North Vietnamese force with the most ruthless application of air power yet seen in history. By then it had only 6,000 combat troops left in Vietnam: none of them were involved in the ground fighting. Instead the South Vietnamese army engaged the enemy with the help of massive air support from the US in the form of B52s and SMART bombs and cluster munitions delivered by electronic means. The North Vietnamese lost 100,000 men, four fifths of their invading force; the South Vietnamese lost a quarter of that number. The lesson was learned. Any allied ground force supported by US airpower could prevail against an enemy, even one as tenacious as the North Vietnamese. Conversely, it was impossible for an enemy to mass a force for an attack if the imposing force could call on decisive air power. The pattern of American operations was set for the wars of the post Cold War era.
Thirty years later the Afghanistan campaign revealed how well these lessons had been learned. In that campaign air power alone could not have prevailed against Taliban. Back in the 1940s one of the fathers of the US strategic bombing Alexandre de Seversky predicted that air power could not disarm a developing country. The US had a hard enough time of it against Serbia in 1999, a semi developed state with a semi developed infrastructure. Afghanistan offered an even less attractive target. It had almost no infrastructure at all, only some “ramshackle command posts, a few ammunition dumps and depots, a handful of fighter jets, a malfunctioning radar at Kandahar Airport and other such”. Yet the bombing was highly effective all the same. It crushed the Taliban whenever they formed to resist the forward thrusts of the Tadjuk, Uzbek and Hazara militias who, in turn, were only willing to advance because they could call on American air power. And the Special Forces, CIA operators and Delta Forces on the ground who worked with the Northern Alliance could call on air strikes at critical periods because they were ‘wired’ into the military network as their counterparts had not been in 1972 by GPS satellite location devices which enabled them to pinpoint enemy positions and communicate with their own HQ. The Special Forces that engaged the militias had almost no firepower of their own. They were able to direct air power instead in an especially lethal manner.
And yet, from the perspective of Europe’s political class its critique of the US military is not so much about its ruthlessness as about its methods. If it has the equipment to pacify much of the world does the US have the will? Is it psychologically equipped for empire?
The critique is that the US is not really interested in the civilising
mission, in the reconstruction of the states and societies with which it
finds itself at war.
It is Afghanistan, of course, that has attracted particular criticism in recent months because of the promises that the United States and its allies made at the height of the war. “In Afghanistan we helped liberate an oppressed people and we will continue helping them secure their country and rebuild their society”, claimed President Bush in his State of Union address in January. But now there is a deep concern that Americans are losing interest even though the task of repairing the wreckage of war – let alone the even more massive job of nation building – has only just begun.
Lack of money has dogged Afghanistan from the start. A year ago the World Bank estimated $10.2bn in aid was needed over five years. International pledges have been about half that sum. And according to CARE International, an NGO monitoring international aid, the money actually spent per capita was under half that of post colonial Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and even East Timor. 36 And much of that has been spent by the CIA paying warlords and militias for help in the war on terror, which is merely ended up in strengthening rivals to the central government they are trying to underwrite.
(2) If the Americans are suspected of wanting empire on the cheap economically, their willingness to stay the course when military conditions deteriorate is also questioned, and has been for some time. This is, of course, a military empire above all else. The Pentagon’s regional commanders exercise more overseas diplomatic leverage than the State Department’s ambassadors: they represent a new breed of ‘political resident’ representing the metropolitan power in the wings. The problem is that the extreme risk averse nature of the US military ensures the job often remains half done.
Indeed, it is to avoid casualties that Bush himself is averse to ‘nation building’ even in Afghanistan where the US has vetoed the formation of anything other than a small, Kabul-based, stabilisation force – currently no more than 5000 strong – in which its own soldiers play a minor role. Unfortunately, the country is not remotely close to becoming a functioning state with a viable infrastructure and control over its territory. And the US-led war against Al-Qaeda is not over, even though the world’s attention has drifted elsewhere. There are probably several hundred Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, and a larger number over the border ready to re-deploy soon. There are other ominous signs. Some 400 rockets have been fired at American forces in the past 10 months. To date there have been 50 US deaths; every week two or three caches of arms are found. .
The European Empire
All Empires are based on effective control, formal or informal by one power or society over another. Informal empire is not new. The British exercised power in Latin America informally for much of the nineteenth Century largely through economic influence (an infrastructure of trusts, property and investments). Today of the two informal empires in the world the European is the most complex.
The trans-national states that constitute the world’s first trans-national community, the European Union, has established, in turn, the world’s trans-national empire. It is an empire distinguished not by the use of military power, but other instruments of influence. Academics talk of a new diplomatic style – cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitan states, Beck writes, differ significantly from ‘surveillance’ states – states like the US which keep the world under scrutiny all the time (quite literally through satellites, U2 flights etc) . Cosmopolitan states by contrast “ do not only fight against terrorism, but also against the causes of terrorism in the world. Out of the solutions of global problems which appear insoluble at the level of the individual state, they regain and renew the power of the political to shape and convince”.
The word ‘political’ is an important one. Robert Cooper, Tony Blair’s former foreign policy adviser, also sees the EU as a ‘post modern system’ which is more ‘transnational than supra national’, a community that considers war to be a failure of policy. Europe, he wrote last year, lives in a postmodern system that instead of the balance of power embraces the ‘rejection of force’ and ‘self-enforcement behaviour’.
Consensus politics makes enemy stereotyping difficult even in domestic politics which is why Ulrich Beck can take of something historically new - “a democracy without enemies”. Democratic peace theory tells us that democratic policy makers need to mobilise so much public support for war that war becomes increasingly difficult to resort to as an instrument of policy. Within a transnational society in which national identity is weakened and which the state is increasingly sensitive to global public opinion public support for war is likely to be more elusive still. And it is likely to be highly sensitive to events such as an attack on a convoy of refugees or the accidental bombing of a school or hospital. The Kosovo War, writes Ignatieff, was not so much won as ‘spun’ – and spin doctors are a feature of transnational states. Winning in the old sense, decisively and conclusively, is becoming more and more difficult.
In addition, the preference for the evolutionary arrival at decisions through summitry, lobbying and intensive bargaining appears to render them incapable of what the US Chiefs of Staff describe as ‘decision superiority’. In a world of risks rather than threats such superiority may make the difference between success and failure in risk management. The importance of decision dominance was identified years ago by Liddel Hart: “decisive results come sooner from sudden shocks than from long drawn out pressures. Shocks throw the opponent off balance. Pressure allows him time to adjust”. In the way in which the Kosovo War was dominated by committees who determined the targets, and frequently quibbled over the targeting, the Americans saw a transnational warfighting ‘style’ if not culture. And what they saw convinced them that they should never prosecute a war in the same way again.
In the end this is an imperial system framed by a unique twenty-first century ideology, what John Fonte calls ‘transnational progressivism’. It is an ideology that, as an American of a particular political persuasion, Fonte himself finds deeply alienating because it challenges the traditional American creed: self-determination and common citizenship. For a transnational progressivist state is one in which ethnic claims take precedence over those of the individual citizen; where the state follows ‘a democratic impulse’ to de-link itself from the nation in order to promote greater multiculturalism; where post national citizenship makes imperative the dismantling of national myths and narratives; where political life means bargaining between the state and different interest groups rather than the social contract of state and citizen; where the values of the main institutions reflect the values of those groups; and in which the idea of transnationalism itself has become a major conceptual tool.
Without endorsing Fonte’s thesis as a whole there is much merit in his essential thesis that transnational progressivism is the main source of the transatlantic divide. The term is a useful one to sum up the very real differences in political culture which make alliance management more difficult than ever.
Let me cite two examples.
Global Governance In the transnational progressivist community that Europe has become power is increasingly shared and risks distributed. This is an empire of overlapping power networks which involve NGOs. These networks promote cosmopolitan democracy - the partnership between states, social advocacy groups, and pressure groups involved either in direct action (environmental protesters such as Greenpeace) or the monitoring of human rights abuses (Watch Groups such as Transparency International, a Berlin based global anti-corruption organisation which publishes an annual Corruption Perception Index (CPI) ranking the extent of corruption in different states). As a consequence sovereignty as traditionally understood is no longer the exclusive prerogative of the state.
It is these which are the building blocks of what David Held calls “a cosmopolitan democratic view”. Unfortunately, humanitarians and liberal international lawyers, writes Michael Ignatieff, are disappointed to find that American power, especially its military power, cannot be integrated into this trans-national legal and economic order.
For their part, in the rise of global governance the Americans find both a disembodied politics and a dis-empowered political community. They are critical of the Europeans for divorcing politics from power. For a century or longer the marriage of the two was represented vividly in the growth of international law and the triumph of multinationalism after 1945. Multilateral institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank still dispose of economic power and they are very much the creature of politics, hence the ‘Washington consensus’ - the US view about global economic management. It is the global framework of multilateralism that gives American power its ‘constitutional characteristics’, as well as what John Ikenberry calls ‘a semi-legalistic right of restraint’ over those powers such as Iraq that are deemed to challenge international law, or to subvert international security.
Military Power and Advocacy Networks Any prospect of future military co-operation between Europe and the US is complicated by the way in which NGOs are beginning to challenge both the military methods and use of particular weapons at the heart of western military strategy. In this dialogue states are finding they have little room for manoeuvre.
One example is depleted uranium and cluster bombs. In its native state uranium comprises highly radioactive U-235 and less active U-238. U-235 is used in reactors and atomic weapons. Once it is extracted, the rest is depleted uranium (DU). DU-tipped munitions are deployed in an anti-armour role on the US A-10 ‘Tankbuster’ aircraft and the British Challenger 2 tanks. Armoured penetration is improved by concentrating the force of a shell into as small an area as possible. The denser the projectile, the harder the impact. The US fired 31,000 such shells during the Kosovo conflict and another 10,000 during peacekeeping operations in Bosnia. The problem is that uranium is ‘pyrophoric’: at the point of impact it burns away into vapour, so the projectile stays sharp. It also leaves behind uranium dust which is poisonous if inhaled.
After Kosovo a storm of protest in Europe brought into question Europe’s use of DU shells in the future. Portugal’s Prime Minister Antoniou Guterres remarked that his country would have to think twice about trusting NATO again and a poll found 71% of the population thought troops should not be sent to the Balkans. Germany and Italy have officially called for a moratorium on DU use. In each case government reaction was influenced by NGO advocacy. The UK based Campaign Against Depleted Uranium (CADU) has links to the wider European Network Against Depleted Uranium (ENADU). The Dutch based World Information on Energy is another grass-roots organisation which acts as an information and networking centre for citizens and groups concerned about radiation. All of these organisations organised a series of demonstrations such as that of International Action Week in January 2001.
In the end, the instrumentalisation of values involves two issues: one is power, the other is processes of control. In terms of power the Americans tend to see this as a necessary instrument. They tend to see the European distrust of power as a liberal delusion, at best a case of political denial. When faced with real challenges the Europeans prefer to fall back on transnational options and assert, rather than argue, that they can be employed in all situations. The upshot is predictable: in accentuating the things they are good at, they highlight the things they are not good at – for example, waging war.
In terms of processes of control both empires want to control disorder but they do so according to different norms. The US is predisposed to see norms, adds Nelson, “only through the aggregate of personal beliefs that are reflected as the state uses power to act in accordance with interest”. In the European case the situation is different again. For there now exists a transnational process away from the traditional nation – state conceptualism and behaviour and towards a new political culture. This amounts much more to the transfer of authority from one bureaucratic level to another (as we traditionally used to attribute it from the national to the supranational). It involves a more pluralistic view of the state as an arena in which are contested different agendas, ideas and interests. These different processes of power themselves lead to different choices or preferences. They produce a different perspective on power and its use. In altering the balance of political forces within Europe they have also been important in the emergence of new identities, ideas and norms which compete with the entrenched national ethos that has dominated European politics for so much of its history.
Power and process, these are the drivers of empire in the early Twenty First Century and it is at the point of the interface between them that they are driving the two empires apart.
Russia too runs an empire, or at least aspires too. Indeed its first foreign policy priority since 1991 has tended to address the neighbours which were so recently part of the Soviet Union and in most cases the old Russian Empire as well. We in the West often ignore this fact. And yet it is bluntly stated as on 28 February 1993 when President Yeltsin stated that “the time has come for distinguished international organisations, including the UN, to grant Russia special powers of a guarantor of peace and stability in former regions of the USSR”.
This priority has pulled Putin in two directions and still does. The first emerges in his striking manifesto of December 1999, ‘Russia at the turn of the Millennium’, a manifesto that argues that Russia’s integration into the world economy – and hence its profound economic transformation, has become the prerequisite for achieving all other objectives. Yet the second direction (also to be found in the speech) reaffirms the traditions of the past: the re-establishment of the ‘administrative vertical’ in Russia and the creation of a good-neighbourly belt on Russia’s borders. It is axiomatic that Russia needs an empire if it is to have equal geopolitical weight in Europe and provide protection against a US dominated international system. In the words of the former First Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Fedorov, (September 2000): “Today we are speaking more or less openly now about our zones of interest. In one way or another we are confirming that the post-Soviet territory is such a zone…. In Yeltsin’s time we were trying to wrap this in a nice paper, now we are saying it more directly: this is our territory, our sphere of influence.”
The first area of change has been Chechnya where (in contrast to the first war) the extremist Islamic factor is now playing a definite role. The ‘war on terrorism’ has made the West ambivalent about human rights in the Chechen conflict. This ambivalence – and in some quarters in the US, increasing sympathy towards Russia – was fairly swiftly exploited by Putin to bring further pressure upon neighbouring Georgia, ostensibly for harbouring Chechen terrorists, but also in pursuit of a long-standing aim: putting an end to Georgia’s independent (and outwardly pro-NATO) policy and driving a further nail in the coffin of GUUAM, the five state grouping founded in opposition to “the centralising tendencies” in the former USSR. Before September 11th it is extremely unlikely Russia would have conducted military operations in Georgia as it did later that November with minimal Western reaction. Yet the US is now showing interest in becoming a participant in the struggle to uproot Al Qaeda in Georgia too.
So the Russian Empire is an old territorial Empire, like the empires of the past, though it is one that given Russia’s straitened circumstances can only police or patrol with Western connivance or permission. The more problematic area of change is Central Asia, where Putin’s backing for US military deployments was secured over the objections of his own military establishment. Here he was at his most pragmatic: pleased (as in Afghanistan) to let the US destroy his old enemies, convinced that it was better to have the US in Central Asia than the Taliban, and aware of the economic realities that would not allow Russia to fight a war in Central Asia as well as Chechnya at the same time. He also understands in a way that few Americans do how closely enmeshed the Central Asian political elites, economies, energy complexes and infrastructure are, with those of Russia. Anyone who believes that temporary US military deployments and infusions of financial assistance will alter that relationship understands little about the imperial dynamic at play in the region.
And then there is Ukraine which has applied to join NATO’s Membership Action Plan (MAP) and has met with positive US support. Yet the war on terrorism has distracted the US from Ukraine as well, even though here the US has made it plain that it is not ready to concede Russia’s claim that “this is our territory” any more than it was before September 11th. Upon the relationship between the US and Russia on this issue will depend the extent to which the US is willing Russia a green light to ‘re-engage’ its former Soviet partners.
The war in Iraq has complicated the situation simply because the disarming of Saddam was the vital, obsessive American interest. Every relationship was viewed through this prism. The subtle nature of Russian diplomacy and the proverbial ‘balance’ of the US State Department played little role. In this respect Russia’s wish to find a new ‘axis’ with France and Germany may be a grave miscalculation in the long term. There is little that the European and Russian Empires hold in common, particularly where it comes to transnational progressivism. In fact, if anything, the American and Russian Empires grounded as they are on the use of military force, have more in common with each other than Berlin or Paris could ever have with Putin’s Moscow. That is not the least of the ironies of an evolving situation, an ironic commentary on the events of September 11th.
Conclusion
And yet for all the problems of alliance management, allies won’t go away. Alliances may not be the best organisations to address certain issues but the US has to start with them whenever it wishes to put together ‘coalitions of the willing’. Without the common partnership of the US and Europe an international system for the Twenty First Century cannot evolve. At some point long after regime change in Iraq is a memory the two empires will have to learn to cooperate more effectively on a new basis of partnership. Europe should not attempt to contain, let alone, challenge American power. And the US should not attempt to exclude Europe from the management of global security. Both should try to complement their own power positions and thus lay the foundations for a more inclusive alliance in the future.
If they fail the future does not bear contemplating. But it is important to state it because if history is any guide the implications are stark. Robert Kagan has argued that Europe is trying to find a post historical paradise, a self contained world built on transnational rules and negotiations. The United States ,by contrast, remains “mired in history”, trapped in a Hobbesian world of power politics in which true security rests in facing adversaries and dealing with threats head on. Kagan’s argument has a ring of truth which is why it has struck such a chord . And Hobbes had something to say about allies and alliances which bears repeating. No kingdom, he tells us can be:
“rich, nor glorious, nor secure if its subjects are either poor, or contemptible, or too weak through want or dissention to maintain a war against their enemies”.
Substitute ‘alliance’ for kingdom, and ‘members’ for subjects and you get the point. For we should remember that the nomads rarely if ever were responsible for destroying the empires or civilisations they attacked. Usually they merely took advantage of a disintegrating situation. It is a sobering thought. For in default of any agreement it’s difficult to see what future the West has as a security community as opposed to a loose confederation of like-minded states. If they can’t work together they will be forced to confront the nomads alone.
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