Horse Trade
Frank Fukuyama has an excellent op-ed up over across the pond in the Financial Times. In it, he asserts that the era of American global hegemony is effectively over, and that it’s time America’s statesmen start thinking about the trade-offs they’re willing to make in order to achieve those things that are most important to them.
His capsule history of American-Russian relations from the early 1990’s to the present is spot-on:
Since the Yeltsin years, the US has had a series of policy differences with the Russians, including Nato expansion, the Balkans, missile defence, policy towards Iran and human rights in Russia itself. Diplomacy, such as it was, consisted of persuading Russia to accept all of the items on our list and telling them their fears and concerns were groundless. The US never regarded the relationship as a bargaining situation in which it would give up things it wanted in return for things the Russians wanted. Like the proverbial Englishman speaking to a foreigner, we thought we could make them understand us by repeating ourselves in a louder voice.
He then goes on to argue that:
a) By recognizing Kosovo’s independence and making the ABM shield a fait accompli, we have thrown away two valuable bargaining chips we could’ve used with the Russians to get them to cooperate over things more important to us, such as Iran, or even non-proliferation in general.
b) NATO membership is no talisman against foreign aggression. Indeed, each round of NATO expansion should be accompanied by serious budgeting of adequate military might to protect the new member countries. In practice, that means that every additional member needs to be defendable by the United States. Since we never had any intentions of actually going to war over Georgia, it was a huge blunder to even consider letting them into the alliance.
My only quibble is with the first point—specifically what Frank has to say about Kosovo. Yes, Kosovo’s independence is of little value to us when compared with our other interests. Yes, if compromising on Kosovo would have guaranteed us Russian cooperation on Iran, it might have been worthwhile pressing the Albanians to remain in Serbia.
But, as I pointed out in Doublethink Online a few weeks back, it turns out recognizing Kosovo may not have been a dumb move after all. Serbia, having seen that Russia is not willing to step in on its behalf, seems to be inching towards accommodation with the West. If Serbia integrates into the EU, we will have not only come that much closer to resolving the traumas which brought us the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, we also will have deprived Russia of a valuable client state with which it could have caused mischief in the future.
Anyway, whether we could have gotten Russia’s cooperation over Iran at all is an open question. A more pessimistic reading of events argues that Russia has been planning to regain some of its global stature ever since Vladimir Putin came to power—that all the necessary damage to the Amero-Russian relationship was done during Yeltsin’s regime. What better way to keep the United States tied down than by keeping the pot on a gentle boil in Iran? I suspect any cooperation we would’ve gotten from capitulating over Kosovo would have been tentative at best as Putin recalibrated his game plan.
But Fukuyama’s broader point holds: as it stands today, we’ve extended ourselves as far as we can go. It’s time to start making hard choices from here on out. What do we really want to achieve in the world? What are we willing to trade for it? And is either potential president up to meeting the challenges of our new reality?