Page 2 of 5 REVAMPING US
FOREIGN POLICY, Part 3 The rising pole of
the East By W Joseph Stroupe
reason that what is perceived as the
increasingly greedy and headstrong militaristic
fashion in which the United States has tended to
exercise its global role since 1991 cuts directly
or indirectly into what mounting numbers of the
world's players see as their legitimate economic,
security, political, diplomatic, regional and
geopolitical aspirations, goals and interests.
The US has inordinately cornered for
itself far too many of the
viable possibilities for
wealth and power since 1991, and this is ever more
deeply resented across the globe. The disparity
between the excess the US has traditionally
possessed in the way of wealth and power and what
much of the rest of the world is left with and
what it cannot readily obtain because of the
inequitable unipolar world order is continually
showcased, and often heaved in its face.
Added to this is the fact that US foreign
policy is seen virtually in every corner of the
globe as the runaway risk to international peace
and security. The galvanizing vision is that of
the ushering in of a new and more equitable world
order that will end excessive US dominance.
By its shockingly self-centered focus
since 1991, and especially since its ravenous 2003
invasion of Iraq, the United States has made
itself a persuasive and compelling galvanizing
force for those opposing US-led unipolarity, a
force at least as potent as that inspired by the
entirely disreputable and aggressive Soviet Union
during the old Cold War that deeply united and
powerfully galvanized the West against a common
foe.
Now, there is every indication that
the grossly unrepentant US administration will
soon embark on a course in the Iran and North
Korea crises that the world at large perceives as
even more greedy and reckless with respect to the
exercise of US power, bringing in additional
ill-advised and enormously destructive military
options aimed at forcibly consolidating America's
avaricious clutch of global power and the
exclusive multidimensional wealth that accompanies
it.
Notwithstanding the recent Democratic
mid-term election victory in the United States,
the issue of the desirability or the
undesirability of continued excessive US global
dominance is one that is gaining, not losing,
potency to galvanize the rising powers in the East
and their energy-exporting partners around the
globe in opposition to continued US-led
unipolarity and in furtherance of the vision of
the creation of a new world order.
Diverse players amalgamated It
is this very issue and its related vision of a new
world order that have driven Russia and China, two
extraordinarily diverse powers, so tightly into
each other's arms. It is an important lesson to
recognize with what deepening accord and cohesion
they are learning to act in nearly every sphere of
endeavor, and why they are doing so.
Their
joint statements issued since 1996 on the world
order have all had one overriding theme - the need
to bring in a more equitable "multipolar" world
order to replace US-led unipolarity. While certain
analysts have kept on trumpeting the supposed
impending disintegration of the unanimity between
the two great powers, the two have proceeded from
agreement to cooperation to full-blown strategic
partnership, all in spite of their significant
differences and the numerous obstacles encountered
along the way.
Their common interest to
see an end to inordinate US global dominance, and
the figurative and literal violence to their
legitimate interests that accompanies that
dominance, transcend and override their
differences, leading to ever deeper joint
cooperation between them.
The Russia-China
axis is the geopolitical seed around which a
rising multifarious but cohesive pole of the East
is progressively coalescing. What is proving
itself as a unifying force of compelling potency
at work between Russia and China is also proving
itself elsewhere in the wider rising East and far
beyond to include the bulk of the world's
energy-exporting regimes.
Far too many
analysts in the West simply don't understand, or
stubbornly refuse to accept, the potency and
significance of the forces at work here and their
potential for altering the entire geopolitical
landscape now - not in the next decade.
Increasingly, all these East-centric
players are finding themselves to be more firmly
"on the same page" with respect to the grand,
transcending issue of bringing an early end, by
virtue of a new world order, to US global
dominance. The informed observer already knows of
the rapidly spreading global complex of
energy-based ties and alliances covering the
spheres of the economy, energy, security and
diplomacy that is being constructed among Russia,
China, India, nearly all the other rising
economies of Asia, and the bulk of the world's
energy-exporting regimes in Central Asia, the
Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
It
is even going so far as to cross (ignore) formal
EU lines to include, on certain fundamental
levels, key European states such as Germany,
France and Italy. That global complex of ties and
alliances excludes completely the US. It
progressively binds its participants ever closer
together in mutual energy-based economic,
political and diplomatic interdependence and helps
to deepen the cohesiveness across the global
grouping.
Consequently, the members of
that global grouping have formed and are
continuing to form a strikingly concrete low-level
(foundational) interleaving of ties and alliances
among themselves
