TEL AVIV - The geostrategic status
quo in Asia is morphing quickly, and the Arab
rebellions have suddenly acquired a prominent role
in it. Some analysts doubted from the start that
the pro-democratic uprisings were ever detached
from the great power play, and accused the United
States of instigating them. Whether or not this is
true, large-caliber realpolitik has now firmly set
in.
The United States is still the only
global superpower, but it is also a superpower in
decline; its economy is in deep trouble, its debt
is soaring, and its military might is sapped by
two quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It
is challenged by an informal coalition of emerging
powers known as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China
and South Africa), which have frequently sought to
portray themselves as champions of the Third
World. It is not a very cohesive bloc, and most of what
unites the countries that are
part of it often appears to be their common
current status as underdogs with respect to the
West.
The American world order is also
challenged by a number of "rogue states", such as
North Korea and Iran. These - specifically Iran,
which is also of major interest with respect to
the Arab uprisings - aspire to be regional
superpowers, but they lack the kind of economic
power that BRIC countries have, and they act
independently, along a separate front against the
United States.
All these international
actors have metaphorically descended on the Arab
uprisings, seeking to make the best out of a
moment of instability that could result in major
shifts in the status quo between them.
Firstly, we cannot simply ignore the
hypothesis, circulated for over a month now by
Russian and Chinese analysts, that the United
States is behind the revolutions. "It's the
Americans who're pulling the strings," Anatoly
Yegorin, the deputy director of the Institute for
Oriental Studies at the Russian Academy of
Science, plainly stated in an interview on
February 4.
So far, there is only
circumstantial evidence of American involvement in
preparing the Arab uprisings. But circumstantial
evidence there is. "In short, the attempt by
Washington to portray that its Libya plans are
molded by events does not add up," writes M K
Bhadrakumar in his story "Libya
puts China in world stage spotlight (Asia
Times Online, March 7). "Clearly, the US is
defining a historical moment: if the Western
world's vital economic interests come under
threat, it is only the US that can salvage them,
even when the theater is Europe's immediate
neighborhood."
In Egypt, there is even
more specific circumstantial evidence. In January,
for example, the Daily
Telegraph published a leaked diplomatic
cable, written in 2008 by the US Embassy in Cairo,
according to which the embassy had helped an
Egyptian dissident travel undetected to the United
States for important meetings with officials and
activists. The dissident told the US diplomats
that "several opposition parties and movements
have accepted an unwritten plan for democratic
transition by 2011".
The cable
does reveal that the embassy did not take the
dissident's claim seriously; the American
administration's confused and contradictory early
attempts to handle the crisis suggest that the
government didn't, either (see US
caught napping, Asia Times Online February 7).
Still, the ideological DNA of the revolts,
certainly of that in Egypt, is beyond doubt
largely American. It came out of the theories of
strategic non-violent activism for social change
systematized by Gene Sharp and a group of
political activists and theorists around him (who
in turn see themselves as intellectual descendents
of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Mahatma Gandhi).
As Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Tina
Rosenberg points out, the leadership of the
Egyptian protest movement was trained in 2009 in
Serbia by the same people who ousted former
Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. [1]
In turn, the Milosevic opposition drew heavily on
Western support and the ideas of Sharp and his
cohort. "Popovic [one of the core organizers of
the Serbian opposition ] was first introduced to
Sharp's ideas in the spring of 2000 by Robert
Helvey, a former US Army colonel who had served as
defense attache at the US Embassy in Burma
[Myanmar]," writes Ms Rosenberg.
What is
even more intriguing is that this is a strategy
intimately familiar to President Barack Obama, who
frequently quotes Mahatma Gandhi and Dr Martin
Luther King Jr in his speeches. As a former
community organizer, his strength is closely
related to one of the most difficult aspects of
managing non-violent movements for social change:
building a broad base of support, as well as
internal consensus, unity and discipline.
While none of this proves that the Obama
administration started the rebellions - much less
that it controls them - the US is certainly trying
to make the best out of them. As Bhadrakumar
observes, by now it seems to have some contingency
plans ready, which it is trying to apply. And it
might just reap some unusual benefits.
In
his article To
fly or not to fly?" (Asia Times Online March
4), Ian Williams writes that, when the Russians
blocked American proposals for military action
against Libya at the United Nations Security
Council, they were "saving the US from itself". He
adds: "However, rather than the US, a threat of
Turkish, or Egyptian intervention or interdiction
of the Libyan military might overcome many of the
legitimate actions, and indeed would encourage the
rebels while stripping Gaddafi of the last of his
crew so he could go down without taking the ship
with him. "
Indeed, prestigious
American think-tank Stratfor has already reported
the presence of Egyptian special forces on Libyan
territory. Meanwhile, a new framing of the
situation in Egypt has started to emerge: that
after Hosni Mubarak, Egypt will assume a
leadership role among Arab nations. "Unlike
Persian Gulf Arab states, whose power is derived
from petrodollars, Egypt has real military might
and regional intelligence networks with which to
assert itself," writes Stratfor.
This
means that in the near future, the US may
conceivably get a new source of manpower in the
Middle East. For Egypt's military rulers, this
would also be a way to divert public attention
from domestic problems and to demonstrate
competent rule in one area where they are indeed
expert: military intervention. In a sense, the
uprising created the ideal conditions for
expanding Egypt's military role in the region. It
weakened the political structure of the country
while empowering the military.
Meanwhile,
Egypt's resurgence would threaten Turkey's role as
the leading democracy in the Muslim Middle East.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government
has already embarked on what many have seen as an
expansionist foreign policy course, and it is
quite conceivable that he might be drawn into
competition with Egypt. Turkey and Egypt together
could perhaps fill much of the power vacuum left
by a scaling down of American presence in the
region.
The United States, an argument
goes, badly needs some time off. The economic
crisis is simply refusing to go away. This has
created increasing domestic pressure to cut down
international involvement, and has brought about a
sense of gloom in many parts of the country.
A prominent American journalist writes in
a personal e-mail: "It makes a climate where we
don't have the mobility and job opportunities we
take for granted. In fact, if you work for the
government, there is a good chance you'll lose
your job ... Meanwhile, we know we're losing
ground internationally. In Europe, people don't
care. They've already lost their status as the
center of the universe. But for us it's a national
tragedy. And to lose our number one status to
China, where civil liberties aren't respected, is
just a kick in the teeth. A humiliation."
China - alongside other emerging powers
from BRIC - is another reason the United States
badly needs to scale back its involvement in the
Middle East. In the past three years, all the BRIC
countries have increased dramatically their
military spending, sparking fears of a new arms
race. Some statistics:
"Last week Moscow
unveiled a $650 billion rearmament plan through
2020, which includes adding 20 submarines
including eight nuclear submarines and more than
600 warplanes, 100 new ships and 1,000 additional
helicopters," writes M K Bhadrakumar in his
article "Kurils:
The great game in Asia-Pacific" (Asia Times
Online, 4 March 2011). "The new strategy
specifically aims at regaining naval capabilities
of the Soviet era and creating next-generation
anti-missile defenses to replace the S-300
system."
Meanwhile, according to Defense
News, "China has announced a 12.7% increase in its
annual defense budget to a new high of $91.5
billion, up from $78.6 billion in 2010 ... China's
defense budget rose from $27.9 billion in 2000 to
$60.1 billion in 2008." The Indian newspaper
Business Standard reports that India has seen a
similar increase in defense spending.
None
of these military budgets match that of the United
States, which for the fiscal year 2010 alone was
over US$660 billion, but the trend is alarming.
The United States is overstretched: during the
past 10 years, it spent over $1,100 billion in
Afghanistan and Iraq alone, and locked hundreds of
thousands of troops in these two conflicts.
According to an analyst who prefers to
stay anonymous, over the course of the next
decade, the American economy might not be able to
keep up, and an arms race might eventually break
it in a similar way to how the arms race of the
Cold War eventually brought down the Soviet Union.
The intense competition between BRIC and
its allies, on the one hand, and the United States
and the European powers, on the other, became
particularly apparent in the diplomatic arena over
Libya. Muammar Gaddafi, in fact, tried to play the
two sides off of each other, for example by
offering China attractive oil contracts in
exchange for support.
Whether or not this
specific offer was taken seriously by anybody,
Russia and China have so far adamantly refused to
authorize military intervention at the United
Nation Security Council, even as the Obama
administration has started to prepare contingency
plans for such a scenario. A little over a week
ago, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez tried to
put a spoke in the mounting international pressure
on Gaddafi by proposing his own peace initiative.
[2]
Meanwhile, a related but separate
confrontation is emerging in the Persian Gulf.
According to Stratfor:
While the world's attention is still
on Libya because of the fighting over there, the
slow-simmering situation in the Persian Gulf is
far more important ... There is the obvious
repercussion for the world's energy supply -
some 40% of total global energy output via sea
comes through the Persian Gulf - but it's not
just about oil. Each one of those states, from
Oman all the way up to Kuwait, houses major
American military installations. They are very
vital for US military operations in this part of
the world, particularly at a time when the
United States is in the process of withdrawing
its forces from Iraq.... In addition to just the
general nature of American military operations
in the region, unrest in the Persian Gulf
complicates the US-Iranian dynamic. The United
States is already withdrawing from Iraq, which
allows Iran to flex its muscles, and if, in
addition, we see unrest destabilizing the
Persian Gulf states, that gives Iran further
room to maneuver and project power, not just on
its side of Persian Gulf but also across into
the Arabian Peninsula.
Indeed, the
claims by the king of Bahrain that the opposition
was trained by Hezbollah may seem far-fetched, but
many analysts see Iran's hand behind the recent
unrest in the Persian Gulf. The real threat of
Iran, Stratfor has previously argued, is not so
much its nuclear program as its ability to project
influence in the region. This threat seems to be
materializing for the United States and its
allies.
The confrontation between the
United States and Iran, however, does not overlap
well with that that between the United States and
BRIC. In fact, as Bhadrakumar notes, early in the
crisis, the Obama administration and the
ayatollahs found themselves temporarily on the
same side. [3]
More recently, however,
Iran took a position similar to that of Russia and
China. On Saturday, the chief of staff of Iran's
armed forces, Major General Hassan Firouzabadi,
issued a veiled threat that US action against
Libya would lead to the destabilization of the
region. "Any kind of US measure and interference
in Libya will not only stabilize Islamic
Revolutions in the region and further clarify
their path and direction, but also cause a severe
blow to the US economy," he said.
Iran is
a relative lightweight economically, and has
frequently been used as a bargaining chip by both
the US and BRIC countries. It carries a
significant threat to American interests in the
Middle East, however, and by most accounts it
aspires to the status of a regional superpower.
Thus, it is an indelible part of the great power
play.
The crisis that is going on brings
with it enormous risks - not least for the global
oil supply and the economic recovery - but what
distinguishes it from the previous state of
affairs is that it is possible to at least imagine
a winning scenario for the Obama administration.
Turkey could take on a wider role in Iraq. Egypt
could police North Africa, and even put pressure
on both Israel and the Palestinians to get back to
the negotiating table. Reality will almost
certainly be less rosy, but at least there is a
vision, and hope dies last.
Meanwhile, the
Arab world will need to get used to the fact - a
familiar pattern in history - that it is
impossible to carry out a revolution in a vacuum.
The problem is, so many different agendas have
started to coalesce once again in this strategic
part of the world that even if pro-democratic
impulses once had a space to develop on their own,
soon they might not.
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