Once upon a time, the world was multipolar. The great powers of Europe all competed to see who would dominate, but employed a shifting alliance system to balance out anyone who seemed to be getting too powerful. When new players joined the game this system fossilized, leading to World War I and as a consequence World War II. After that, the world was dominated by two superpowers with opposing ideologies, who led coalitions of like-minded governments to see whether communism or democracy would triumph. The winner turned out to be democracy, and so with the Soviet Union's collapse, the United States became the world's sole superpower, a country with unrivaled military strength able to deploy anywhere on the globe.
Back in 1989, Fukuyama talked about the "End of History," since after all the great political debate seemed to be over, liberalism was ascendant, and the former Warsaw Pact countries were kicking out their communist regimes and clamoring for democracy. Others looked forward to a Pax Americana, in which the United States would use its preponderance of power to protect the international system as a mostly benign overlord. The original Gulf War seemed to vindicate this idea, and saw the US enforce a United Nations resolution to kick Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. Everything seemed to be going well, and the future looked bright.
We are not living in that world anymore. Global freedom has been in decline for nine years running. The former Soviet satellite states are under threat by a resurgent, authoritarian Russia that's undermining their autonomy through means just short of outright war. The United States went back to Iraq, defying the United Nations in doing so, spent nearly a decade there, and now tries to keep the dysfunctional "democracy" it created from being toppled by an Islamic State even worse than Saddam Hussein's despotism. Everything seems to be getting worse, and there's little hope in sight.
Has the global distribution of power changed over the past quarter century? I would say no, not substantially. The world isn't multipolar, there's no "great game" being played on the global stage by a handful of major powers. The United States is still supremely powerful, despite the exhaustion from decade-long deployments in two countries. Russia is resurgent - that is, aggressive, it's still an economic time bomb and its army hasn't recovered from the USSR's collapse - but it still can't match the United States. As I've said before, this isn't Cold War II, Russia has no ideological appeal. At best Putin can try to start an "absolute power" club with the rulers of Iran and Syria, but nobody else is looking at Russia as a model government.
No, the world still seems to be unipolar. What's changed is our understanding of what that means. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we've seen that just because you have a state-of-the-art army capable of pulverizing any adversary doesn't mean that you'll be able to build something in the resulting ruins. We've seen the international community picking and choosing when and where to live up to its ideals, intervening in Kosovo but watching the Rwandan genocide. And we've seen a supposed bastion of freedom imprison people without trials, torture them as suspected terrorists, and turn into a surveillance state that spies on both its own citizens and its allies.
But rather than describing the world in terms of how power is distributed in the international system, an alternative is to name an era after something more intangible. There were the Dark Ages that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, an era popularly perceived as one of ignorance and barbarism. There was the Renaissance, when the Western world rediscovered the good parts of Greek civilization while skipping the pederasty. There was the Enlightenment, in which liberalism blossomed and transformed political thought, laying the foundation for modern democracy.
And now? I call the current era the Disillusionment.
The big difference between now and the end of the Cold War is not in the distribution of power, or the emergence of some rival to the liberal international order. What's changed is us - we've seen the limitations and shortcomings of these things, but don't have a viable alternative to them.
We thought freedom and democracy would fill the vacuum left by communism, and while Eastern Europe was able to pick up the habit of letting people vote, in the rest of the world, that didn't happen. China's one-party government has gotten so good at quashing dissent and controlling information that most of its subjects don't know anything happened in Tienanmen Square. In Russia, when President Yeltsin's opponents objected to his power-grabbing, he had the army shell Moscow's White House; his successor Putin never leaves power, and when a rival politician is gunned down just outside the Kremlin, Russian state media is quick to decry the murder as an attempt to discredit their beloved leader. In the Middle East, the Arab Spring saw the region rise up against its repressive and incompetent regimes, but only Tunisia can be said to be better off for its revolution; the others either failed or resulted in regimes that are at best as bad as the ones replaced.
And what of the democracies that won the Cold War? America’s
political system is increasingly partisan, its conservative faction is
increasingly radical, and the national legislature is so dysfunctional that it is now an
accomplishment to pass an unbalanced budget without the GOP's lunatic fringe shutting down the federal
government. The national debt is skyrocketing and neither
party is willing to risk votes by properly fixing it, the country’s
infrastructure is decaying, and attempts to reform America’s health care system
- well short of the sort of comprehensive government health care seen in the Nordic countries - have been viewed as a socialist takeover and led to the aforementioned
government shutdowns. Voters aren't happy, Congress' approval rating is in the toilet, and yet the public keeps voting for politicians who exacerbate these problems.
It's rather telling that we set up parliamentary systems in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of the brand of federalism America currently fails to function under.
Across the
pond, the socialist democracies of Europe have been peaceful since World War
II and have come together in an unprecedented European Union, but this is showing signs
of strain. It’s easy to support a lot of
social programs when America has effectively paid for your national defense,
but with the current global economic downturn it’s getting harder to find the
funding - plus Putin’s antics make defense spending more relevant than it’s
been in decades. The EU is struggling to deal
with the economic malaises of its least successful members, leading countries like Great Britain
to talk about dropping out. And now
there’s a flood of refugees from a war no one did anything about that is
putting Europe’s welcoming, open-minded
reputation to the test.
Global governance, the liberal international order, the same system that punished Saddam for invading his neighbor? Helpless to do anything about Syria because Russia has its Security Council veto. Capitalism, the free market system that maximizes wealth while minimizing government interference? The gap between the rich and everyone else
keeps growing wider, a global economy means you can lose your job simply
because it’s cheaper to have a foreigner do it on the other side of the world,
and the people ostensibly in control of the economy are willing to wreck it in
pursuit of short-term profits.
All the systems and principles the West fought the Cold War for just don't seem to be living up to their potential. And since the Cold War is over, there's no viable alternatives to them. Communism was a failure, it was simultaneously naive and ruthlessly brutal. The medieval society the Islamic State is trying to construct in the ruins of the Middle East lacks appeal to anyone but sufficiently sociopathic Muslims. Nobody wants to live under an authoritarian regime like in Russia or China, and people outside of them would take democracy on its worst day over a dictatorship on its best, but it's going to be hard for a Russian or Chinese to get galvanized to stand against the system when they see the US government shutting down over Obamacare or Europe threatening to kick out Greece if it doesn't get its economy together, especially if those authoritarian regimes can deliver a similar standard of living.
So disillusionment, pessimism. Recent events have done for politics and economics what World War I did for science, so I suppose you could say we've been living in one long Age of Disillusionment for a century now.
As gloomy as this situation is, there's a straightforward way out - if the system is broken, and we don't have an alternative, fix what we have. Of course, "straightforward" isn't the same as "easy." Can the American electorate support candidates who vow to bridge the partisan divide and solve their nation's problems, instead of politicians who stick to their principles and refuse to compromise? Can Europe hold itself together and maintain its standards in the face of an uncertain economy, Russian aggression, and an influx of refugees? Can we reform the international system so that disasters like Syria aren't allowed to happen, and have free markets that benefit more than the richest participants?
The Western world getting its act together is an important first step, but that in itself won't bring us back to the good old days of 1991. Saddam's gone, but there's plenty of people like him out there. But if we can't solve the problems at home, how can we expect to fix what's wrong with the rest of the world?
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Thursday, September 10, 2015
A Pound of Prevention or an Ounce of Cure?
They call it the "international community," as if all the nations of the world are homes in a village somewhere. That'd be one messed-up looking town.
You'd have the sprawling, lavish mansion of the USA (purchased on credit, serious issues with the plumbing and foundation) on the same street as Latin America, whose homes have holes in the roof and bullet holes around the door. The Koreas share a duplex, one of which is well-lit and prosperous, the other dark and boarded-up - and the owner occasionally takes potshots at the mailman. Well-to-do and quiet Europe Street is just around the corner from the Middle East Road, which is currently on fire.
There are fire trucks and such in an enclosed parking lot that can only be unlocked when the right five households agree to do so. The understanding is that if your home is burning down, it's only a matter of real concern if some sparks land on a neighbor's yard. And if you happen to hear the sound of women and children screaming from a neighbor's house, mixed with muffled gunshots and the thump of something heavy hitting the floor, well... it's not really your business, or your problem.
Not a model community, in other words.
It does have its good points, however - if someone's home is ablaze, sometimes its neighbors will provide shelter for the residents until the fires go out and they can rebuild. But other times, a neighbor will force a fleeing family to stand out in the yard without water or shelter, because they aren't wanted. And then we have a crisis of people without adequate supplies, struggling to find a place of safety when what they thought was home became a roaring conflagration.
And it begs the question - maybe it would've been easier to douse the flames when they were first sparked. Sure, it'd be hard work, and expensive, and you might even lose people. You'd probably expend more resources and cause more grief preventing the crisis than you would by watching it happen but letting some refugees camp out on your property. But while your individual share in the effort would be greater, the overall level of misery would be much lessened. You'd be doing something good for your community.
But it's not a real international "community," is it? Just a bunch of self-interested actors who happen to live next to each other. And so we'll watch a disaster like Syria unfold, consider taking action, but decide it's not really worth the trouble. It's not really our problem.
At least until those refugees show up on our borders, asking why we aren't doing anything to help.
You'd have the sprawling, lavish mansion of the USA (purchased on credit, serious issues with the plumbing and foundation) on the same street as Latin America, whose homes have holes in the roof and bullet holes around the door. The Koreas share a duplex, one of which is well-lit and prosperous, the other dark and boarded-up - and the owner occasionally takes potshots at the mailman. Well-to-do and quiet Europe Street is just around the corner from the Middle East Road, which is currently on fire.
There are fire trucks and such in an enclosed parking lot that can only be unlocked when the right five households agree to do so. The understanding is that if your home is burning down, it's only a matter of real concern if some sparks land on a neighbor's yard. And if you happen to hear the sound of women and children screaming from a neighbor's house, mixed with muffled gunshots and the thump of something heavy hitting the floor, well... it's not really your business, or your problem.
Not a model community, in other words.
It does have its good points, however - if someone's home is ablaze, sometimes its neighbors will provide shelter for the residents until the fires go out and they can rebuild. But other times, a neighbor will force a fleeing family to stand out in the yard without water or shelter, because they aren't wanted. And then we have a crisis of people without adequate supplies, struggling to find a place of safety when what they thought was home became a roaring conflagration.
And it begs the question - maybe it would've been easier to douse the flames when they were first sparked. Sure, it'd be hard work, and expensive, and you might even lose people. You'd probably expend more resources and cause more grief preventing the crisis than you would by watching it happen but letting some refugees camp out on your property. But while your individual share in the effort would be greater, the overall level of misery would be much lessened. You'd be doing something good for your community.
But it's not a real international "community," is it? Just a bunch of self-interested actors who happen to live next to each other. And so we'll watch a disaster like Syria unfold, consider taking action, but decide it's not really worth the trouble. It's not really our problem.
At least until those refugees show up on our borders, asking why we aren't doing anything to help.
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Bread and Circuses
I have a concern about the upcoming Iran nuke deal that doesn't actually have anything to do about Iran's nuclear capability.
During a trip to the gym, I had the radio on, not really to listen to but to provide some non-engine background noise. The program had a story on Iran and its people's reaction to the potential for lifted sanctions, and mentioned that the country's rulers hoped that improved economic conditions would make the population less unruly. And I suddenly had second thoughts.
See, one of the big theories I studied in grad school was the democratic peace theory, oftentimes called the "Kantian peace" after early proponent Immanuel Kant. The short version is that democracies are very unlikely to go to war with each other, so it'd be great if every nation in the world let people vote for their leaders. A book I read about it focused on three elements to this theory: democracy itself, economic interdependence, and shared involvement in international organizations, as mutually-reinforcing principles that could bring about this type of peace.
It's a nice theory, and sounds appealing. So in Iran's case, its leadership being willing to negotiate with world leaders over its nuclear program could lead to it cooperating more with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the like. These organizations have their own rules and protocols, and by participating in them, Iran would theoretically learn more about how to run a democratic government. At the same time, eased economic sanctions and increased foreign trade would create financial ties between Iran and other nations, or in other words a disincentive to threatening those ties through behavior that might convince countries to impose sanctions again. And I suppose copies of the Declaration of Independence are being smuggled in along with that increased trade, as another nudge towards democracy.
The book I read - Triangulating Peace by Russett and Oneal, if you're interested - used a lot of statistics and regressions and all that numeric stuff to prove their point, and I'm not the one to examine that sort of thing, I much prefer a concrete example. And we can look at history and see the inverse of the theory playing out, when post-WWI Germany had an economic crisis and rejected international governance as it discarded democracy in favor of authoritarianism. The problem is that when I examine the world right now, I don't see a strong positive example.
Consider China. The country prefers to be an exception to rules rather than conforming with the international community's expectations regarding things like water boundaries, but it's certainly abandoned communism and become one of America's most important trade partners, which helps to take the edge off the crises caused by the aforementioned disputed water boundaries. But is this trade helping the country become more democratic?
Not to my knowledge. The events in Tienanmen Square in 1989 have been so heavily suppressed that most Chinese don't know those pro-democracy rallies and subsequent crackdowns even happened. Dissidents issue Charter 08 and get detained by the authorities, websites discussing it get shut down, and of course the media isn't allowed to mention the thing. Hong Kong held protests against voting restrictions just last year, but it's a Special Administrative Region with a history of democracy. There's been no "Chinese Spring," no mass demonstrations against corrupt and authoritarian leaders. China's government still sucks, and its people aren't taking much action to change this.
Here's my concern - back in the days of the Cold War, we had two systems of government competing to see which could create the best society. And towards the end, when things loosened up a bit, one of the contributing factors to the fall of the USSR was its citizens could see that communism had created a country that couldn't even feed itself, while the capitalist pig-dogs in America had Coca-Cola, denim jeans and awesome music. This created outrage that was usefully destructive.
But today, thanks to global trade, every nation can get the material benefits of a First World, democratic society. American fast food chains span the globe, our Apple gadgets are being built in China, and Hollywood churns out Michael Bay movies to liquefy audiences' brains through excessive explosions and incomprehensible cinematography. So even if you live in a repressive regime like China, you've got lots of ways to take the edge off it. You may not be able to vote or browse the internet freely, but you can catch the latest Transformers garbage on your phone-puter. And isn't that easier than taking to the streets to protest the latest round of arrests?
We're exporting bread and circuses to non-democratic regimes, in other words. They can enjoy the fruits of a free and open society, and their subjects have less incentive to make their own countries the same way.
So back to Iran. If all goes well and the country begins to behave less like a rogue state and reaps the economic benefits of doing so, is it likely to cast off its theocratic regime and become a peace-loving, human rights-respecting democracy? I hope so. The major difference between Iran and China is that the former was a functioning democracy until we Americans screwed it up, while China went from an imperial system to an illiberal "republic" to Mao's deranged attempt at communism. Even today Iran is sort of democratic, it just has a religious government making sure the Iranian electorate don't vote for the wrong people. Meanwhile in China, the only places with a democratic heritage are the former foreign holdings of Hong Kong and Macau.
Iran knows better than China what a democracy should look like, so they should have an easier time bringing one about - which is not to say that convincing all those security forces and religious militias to bow to the will to the people will necessarily be easy. It'd be great if the increased prosperity from lifted sanctions allowed Iran's middle class to expand and grow strong enough to challenge its priest-tyrants. But that would take a lot of effort, and it's so much easier to sit back and watch a movie on your smartphone...
During a trip to the gym, I had the radio on, not really to listen to but to provide some non-engine background noise. The program had a story on Iran and its people's reaction to the potential for lifted sanctions, and mentioned that the country's rulers hoped that improved economic conditions would make the population less unruly. And I suddenly had second thoughts.
See, one of the big theories I studied in grad school was the democratic peace theory, oftentimes called the "Kantian peace" after early proponent Immanuel Kant. The short version is that democracies are very unlikely to go to war with each other, so it'd be great if every nation in the world let people vote for their leaders. A book I read about it focused on three elements to this theory: democracy itself, economic interdependence, and shared involvement in international organizations, as mutually-reinforcing principles that could bring about this type of peace.
It's a nice theory, and sounds appealing. So in Iran's case, its leadership being willing to negotiate with world leaders over its nuclear program could lead to it cooperating more with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the like. These organizations have their own rules and protocols, and by participating in them, Iran would theoretically learn more about how to run a democratic government. At the same time, eased economic sanctions and increased foreign trade would create financial ties between Iran and other nations, or in other words a disincentive to threatening those ties through behavior that might convince countries to impose sanctions again. And I suppose copies of the Declaration of Independence are being smuggled in along with that increased trade, as another nudge towards democracy.
The book I read - Triangulating Peace by Russett and Oneal, if you're interested - used a lot of statistics and regressions and all that numeric stuff to prove their point, and I'm not the one to examine that sort of thing, I much prefer a concrete example. And we can look at history and see the inverse of the theory playing out, when post-WWI Germany had an economic crisis and rejected international governance as it discarded democracy in favor of authoritarianism. The problem is that when I examine the world right now, I don't see a strong positive example.
Consider China. The country prefers to be an exception to rules rather than conforming with the international community's expectations regarding things like water boundaries, but it's certainly abandoned communism and become one of America's most important trade partners, which helps to take the edge off the crises caused by the aforementioned disputed water boundaries. But is this trade helping the country become more democratic?
Not to my knowledge. The events in Tienanmen Square in 1989 have been so heavily suppressed that most Chinese don't know those pro-democracy rallies and subsequent crackdowns even happened. Dissidents issue Charter 08 and get detained by the authorities, websites discussing it get shut down, and of course the media isn't allowed to mention the thing. Hong Kong held protests against voting restrictions just last year, but it's a Special Administrative Region with a history of democracy. There's been no "Chinese Spring," no mass demonstrations against corrupt and authoritarian leaders. China's government still sucks, and its people aren't taking much action to change this.
Here's my concern - back in the days of the Cold War, we had two systems of government competing to see which could create the best society. And towards the end, when things loosened up a bit, one of the contributing factors to the fall of the USSR was its citizens could see that communism had created a country that couldn't even feed itself, while the capitalist pig-dogs in America had Coca-Cola, denim jeans and awesome music. This created outrage that was usefully destructive.
But today, thanks to global trade, every nation can get the material benefits of a First World, democratic society. American fast food chains span the globe, our Apple gadgets are being built in China, and Hollywood churns out Michael Bay movies to liquefy audiences' brains through excessive explosions and incomprehensible cinematography. So even if you live in a repressive regime like China, you've got lots of ways to take the edge off it. You may not be able to vote or browse the internet freely, but you can catch the latest Transformers garbage on your phone-puter. And isn't that easier than taking to the streets to protest the latest round of arrests?
We're exporting bread and circuses to non-democratic regimes, in other words. They can enjoy the fruits of a free and open society, and their subjects have less incentive to make their own countries the same way.
So back to Iran. If all goes well and the country begins to behave less like a rogue state and reaps the economic benefits of doing so, is it likely to cast off its theocratic regime and become a peace-loving, human rights-respecting democracy? I hope so. The major difference between Iran and China is that the former was a functioning democracy until we Americans screwed it up, while China went from an imperial system to an illiberal "republic" to Mao's deranged attempt at communism. Even today Iran is sort of democratic, it just has a religious government making sure the Iranian electorate don't vote for the wrong people. Meanwhile in China, the only places with a democratic heritage are the former foreign holdings of Hong Kong and Macau.
Iran knows better than China what a democracy should look like, so they should have an easier time bringing one about - which is not to say that convincing all those security forces and religious militias to bow to the will to the people will necessarily be easy. It'd be great if the increased prosperity from lifted sanctions allowed Iran's middle class to expand and grow strong enough to challenge its priest-tyrants. But that would take a lot of effort, and it's so much easier to sit back and watch a movie on your smartphone...
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Peace Talks
So Syria's government has recently stated that it's ready for peace talks, though given today's air strikes against a rebel city, apparently al-Assad's regime is also ready for more war. Or maybe Syria's dictator and his cronies are aware that it probably isn't time to negotiate.
Now it's been a while since my Conflict Resolution class, but here's what I remember about a key concept without having to dig up my old notes. "Ripeness" is the notion that there's a certain time over the course of a conflict that the belligerents will be open to a negotiated solution to it. Despite what it sounds like, it has nothing to do with whether the bodies are being properly disposed of.
At the start of a civil war, everybody's all pumped for fighting. They're sick of each other, they think violence is their only option, and they think they can win a conflict - otherwise they wouldn't be fighting it in the first place. Trying to intervene and get everyone to try a diplomatic solution is most likely going to be a wasted effort. It's only after the sides have fought for a while, seen the real cost of war, gotten a feel for their opponent's capabilities, and run into some setbacks, that they might change their mind. If one side is clearly winning a civil conflict, then they'll see no reason to negotiate with the losing side, and probably go on to win it. But if the sides are stalemated and they realize that they can't get all - or even most - of what they want through force of arms alone, then they may be willing to come to the negotiating table. In short, a conflict has to "ripen" for a bit before there's a good chance of peacefully resolving it.
Now, the Syrian civil war has been going on since 2011, it's killed 200,000 people, displaced over 10 million people, and has spilled over into neighboring countries. But is it "ripe" for a peaceful resolution?
Since Thursday's statement from the al-Assad regime doesn't seem to be going anywhere or been taken seriously, the answer is probably "no." This seems to be either an attempt at good PR by a dictatorial government willing to bomb hospitals, or an admission that the war isn't going well for al-Assad and that these theoretical peace talks would be the only way for him to keep his head and stay in power. A sign of desperation in other words.
Even if al-Assad is willing to use words for once, there's little indication the other sides share this interest in negotiations. ISIS has said, if I recall correctly, that the powers arranged against them would have to treat with them eventually, but this was presumably bravado and an attempt by ISIS to gain legitimacy. As for the other rebels - well, let's not make the mistake of assuming that the rebels are a unified faction. There's those legendary "moderate" Syrians resistance fighters that are backed by the US, and who may have little reason to give up with such a powerful ally on their side. Then there are others who apparently are willing to listen to Iranian delegates and hold a truce, though since I can't find a follow-up on that story I'm not sure how well it went.
More importantly, for negotiations to be successful there has to be common ground, and all of these three factions have mutually-exclusive goals. Bashar al-Assad wants to stay alive and his cronies want him to stay in power. The rebels want him gone and someone new in charge. And ISIS rejects the notion of modern Syria in favor of a religious state under their control. I suppose the best you could offer would be to divide Syria up among the three of them, except, well, we don't like doing that in a post-colonial country like Syria. People in the rest of the Middle East might start getting the wrong idea. Much better to pretend that the lines in the sand mean something.
All this to say, al-Assad's words of peace sound hollow, and the fighting in Syria is probably going to continue. Because from what else I remember from my conflict studies courses, this civil war in Syria has all the signs of a nasty, protracted conflict. We've got easily-captured natural resources (oil) that can be used to fund the fighting. We've got an array of outside actors backing the factions within the civil war - Iran and Russia are propping up al-Assad, the United States and some of its regional allies are (officially) backing the Syrian resistance, and then there are fundamentalist Muslims all over the world lending financial or material support to ISIS. And we've got goals that are more profound than disputes over representation in government or resource allocation, but a conflict over what type of government is acceptable.
But just because the sides in the civil war may not be interested in a peaceful resolution doesn't mean that the fighting has to go on forever. The United States is supposedly going to step up its support of the Syrian rebels, and Turkey has recently gotten off its duff to contribute, even if they seem more interested in fighting Kurds than ISIS. Hopefully with this support, the "good guys" - or at least the guys who aren't loyal to a dictator or a religious fanatics - will be able to tip the balance and resolve the conflict the hard way.
If they do it fast enough, there may be enough of Syria left to salvage when they're finished.
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Dealing With Iran
The tragedy of Iran is twofold. First, there is the fact that its people are quite open-minded and moderate compared to the rest of the Middle East, and even took to democracy without America having to impose it on them - it is only its revolutionary Islamist regime that makes the country an enemy of freedom. Second is the fact that Iran would still be a parliamentary system if the United States hadn't once again decided that as part of its global struggle to protect democracy from communism it should set up an authoritarian puppet regime, whose collapse set the stage for the aforementioned revolutionary Islamist regime to take over.
But there's no use bemoaning America's past mistakes (save for hoping that we'll learn from them at some point), so we have to look at the situation we have now, and figure out where to go from here.
Iran is not a friendly country. Its leadership hates us for backing the Shah decades ago, hates us for backing its rivals in the Middle East now, and hates us for being a country where women can wear a bikini and men can skip church to watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Iran supports Bashar al-Assad, the tyrant who led Syria
into civil war, and terrorist groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Its regime rejects notions of human rights in
favor of religious fundamentalism, and when Iranians attempt to protest election
results they’re suppressed by security forces and Islamic militias. And its nuclear program has had ambitions to build a weapon in the past, and a history of ignoring international treaties and hiding things from nuclear inspectors
Almost as worringly, Iran is also a schizophrenic country. It has an elected national government that at every level is checked by a fanatical religious regime, so even while Iran's negotiators try to work out a deal with us, the Ayatollah is posting taunts and threats on social media while his priests lead the "Death to America" refrain they've been singing for nearly forty years now. It has a conventional military, as well as an Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution and its auxiliary Basij militias, which act on their own initiative when it comes to brutalizing or imprisoning citizens who dare to speak out against the religious regime. This is not the sort of system that you'd want to have access to nuclear power, in other words. Even if Iran doesn't build a conventional bomb with it, there's all sorts of mischief its glassy-eyed fanatics could get up to with a radioactive sample.
America's response to all this has been to try to isolate Iran diplomatically and, along with other countries, impose economic sanctions in an effort to punish and limit its misbehavior. They haven't worked. Even after the UN Security Council sanctioned the country for continuing its nuclear program, Iran was able to build a functioning reactor, step up production, even start a second underground facility. As we've also seen in places like Iraq and Cuba, if a regime is willing to brutalize its own people to stay in power, imposing additional hardships on that population probably isn't going to get it to do what we want.
So the status quo isn't working, and the Obama Administration has done something pragmatic. Rather than sticking to our current strategy and watching as Iran develops its nuclear program despite the sanctions, the president has attempted to give us some control over what the country does next, lifting some ineffective economic disincentives if Iran behaves itself and follows some instructions.
So the status quo isn't working, and the Obama Administration has done something pragmatic. Rather than sticking to our current strategy and watching as Iran develops its nuclear program despite the sanctions, the president has attempted to give us some control over what the country does next, lifting some ineffective economic disincentives if Iran behaves itself and follows some instructions.
Naturally, the Republicans are outraged. Iran will surely use the money it makes from lifted sanctions to back terrorist groups. Israel, our 51st state, will be placed in mortal peril. All our valuable allies in the region (whoever they are) will lose faith in America's resolve to stand with them, assuming they had any left after we watched our dictator in Egypt be replaced by another dictator, or ISIS run all over Iraq. Even the American public doesn't have a whole lot of support for this triumph of years of patient diplomacy - it simply feels wrong to lift sanctions on a hostile, undemocratic regime that hasn't changed its tune.
But we don't have many alternatives. If we stick to our principles, fold our arms, and refuse to deal with Iran, we miss out on Iran's agreement to let nuclear inspectors in, reduce its low-yield uranium stockpile by 98%, cut down on centrifuge production, and so forth. It's an unhappy compromise, and dropping some of the sanctions against Iran means that a troublesome regime will have more money to spend on other projects we don't like, but at least it will have some restrictions on a program that has us very worried. How else are we going to control Iran's nuclear aspirations? Is anyone seriously proposing yet another American military operation in the Middle East, at a time that we're already reluctantly working with Iran against ISIS?
Optimistically, this deal could lead to further negotiations on those other things about Iran we find so objectionable. And if nothing else, lifting some sanctions could help bolster Iran's middle class, that important ingredient for democracy. So not only would we be helping out some people that already have enough problems just living under the Iranian government, we might be causing problems for that Iranian government when those people question why they're required to chant "death to America" every day.
This is not a deal that America would normally be proud of, but right now it might be the best option we have.
But we don't have many alternatives. If we stick to our principles, fold our arms, and refuse to deal with Iran, we miss out on Iran's agreement to let nuclear inspectors in, reduce its low-yield uranium stockpile by 98%, cut down on centrifuge production, and so forth. It's an unhappy compromise, and dropping some of the sanctions against Iran means that a troublesome regime will have more money to spend on other projects we don't like, but at least it will have some restrictions on a program that has us very worried. How else are we going to control Iran's nuclear aspirations? Is anyone seriously proposing yet another American military operation in the Middle East, at a time that we're already reluctantly working with Iran against ISIS?
Optimistically, this deal could lead to further negotiations on those other things about Iran we find so objectionable. And if nothing else, lifting some sanctions could help bolster Iran's middle class, that important ingredient for democracy. So not only would we be helping out some people that already have enough problems just living under the Iranian government, we might be causing problems for that Iranian government when those people question why they're required to chant "death to America" every day.
This is not a deal that America would normally be proud of, but right now it might be the best option we have.
Friday, July 17, 2015
Terrorism, or Something
Nearly a year between posts? Pathetic.
If you want to see the difference between CNN and Fox News' approach to journalism, look no further than their 5:00 headline news hours last evening, when they responded to the attacks in Chattanooga.
On CNN you could see Wolf Blitzer talking to journalists on the scene, basing the discussion on witnesses, authorities and other experts. He focused on what was known and could be verified, and took care to describe Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez as "the alleged gunman" or "suspected gunman," even if everyone was pretty certain he did it.
Meanwhile on Fox News you had Bret Baier introducing the story, then turning to a panel of conservative pundits so they could give us their opinions on it. This was mainly an opportunity for the perpetually-scowling Charles Krauthammer to complain that President Obama is once again describing the incident as a "lone gunman" situation because the president is too limp-wristed to immediately interpret the shooting as another battle in our eternal war against radical Islam.
One network deals with facts, the other opinions. One is out to report on reality, the other to create a specific reality for its viewers to live in.
Was it an act of terror? Hard to say at this point, we're still working out why someone who lived in a quiet neighborhood, got a degree as an electrical engineer, and brought up some kids would suddenly pick up a rifle and shoot up a recruiting center and Navy facility. But the authorities are treating it as a potential terrorist attack, and it's not an unreasonable assumption to make. The suspected shooter was a Muslim, if I heard the news right he hadn't been employed since 2012, and he made several trips to the Middle East over the past few years. This would fit the pattern of "normal Muslim disaffected by life in America and radicalized into a murderer" that's going on these days. But again, we haven't confirmed that yet, so for all we know he was radicalized by the Westboro Baptist Church and set off by the Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage.
But back to the question - was it terror? I've taken classes on the subject and can only rub my temple wearily.
Terrorism is supposed to be a dialogue. There's a strong Group A, a country or government or something, and a weak Group B, a revolutionary movement or insurgency or the like. Group B cannot get Group A to change policy on its own, but instead they target something else, like Group A's civilian population, or Group A's ally Group C. "Do what we want," Group B says, "or more people will die." The idea is that between Group A's desire to protect what Group B is attack and that population's outrage that Group A can't protect them, it will have no choice but to bow to their demands.
Now, this Abdulazeez fellow - a Muslim, yes, might have been radicalized by ISIS or whoever, yes. But what was he saying? What was his purpose behind shooting up these places? We haven't found a video he made explaining his actions yet, or any social media posts warning of it. I think I heard that ISIS' twitter account tried to take credit for it, but that hasn't been verified yet either.
If he was another ordinary citizen convinced to murder on behalf of ISIS, I guess he's a terrorist, since they're a terrorist organization trying to change the United States' behavior. But if he was then he didn't do a very good job of advertizing it, and was annoyingly vague on what he wanted us to do. Perhaps stop the airstrikes against ISIS targets? Cease our support of the regimes ISIS is fighting against? Cover up our bikini-clad supermodels?
Another possibility is that Abdulazeez bought into ISIS' (and Krauthammer's) belief that America and Islam exist in natural conflict, that our respective values are incompatible and inevitably lead to violence. In this case he would be killing Americans for the sake of killing Americans, because what, are we all supposed to renounce our citizenship and Western liberal values in favor of the extreme fundamentalist Islam ISIS espouses?
But if that's the case, why did he choose a recruitment center and Navy facility, as opposed to randomly opening fire in some public area? Why these two military targets?
See, a uniform makes the question of whether a given act of violence was terrorism or not a bit more complicated. Let's say Group B blows up a bunch of vehicles with a roadside bomb. If they were buses belonging to Group A's civilian population as part of a campaign to get Group A to alter it's behavior, it's clearly an act of terror. If they were tanks and humvees belonging to Group A's military that's occupying Group B's country, then it's an example of asymmetrical warfare - the point of a uniform is to announce that you're a valid target in the game of "War" you're playing.
But in this case these military victims (condolences to the families of Thomas Sullivan, Squire Wells, David Wyatt, and Carson Holmquist) were in America, not currently fighting anyone or oppressing anybody. They were arguably the instruments of American policy, but weren't executing it at the moment, so that puts them in a strange place - they're not quite like a civilian population terrorists attack to put pressure on a government, but they aren't active combatants in a war zone. If Abdulazeez was at "war with America" or "punishing America for its crimes" or anything, he was unusually specific in how he expressed that.
All this to say, it's unclear if this was an act of conventional terrorism or not, but as we've seen in cases like the Fort Hood shooting, it's close to the sort of terrorism we get these days. Really, we need to wait and get the whole story before making a judgment.
Hear that, Fox News?
If you want to see the difference between CNN and Fox News' approach to journalism, look no further than their 5:00 headline news hours last evening, when they responded to the attacks in Chattanooga.
On CNN you could see Wolf Blitzer talking to journalists on the scene, basing the discussion on witnesses, authorities and other experts. He focused on what was known and could be verified, and took care to describe Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez as "the alleged gunman" or "suspected gunman," even if everyone was pretty certain he did it.
Meanwhile on Fox News you had Bret Baier introducing the story, then turning to a panel of conservative pundits so they could give us their opinions on it. This was mainly an opportunity for the perpetually-scowling Charles Krauthammer to complain that President Obama is once again describing the incident as a "lone gunman" situation because the president is too limp-wristed to immediately interpret the shooting as another battle in our eternal war against radical Islam.
One network deals with facts, the other opinions. One is out to report on reality, the other to create a specific reality for its viewers to live in.
Was it an act of terror? Hard to say at this point, we're still working out why someone who lived in a quiet neighborhood, got a degree as an electrical engineer, and brought up some kids would suddenly pick up a rifle and shoot up a recruiting center and Navy facility. But the authorities are treating it as a potential terrorist attack, and it's not an unreasonable assumption to make. The suspected shooter was a Muslim, if I heard the news right he hadn't been employed since 2012, and he made several trips to the Middle East over the past few years. This would fit the pattern of "normal Muslim disaffected by life in America and radicalized into a murderer" that's going on these days. But again, we haven't confirmed that yet, so for all we know he was radicalized by the Westboro Baptist Church and set off by the Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage.
But back to the question - was it terror? I've taken classes on the subject and can only rub my temple wearily.
Terrorism is supposed to be a dialogue. There's a strong Group A, a country or government or something, and a weak Group B, a revolutionary movement or insurgency or the like. Group B cannot get Group A to change policy on its own, but instead they target something else, like Group A's civilian population, or Group A's ally Group C. "Do what we want," Group B says, "or more people will die." The idea is that between Group A's desire to protect what Group B is attack and that population's outrage that Group A can't protect them, it will have no choice but to bow to their demands.
Now, this Abdulazeez fellow - a Muslim, yes, might have been radicalized by ISIS or whoever, yes. But what was he saying? What was his purpose behind shooting up these places? We haven't found a video he made explaining his actions yet, or any social media posts warning of it. I think I heard that ISIS' twitter account tried to take credit for it, but that hasn't been verified yet either.
If he was another ordinary citizen convinced to murder on behalf of ISIS, I guess he's a terrorist, since they're a terrorist organization trying to change the United States' behavior. But if he was then he didn't do a very good job of advertizing it, and was annoyingly vague on what he wanted us to do. Perhaps stop the airstrikes against ISIS targets? Cease our support of the regimes ISIS is fighting against? Cover up our bikini-clad supermodels?
Another possibility is that Abdulazeez bought into ISIS' (and Krauthammer's) belief that America and Islam exist in natural conflict, that our respective values are incompatible and inevitably lead to violence. In this case he would be killing Americans for the sake of killing Americans, because what, are we all supposed to renounce our citizenship and Western liberal values in favor of the extreme fundamentalist Islam ISIS espouses?
But if that's the case, why did he choose a recruitment center and Navy facility, as opposed to randomly opening fire in some public area? Why these two military targets?
See, a uniform makes the question of whether a given act of violence was terrorism or not a bit more complicated. Let's say Group B blows up a bunch of vehicles with a roadside bomb. If they were buses belonging to Group A's civilian population as part of a campaign to get Group A to alter it's behavior, it's clearly an act of terror. If they were tanks and humvees belonging to Group A's military that's occupying Group B's country, then it's an example of asymmetrical warfare - the point of a uniform is to announce that you're a valid target in the game of "War" you're playing.
But in this case these military victims (condolences to the families of Thomas Sullivan, Squire Wells, David Wyatt, and Carson Holmquist) were in America, not currently fighting anyone or oppressing anybody. They were arguably the instruments of American policy, but weren't executing it at the moment, so that puts them in a strange place - they're not quite like a civilian population terrorists attack to put pressure on a government, but they aren't active combatants in a war zone. If Abdulazeez was at "war with America" or "punishing America for its crimes" or anything, he was unusually specific in how he expressed that.
All this to say, it's unclear if this was an act of conventional terrorism or not, but as we've seen in cases like the Fort Hood shooting, it's close to the sort of terrorism we get these days. Really, we need to wait and get the whole story before making a judgment.
Hear that, Fox News?
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
Cold War Deux?
Tensions with Russia are... probably falling, actually, the violence in Gaza has been pretty distracting and no passenger aircraft have been shot down lately. This doesn't mean that the situation in Ukraine is necessarily better - though the Ukrainian army has made progress against the secessionists, there's a lot of Russian soldiers hovering on the border, and it's easy to imagine them moving in to rescue persecuted Russian-speaking Ukrainians from those national socialists in Kiev, or responding to an attack that those treacherous Ukrainians claimed they never made.
So it's no great surprise that the cover of the previous issue of Time was mostly red, had Vladimir Putin on it, and was titled "Cold War Two." The subject is so grave and important that of course the cover story of the issue that came in the mail Sunday was "Manopause" and contained a quote by Obama denying a second Cold War. But let's humor the magazine anyway.
The Cold War was an exciting time for me - I learned to stop soiling myself, figured out how to walk, and was well on my way to tying my own shoes. By the time I got to college, political scientists and historians had put together an autopsy report explaining how the previous era started, how it worked, and how it ended. So it's pretty simple to compare current events to this model to see how accurate Time's Cold War II cover was. The original Cold War's distinguishing characteristics were its bipolar structure, the ideological basis of the conflict, and the fact that said conflict never escalated to direct fighting. Are these being repeated in this hypothetical second Cold War?
Bipolarity - Polarity refers to the distribution of power within a system. Mutlipolarity has been the norm for the past couple of centuries, with a collection of great powers competing and balancing against each other so that no single player was able to totally dominate. After World War II and the decline of the French and British empires, the world was left with the United States and the Soviet Union as a pair of superpowers that could check each other, but were leagues beyond anyone else. With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR, we had the rare case of one state so powerful that no combination of rivals could challenge it, making it the lone superpower in a unipolar system. And in America it's best to insist that this is still the case, that the United States is unstoppable and capable of anything, and certainly not suffering from imperial overreach or anything like that.
Since obviously the United States cannot not be a superpower, I guess the question then is whether Russia's caught up to the obscenely bloated US military. A quick glance at GlobalSecurity's Russia military guide suggests that the answer is "no."
On the other hand, my Russian history professor made a good point when he was discussing the Cold War - at its onset, the Soviet Union's superpower status wasn't due to the might of its armies but where they were. The Soviets didn't have the best generals, or the best weapons, or the best-trained soldiers, but what it did have it had in bulk, and at the end of World War II that bulk was sitting right between Eastern and Western Europe, positioned to swarm into the rest of the continent faster than you can say "blitzkrieg." It took some years for the Soviet Union to build enough nukes to become a "legitimate" superpower, but even before that it was treated as one because the power it had was in place to do some major damage.
Today, the Russian army still hasn't recovered from the post-Soviet crisis, and isn't even up to the Soviet Union's standards. More importantly it isn't sitting in East Germany, poised to defend communism by rolling into Paris or the capitals of its "allies." It still has a bunch of vintage Soviet nukes, of course, but nuclear weapons are hard to work into calculations of power. What conflict would be worth going to nuclear war for? Would the threat of nukes deter conflict, or would Putin calculate that the United States wouldn't be willing to risk atomic retribution by nuking Russian forces liberating Ukraine from those awful Ukrainians? For all the effort countries put into getting nuclear weapons, they've only been used twice, and most people are very happy for that fact.
The short version is that the Russian military is no match for the United States', and doesn't have the force projection capacity or infrastructure to counter it on a global level. That said, Russia is more than a match for its neighbors, and is well-positioned to assert its dominance within its neighborhood of former Soviet satellites. Which is bad news for any of those satellites that might want to move into a more democratic, pro-Western orbit, such as Ukraine. And just because the United States would probably win a fight with Russia doesn't mean anyone should be looking forward to such a scenario.
Ideology - It wasn't just the distribution of power that made the Cold War unique, it was how those powers defined themselves. After centuries of competing kingdoms and empires, the Cold War featured two competing political systems, democratic capitalism and communism. These weren't merely rivals on the world stage, but saw themselves as mutually incompatible, turning the conflict into a struggle over the future of mankind's political evolution. When the USSR collapsed, it seemed like the great political question of the century had been answered, that democracy was triumphant, leading Fukuyama to declare it the "end of history." The world could look forward to a future of government by the people, for the people, and everyone would be rich thanks to free markets.
Obviously that isn't how it happened, and the world has in fact gotten less democratic in recent years. With the expectation that other countries would have no choice but to democratize, the West has sat on its laurels. But even if communism has been shown to be a dead end, the tyrants of the world are in no hurry to give up their power. And it turns out that free markets don't necessarily require governments to have free and fair elections, or to stop controlling their people through fear and violence.
Russia is, technically, a democracy. There are elections, and there are supposedly limits on its government's power. It's just that the government controls something like 90% of Russia's media, and it's hard for opposition parties to get their message out, or even show up on ballots. And people who criticize the government end up in jail, or beaten to a pulp, or dead from radiation poisoning under mysterious circumstances. And Putin keeps rewriting the rules so he can bounce between the offices of President and Prime Minister, never leaving power. And he owes a lot of his influence to browbeating the oligarchs who looted the country during the wild days of capitalismization into supporting him, with the help of his buddies from the KGB.
In short, Russia is not a part of the Free World, and its leader views the democratic West as threats and rivals. But unlike its communist predecessor, modern Russia has no alternative model to offer the world, no revolutionary government that would save it from capitalist exploitation. Instead, what Putin is backing in places like Syria and Iran is something even older, Czarist notions of absolute sovereignty and governance free from interference by "human rights" organizations, international "law," or anything that limits the power of the state's ruler. Communism appealed to the masses, what Putin believes in appeals to presidents-for-life and other tyrants. This is why he (and other non-democracies like China) have to wave the nationalism flag around and find threats within and beyond the nation's borders to rally the people against - it helps excuse the measures he makes to stay in power, and distracts them from questioning why they let him get away with it.
So while the Soviet Union had the communist bloc to support it, Putin's network is much more diverse. Syria is an illiberal Arab presidency, Iran a Persian theocracy. Sometimes the "BRICS," the fivesome of up-and-coming states that are or are about to rival the major players of Europe when it comes to economic and military power, are described as some sort of Russian-led alliance, but take a closer look at it: Brazil, a Latin American democracy recovering from a dictatorship, Russia, described above, India, a subcontinent boasting the world's largest democracy, China, a one-party free market powerhouse, and South Africa, perhaps the most functional country in sub-Saharan Africa. Most of these guys lean closer to democracy than Putinism, and the only thing any of them have in common is that they aren't part of the Western establishment. The Warsaw Pact 2.0 this ain't.
Russia doesn't have anything to offer the world other than its markets and national resources. It's not part of an ideological bloc anymore, Putin simply styles himself as the leader of a group of nations(' rulers) that are opposed to the West's domination (because it threatens their grip on power). At the same time, the West isn't marching in step these days - Bush and Obama have squandered a lot of American soft power, and Europe can't agree on a continent-wide agenda, much less one encompassing the democratic world. Even after the Malaysian Airlines disaster, France is selling Russia a pair of helicopter carriers.
In short, this current "Cold War" isn't really based on ideology, and there's much less unity within its "sides."
Indirect Conflict - The Cold War is called that because the United States and Soviet Union never declared war on each other, and never acknowledged the times their forces may have fought each other. Instead they waged war by proxy, backing revolutionaries or governments that agreed with their ideology... or revolutionaries or governments that merely opposed the other guy. Since both sides had enough combined nuclear weapons to cover the surface of the Earth several times over, it is a very good thing that the Cold War never went hot. Turning the Third World into a battlefield full of puppet dictators seems a small price to pay for sparing the rest of the planet, hmm?
As recent events in Ukraine show (assuming you believe the capitalist imperialist non-Russian media), this sort of thing is still going on. Russia has backed insurgents in eastern Ukraine, as well as Georgia, and before it had to back those Ukrainian separatists it was backing a pro-Russian regime in Kiev. In response, the United States has pledged billions of dollars in aid to the new government in Kiev and is moving increasingly closer to providing military training and support. And like during the Cold War, we're supporting these guys because they're talking about democracy and opposing Russia, and not really considering whether the east Ukrainian separatists have some legitimate grievances about being discriminated against, or being roped into a country they don't want to belong to due to arbitrary post-imperial borders.
On the other hand, we're not doing the same in Georgia or other Russian satellites, probably because Americans would have a hard time finding them on the map. So unlike the Cold War "I push back wherever you push" mentality, we've grown a bit more discerning. Ukraine is on Europe's doorstop, and after fifty miserable years under the Soviet Union's thumb, nobody in Eastern Europe wants Russia to start rolling west again. Central Asia, meh.
So, to wrap things up:
This is not a second Cold War. Relations between the United States and Putin's Russia are quite chilly, the rhetoric is nasty, Russian-backed insurgents are causing problems, and it looks like Russia may start invading its neighbors again. But this isn't a global conflict, or an ideological conflict - I'd say it's closer to the United States' relations with Iran. Our antagonist is once again a country that holds elections but is dominated by an autocrat and his cronies, who are backing insurgents and tyrants where it benefits them, and who happen to be sitting on a bunch of oil they can use as a bargaining chip. The United States' response to this has not been direct confrontation, but sanctions and attempts to isolate them diplomatically, which are foiled when our allies decide to deal with them anyway.
During the Cold War we tried to contain communism, and since communism is a concept, that meant we got to fight it wherever someone with access to a Kalashnikov read about Marx. Russia in contrast is just another country, so the scale of this Cold Skirmish is smaller, and the stakes are much lower. And this should come as a relief, because the Cold War was a godawful period in human history, and the best we can say about it is that it didn't go hot and lead to mankind's extinction in a nuclear holocaust. Nobody should be eager to return to such a dismal era.
The problem is that it sounds like Putin is. As awful as the Cold War was, it was also Russia's time in the sun, when Europe's most backward country got to split the planet with another power. Appealing to that faded glory is winning Putin a lot of support at home, and judging by interviews with Russian-speaking east Ukrainians, a lot of people in or around Russia are happy to fall into the old "the Americans are behind everything and we need to be strong" mentality. Putin insists that the American-led West is trying to contain and gang up on a resurgent Russia... and unless we want to encourage more incidents like Georgia, or Crimea, or Ukraine, we might just have to.
So it's no great surprise that the cover of the previous issue of Time was mostly red, had Vladimir Putin on it, and was titled "Cold War Two." The subject is so grave and important that of course the cover story of the issue that came in the mail Sunday was "Manopause" and contained a quote by Obama denying a second Cold War. But let's humor the magazine anyway.
The Cold War was an exciting time for me - I learned to stop soiling myself, figured out how to walk, and was well on my way to tying my own shoes. By the time I got to college, political scientists and historians had put together an autopsy report explaining how the previous era started, how it worked, and how it ended. So it's pretty simple to compare current events to this model to see how accurate Time's Cold War II cover was. The original Cold War's distinguishing characteristics were its bipolar structure, the ideological basis of the conflict, and the fact that said conflict never escalated to direct fighting. Are these being repeated in this hypothetical second Cold War?
Bipolarity - Polarity refers to the distribution of power within a system. Mutlipolarity has been the norm for the past couple of centuries, with a collection of great powers competing and balancing against each other so that no single player was able to totally dominate. After World War II and the decline of the French and British empires, the world was left with the United States and the Soviet Union as a pair of superpowers that could check each other, but were leagues beyond anyone else. With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR, we had the rare case of one state so powerful that no combination of rivals could challenge it, making it the lone superpower in a unipolar system. And in America it's best to insist that this is still the case, that the United States is unstoppable and capable of anything, and certainly not suffering from imperial overreach or anything like that.
Since obviously the United States cannot not be a superpower, I guess the question then is whether Russia's caught up to the obscenely bloated US military. A quick glance at GlobalSecurity's Russia military guide suggests that the answer is "no."
On the other hand, my Russian history professor made a good point when he was discussing the Cold War - at its onset, the Soviet Union's superpower status wasn't due to the might of its armies but where they were. The Soviets didn't have the best generals, or the best weapons, or the best-trained soldiers, but what it did have it had in bulk, and at the end of World War II that bulk was sitting right between Eastern and Western Europe, positioned to swarm into the rest of the continent faster than you can say "blitzkrieg." It took some years for the Soviet Union to build enough nukes to become a "legitimate" superpower, but even before that it was treated as one because the power it had was in place to do some major damage.
Today, the Russian army still hasn't recovered from the post-Soviet crisis, and isn't even up to the Soviet Union's standards. More importantly it isn't sitting in East Germany, poised to defend communism by rolling into Paris or the capitals of its "allies." It still has a bunch of vintage Soviet nukes, of course, but nuclear weapons are hard to work into calculations of power. What conflict would be worth going to nuclear war for? Would the threat of nukes deter conflict, or would Putin calculate that the United States wouldn't be willing to risk atomic retribution by nuking Russian forces liberating Ukraine from those awful Ukrainians? For all the effort countries put into getting nuclear weapons, they've only been used twice, and most people are very happy for that fact.
The short version is that the Russian military is no match for the United States', and doesn't have the force projection capacity or infrastructure to counter it on a global level. That said, Russia is more than a match for its neighbors, and is well-positioned to assert its dominance within its neighborhood of former Soviet satellites. Which is bad news for any of those satellites that might want to move into a more democratic, pro-Western orbit, such as Ukraine. And just because the United States would probably win a fight with Russia doesn't mean anyone should be looking forward to such a scenario.
Ideology - It wasn't just the distribution of power that made the Cold War unique, it was how those powers defined themselves. After centuries of competing kingdoms and empires, the Cold War featured two competing political systems, democratic capitalism and communism. These weren't merely rivals on the world stage, but saw themselves as mutually incompatible, turning the conflict into a struggle over the future of mankind's political evolution. When the USSR collapsed, it seemed like the great political question of the century had been answered, that democracy was triumphant, leading Fukuyama to declare it the "end of history." The world could look forward to a future of government by the people, for the people, and everyone would be rich thanks to free markets.
Obviously that isn't how it happened, and the world has in fact gotten less democratic in recent years. With the expectation that other countries would have no choice but to democratize, the West has sat on its laurels. But even if communism has been shown to be a dead end, the tyrants of the world are in no hurry to give up their power. And it turns out that free markets don't necessarily require governments to have free and fair elections, or to stop controlling their people through fear and violence.
Russia is, technically, a democracy. There are elections, and there are supposedly limits on its government's power. It's just that the government controls something like 90% of Russia's media, and it's hard for opposition parties to get their message out, or even show up on ballots. And people who criticize the government end up in jail, or beaten to a pulp, or dead from radiation poisoning under mysterious circumstances. And Putin keeps rewriting the rules so he can bounce between the offices of President and Prime Minister, never leaving power. And he owes a lot of his influence to browbeating the oligarchs who looted the country during the wild days of capitalismization into supporting him, with the help of his buddies from the KGB.
In short, Russia is not a part of the Free World, and its leader views the democratic West as threats and rivals. But unlike its communist predecessor, modern Russia has no alternative model to offer the world, no revolutionary government that would save it from capitalist exploitation. Instead, what Putin is backing in places like Syria and Iran is something even older, Czarist notions of absolute sovereignty and governance free from interference by "human rights" organizations, international "law," or anything that limits the power of the state's ruler. Communism appealed to the masses, what Putin believes in appeals to presidents-for-life and other tyrants. This is why he (and other non-democracies like China) have to wave the nationalism flag around and find threats within and beyond the nation's borders to rally the people against - it helps excuse the measures he makes to stay in power, and distracts them from questioning why they let him get away with it.
So while the Soviet Union had the communist bloc to support it, Putin's network is much more diverse. Syria is an illiberal Arab presidency, Iran a Persian theocracy. Sometimes the "BRICS," the fivesome of up-and-coming states that are or are about to rival the major players of Europe when it comes to economic and military power, are described as some sort of Russian-led alliance, but take a closer look at it: Brazil, a Latin American democracy recovering from a dictatorship, Russia, described above, India, a subcontinent boasting the world's largest democracy, China, a one-party free market powerhouse, and South Africa, perhaps the most functional country in sub-Saharan Africa. Most of these guys lean closer to democracy than Putinism, and the only thing any of them have in common is that they aren't part of the Western establishment. The Warsaw Pact 2.0 this ain't.
Russia doesn't have anything to offer the world other than its markets and national resources. It's not part of an ideological bloc anymore, Putin simply styles himself as the leader of a group of nations(' rulers) that are opposed to the West's domination (because it threatens their grip on power). At the same time, the West isn't marching in step these days - Bush and Obama have squandered a lot of American soft power, and Europe can't agree on a continent-wide agenda, much less one encompassing the democratic world. Even after the Malaysian Airlines disaster, France is selling Russia a pair of helicopter carriers.
In short, this current "Cold War" isn't really based on ideology, and there's much less unity within its "sides."
Indirect Conflict - The Cold War is called that because the United States and Soviet Union never declared war on each other, and never acknowledged the times their forces may have fought each other. Instead they waged war by proxy, backing revolutionaries or governments that agreed with their ideology... or revolutionaries or governments that merely opposed the other guy. Since both sides had enough combined nuclear weapons to cover the surface of the Earth several times over, it is a very good thing that the Cold War never went hot. Turning the Third World into a battlefield full of puppet dictators seems a small price to pay for sparing the rest of the planet, hmm?
As recent events in Ukraine show (assuming you believe the capitalist imperialist non-Russian media), this sort of thing is still going on. Russia has backed insurgents in eastern Ukraine, as well as Georgia, and before it had to back those Ukrainian separatists it was backing a pro-Russian regime in Kiev. In response, the United States has pledged billions of dollars in aid to the new government in Kiev and is moving increasingly closer to providing military training and support. And like during the Cold War, we're supporting these guys because they're talking about democracy and opposing Russia, and not really considering whether the east Ukrainian separatists have some legitimate grievances about being discriminated against, or being roped into a country they don't want to belong to due to arbitrary post-imperial borders.
On the other hand, we're not doing the same in Georgia or other Russian satellites, probably because Americans would have a hard time finding them on the map. So unlike the Cold War "I push back wherever you push" mentality, we've grown a bit more discerning. Ukraine is on Europe's doorstop, and after fifty miserable years under the Soviet Union's thumb, nobody in Eastern Europe wants Russia to start rolling west again. Central Asia, meh.
So, to wrap things up:
This is not a second Cold War. Relations between the United States and Putin's Russia are quite chilly, the rhetoric is nasty, Russian-backed insurgents are causing problems, and it looks like Russia may start invading its neighbors again. But this isn't a global conflict, or an ideological conflict - I'd say it's closer to the United States' relations with Iran. Our antagonist is once again a country that holds elections but is dominated by an autocrat and his cronies, who are backing insurgents and tyrants where it benefits them, and who happen to be sitting on a bunch of oil they can use as a bargaining chip. The United States' response to this has not been direct confrontation, but sanctions and attempts to isolate them diplomatically, which are foiled when our allies decide to deal with them anyway.
During the Cold War we tried to contain communism, and since communism is a concept, that meant we got to fight it wherever someone with access to a Kalashnikov read about Marx. Russia in contrast is just another country, so the scale of this Cold Skirmish is smaller, and the stakes are much lower. And this should come as a relief, because the Cold War was a godawful period in human history, and the best we can say about it is that it didn't go hot and lead to mankind's extinction in a nuclear holocaust. Nobody should be eager to return to such a dismal era.
The problem is that it sounds like Putin is. As awful as the Cold War was, it was also Russia's time in the sun, when Europe's most backward country got to split the planet with another power. Appealing to that faded glory is winning Putin a lot of support at home, and judging by interviews with Russian-speaking east Ukrainians, a lot of people in or around Russia are happy to fall into the old "the Americans are behind everything and we need to be strong" mentality. Putin insists that the American-led West is trying to contain and gang up on a resurgent Russia... and unless we want to encourage more incidents like Georgia, or Crimea, or Ukraine, we might just have to.
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