Georgia is the graveyard of America's unipolar world

Russia's defiance in the Caucasus has brought down the curtain on Bush
senior's new world order - not before time

Seumas Milne 
The Guardian, Thursday August 28 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/28/russia.usforeignpolicy

If there were any doubt that the rules of the international game have
changed for good, the events of the past few days should have dispelled it.
On Monday, President Bush demanded that Russia's leaders reject their
parliament's appeal to recognise the independence of South Ossetia and
Abkhazia. Within 24 hours, Bush had his response: President Medvedev
announced Russia's recognition of the two contested Georgian enclaves. 

The Russian message was unmistakable: the outcome of the war triggered by
Georgia's attack on South Ossetia on August 7 is non-negotiable - and
nothing the titans of the US empire do or say is going to reverse it. After
that, the British foreign secretary David Miliband's posturing yesterday in
Kiev about building a "coalition against Russian aggression" merely looked
foolish.

That this month's events in the Caucasus signal an international turning
point is no longer in question. The comparisons with August 1914 are of
course ridiculous, and even the speculation about a new cold war overdone.
For all the manoeuvres in the Black Sea and nuclear-backed threats, the
standoff between Russia and the US is not remotely comparable to the events
that led up to the first world war. Nor do the current tensions have
anything like the ideological and global dimensions that shaped the 40-year
confrontation between the west and the Soviet Union.

But what is clear is that America's unipolar moment has passed - and the new
world order heralded by Bush's father in the dying days of the Soviet Union
in 1991 is no more. The days when one power was able to bestride the globe
like a colossus, enforcing its will in every continent, challenged only by
popular movements for national independence and isolated "rogue states",
are now over. For nearly two decades, while Russia sunk into "catastroika"
and China built an economic powerhouse, the US has exercised unprecedented
and unaccountable global power, arrogating to itself and its allies the
right to invade and occupy other countries, untroubled by international law
or institutions, sucking ever more states into the orbit of its voracious
military alliance.

Now, pumped up with petrodollars, Russia has called a halt to this
relentless expansion and demonstrated that the US writ doesn't run in every
backyard. And although it has been a regional, not a global, challenge,
this object lesson in the new limits of American power has already been
absorbed from central Asia to Latin America. 

In Georgia itself, both Medvedev's recognition of Abkhazia and South
Ossetia's independence and Russia's destruction of Georgian military
capacity have been designed to leave no room for doubt that the issue of
the enclaves' reintegration has been closed. There are certainly dangers
for Russia's own territorial integrity in legitimising breakaway states.
But the move will have little practical impact and is presumably partly
intended to create bargaining chips for future negotiations.

Miliband's attempt in Ukraine, meanwhile, to deny the obvious parallels with
the US-orchestrated recognition of Kosovo's independence earlier this year
rang particularly hollow, as did his denunciation of invasions of sovereign
states and double standards. Both the west and Russia have abused the
charge of "genocide" to try and give themselves legal cover, but Russia is
surely on stronger ground over South Ossetia - where its own
internationally recognised peacekeepers were directly attacked by the
Georgian army - than Nato was in Kosovo in 1999, where most ethnic
cleansing took place after the US-led assault began. 

There has been much talk among western politicians in recent days about
Russia isolating itself from the international community. But unless that
simply means North America and Europe, nothing could be further from the
truth. While the US and British media have swung into full cold-war mode
over the Georgia crisis, the rest of the world has seen it in a very
different light. As Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's former UN ambassador,
observed in the Financial Times a few days ago, "most of the world is
bemused by western moralising on Georgia". While the western view is that
the world "should support the underdog, Georgia, against Russia ... most
support Russia against the bullying west. The gap between the western
narrative and the rest of the world could not be clearer."

Why that should be so isn't hard to understand. It's not only that the US
and its camp followers have trampled on international law and the UN to
bring death and destruction to the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In the early 1990s, the Pentagon warned that to ensure no global rival
emerged, the US would need to "account for the interests of advanced
industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership". But
when it came to Russia, all that was forgotten in a fog of imperial hubris
that has left the US overstretched and unable to prevent the return of a
multipolar world.

Of course, that new multipolarity can easily be overstated. Russia is a
regional power and there is no imminent prospect of a serious global
challenger to the US, which will remain overwhelmingly the most powerful
state in the world for years to come. It can also exacerbate the risk of
conflict. But only the most solipsistic western mindset can fail to grasp
the necessity of a counterbalance in international relations that can
restrict the freedom of any one power to impose its will on other countries
unilaterally.

One western response, championed by the Times this week, is to damn this
growing challenge to US domination on the grounds that it is led by
autocratic states in the shape of Russia and China. In reality, western
alarm clearly has very little to do with democracy. When Russia collapsed
into the US orbit under Boris Yeltsin, his bombardment of the Russian
parliament and shamelessly rigged elections were treated with the greatest
western understanding. 

The real gripe is not with these states' lack of accountability - Russian
public opinion is in any case overwhelmingly supportive of its government's
actions in Georgia - but their strategic challenge and economic rivalry.
For the rest of us, a new assertiveness by Russia and other rising powers
doesn't just offer some restraint on the unbridled exercise of global
imperial power, it should also increase the pressure for a revival of a
rules-based system of international relations. In the circumstances, that
might come to seem quite appealing to whoever is elected US president.
-- 
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