also in actually inhibiting climate change. Others around the world, including the European Union and Brazil, have attempted their own domestic reforms on carbon emissions and energy use, and committed themselves to pursuing renewable energy. Even China has made reducing emissions a goal, a fact it refuses to let the United States ignore. But none of those nations currently has the ability to lead a global initiative. President Obama committed the United States to energy and carbon reform at the Copenhagen Summit in 2009, but the increasingly polarized domestic political environment and the truculent American economic recovery are unlikely to inspire progress on costly energy issues.
China is also critically important to any discussion of the management of climate change as it produces 21% of the world’s total carbon emissions, a percentage that will only increase as China develops the western regions of its territory and as its citizens experience a growth in their standard of living. China, however, has refused to take on a leadership role in climate change, as it has also done in the maritime, space, and cyberspace domains. China uses its designation as a developing country to shield itself from the demands of global stewardship. China’s tough stance at the 2009 Copenhagen Summit underscores the potential dangers of an American decline: no other country has the capacity and the desire to accept global stewardship over the environmental commons.
Only a vigorous Unites States could lead on climate change, given Russia’s dependence on carbon-based energies for economic growth, India’s relatively low emissions rate, and China’s current reluctance to assume global responsibility. The protection and good faith management of the global commons—sea, space, cyberspace, nuclear proliferation, water security, the Arctic, and the environment itself—are imperative to the long-term growth of the global economy and the continuation of basic geopolitical stability. But in almost every case, the potential absence of constructive and influential US leadership would fatally undermine the essential communality of the global commons.
The argument that America’s decline would generate global insecurity, endanger some vulnerable states, produce a more troubled North American neighborhood, and make cooperative management of the global commons more difficult is not an argument for US global supremacy. In fact, the strategic complexities of the world in the twenty-first century—resulting from the rise of a politically self-assertive global population and from the dispersal of global power—make such supremacy unattainable. But in this increasingly complicated geopolitical environment, an America in pursuit of a new, timely strategic vision is crucial to helping the world avoid a dangerous slide into international turmoil.
- PART 4 -
BEYOND 2025: A NEW GEOPOLITICAL BALANCE
America’s global standing in the decades ahead will depend on its successful implementation of purposeful efforts to overcome its drift toward a socioeconomic obsolescence and to shape a new and stable geopolitical equilibrium on the world’s most important continent by far, Eurasia.
The key to America’s future is thus in the hands of the American people. America can significantly upgrade its domestic condition and redefine its central international role in keeping with the new objective and subjective conditions of the twenty-first century. In order to achieve this, it is essential that America undertake a national effort to enhance the public’s understanding of America’s changing, and potentially dangerous, global circumstances. America’s inherent assets, as discussed previously, still justify cautious optimism that such a renewal can refute the prognoses of America’s irreversible decline and global irrelevance, but public ignorance of the growing overall vulnerability of America’s domestic and foreign standing must be tackled deliberately, head-on, and from the top down.
Democracy is simultaneously one of America’s greatest strengths and one of the central sources of its current predicament. America’s founders designed its constitutional system so that most decisions could only be made incrementally. Therefore, truly comprehensive national decisions require a unique degree of consensus, generated by dramatic and socially compelling circumstances (such as, at their extreme, a great financial crisis or an imminent external threat) and/or propelled by the persuasive impact of determined national leadership. And since in America only the President has a voice that resonates nationally, the President must drive America’s renewal forward.
As both candidate and President, Barack Obama has delivered several remarkable speeches. He has spoken directly and in a historically sensitive manner to Europeans, Middle Easterners, Muslims, and Asians, addressing the necessarily changing relationship of America to their concerns. In particular, President Obama’s speeches in Prague and Cairo raised the world’s expectations regarding the orientation of America’s future foreign policy. International public opinion polls showed an almost immediate and positive reaction in the world’s perception of America as a whole because of President Obama’s image and rhetoric. Yet he has failed to speak directly to the American people about America’s changing role in the world, its implications, and its demands.
The tragedy of September 11, 2001, fundamentally altered America’s own view of its global purpose. Building off of the public’s basic ignorance of world history and geography, profit-motivated mass media exploited public fears allowing for the demagogically inclined Bush administration to spend eight years remaking the United States into a crusader state. The “war on terror” became synonymous with foreign policy and the United States, for the most part, neglected to build a strategy that addressed its long-term interests in an evolving geopolitical environment. Thus, America was left unprepared—thanks to the confluence of the above—to face the novel challenges of the twenty-first century.
America and its leaders need to understand the new strategic landscape so that they can embrace a domestic and foreign renewal aimed at revitalizing America’s global role. What follows addresses the demands of the evolving geopolitical conditions and provides, in response, the outline of a timely vision for US foreign policy.
1: EURASIA’S GEOPOLITICAL VOLATILITY
Both the most immediate foreign policy threat to America’s global status and the longer-range challenge to global geopolitical stability arise on the Eurasian continent. The immediate threat is currently located in the region east of Egypt’s Suez Canal, west of China’s Xinjiang Province, south of Russia’s post-Soviet frontiers in the Caucasus and with the new central Asian states. The longer-range challenge to global stability arises out of the still-continuing and consequentially unpredictable shift in the global center of gravity from the West to the East (or from Europe to Asia and perhaps even from America to China).
America, more than any other power, has become directly involved in a series of conflicts within Eurasia. It is a telling fact that regional powers potentially more directly affected by the consequences of what happens in that volatile area—such as India, Russia, and China—have stayed carefully away from any direct participation in America’s painful (at times, inept) efforts to cope with the region’s slide into escalating ethnic and religious conflict.
Ultimately, any constructive solution to the Afghan conflict has to combine an internal political accommodation between the government in Kabul and rival Afghan factions within an external regional framework in which Afghanistan’s principal neighbors assume a major role in contributing to the country’s stability. As argued earlier, protracted and largely American military involvement is neither the solution to the Afghan tragedy initiated by the Soviet invasion of the country nor is it likely to provide regional stability. Similarly, the regional challenge posed by Iran can be resolved neither by an Israeli nor by an American military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities now under construction. Such actions would simply fuse Iranian nationalism with belligerent fundamentalism, producing a protracted conflict with highly destabilizing consequences for the few still pro-Western
