Arab regimes of the Middle East. In the long run, Iran also has to be assimilated into a process of regional accommodation.
In any case, America can still contain a nuclear Iran. In the past, America had successfully deterred the use of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union and China—despite at times extreme belligerence by both countries—and eventually produced conditions favorable to an American-Russian as well as an American-Chinese accommodation. America, moreover, has the capacity to provide an effective nuclear shield for all of the Middle East in the event that it becomes evident that Iran is actually acquiring nuclear weapons. Hence, if Iran does not reach an acceptable accommodation with the world community, providing credible assurances that its nuclear program does not contain a secret nuclear weapons component, the United States should make a public commitment to consider any Iranian attempt at intimidating or threatening its Middle Eastern neighbors as a threat against the United States.
In that context, if it becomes clear that Iran is actually in the process of acquiring nuclear weapons, America could also seek commitments from other nuclear powers to participate in the collective enforcement of a UN resolution to disarm Iran, by compulsion if necessary. But it must be stressed: such enforcement would have to be collective and involve also Russia and China. America can provide a nuclear umbrella for the region by itself, but it should not engage in a solitary military action against Iran or just in cooperation with Israel, for that would plunge America into a wider, again lonely, and eventually self-destructive conflict.
Of equal importance to the problems of Afghanistan and Iran is America’s stake in a constructive resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This conflict poisons the atmosphere of the Middle East, contributes to Muslim extremism, and is directly damaging to American national interests. A positive outcome would greatly contribute to stability in the Middle East. Otherwise, American interests in the region will suffer, and eventually Israel’s fate in such a hostile international environment will be in doubt.
These three interrelated issues are the most urgent items on America’s current geopolitical agenda because of the immediacy of their potential impact. But the far-reaching changes in the distribution of global power signal the historic need—the foregoing crises aside—for the United States also to pursue a longer-term strategic vision of more stable and cooperative Eurasian geopolitics. At this stage, only America is in the position to promote the needed transcontinental equilibrium without which the percolating conflicts on this huge and now politically activated continent will dangerously escalate. Europe, alas, is looking inward, Russia still at its recent past, China to its own future, and India enviously at China.
Such a longer-term geostrategic effort has to focus on Eurasia as a whole. Its combination of competitive geopolitical motivations, political might, and economic dynamism make that huge trans-Eurasian continent the central arena of world affairs.{5} America—after its emergence in 1991 as the world’s only superpower—had a unique opportunity to play an active role in helping to develop Eurasia’s new international architecture in order to fill the void created by the disappearance of the once continentally dominant Sino-Soviet bloc. That opportunity was wasted, and so now the task has to be undertaken in circumstances considerably more challenging for America.
Eurasia, in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, has drifted. Europe has become less, not more, politically united, while in the meantime Turkey and Russia have both remained on the uncertain periphery of the Western community. In the East, China has grown in economic, political, and military might, creating anxiety in a region already beset with historic rivalries. America must fashion a policy relevant to the challenges on both sides of Eurasia in order to ensure the stability of the continent as a whole.
In the West, the European Union failed to use the years of “Europe whole and free” to make Europe truly whole and its freedom firmly secure. A monetary union is not a substitute for real political unity, not to mention that a monetary union based on very unequal national resources and obligations could not foster a binding sense of transnational unity. Concurrent economic tribulations, which magnified after 2007 particularly in southern Europe, made the notion of Europe as a political and military heavyweight increasingly illusory. Europe, once the center of the West, became an extension of a West whose defining player is America.
However, the unity of that currently America-dominated West should not be taken for granted. Not only do the members of the EU lack a genuinely shared transnational political identity—not to mention a common global role—but also they are potentially vulnerable to deepening geostrategic cleavages. Great Britain clings to its special attachment to the United States and to a special status in the EU. France, envious of Germany’s rising stature as the prime power of the EU, keeps seeking a preeminent role for itself by periodic overtures for shared leadership with America, Russia, or Germany, not to mention leadership of the amorphous Mediterranean Union. Germany increasingly toys with Bismarckian notions of a special relationship with Russia, which inevitably frightens some Central Europeans into pleading for ever-closer security links with the United States.
All European countries, moreover, are opting out of any serious commitment to their own, or even to NATO-based, collective security. In different ways, its rapidly aging population as well as its youth care far more for their social security than for their national security. Basically, the United States is increasingly left with the ultimate responsibility for Europe’s security, in the reassuring hope that America will remain committed to preserving the frontiers of “Europe whole and free.” But these boundaries could be leapfrogged by the emerging German-Russian special relationship, driven on Germany’s side by the irresistible attraction to its business elite (as well as to the Italian and some others) of the commercial prospects of a modernizing Russia. The European Union thus faces the prospect of deepening geostrategic divisions, with some key states tempted by the option of a privileged business as well as political relationship with Russia.
The foregoing is particularly a cause both for regret and concern because the European enterprise holds great and already demonstrated potential for the democratic and social transformation of the European east. The enlargement of the EU to Central Europe (which during the Cold War was usually referred to as Eastern Europe) has already generated far-reaching institutional and infrastructural reforms in the region, most significantly in Poland, providing an example that is becoming increasingly attractive to the peoples of the adjoining Ukraine and Belarus. In time, Europe’s example could become a truly compelling transformative influence on both Turkey and Russia, especially if a geopolitically more active Europe, together with America, were guided by a shared long-term goal to engage them in a larger and more vital Western community.
That requires, however, a long-term vision and an equally long-term strategy for executing it. But today’s Europe—along with America—lacks both. It is ironic that even in the geographically distant Korea the country’s leading newspaper published in the fall of 2010 an apt indictment of Europe’s strategic self-indulgence, bluntly stating that:
It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that Europe has suddenly become a political backwater. But it is true that Europeans need to take a long, hard look at themselves and at where they will be in 40 years if current trends continue. What is needed today is a clear definition of Europe’s interests—and its responsibilities. Europe needs a sense of purpose for a century in which many of the odds will be stacked against it, as well as a statement of the moral standards that will guide its actions and, one hopes, its leadership. [17]
So, the question “where Europe will be forty years from now?” is directly germane in geopolitical terms to the future of Europe’s relationship with its geographic east, and that should be of equal concern both to Europe and to America. What should be the eastern boundary of a larger Europe and thus of the West? What roles could Turkey and Russia play were they truly to become part of a larger West? Conversely, what would be the consequences for Europe and America were Turkey and Russia to remain—in part because of European prejudice and American passivity—outside of Europe and thus also outside of the West?
In Turkey, its ongoing but unfinished transformation has in fact been modeled from its very start on Europe, with the announcement in 1921 by Ataturk (Mustafa Kemal), the leader of the “Young Turks” movement, of the decision to transform the Turkish ethnic core of the fallen and dismembered Ottoman Empire into a modern European-type secular nation-state, to be known henceforth as Turkey. In more recent times, its modernization evolved into democratization, a process to a significant degree driven by Turkey’s interest in becoming more explicitly a part of the unifying Europe. The Turkish aspiration was encouraged as early as the 1960s by the Europeans themselves, and it resulted in Turkey’s official application for membership in 1987. In turn, that action led to the EU’s decision in 2005 to start formal negotiations. And despite the recent hesitations of some members of the EU—particularly France and Germany—regarding Turkish membership, it is a geopolitical reality that a genuinely Western-type Turkish democracy, if solidly anchored in the West through more than just NATO, could be
