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| Return to: Left History: a digital archive | Return to: Say no to imperialist wars! | Return to: NATO-Yugoslav War Internet Resources |
Burgeoning anxieties about strategic partnerships among Russia, China, and India - three middling powers fearful of US hegemony - illustrate just how different the multipolar world of today is from the era of the Cold War.
At the end of 1999 there are no dominoes to delude US leaders into a ground war in Asia, no alliance-dividing quarrels about deploying US nuclear missiles in Europe, and no superpower arms race. On the contrary, the reason that America's foreign policy mandarins are fretting about strategic partnerships among Moscow, Beijing, and New Delhi is that those governments fear Washington's unchallenged preeminence.
That fear is not abstract or frivolous. It is not merely a matter of cultural or commercial jealousy - leaders in Russia, China, and India seem less annoyed by the appeal of American movies and music than are the elite civil servants who govern France. All three countries want more, not less, US investment and technology flowing into their economies.
But the specter of precision-guided US bombs falling on sovereign Serbia last spring provoked vehement complaints, particularly from Moscow and Beijing. Some of that vehemence may be discounted as posturing, either for domestic audiences or to gain a psychological edge, as in Beijing's negotiations for accession to the World Trade Organization or Moscow's maneuvering for continued loans from the International Monetary Fund.
Nevertheless, Russia, China, and India all have grounds for feeling threatened by NATO's American-dominated bombing of Serbia. Each of the three countries has had, or can anticipate having, an armed conflict over a secessionist province. Russia has been bombing Chechnya lately. China tried to intimidate Taiwan with missile launches in 1995 and 1996 and with military exercises this year. India went to the brink of war with Pakistan last spring over Kashmir.
As seen from Moscow, Beijing, and New Delhi, the air war against Serbia shattered precepts of international law and order, establishing precedents that those capitals find ominous. All three nations, reading their own concerns into the conflict over Kosovo, saw Washington violating the territorial integrity of a sovereign state, interfering in the internal affairs of that state (even though the United States at that time rejected Kosovo's aspiration to independence) and taking NATO into a war without a mandate from the Security Council, where Russia and China have veto power.
The Clinton administration and its successor would be wise to take seriously these worries. One of the first requirements of statecraft is to be capable of seeing the world as other states see it. If American leaders, walking in the shoes of their Russian counterparts, had listened to assurances about the benevolence of an expanded NATO and then seen the alliance launch its first war a couple of weeks after absorbing Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, those American statesmen would have been no less suspicious and resentful than their Russian counterparts have been.
Words alone will not still the fears provoked by America 's behavior. President Clinton's aptitude for empathy will be of no use in molding the strategic thinking of spooked statesmen in Moscow, Beijing, or New Delhi. Those three populous nuclear powers must be persuaded by deeds that Washington is not bent on exercising global hegemony. The path to such persuasion passes through multilateral cooperation on international problems such as drug trafficking, terrorism, climate change, and border-disdaining diseases. Similarly, Washington will have to demonstrate a will to engage in genuine consultation wherever it wishes to resolve regional or humanitarian crises.
What need not be taken too seriously, at least for now, is the talk of anti- American strategic alliances. Beijing does not want US forces to leave Asia: The moment they did, Japan might remilitarize and become a nuclear power. Russia depends on Washington's good will for continued loans from international financial institutions. And when New Delhi entered the nuclear powers club, India's defense minister said that China, not Pakistan, was the spur to the Indian nuclear blasts and that China represented the greatest single threat to India's security.
Nonetheless, Washington should work on its relations with these three enormously important states so they don't build anti-American coalitions.