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MMXIX/MMXX / copyright 2003. A. Frye

Chapter

23

New World Disorder 21st Century Geopolitics, 1980s-present

The last decades of the 20th century saw stunning changes in the political power structure of the world. The Soviet bloc imploded with breathtaking rapidity, and for a moment, optimists declared a triumph of enlightened democracy and modernity. But within just a few years, the hopeful dreams of a new world order collapsed in the genocides of Africa and the Balkans; in the aggression of dictatorial regimes from Pyongyang to Teheran; in the continuing acts of terror and greed. The world was not new or ordered, but even more chaotic than the ironically predictable bipolar world that had passed.

Love and Money: Toward Eurounity

Despite the devastation of World War II and the dark cloud of Soviet aggression, Europeans went about rebuilding their continent after 1945. As their colonial empires dropped away (a process of abandoning imperial holdings called decolonization), European states recovered both economically and politically by the 1960s, in part thanks to generous American financial aid. Critical to recovery was the gradual unification of the west European economy by formation of multinational cooperative associations. Led by Christian Democrats Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman of France, Alcide deGasperi of Italy, and Konrad Adenuer of West Germany, western European governments pushed to unite European economies as a bulwark against communism and to preserve peace after witnessing the horrors of war. In 1947, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands formed Benelux, an economic alliance that removed tariffs and customs barriers. In 1951, Italy, Britain, and France joined the Benelux nations in a Coal and Steel treaty. This evolved in 1957 into the Common Market, which expanded to include West Germany. The Common Market allowed trade to flow without taxes and by establishing common standards for goods; for example, by establishing common food safety standards. Some thought the Common Market to be the first tiny step toward a “United States of Europe.”

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By 1973, the Common Market had become the European Community (EC). The British, who had been hesitant about joining and who had also been blocked by the French for a time, finally joined. In the 1980s, more nations joined the European club. Ultimately in 1992, in the Dutch town of Maastricht, an historic treaty created the European Union (EU). Signing the document and entering the conglomeration were Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. In 1995, Austria, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden joined the EU, but so far the Norwegians have consistently voted against EU membership. Signatories to the Maastricht treaty agreed to merge many of their laws and move toward a common currency, the Eurodollar (or euro) by 2002 (except for Britain, Sweden, and Denmark which kept their old money but also use euros). Today there are few restrictions on the movement of peoples and goods between member nations, and they coordinate many domestic policies and efforts.

Leaving EU

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Since the collapse of the Iron Curtain, new nations sought admittance to the EU. In the spring of 2003, Poland, Hungary, the Czechs, Slovakia, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Cyprus, and Malta were admitted to Europe’s unifying club; by 2006 Romania, and Bulgaria also joined the EU. Western Europe: Reduced, Reborn, and Reactive Emerging from World War II, the United Kingdom (or the UK; the British) rejected the Conservatives and voted Churchill out of office in 1945.1 Until the late 1960s,

the Labour Party usually dominated British politics and expanded the British welfare state. Many major British industries, including transport, health care, and the North Sea oil fields, remained under the partial or complete control of the state. Under a new queen, Elizabeth II (r. 1952 – present), Britain abandoned most of its overseas possessions with astonishing rapidity, though it tried to maintain relations with its old colonies by way of its Commonwealth. In the Cold War, the British remained staunch allies of the United States. But the welfare state only delivered

some of its promises. BY the 1970s, the British faced a stagnant economy with 11 to 15% unemployment and chronically poor service from the government. In 1979, the British elected Margaret Thatcher (r.1979-1990), an energetic Conservative, as Britain’s first female prime minister. The "Iron Lady," as she was known, took a Churchillian stand against the Soviets. She sold off or privatized many government-run industries in the UK, and the British economy began to make a modest recovery. When Argentina tried to seize the British held Falkland Isles in the South Atlantic, Thatcher dispatched the British military to decisively defeat the Argentines, reawakening the lost dream of British muscle if only for a moment. Meanwhile the British government continued to face problems in Northern Ireland, where a minority descended from Scottish settlers of the 1600s remained staunchly in favor of remaining part of the UK; the rest desired union with the Republic of Ireland. Though labeled "Catholics" and "Protestants," the conflict between pro-British and pro-Irish sides was more about nationalism than religion. In 1969, British troops opened fire on peaceful protesters in the infamous "Bloody Sunday" shootings.2 The British army occupied Ulster, which often appeared to be a war zone. The pro-Irish party Sinn Fein was accused of links to the illegal terrorist IRA (Irish Republican Army) which continued to use bombings and assassinations to oppose the British presence in Ulster. Pro-British groups, the so-called "paramilitaries" or Ulster Unionists, reacted just as violently in their opposition to unifying Ulster with Ireland. Labour returned to power in the 1990s under Tony Blair (PM, 1997-2007), who tried to move Labour toward the center. He assisted the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan and favored closer ties with the European Union. He worked toward a compromise in North Ireland; by the early 2000s the violence had subsided and by Easter 2007, the IRA and Ulster Unionists finally laid down their arms and cooperated to form a joint provincial government. But in 2010, 2010 the Conservatives returned to power amid concerns about too much EU bureaucracy and the threat if foreign immigration overwhelming the island nation.

1 He was reelected in his 80s, from 1951-55; during his prime ministry a young princess became Queen

Elizabeth II. 2 ....an event contemporized by the ever culturally erudite Bono / U2.

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In France under the Fourth Republic (founded 1945), colonial wars over Indochina and Algeria caused tremendous turmoil. In 1958 as the French government debated withdrawing from a nasty guerilla war in Algeria, the army tried to seize power. The government collapsed but the coup was foiled and a new constitution – (count ‘em) the Fifth Republic – was created under the leadership of World War II hero Charles de Gaulle (r.1958-1969). DeGaulle (and subsequent Gaullist parties) appealed to a revived sense of French pride. Nevertheless, the French – after a couple nasty colonial wars – abandoned most colonies, including Algeria, though a million French refugees whose families had been in Algeria had to flee to France. In the 1960s, France abandoned the remainder of its African colonies, retaining only a few scattered islands across the globe and French Guiana in South America. France loudly (if not convincingly) claimed independent great power status while the British became resigned to a “special relationship” with the Americans. DeGaulle launched programs for France to build her own aircraft carriers, jets, and nuclear weapons, conducting controversial oceanic nuclear tests in France’s Pacific island spheres. He also blocked British entry into the Common Market, angry at British snubs toward the French during World War II. In 1966, he withdrew French forces from NATO, though France remained partially connected to the alliance, and rejoined it a decade later. However, the unrest of the 60’s reached to Paris. Students, leftists, and workers, angry at cuts in benefits and rising tuition, rioted against the conservative deGaulle government in 1968. The loss of popularity shook confidence in the old general, and deGaulle resigned in 1969. French Socialists and Christian Democrats expanded the welfare state, providing increased state services, agricultural subsidies, and generous state paid vacations, though it cut back some of the more expensive parts of the welfare system in the late 1980s. France became one of the strongest supporters of the European Union. But the French also struggled with rising numbers of immigrants and descendants of natives from its former North African colonies, especially Algeria. It also struggled with increasing incidents of Islamist violence and, as an assertively secular state, banned its Muslim citizens from wearing hijab, the scarf and veil for Muslim women. By the 1960’s, Germany had the most successful economy, led for years by

Christian Democrat (Germany’s centrist party) Conrad Adnenauer, a big advocate of linking Germany to the greater European community. Germany’s Social Democrats (center-left) also favored European unity, and today German Chancellor Angela Merkel(r.2005-present), a Christian Democrat born in communist East Germany, continues to pursue European unity while leading a unified and economically powerful Germany (see below for how and why that happened). As several nations,

including the United States, embraced populism, the centrist Merkel has emerged as a leading voice for global cooperation in defense of universal democratic values. Immigrants in Europe – especially Muslim and African immigrants - have faced mixed reactions, despite relatively open asylum and immigration laws. Some demographers predict that as church attendance drops precipitously in a mostly secular Western Europe, practicing Muslims will outnumber practicing Christians within decades. Part of the immigrant issue is fueled by the declining birthrate of aging and urbanized Europeans. As Western Europe has seen a flood of non-European and Slavic immigrants (many of them from Muslim nations) turn it into a multi-cultural society, ultra-nationalist parties (who oppose foreigners and foreign cultural influence within their nations) have urged the exclusion of immigrants. The latest flood of war refugees

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from Middle Eastern wars and jihadi terrorist strikes within Europe have only increased European concerns about non-European immigration.

The EU was challenged by the fiscal collapse of several European governments in 2010 and 2011. Although the worst case was Greece, several nations had borrowed so much money for generous welfare programs and bloated bureaucracies (Greece was notorious for having 2 or 3 bureaucrats to do one job), that they could no longer pay the interest on the loans. As a result, the Eurodollar began to lose value. Disciplined economic powerhouses like Germany had to bail out the weaker economies in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, and even formerly booming Ireland; the tapestry of the EU seemed to be frayed, though not yet unraveling. In recent years, frustration with EU bureaucracy (the hated “Eurocrats of Brussels”), fears about security, and concerns about immigration through the EUs open borders had led to a nationalist backlash against the EU, immigrants, and the expanding

bureaucratic welfare state, at least in some nations. To the surprise of elites in Europe and the West, there have been popular political movements against the EU, secularism, “political correctness”, immigration and foreign cultural influence, and other hallmarks of modern “liberal democracy.” The popular backlash has been given the vague term populism, though the word means different things in different areas. Some populists sound vaguely socialist or nationalist, others sound ultra-nationalist and traditionalist, depending on which party and which nation is under discussion. But what they have in common is dislike of EU bureaucrats and a fear of

too much immigration without assimilation into European values. In Britain, populism took the form of a popular referendum in 2016 to pull Britain out of the EU, a so-called Brexit. After delay and debate, the British finalized their withdraw in early 2020, under Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson (r. 2019-p.). In Poland, Hungary, and Austria, populist leaders won major elections and enacted laws that recognized or emphasized Catholic roots of culture (like banning open stores on Sunday in Poland in 2018) or severely restricted immigration (as in Hungary in 2016). In many cases, populist rhetoric has been openly anti-immigrant, especially out of fear and response to Islamist terrorism. In France, the nationalist candidate Marine LePen has gained in popularity with her promise to weaken the EU and block Muslim immigration.3 The Italians (the 5 Star Movement) and Germans (the AfD, Alternative fur Deutchland) are have seen the rise of strong nationalist parties that do not fot the typical liberal/conservative mold. Nowhere has ultra-nationalism in Europe had a bigger impact than in the Balkans, especially beginning after the Soviet collapse.

3 Her predecessor and father, Jean LePen, made anti-Semitic remarks and praised France’s pro-Nazi Vichy

regime in WW2. His daughter has repudiated those comments, but has asserted that Islam is a threat to

France, irritating France’s over 4 million citizens of Algerian and Moroccan descent.

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Death in the Balkans: Nationalism Redux One of the most tragic conflicts in the post-Soviet era was the implosion of the Balkan nation of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia had several ethnic and religious groups: Catholic Slovenes and Croats in the north and along the Adriatic coast; Bosnian Muslims in the mountainous center; Muslim Albanians in the southwest province of Kosovo; Orthodox Macedonians along the Greek border; and the largest ethnic group, the Orthodox Serbs in the central and southern regions.

After World War II, Josef Broz Tito, who ruled Yugoslavia with an iron hand, steadfastly maintained his country's separation from Russia and actually appeared to create a society that was learning to transcend its religious and ethnic differences. But Tito died in 1980, and by 1987, the Yugoslav communist party came under the rule of Slobodan Milosovic (r.1987-2000). As communism collapsed, so did Yugoslav unity. In 1990, the Serb-dominated communist party was defeated. Milosovic, determined to preserve his power, switched from Marxism to nationalism and called upon

Serbs to create "Greater Serbia," an empire based on Serb nationalism rather than Marxist brotherhood. In 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence. While Slovenia saw

little fighting, the Croats fought for four years against the Serbs. That same year, the Bosnian Muslims declared their independence. But many people in Bosnia were Serbians, and these Bosnian Serbs, armed and supported by Milosovic, attacked the Bosnian Muslims. The Croats also became involved, fighting at first against the Muslims, but then joining the Bosnians against the Serbs. The fighting was vicious, with both sides purposely killing civilians. The Bosnian capital of Sarajevo was under siege for months, and Serb snipers killed anyone who dared move about. The Serbs were especially notorious for "ethnic cleansing" – the rounding up and executing of Bosnian men, women, and children. Croat and Bosnian commanders also committed some atrocities against Serb civilians. Once again indiscriminate rape, boxcars crammed with

civilians, and concentration camps were used as weapons in ethnic conflicts in Europe. History, once again, was cyclically repeating its tragedies. In 1995, European and American pressure, including NATO airstrikes against Bosnian Serb forces laying siege to Sarajevo, forced a Serbian delegation to travel to Dayton, Ohio, for negotiations. The Dayton Accords ended the war and split Bosnia between a Muslim-Croat republic in the west and the Serbian "Republika Srpska" in the east. In 1997, Milosovic turned his attention to the Serbian province of Kosovo, 90% of which was populated by Albanian speaking Muslims. Again, the Serbs engaged in ethnic cleansing and Kosovar Muslims took refuge in Albania. The UN deployed peacekeepers in Albania and NATO forces struck back in 1999, conducting air raids on the Serb capital of Belgrade and on the Serb army. Though the Serbian regime backed

Serbo-Croat War

1991-95

NATO/EU intervention

Ethnic atrocities [1990s]

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down, the Serbian people themselves rioted in September 2000, demanding the end to Milosovic’s reign. A UN war crimes tribunal was convened in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1996, to try those few perpetrators of genocide who have been captured. Milosovic was captured in 2001 and put on trial, but died in a Dutch prison in 2006; other Balkan murderers have since been tried and convicted. At century's end, thousands lay dead, and mass graves and concentration camps continued the bitter legacy of an ethnic rivalry in the Balkans that stretches back to the middle ages. Meanwhile in Moscow… After the abrupt fall of the USSR, the “new Russia” got off to a shaky beginning under the popular but mercurial and alcoholic Boris Yeltsin (Pres., 1992-2000). Without the tyrannical control of communist dictators to keep a lid on tension, the former Soviet empire erupted in violence. In the Caucasus, Muslim Azerbaijan and

Orthodox Armenia battled over borders. In the Georgian Republic, political rivals and ethnic majorities engaged in assassinations, bombings, and attempted coups. The Ukrainians and Russians argued over which nation would inherit the Crimea with its Black Sea fleet and strategic naval bases. In Soviet Central Asia, former communist officials set up dictatorships based on cults of personality; in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Islamist rebels attacked the new governments. Occasionally, the Russian military intervened in these new nations because Russia still wished to exercise some influence in the former Soviet regions, in what

Moscow now calls its "Near Abroad." The largely Muslim Chechens tried to separate their region in the southern Caspian region. Russian troops attacked Chechnya, shelling the provincial capital at Grozny. In 1997, the Russian commander negotiated a peace, but it was overruled by Yeltsin. In 1999, the Russians again went on the offensive, seizing Grozny in February 2000. Saddled with economic problems, a decaying infrastructure, and a general malaise over the failure of the USSR, Yeltsin found it difficult to find solutions for his massive nation. Russian criminals and former communist leaders often acted in concert to seize power over industries. Gangs assassinated businessmen who refused to pay for "protection" and government officials who tried to enforce the law. Some scholars estimate that a third of the Russian government was under the direct control of the Russian mafia. Foreign businesses eagerly invested in the new Russia, but pulled out after a few years as the nation sank into chaos. Russia did not have modern, Keynesian, 21st century capitalism, but a laissez faire Darwinian free-for-all that more resembled the capitalism of the early 19th century. In this atmosphere, a few astute “oligarchs” rose to the top of the Darwinian struggle to gather in the wealth and assets of the former USSR, especially control of Russia’s vast oil and gas reserves. Despite health problems and bouts of alcoholism, Yeltsin maintained his position. On Dec. 31, 2000, Russians elected a former secret police agent, Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin’s designated protégé. Putin corralled, crushed, or co-opted the Russian mafia and then Putin hit the Chechen rebels hard. In 2004, the Chechens retaliated; they bombed a Russian school, killing dozens, and combining nationalism with jihad they

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conducted various terrorist activities in Russia.4 Putin responded with all-out war, shelling cities and killing thousands of Chechen civilians, but eventually the rebels were defeated. However critical journalists were harassed and, occasionally, murdered. Opposing candidates were audited or indicted for crimes that seemed more imagined than real. Little by little, Putin gained more and more control in a “creeping” or “soft” dictatorship. Putin also arranged the indictment of those oligarchs foolish or unfortunate enough to oppose him; the Russian government arrested Russia’s top oil kingpin and seized the company’s assets

Nevertheless, Putin’s firm authority was popular after the chaos of the Yeltsin years. He made a strong appeal to Slavic nationalism, revived celebrations and symbols from the czarist past, and restored the Russian Orthodox Church to official favored status. He declared that “Russia was a great power again” and, in a land nostalgic for the glory days of empire, Putin’s anti-U.S. or anti-Western attitude proved popular. He rebuked American foreign policy in places like Iraq and Syria, provided aid to Iran, and continued to prop up pro-Moscow dictators in Syria, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. Though the Constitution forced him to step down as president in 2008, an election placed Dmitri Medvedev, a Putin associate, in power, while Putin continued his presence in the

4 In 2013, two terrorists from Daghestan (a Muslim region next to Chechnya) bombed the Boston Marathon.

UKRAINE

RUSSIA BELARUS

SYRIA

Chechnya

Daghestan

GEORGIA

AZERBAIJAN

ARMENIA

Caspian

Sea

Estonia

Latvia Lithuania Russia

Poland

Baltic

Sea

NATO member

RUSSIAN military

intervention

RUSSIAN occupied or war

zone

Crimea

Black Sea

St. Petersburg

Moscow

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Russian hockey uniform from the

latest Olympics – notice the two

headed Imperial eagle – a

throwback to czarist days.

Kremlin in the allegedly weaker office of prime minister. In 2012, Putin once again became president and in a obviously rigged election, then won a fourth 6 year term in 2018. In foreign policy, Russia became increasingly aggressive, appearing to have little concern for the opinion of the West. In fact, Putin (and Russians) felt threatened when NATO brought in Eastern European nations and the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). From a Russian perspective, the West – source of past invasions – was getting closer to Russia. Under Putin, Soviet troops interfered in nearby Caucasian Georgia, staged a cyber-attack on Estonia, and cut off energy shipments to pressure neighboring Ukraine into compliance with Russian demands. When the Ukrainian parliament and a popular protest forced out a pro-Soviet president and flirted with joining NATO, Russian troops seized the Crimea in March of 2014, ignoring treaties and international protests. Since late 2014, Putin has supported Russian speaking rebels in eastern Ukraine (and secretly sent troops and aid into that nation while feigning innocence). Russian cyberspies hacked American and European elections and waged disinformation campaigns through social media. It appeared that Russian Bear was once again making a play to be great power, motivated no longer by Marx, by something much older – geopolitics and pride in “Mother Russia.” The Capitalist Communist: Deng Xiaoping Like Russia, China has turned back to nationalism as its guiding principle, praising Confucius again, rather than the internationalist rhetoric of a 19th century German economist. Though still ruled by an authoritarian Communist Party, China’s dynasty of bureaucrats has gradually allowed more and more capitalism into their economic mix. Today they have what can best be described as an authoritarian welfare state that puts China first but allows private property and profit. It would be ungenerous to call it fascism, but experts have dubbed it “state capitalism” or, hearkening an even earlier theory, “neo-mercantilism.” The change began with a man once imprisoned by Mao, who was also one of Mao’s close associates and fellow revolutionaries. When China’s founding communist Mao Zedong died, a power struggle ensued

between two groups: one of radical revolutionary Marxists, and the other of pragmatic moderates. The Marxists were led by Mao's widow, Jiang Qing; she and her three associates were dubbed the Gang of Four. The moderates were led by Deng Xiaoping (r. 1976-1997). Tired of Mao’s disastrous policies, the Peoples Liberation Army backed Deng and his associates, and the Gang of Four were publically tried, humiliated, and eliminated. Deng quickly proved to be a maverick leader, more interested in the growth of China than in Marxist theory. He famously cited a Chinese proverb, "It does not matter if the cat is white or black as long as it catches the mice." In other words, if adding some capitalism made

China wealthy and great, then it would be allowed. By the early 1980s, Deng allowed private enterprise to sprout in a few areas of China, most notably near Guangzhou (Canton), a major city near British Hong Kong, and later in Shanghai. He told farmers to "dare to be rich," and allowed the privatization of land: between 1978 and 1984, as farmers responded to the change and 93% of Chinese agriculture came under private control; food production exploded by 50%. Deng mandated "Four Modernizations" in

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A lone protester faces down a tank at Tiananmen

Square, 1989. He was dragged away and later

died in a prison camp.

the areas of agriculture, technology, industry, and the military. Between 1980 and 1993, the country's overall national production doubled. By the late 1980s, the Chinese allowed foreign investment and even created a stock exchange in Shanghai. In the course of little more than a decade, China became a major player in the world economy and a major trade partner with the United States and Europe. As the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s, some experts – and some Chinese - optimistically hoped the communist party leaders of China would give way to less repressive, more democratic and humane policies as well. In 1989, during a visit by Mikhail Gorbachev, Chinese students staged a massive rally with more than 100,000 protesters in Tiananmen Square, the main plaza in Beijing. For several days the pro-democracy protesters gave speeches, protested corruption within the party, and made emotional appeals for democratic reform. Some remembered that the communist movement in China had begun with student protests in 1919 and hoped for a repeat of history. The protests spread to twenty cities. But Deng ordered an armed crackdown, and the military crushed the peaceful protest with tear gas and tanks. Five thousand protesters were killed and many more were arrested. The latter eventually disappeared in the labor camps of the desert gulag in China’s remote Xiajiang region, where goods were produced by the slave labor of tortured dissidents. While profit might have become legal, liberty of expression and freedom of speech were not allowed. Hegemony of the Han Deng died in 1997, but his successors seem to be continuing the policy of capitalization under totalitarianism. At the time of Deng’s death, China had just reacquired the British colony of Hong Kong and, a year later, the former Portuguese colony of Macao. Both were allowed to keep their free economy and, at first, their political liberty. China was run by a series of presidents who had limited terms; it seemed that the Party, rather than a single leader, would continue to run China. By the 2000s, China had become as economically powerful as the United States and Europe with a growing middle class of entrepreneurs and technological innovators. But China continued to harass and arrest any dissidents. It built a “surveillance state” of closed circuit cameras, secret police, and a censored internet. In Hong Kong and Macao, complaints about the Beijing government resulted in arrests and crack downs. Minority ethnic groups – notably Tibetans and Muslims in the far western part of China – face discrimination in favor of ethnic “Han” Chinese culture. And the Chinese rhetoric

became more assertive about foreign presence in Asia. They continued to claim Taiwan was a rebel state and resented any hint of Taiwan being treated by the West as a sovereign state. They set about building a more advanced navy and asserted rights over disputed islands in the South China Sea. In 2013, a new and more assertive leader, Xi Jinping (2013 - present)5 openly declared China as a great power, especially in its traditional sphere of East Asia. Xi declared that East Asia was the Chinese “sphere of influence,” and not a place for the United states to

5 Xi is the family name; Asian cultures place the family name first, rather than last; so it’s Mr. Xi

(pronounced: Zhee).

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flex its muscles anymore. China is a major supplier of arms to nations that oppose the United States, such as North Korea, Libya, Sudan, and especially the growing regional power of Iran. Lately it has been claiming exclusive rights in the South China Sea over international waters, a claim disputed by Vietnam, the Philippines and the United States; the possible presence of oil supplies under the waters may be motivating China. Under Xi, there has been a crackdown on what few civil liberties existed and the Muslim Uighur minority in western China has been severely persecuted, including mass incarcerations in “reeducation” camps. In 2018, Xi changed the constitution to expand his power and give himself an unlimited term in office as leader. Among the Han Chinese, the new prosperity has made many willing to accept the continuance of one party rule under the imperial Xi Jinping. China has worked to improve its global outreach. It has tried to restrain dangerous North Korean dictators, attracted the Olympiad in 2008, and opened itself more to global trade and investment. Chinese money and technicians have begun to influence economies and governments in Africa (where in 2017 it opened its first international military base in Djibouti), South Asia, South America, and even eastern Europe. However, China’s reputation was damaged by the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic, a severe flu virus that originated in China. Xi’s bureaucrats suppressed early warnings by doctors in the Wuhan region where it began, and only belatedly responded. The virus killed thousands and caused a massive global downturn as nations ordered unprecedented quarantines, severely damaging the global economy, at least in the short-term. China has embarked on history’s most expensive foreign infrastructure plan. Under the Belt and Road Initiative, building bridges, railways, and ports in Asia, Africa, and beyond. If the initiative’s cost reaches a trillion dollars, as predicted, it will be more than seven times that of the American 1947 Marshall Plan did to rebuild post-WW2 Europe. Many observers see this as China’s attempt to become the new global power, or even an imperial power through economics. With the largest, fastest growing economy, and with a military capability rapidly expanding its ability to project power beyond East Asia, 21st century China may be the biggest challenge to the post-Cold War dominance of the United States.

Conclusions The old bipolar Cold War World is gone and although the U.S. is without peer in raw power, it has found, like Gulliver in Lilliput, that it can be frustrating and baffling to be the lone giant. Old allies are no longer willing to follow the American lead and new rivals are appearing motivated by nationalism rather than abstract theory. In some ways, the new world is a lot like the old, 19th century world of multiple “great powers,” which is more confusing or complex than the simple two-sided days of the Cold War. In terms of the global geopolitical picture, it may be as the old Chinese curse says: “May you live in interesting times.”

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Words in courier italic font have been added by A. Frye.

Chapter 23 PRIMARY DOCUMENTS

Making China Great Again Evan Osnos The New Yorker, January 2018

China has never seen such a moment, when its pursuit of a larger role in the world coincides with America’s pursuit of a smaller one. Ever since the Second World War, the United States has advocated an international order based on a free press and judiciary, human rights, free trade, and protection of the environment. It planted those ideas in the rebuilding of Germany and Japan, and spread them with alliances around the world.

…(But) in a speech to Communist Party officials January 20th, Major General Jin Yinan, a strategist at China’s National Defense University, celebrated America’s pullout from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. “We are quiet about it,” he said. “We repeatedly state that Trump ‘harms China.’ We want to keep it that way. In fact, he has given China a huge gift. That is the American withdrawal from T.P.P.” Jin, whose remarks later circulated, told his audience, “As the U.S. retreats globally, China shows up.”

For years, China’s leaders predicted that a time would come—perhaps midway through this century—when it could project its own values abroad. In the age of “America First,” that time has come far sooner than expected. China’s approach is more ambitious. In recent years, it has taken steps to accrue national power on a scale that no country has attempted since the Cold War, by increasing its investments in the types of assets that established American authority in the previous century: foreign aid, overseas security, foreign influence, and the most advanced new technologies, such as artificial intelligence. It has become one of the leading contributors to the U.N.’s budget (as the U.S. plans to cut its contribution by 40%) and to its peacekeeping force, and it has joined talks to address global problems such as terrorism, piracy, and nuclear proliferation.

China is negotiating with at least sixteen countries to form the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a free-trade zone that excludes the United States, which it proposed in 2012 as a response to the T.P.P. If the deal is signed next year, as projected, it will create the world’s largest trade bloc, by population.

Some of China’s growing sway is unseen by the public. In October, the World Trade Organization convened ministers from nearly forty countries in Marrakech, Morocco, for the kind of routine diplomatic session that updates rules on trade in agriculture and seafood. The Trump Administration, which has been critical of the W.T.O., sent an official who delivered a speech and departed early. “For two days of meetings, there were no Americans,” a former U.S. official told me. “And the Chinese were going into every session and chortling about how they were now guarantors of the trading system.”

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By setting more of the world’s rules, China hopes to “break the Western moral advantage,” which identifies “good and bad” political systems, as Li Ziguo, at the China Institute of International Studies, has said. In November, 2016, Meng Hongwei, a Chinese vice-minister of public security, became the first Chinese president of Interpol, the international police organization; the move alarmed human-rights groups, because Interpol has been criticized for helping authoritarian governments target and harass dissidents and pro-democracy activists abroad.

By some measures, the U.S. will remain dominant for years to come. It has at least twelve aircraft carriers. China has two. The U.S. has collective defense treaties with more than fifty countries. China has one, with North Korea. Moreover, China’s economic path is complicated by heavy debts, bloated state-owned enterprises, rising inequality, and slowing growth. The workers who once powered China’s boom are graying. China’s air, water, and soil are disastrously polluted.

And yet the gap has narrowed. In 2000, the U.S. accounted for 31% of the global economy, and China accounted for 4%. Today, the U.S.’s share is 24% and China’s 15%. If its economy surpasses America’s in size, as experts predict, it will be the first time in more than a century that the world’s largest economy belongs to a non-democratic country. At that point, China will play a larger role in shaping, or thwarting, values such as competitive elections, freedom of expression, and an open Internet.

On his recent visit to Washington, Prime Minister Lee, of Singapore, said that the rest of the world can no longer pretend to ignore the contrasts between American and Chinese leadership. “Since the war, you’ve held the peace. You’ve provided security. You’ve opened your markets. You’ve developed links across the Pacific,” he said. “And now, with a rising set of players on the west coast of the Pacific, where does America want to go? Do you want to be engaged?” He went on, “If you are not there, then everybody else in the world will look around and say, I want to be friends with both the U.S. and the Chinese—and the Chinese are ready, and I’ll start with them.”

Xi Jinping started his second term with more unobstructed power than any Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping, who died in 1997. The Nineteenth Party Congress, held in October, had the spirit of a coronation, in which the Party declared Xi the “core leader,” an honor conferred only three other times since the founding of the nation (on Mao Zedong, Deng, and Jiang Zemin), and added “Xi Jinping Thought” to its constitution—effectively allowing him to hold power for life, if he chooses.

For decades, China avoided directly challenging America’s primacy in the global order, instead pursuing a strategy that Deng, in 1990, called “hide your strength and bide your time.” But Xi, in his speech to the Party Congress, declared the dawn of “a new era,” one in which China moves “closer to center stage.” He presented China as “a new option for other countries,” calling this alternative to Western democracy the zhongguo fang’an, the “Chinese solution.”

Xi has inscribed on his country a rigid vision of modernity. A campaign to clean up “low-end population” has evicted migrant workers from Beijing, and a campaign against dissent has evicted the most outspoken intellectuals from online debate. The Party is reaching deeper into private institutions. Foreign universities with programs in China, such as Duke, have been advised that they must elevate a Communist Party secretary to a decision-making role on their local boards of trustees. The Party is encouraging dark imaginings about the outside world: posters warn the public to “protect national secrets” and to watch out for “spies.” Beijing is more convenient than it was not long ago, but also less thrilling; it has gained wealth but lost some of its improvisational energy.

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In concrete terms, why does it matter if America retreats and China advances? One realm in which the effects are visible is technology, where Chinese and American companies are competing not simply for profits but also to shape the rules concerning privacy, fairness, and censorship. China bars eleven of the world’s twenty-five most popular Web sites—including Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia—because it fears they will dominate local competitors or amplify dissent. The Chinese government has promoted that approach under a doctrine that it calls “cyber-sovereignty.” In December, China hosted an Internet conference that attracted American C.E.O.s such as Tim Cook, of Apple, even though China has forced Apple to remove apps that allow users to circumvent the “Great Firewall.”

In Beijing, I hailed a cab and headed to the northwest corner of the city, where a Chinese company called SenseTime is working on facial recognition, a field at the intersection of science and individual rights. The company was founded in 2014 by Tang Xiao’ou, a computer scientist who trained at M.I.T. and returned to Hong Kong to teach. (For years, China’s startups lagged behind those in Silicon Valley. But there is more parity now. Of the forty-one private companies worldwide that reached “unicorn” status in 2017—meaning they had valuations of a billion dollars or more—fifteen are Chinese and seventeen are American.)

SenseTime’s offices have a sleek, industrial look. Nobody wears an identification badge, because cameras recognize employees, causing doors to open. I was met there by June Jin, the chief marketing officer, who earned an M.B.A. at the University of Chicago and worked at Microsoft, Apple, and Tesla. Jin walked me over to a display of lighthearted commercial uses of facial-recognition technology. I stepped before a machine, which resembled a slender A.T.M., that assessed my “happiness” and other attributes, guessed that I am a thirty-three-year-old male, and, based on that information, played me an advertisement for skateboarding attire. When I stepped in front of it again, it revised its calculation to forty-one years old, and played me an ad for liquor. (I was, at the time, forty.) The machines are used in restaurants to entertain waiting guests. But they contain a hidden element of artificial intelligence as well: images are collected and compared with a facial database of V.I.P. customers. “A waiter or waitress comes up and maybe we get you a seat,” Jin said. “That’s the beauty of A.I.”

Next, Jin showed me how the technology is used by police. She said, “We work very closely with the Public Security Bureau,” which applies SenseTime’s algorithms to millions of photo I.D.s. As a demonstration, using the company’s employee database, a video screen displayed a live feed of a busy intersection nearby. “In real time, it captures all the attributes of the cars and pedestrians,” she said. On an adjoining screen, a Pac-Man-like trail indicated a young man’s movements around the city, based only on his face. Jin said, “It can match a suspect with a criminal database. If the similarity level is over a certain threshold, then they can make an arrest on the spot.” She continued, “We work with more than forty police bureaus nationwide. Guangdong Province is always very open-minded and embracing technology, so, last year alone, we helped the Guangdong police bureau solve many crimes.”

In the city of Shenzhen, the local government uses facial recognition to deter jaywalkers. At busy intersections, it posts their names and I.D. pictures on a screen at the roadside. In Beijing, the government uses facial-recognition machines in public rest rooms to stop people from stealing toilet paper; it limits users to sixty centimetres within a nine-minute period.

China’s effort to extend its reach has been so rapid that it is fuelling a backlash. Australian media have uncovered efforts by China’s Communist Party to influence Australia’s government. In December, Sam Dastyari, a member of the Australian Senate, resigned after revelations that he warned one of his donors, a businessman tied to China’s foreign-influence efforts, that his phone was

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likely tapped by intelligence agencies. Australia’s Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, announced a ban on foreign political donations, citing “disturbing reports about Chinese influence.”

Foreign governments and human-rights groups have expressed alarm that Beijing is pursuing critics beyond its borders and bringing them to mainland China for detention. One night last January, unidentified men escorted a Chinese-Canadian billionaire, Xiao Jianhua, from a Hong Kong hotel, in a wheelchair, with a sheet over his head. (His whereabouts are unknown.) In several cases, beginning in 2015, the publishers of books critical of China’s leaders were abducted from Hong Kong and Thailand, without public extradition procedures.

Across Asia, there is wariness of China’s intentions. Under the Belt and Road Initiative, it has loaned so much money to its neighbors that critics liken the debt to a form of imperialism. When Sri Lanka couldn’t repay loans on a deepwater port, China took majority ownership of the project, stirring protests about interference in Sri Lanka’s sovereignty. China also has a reputation for taking punitive economic action when a smaller country offends its politics. After the Nobel Prize was awarded to the dissident Liu Xiaobo, China stopped trade talks with Norway for nearly seven years; during a territorial dispute with the Philippines, China cut off banana imports; in a dispute with South Korea, it restricted tourism and closed Korean discount stores.

In dozens of interviews in China and the U.S., I encountered almost no one who expects China to supplant the U.S. anytime soon in its role as the world’s preeminent power. Beyond China’s economic obstacles, its political system—including constraints on speech, religion, civil society, and the Internet—drives away some of the country’s boldest and most entrepreneurial thinkers. Xi’s system inspires envy from autocrats, but little admiration from ordinary citizens around the world. And for all of Xi’s talk of a “Chinese solution,” China has yet to mount serious responses to global problems, such as the refugee crisis or Syria’s civil war. Global leadership is costly; it means asking your people to contribute to others’ well-being, to send young soldiers to die far from home. In 2015, when Xi pledged billions of dollars in loan forgiveness and additional aid for African nations, some in China grumbled that their country was not yet rich enough to do that. China is not “seeking to replace us in the same position as a kind of chairman of planet Earth,” Daniel Russel said. “They have no intention of emulating the U.S. as a provider of global goods or as an arbiter who teases out universal principles and common rules.”

More likely, the world is entering an era without obvious leaders, an “age of nonpolarity,” as Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has described it, in which nationalist powers—China, the U.S., Russia—contend with non-state groups of every moral stripe, from Doctors Without Borders to Facebook, and ExxonMobil to Boko Haram. It is natural for Americans to mourn that prospect, but Shivshankar Menon, India’s former foreign secretary, suspects that the U.S. will retain credibility and leadership. “The U.S. is the only power that I know of which is capable of turning on a dime, with a process of self-examination,” he said. “Within two years of entering Iraq, there were people within the system saying, ‘Are we doing the right thing?’” He has seen the country recover before: “Three times just in my lifetime. I was in the U.S. in ’68, on the West Coast. I’ve seen what the U.S. did in the eighties to reinvent itself. What it did after 2008 is remarkable. For me, this comes and goes. The U.S. can afford it.”

Menon continued, “I think we’re going back to actually the historic norm, separate multiverses, rather than one, which was an exception. If you go back to the concept of Europe in the nineteenth century, people basically lived in different worlds and had very controlled interactions with each other. China is not going to take responsibility for everything that happens in the Middle East or South America.”

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Late one afternoon in November, I went to see a professor in Beijing who has studied the U.S. for a long time. America’s recent political turmoil has disoriented him. “I’m struggling with this a lot,” he said, and poured me a cup of tea. “I love the United States. I used to think that the multiculturalism of the U.S. might work here. But, if it doesn’t work there, then it won’t work here.” In his view, the original American bond is dissolving. “In the past, you kept together because of common values that you call freedom,” he said. Emerging in its place is a cynical, zero-sum politics, a return to blood and soil, which privileges interests above inspiration.

In that sense, he observed, the biggest surprise in the relationship between China and the United States is their similarity. In both countries, people who are infuriated by profound gaps in wealth and opportunity have pinned their hopes on nationalist, nostalgic leaders, who encourage them to visualize threats from the outside world. “China, Russia, and the U.S. are moving in the same direction,” he said. “They’re all trying to be great again.”

The Soviet Union Is Gone, But It’s Still Collapsing

And 5 other unlearned lessons from leading experts about modern Russia and the death of an empire. (Foreign Policy Magazine, various, December 2016).

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the creation of 15 new countries in December 1991 remade the world overnight. The Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation disappeared, and democracy and free-markets spread across the now defeated Soviet empire. Of course, 25 years later, events didn’t exactly unfold as initially predicted. The forces of globalization have mutated former Soviet countries in unseen ways, emboldening autocrats and entrenching corruption across the region. Meanwhile, the geopolitical animosities of the Cold War are resurgent, with relations between Moscow and Washington at their lowest point since the Soviet-era arms race. The creation of new countries, meanwhile, has given rise to nationalism and autocracies that are shaping foreign-policy decisions and altering societies in unforeseen ways.

Yet, the significance of this quarter-century of change is still not fully understood. Why did the Soviet Union really collapse and what lessons have policymakers missed? How is history repeating itself across the lands of the former superpower? In search of answers, Foreign Policy asked six experts with intimate knowledge of the region from their time in finance, academia, journalism, and policymaking. Here are the unlearned lessons from the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union Is Still Collapsing Serhii Plokhy

The 20th century witnessed the end of the world built and ruled by empires: from Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, which fell in the final days of World War I, to the British and French empires, which disintegrated in the aftermath of World War II. This decades-long process concluded with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the mighty successor to the Russian Empire, which was stitched back together by the Bolsheviks in the early 1920s, only to fall apart 70 years later during the final stage of the Cold War.

Although many factors contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union, from the bankruptcy of communist ideology to the failure of the Soviet economy, the wider context for its dissolution is often overlooked. The collapse of the Soviet Union, like the disintegration of past empires, is a process rather than an event. And the collapse of the last empire is still unfolding today. This process did not end with Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation on Christmas Day 1991, and its victims are not

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limited to the three people who died defending the Moscow White House in August 1991 or the thousands of casualties from the Chechen wars.

The rise of nation-states on the ruins of the Soviet Union, like the rise of successor states on the remains of every other empire, mobilized ethnicity, nationalism, and conflicting territorial claims. This process at least partly explains the Russian annexation of Crimea, the war in Ukraine, and the burst of popular support for those acts of aggression in the Russian Federation. As the victim of a much more powerful neighbor’s attack, Ukraine found itself in a situation similar to that of the new states of Eastern Europe formed after World War I on the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires. Those states struggled with the enormous tasks of nation building while trying to accommodate national minorities and defend themselves against revanchist powers claiming the loyalty of those same minorities.

Although the historical context of the collapse of empires helps us understand the developments of the last 25 years in the former Soviet space, it also serves as a warning for the future. The redrawing of post-imperial borders to reflect the importance of nationality, language, and culture has generally come about as a result of conflicts and wars, some of which went on for decades, if not centuries. The Ottoman Empire began its slow-motion collapse in 1783, a process that reached its conclusion at the end of World War I. The ongoing war in eastern Ukraine is not the only reminder that the process of Soviet disintegration is still incomplete. Other such reminders are the frozen or semi-frozen conflicts in Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the semi-independent state of Chechnya.

A lesson that today’s policymakers can learn from the history of imperial collapse is that the role of the international community is paramount in sorting out relations between former rulers and subjects. Few stable states have emerged from the ruins of bygone empires without strong international support, whether it is the French role in securing American independence, Russian and British involvement in the struggle for Greek statehood, or the U.S. role in supporting the aspirations of former Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe. The role of outsiders has been and will remain the key to any post-imperial settlement. Looking at the current situation, it’s difficult to overstate the role the United States and its NATO allies can play in solving the conflict in Ukraine and other parts of the volatile post-Soviet space. The fall of the Soviet Union, which carried the legacy of the last European empire, is still far from over.

Serhii Plokhy is the professor of history and director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. He is the author of "The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union," "The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine," and his latest book is "The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story."

Abandonment Has Consequences Bill Browder

When the Soviet Union collapsed 25 years ago, the world breathed a collective sigh of relief as the threat of nuclear annihilation was all but eliminated. Russia transitioned into a democracy, and the West could refocus its efforts on peace and prosperity. In the process, however, the pendulum swung from intense anxiety toward Moscow to inattention and neglect.

Unfortunately, while the West was ignoring Russia, it was quietly mutating into something far more dangerous than the Soviet Union. With no real laws or institutions, 22 Russian oligarchs stole 40 percent of the country’s wealth from the state. The other 150 million Russians were left in destitution and poverty, and the average life expectancy for men dropped from 65 to 57 years. Professors had to earn a living as taxi drivers; nurses became prostitutes. The entire fabric of Russian society broke

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down. Meanwhile, the West wasn’t just ignoring the looting of Russia; it was actively facilitating it. Western banks accepted pilfered funds from Russian clients, and Western real estate agencies welcomed oligarchs to buy their most coveted properties in St-Tropez, Miami, and London.

The injustice of it all was infuriating for average Russians, and they longed for a strongman to restore order. In 1999, they found one: Vladimir Putin. Rather than restoring order, however, Putin replaced the 22 oligarchs with himself alone at the top. From my own research, I estimate that in his 18 years in power he has stolen $200 billion from the Russian people. Putin did allow a fraction of Russia’s oil wealth to seep into the population — just enough to prevent an uprising, but nowhere near enough to reverse the horrible injustice of the situation. But that didn’t last long either. As the oil boom waned, the suffering of ordinary Russians resumed, and people took to the streets in 2011 and 2012 to protest his rule. Putin’s method of dealing with an angry population comes from the standard dictator playbook: If your people are mad at you, start wars. This was the real reason behind his invasion of Ukraine, and it worked amazingly well: Putin’s approval rating skyrocketed from 65 percent to 89 percent in a few months.

In response to the annexation of Crimea, the war in Ukraine, and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which killed 298 innocent people, the West had no choice but to respond with a range of sanctions against Russia. These sanctions, combined with the collapse of oil prices, led to more economic hardship, which made the Russian people even angrier. So Putin started another war, this time in Syria.

The problem the world now faces is that Putin has effectively backed himself into a corner. Unlike any normal world leader, he cannot gracefully retire — he would lose his money, face imprisonment, or even be killed by his enemies. Therefore, what started out as a profit-maximizing endeavor for Putin has transformed into an exercise in world domination to ensure his survival.

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the West still faces a menacing threat from the Kremlin. It is now driven by kleptocracy rather than communist ideology. But it is still the same menace, with the same nuclear weapons, and an extremely dangerous attitude. The real tragedy is that if Western governments hadn’t tolerated Russian kleptocracy over the last quarter century, we wouldn’t be where we are today. But as long as Putin and his cronies continue to keep their money safe in Western banks, there is still leverage: Assets can be frozen, and accounts can be refused. If one lesson is to be taken from the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is that we in the West cannot continue to keep our heads in the sand and ignore kleptocracy in Russia, because the consequences are disastrous.

Bill Browder is the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management and the head of the Global Campaign for Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Ideology Should Not Guide Foreign Policy Dmitri Trenin

The Soviet Union saw itself as an ideological power. Moscow believed that communism offered, as the old communist slogan went, a “bright future for all humanity.” Leaders in Moscow were convinced that communism was the right recipe for any country, regardless of history, development, or culture — and 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet empire, that misplaced logic is still shaping events around the globe.

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The Soviet Union’s first major success in communism promotion came in Mongolia, where Moscow prided itself in shifting the country from feudalism to socialism by the late 1930s. After World War II, in addition to Eastern Europe and East Asia, Soviet-sponsored regimes spread across the globe, from Latin America to East Africa, with nominal success.

But then came Afghanistan in 1979. Moscow went in first to ensure that leaders in Kabul remained loyal to the Soviet Union, but once it was in, the mission changed to helping the Afghans build a state and society based on the Soviet model, like it did in Mongolia. It was in Afghanistan that the Soviet Union discovered the power of militant Islam and eventually understood that it was so much easier to invade a deeply religious country than to reshape its society. By the time Moscow sent military forces into the country, the Soviet Union had revealed its cardinal weakness: imperial overreach. Moscow was already beginning to struggle to keep in line its allies in Eastern Europe — and to support dozens of client states across the globe.

Discontent at home was grossly enhanced by the war in Afghanistan, which was both costly and unnecessary. At the same time, the Soviet economy had run out of steam by the 1980s, with infrastructure crumbling and popular rancor growing. The cost of supporting a long list of satellites and surrogates was sapping the finances of the Soviet Union. Moscow, which had always been wary of borrowing abroad, began to take more and more loans. In the final years of the Soviet Union, its foreign policy was heavily influenced by the constant need to seek more funding from abroad: The pace of domestic liberalization was increased, steps toward the German reunification were taken, and Moscow did not intervene when Eastern Europe pursued its own political course in the 1980s.

The lessons from this historical episode apply first of all to the Russian Federation, the successor to the Soviet Union. It immediately rejected any state ideology, abandoning not only the global empire but also the lands traditionally seen as Russia’s historical heartland, such as Ukraine. Twenty-five years later, as it seeks to rebuild itself as a global great power, Russia is realizing that founding an empire under a different name is not in the cards. Having entered the war in Syria, Russia has also made it clear from the start that it will not send in its ground forces, lest Syria becomes another Afghanistan.

But the lessons shouldn’t be limited to the former Soviet space. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. U.S. interventions in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 developed into massive nation-building projects under the guise of democracy — at great human and financial cost. Any ideology, not just communist, is a poor guide for foreign policy. Foreign military misadventures result in disappointment at home and loss of prestige abroad. And a growing national debt is a ticking bomb that threatens the very stability of the state.

In the end, the Soviet Union paid the ultimate price for its imperial hubris.

Dmitri Trenin is the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center and served in the Soviet and Russian armed forces from 1972 to 1993. His latest book is "Should We Fear Russia?."