Gus > Russia might find it more awkward to bully China than the fretful Europeans...
Au contraire, Russia and China are the best of friends. This is from 2001 already, before 9/11 in fact.
archive.newsmax.com
>>Analysis: China, Russia sewing up Eurasia
WASHINGTON -- One of the most important foreign-policy articles to appear in the mainstream U.S. press in years ran in the Outlook section of the Washington Post on Sunday.
At a time when triumphal voices still dominate the American media about the United States' apparently eternal global leadership, the article served notice that under President Bush that clout is vanishing faster than morning dew in the Sahara.
Constantine Menges was a special assistant for national security affairs to President Ronald Reagan 20 years ago and is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington. He warned U.S. policy-makers that the Shanghai Pact, signed on June 15 by Russia, China and four Central Asian nations between them, is the foundation of a Eurasian military-geostrategic alliance.
The agreement aims, Menges wrote, to sweep U.S. influence out of the Eurasian heartland and, eventually, contain and isolate the United States, just as the NATO alliance eventually did to the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. Menges noted that the Shanghai Pact nations already have a combined population of 1.5 billion and combined conventional military manpower of 3.6 million. He also noted that Iran, Mongolia and Turkmenistan have already made clear they want to join the pact, a development that would add another 78 million people to the pact and raise its combined military forces to 4.2 million.
The pact was overshadowed at the time in Western (especially American) eyes by Bush's supposedly triumphal trip through Europe.
The presidential travels were notable first for Bush's blanket dismissal of the concerns of all 15 European Union heads of government over his policies on missile defense and global warming. At the Slovenian castle of Brdo, he then met President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who had flown in right after signing the historic Shanghai Pact session with Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
Right after Putin had joined the most far-reaching military alliance in 46 years to counter and threaten U.S. global power since the 1955 Warsaw Pact, Bush proclaimed him a man worthy of his trust. The U.S. president then announced he had a sense of the soul of the former director of the Russian domestic security service and KGB spy. Bush also announced during that trip - his first to Europe as president - in a speech clearly meant to be historic in the Polish capital, Warsaw, that he supported continued expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. What that effectively meant was that Bush would push to get the three Baltic states - Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, with their combined population of barely 7 million - into the alliance set up to counter the Soviet Union, from which all three declared independence in 1991.
The combined military power that the three former Soviet republics would bring to NATO is precisely zero. The already-real military might that Russia and China bring to each other in the Shanghai Pact is awesome. The military power of the United States is shrinking by the day. And if Bush and his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, have their way, it is going to very rapidly shrink a lot further.
Rumsfeld needs to save money out of the annual U.S. defense budget to pay for the anti-ballistic missile program he so loves. He also needs to do so because of the fiscal constraints of Bush's $1.3 trillion tax cut, which is already law.
Therefore the defense secretary has already announced that he wants to scrap the doctrine that U.S. armed forces must - at least in theory - be capable of fighting two conventional wars at the same time.
But translated into plain language out of the soothing mantras of Pentagon strategists and White House spin doctors, this represents a stark and simple reality: If Iraq threatens Kuwait and China threatens Taiwan at the same time, the United States will only be able to deploy full military power to protect or rescue one of those small allies at the same time.
The creation of the Shanghai Pact makes such a grim scenario far more likely. As Menges pointed out in his Washington Post essay, it appears to have been deliberately modeled on the Warsaw Pact, except on a far grander scale.
And just as the Warsaw Pact codified and confirmed, for another 35 years, Soviet military and political control of Central Europe, the Shanghai Pact is expressly designed to nail down joint Russian-Chinese control of the vast regions of Eurasia.
The very fact that it has been signed, combined with the continued shrinkage in conventional U.S. military capabilities decreed by Bush and Rumsfeld, has another geostrategic consequence that has already begun.
Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, may continue to echo the empty rhetoric of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that the United States remains the indispensable global power. But the cold geopolitical reality - thanks to Shanghai - is that, across at least 11 of the 24 time zones of the earth, the United States has already been dispensed with.
From its NATO allies Poland in Central Europe and Turkey in the Middle East, Washington has no effective or reliable allies all the way to South Korea on the northeastern fringe of Asia.
Turkey already faces the prospect of being denied entry into the European Union by France, Germany and Greece. And South Korea, dependent on the good will of neighboring giant China and historically distrustful of democratic, pro-U.S. Japan, is likely to face steadily increasing pressure from Beijing, backed by her Shanghai partners, to force out the 37,000 U.S. troops still stationed there.
While most of the U.S. media shrugged off the significance of the Shanghai Pact, we did not. The Russia-China partnership has global implications. It means U.S. economic and strategic interests in Central Asia may already be assessed as dead. And, as Menges noted, the threat to U.S. global leadership does not end there. In fact, it's just the beginning.<< |
