Northern Security and Global Politics

Ann-Sofie Dahl, Pauli Järvenpää

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135005344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book takes a comprehensive approach to security in the Nordic-Baltic region, studying how this region is affected by developments in the international system.

The advent of the new millennium coincided with the return of the High North to the world stage. A number of factors have contributed to the increased international interest for the northern part of Europe: climate change resulting in ice melting in Greenland and the Arctic, and new resources and shipping routes opening up across the polar basin foremost among them. The world is no longer "unipolar" and not yet "multipolar, " but perhaps "post-unipolar", indicating a period of flux and of declining US unipolar hegemony.

Drawing together contributions from key thinkers in the field, Northern Security and Global Politics explores how this situation has affected the Nordic-Baltic area by addressing two broad sets of questions. First, it examines what impact declining unipolarity - with a geopolitical shift to Asia, a reduced role for Europe in United States policy, and a more assertive Russia - will have on regional Nordic-Baltic security. Second, it takes a closer look at how the regional actors respond to these changes in their strategic environment.

This book will be of much interest to students of Nordic and Baltic politics, international security, foreign policy and IR.

Part I

From unipolar to post-unipolar

The US, Russia and the Nordic–Baltic region

The geopolitical role of the Nordic–Baltic region is undergoing a profound change, as the impact of globalization, climate change, and a rekindling of great power interests are combined. The exploration of ocean-bottom treasures – oil, gas and precious minerals – in tremendous quantities, and facilitated by new shipping routes passable the year around, have attracted intense attention from great powers to the region, and the High North in particular.

This development has largely coincided with what appears to be the end of the “unipolar moment”. The global rise of terrorism, an international finance crisis, and the rise of potential contenders of power – a number of emerging powers such as China, India, Russia and Brazil – seem to indicate that the United States’ influence is rapidly shrinking to a point where it no longer enjoys a position of primacy in the world.

But is there really an ongoing change from a unipolar system to a post-unipolar one, and what is the meaning of these concepts? Is the United States losing interest in certain areas of the world – such as the Nordic–Baltic region – now that its power is no longer omnipotent, and its strategic focus is increasingly on Asia? Is the change in the strategic role of the North reflected in the policies of the United States and her allies? What is the view in NATO capitals on the build-up of Russian and Chinese interests in the broader region? Is there a role for NATO in the Arctic? And, last but not least: what is the perspective in Moscow?

Abstract for the chapter but web only

1 American power in a post-unipolar world¹

Robert Lieber

In the aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the international distribution of power no longer appeared to be bipolar, but unipolar. In reality, these descriptive terms were and are reductive, in that they greatly over-simplify far more complex realities. Nonetheless, the United States did enjoy a unique position. More than two decades later, however, assessments of America’s role and of its power have changed dramatically. If descriptions of the United States in the 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century were often hyperbolic in expressions of awe about the size, power, and capacity of the United States, they have now shifted in the opposite direction, once again exaggerating America’s condition and role, but now depicting the country as in a state of fundamental decline at home and receding influence abroad.

I discuss below how these depictions of decline have become excessive. They tend to project the future based on short-sighted extrapolation of current trends and to be driven primarily by an emphasis on America’s recent problems of debt and deficit along with its lagging economic growth rate. Such assessments overlook longer term and more fundamental patterns, especially the experience of the United States in overcoming much greater challenges in earlier eras. They also overstate the degree of erosion in America’s standing and undervalue its enormous underlying strengths in economic size, technological and scientific innovation, competitiveness, population and demography, military power, a noisy but robust democracy, the rule of law, and a flexibility and adaptability unique for a major power.

Despite the rise of China and other emerging regional states, as well as a degree of attrition in its relative power, America retains a very substantial edge when compared with other international actors. In short, the United States is not destined to decline. To the extent that the American future remains in question, the determining factors are more likely to be those of ideas, beliefs and leadership rather than the economic and material dimensions that have attracted so much attention in recent years.

Assessing the American future

Long-term predictions are notoriously hard to get right, as evident in repeated warnings and prophecies about American decline from the late eighteenth century to the present. Samuel Huntington, writing nearly a quarter century ago, identified no fewer than five waves of contemporary declinism: in 1957–8 after the Soviet launching of Sputnik; in 1969–71 when President Nixon proclaimed the end of the bipolar world and abandoned the gold standard; in 1973–4 in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War and a serious oil shock; in the late 1970s after Vietnam, Watergate, and a burst of Soviet assertiveness; and in 1987 with major budget and trade deficits, the rise of Japan, and an October 1987 stock market crash.² And yet, the decade ended not with the demise of the United States, but with the opening of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, and an emerging consensus about American primacy and unipolarity.

Since that time, assessments of the United States have continued to oscillate, whether expressed in terms of its extraordinary power and influence or, in warning of its vulnerability and weakness. With the beginning of the 1990s, in the aftermath of the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait and the breakup of the Soviet Union, observers of America who only a few years earlier had offered gloomy forecasts now described the US as the lone superpower, not just in military and geopolitical terms, but in the triumph of the American model of market capitalism and liberal democracy.³

In the following years, the “Washington consensus” was trumpeted as the only viable course for countries wishing to meet the needs of their people for economic development and prosperity. By the middle of the decade, the notion of overwhelming American primacy across the multiple dimensions by which world power is measured had become a given. This was evident not only on the part of those who embraced it, but also by critics who pointed with alarm at this predominance and its implications. Characteristically, a French foreign minister complained about this “hyperpower”.⁴

Especially in the academic world, but not only there, the end of the Cold War and the appearance of a seemingly unipolar era gave rise to proclamations of a “new world order” in which traditional security concerns were becoming outmoded. The phrase was most notably used by President George H.W. Bush in a March 1991 speech following the success of Operation Desert Storm, but the idea was amplified in post-Cold War discourse among academics, public intellectuals and foreign observers, who emphasized the “new” security issues such as civilian power, development, globalization, disease, the environment, national and cultural identities as increasingly central in world affairs. International institutions and global governance became the framework for this discourse. In the meantime, traditional security concerns were labeled as “old thinking”.

The sobering reality of the 1990s, however, was that hard power retained its critical importance. The ability of the UN Security Council to arrive at a common position on the use of force to remove Saddam from Kuwait provided not the harbinger of a new global order, but a rare exception. Instead, ethnic cleansing, civil wars, and the consequences of state failure became brutally apparent in places such as Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, the Congo, and Kosovo. The lesson here and often elsewhere was that the alternative to leadership or involvement by the United States in urgent and deadly crises was not that the UN, various multilateral institutions, or some other powerful state would take the lead in maintaining order, but was more likely to be inaction and often tragedy.

Flawed assumptions about global governance were not the only misconception. At the same time, insufficient attention was paid to a different kind of gathering threat. Evidence of radical jihadist terrorism was increasingly apparent, but was not accorded the priority it deserved. Ominous signs were there: in the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center, the 1996 suicide truck bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. There was also Osama bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of jihad against the Americans and the “Judeo-Crusader alliance”.⁵ Much more common as an expression of the decade’s optimism about globalization was the sentiment voiced by President Bill Clinton: “In the new century, liberty will be spread by cell phone and cable modem.”⁶

The shock of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon defined much of the following decade for the United States, but – yet again – in successively contradictory terms. The ousting of the Taliban regime within months of the attack, followed less than 18 months later by the invasion of Iraq and the quick defeat and demise of Saddam Hussein gave rise to awed statements about America’s unparalleled power. The widely quoted words of Paul Kennedy, “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing”, typified these sentiments.⁷

Not everyone shared Kennedy’s (then) adulation, and the Bush administration itself became a lightning rod for criticism, even before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Admiring – or disparaging – depictions of the United States as at the pinnacle of world power did not outlast the decade. Growing insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, rising American and allied casualties, and failure to cope effectively with the Katrina hurricane that devastated New Orleans in August 2005 triggered an abrupt shift in perceptions of America. Suddenly, the US no longer seemed omnipotent. Reinforcing this trend was the bursting of the real estate bubble in 2007, followed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and the eruption of a full-blown financial crisis. Instead of being seen as the “hyperpower”, America was increasingly depicted in almost dire terms. Commentators and pundits shifted rapidly, no longer portraying America as uniquely dominant and powerful, but instead vulnerable and imperiled. As an example of this volatility, Eric Edelman has pointed to the sharp contrast between the 2004 report of the National Intelligence Council, Mapping the Global Future 2020, which saw unipolarity as likely to remain a persistent feature in world affairs, and the 2008 publication, Global Trends 2025, which forecast a quite different global multipolar system.⁸

The 2008 Obama election victory, which was widely embraced abroad, did not serve to stem the flood of pessimistic assessments. These intensified after the 2010 midterm election in which Democrats suffered their worst since 1938. In reaction, a leading political journalist declared that, “In this election you can glimpse the brutish future of American politics”,⁹ while a domestic critic expressed the mood on the left by proclaiming, “What this election suggests to me is that the United States may have finally lost its ability to adapt politically to the systemic crises that it has periodically faced.”¹⁰

These expressions of extraordinary primacy and then of radical decline juxtapose two forms of hyperbole – uncritical admiration and awe during the earlier part of the past decade and then exaggerated depictions of weakness and incapacity in the latter part, and both embody overreaction to immediate events.

What then can we say about the future of the Americ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I From unipolar to post-unipolar The US, Russia and the Nordic-Baltic region
• Part II Strategies in the North Nordic-Baltic perspectives
• Bibliography
• Index