In Defense of America (16 page)

Hopes that the fall of the Soviet Union would lead to the emergence of a democratic and liberal Russia are now long gone. President Putin drew for justification of his authoritarian approach on the chaos of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency and ordinary Russians’ incredulous fury at the oligarchs, who became within a few years some of the richest people on the planet. But he also drew on the hurt pride after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the belief that surely it was just a matter of time before Russia reclaimed its empire. It is a fantasy, but one that seems to have sustained Putin as he chose to step up the aggressive rhetoric against the United States in the final year of his presidency. At a dinner at his residence outside Moscow in June 2007, he used America’s plans to site missile defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic as provocation for announcing that he might point Russia’s nuclear missiles at Europe again for the first time since the end of the Cold War.
⁶

Even more striking than this declaration, which, as presumably intended, grabbed the world’s headlines for the week before the G8 summit of the biggest industrial countries, was his deep suspicion of America, which threaded through everything he said. Putin cited the latest Amnesty International report repeatedly through the four-hour dinner, finding in it an endless vein of abuses of human rights in the United States (and ignoring its lengthy criticism of Russia). Shortly afterward, he announced that Russia would suspend the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe treaty, which regulated how close to the border Russia and Europe would keep their armed forces.
⁷

Oil at more than $100 a barrel has fed Russia’s dream of being able to act like a superpower, albeit one temporarily shrunken. An astute eye on Europe’s need for energy, and care in signing deals on new pipelines have given Russia more leverage. But it can’t last. Not only has Russia’s wider economy not developed, but it has not invested much of this bonanza back into its oil industry, which remains wasteful and, in places, simply primitive.

Nor is Russia tolerant of foreign investment. In the oil industry, where the Kremlin has only briefly accepted foreign companies, it is busy rewriting their contracts to turn these firms into the equivalent of hired help —a sure way to prevent the technology transfer that can benefit both sides. That was the fate Royal Dutch Shell suffered in 2006 when Russia revoked, on “environmental grounds,” its license for the $20 billion Sakhalin-2 oil and gas field, forcing it to sell a controlling stake. BP, the British energy company, has little to protect it if, as seems likely, Russia decides that its previous agreements were too generous given today’s oil prices.

This rising tension comes at a point of particularly icy relations with Britain, because of a macabre episode in which the violent world of Russian agents and émigrés burst into the open in London’s Piccadilly. In November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former Soviet-era security agent, was murdered by polonium poisoning, apparently from lunch in a sushi bar. The radioactive substance (hard to obtain except from Russian government laboratories) had apparently been placed in his food. Litvinenko, who became a British citizen shortly before his death, used the time it took him to die in hospital to condemn the Kremlin, accusing President Putin of his murder. Russia has since refused to respond to Britain’s extradition request for the man it believes carried out the killing.

Do these kinds of actions put Russia outside international laws and treaties? On the edge of them, certainly. A country that will not recognize commercial contracts is just a whisker away from defying all kinds of international law, trading resolutions, arms treaties, and so on. So is any country that murders another’s citizens, let alone by James Bond–like methods.

Yet it would be an exaggeration to say that Russia has become a rogue state. The hope, in the eyes of Western diplomats, is that it is still picking fights one by one, on their merits, not for the mere sake of obstructing the West. The United States, Britain, and France have persuaded Russia to join them in the United Nations Security Council in putting sanctions on Iran for refusing to drop its nuclear ambitions. Nor has Russia caused as much mischief as it might have done when the Serbian province of Kosovo declared itself to be an independent country early in 2008, even though, as an old ally of Serbia, it could easily have encouraged violent uprising. It certainly agrees with the United States and Britain about the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, even if that leads to horrors like its treatment of Chechnya (about which Europe has been shockingly silent).

The best hope is to continue to give Russia incentive to work in line with Western interests, and the United States is better placed than Europe to do that, as the greater military power and also as an unchallengeable example of economic success.

China: Persuading It to Work Within Rules

There are so many forecasts of a coming clash between China and the United States that they almost count as a new kind of product, produced in bulk by both countries. Both want energy, and security, and trade on their own terms. Even though China has traditionally said the minimum about foreign policy, preferring to express itself through contracts signed, it has been openly contemptuous of democracy. In Kenya in January 2008, when protests at a rigged election killed hundreds, an editorial in the Communist Party’s
People’s Daily
declared that “Western-style democratic theory simply isn’t suited to African conditions, but rather carries with it the root of disaster.” China’s leaders have argued that India is handicapped by its democracy from reaching Chinese rates of growth.

It is impossible to exaggerate the drama of the transformation China is conducting on itself. Lawrence Summers, the former U.S. treasury secretary, has pointed out that living standards in China will “rise 100-fold within a single human life span —more than living standards have increased in the United States since my country gained independence in 1776.” He added, in a speech in Beijing in January 2007, that “what happens in Asia, the changes in the lives of so many people, so quickly, and its ramifications for the global system will be the most important story when the history of our times is written.”
⁸

So far, China is managing to secure itself supplies of energy and resources. It has been steaming through Africa, signing deals with governments (and imposing none of the conditions about democracy and good government that high-minded development agencies such as Britain’s Department for International Development tend to attach). Its state-owned oil companies are competing hard to be among the first into Iraq, less perturbed than their Western counterparts by fears of violence or uncertain title to the resources.

But the question is whether that can continue. China’s imports of oil will need to triple by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. Pollution is beginning to brake its growth. According to the government’s own estimates, the costs of that pollution in damaged health, undrinkable water, and lost agriculture could be a tenth of the gross domestic product.
⁹
China’s new affluence also gives the provinces and even small communities the power to challenge Beijing, as Chinese leaders are well aware. Each year, there are tens of thousands of local protests, against everything from pollution to compulsory relocation orders. That doesn’t mean China will become more democratic as it gets richer —just that as it gets richer, its leaders will find it harder to keep control. In an
Economist
magazine debate held in London’s Chatham House in March 2006 under the title “India Will Overtake China in the Next 25 Years,” almost all the panel and audience disagreed with the proposition but also felt that China was more capable of sudden turmoil and instability, and that its success was more vulnerable to fracture.

There are signs that China is beginning to realize that its interests lie in being closely connected to other governments and in following international rules. It joined the World Trade Organization in December 2001 after a fifteen-year battle and has begun to acknowledge that this is going to mean tightening up piracy of DVDs and not selling poisonous toys abroad.

The United States is well-placed to encourage this. As John Ikenberry, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, argued in a
Foreign Affairs
article in early 2008, “China . . . faces a Western-centered system that is open, integrated, and rule-based, with wide and deep political foundations . . . itself the product of farsighted US leadership.” He added: “As it faces an ascendant China, the United States should remember that its leadership of the Western order allows it to shape the environment in which China will make critical strategic choices. If it wants to preserve this leadership, Washington must work to strengthen the rules and institutions that underpin that order —making it even easier to join and harder to overturn.”
¹⁰

China appears at least partly convinced of this case. It has agreed to back sanctions against Iran in the United Nations Security Council, even though the United States and Britain feared it would not support action against its trading partner and oil supplier. It has (if grudgingly) agreed to work with other countries to put pressure on North Korea over its nuclear program. And it was clearly shocked by Hollywood’s protest against the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, culminating in Steven Spielberg’s decision to withdraw as artistic director of the games. In a very rare move, it began putting pressure on Sudan, as its largest trading partner and international protector, leaning on it to accept an international peacekeeping force, sending engineers to help the force, and appointing a special envoy to the region. America will play a vital part in persuading China generally to take up this kind of role.

Iran: A Nuclear Bomb Within the Next Presidency?

The United States may find the same task harder with Iran, which is not giving way in its determination to hold on to its nuclear program. A now notorious American “National Intelligence Estimate,” published at the end of 2007, punctured the United States’ threats that it would not rule out military strikes if Iran did not back down. The report, by saying that it believed Iran had stopped designing the warheads of nuclear weapons, allowed Iran gleefully to claim the moral high ground —even though the report made clear that such work had taken place and that other potential preparations for a weapon were continuing.

But while the notion of attacking Iran regularly pulses through Washington, it has always been deeply unattractive —far worse than an invasion of Iraq. An invasion of Iran is unthinkable —it is a much bigger country, with about 65 million people compared to Iraq’s 27 million or so.
¹¹
It has been helped by five years of high oil prices; it has an army of more than half a million, with 350,000 reservists as well.
¹²
You do not have to have many conversations in Tehran pizza parlors, their walls covered with photographs of ayatollahs but their menus all-American, to work out that an attack would make instant enemies out of the many Iranians who love the United States —the best hope for prizing the ayatollahs out of power. One Iranian told
Newsweek:
“As a gay man living in Iran” —a phenomenon that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said doesn’t exist —“I couldn’t express myself and be what I am. My brother went to jail for eight years because he opposed this regime. . . . Despite all that, if one day America or Israel attack Iran, I’ll go back and defend my country.”
¹³
A deliberate insult to Ahmadinejad from the president of Columbia University provoked an outpouring of support for him from ordinary Iranians, outraged at the snub to their country (which Ahmadinejad’s blog gleefully recorded).
¹⁴

Even an airstrike on Iran’s nuclear targets would be formidably hard for the United States. Beyond the half-dozen known sites, Iran could have many hidden ones —and hundreds of missile silos as well. If America attempted a strike, the only likely member of the “coalition of the willing” would be Israel, though Iran’s worried Arab neighbors might quietly be supportive. Many speculate that Israel might do the job on its own, but one Israeli officer explained to me in late 2007 why that seemed unattractive. “We’d get the retaliation [from Iran] either way, but the U.S. would do it better —they’d have the scale to hit more of the targets. So only if we were completely convinced the U.S. would never move, and that the threat had reached the point of warranting immediate action, would we consider that step.”
¹⁵

For all these reasons, the Bush administration has rightly been putting its efforts behind diplomacy, together with Europe. Seyed Mohammad Hossein Adeli, a former Iranian ambassador to London, said with a grin on leaving the post in November 2005, “My job was to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Europe.”
¹⁶
British diplomats disagree that he achieved this goal, but there is no faulting the tactics. There are some signs now that the American drive to clamp down on Iranian banks is having an effect, which previous sanctions have not.

America Preoccupied at Home

The amount of effort Americans will want to put into these problems abroad will depend also on their stamina for handling change at home. The 2008 election campaign was an illustration —although easily overlooked outside America —of the difficult questions its politicians and people have to cope with in the immediate future. The population, which has just passed 300 million, is set to rise to 420 million by 2050. About half of that is projected to come from immigration and from immigrants’ children, but half is the result of Americans’ living longer.

That is an extraordinary wave of change for a country to handle, even before considering that many of the new people will be Hispanic. It begins to change the character of the country, pushing out the suburbs, stretching out the West and Southwest. It is a huge opportunity as well as a strain. It will leave America as the only big developed country with more children than pensioners, and with a growing population of working age.