Guardian UK: Georgia is the graveyard of America's unipolar world

[marmar]

Georgia is the graveyard of America's unipolar world
Russia's defiance in the Caucasus has brought down the curtain on Bush senior's new world order - not before time

Seumas Milne
The Guardian, Thursday August 28 2008



If there were any doubt that the rules of the international game have changed for good, the events of the past few days should have dispelled it. On Monday, President Bush demanded that Russia's leaders reject their parliament's appeal to recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Within 24 hours, Bush had his response: President Medvedev announced Russia's recognition of the two contested Georgian enclaves.

The Russian message was unmistakable: the outcome of the war triggered by Georgia's attack on South Ossetia on August 7 is non-negotiable - and nothing the titans of the US empire do or say is going to reverse it. After that, the British foreign secretary David Miliband's posturing yesterday in Kiev about building a "coalition against Russian aggression" merely looked foolish.

That this month's events in the Caucasus signal an international turning point is no longer in question. The comparisons with August 1914 are of course ridiculous, and even the speculation about a new cold war overdone. For all the manoeuvres in the Black Sea and nuclear-backed threats, the standoff between Russia and the US is not remotely comparable to the events that led up to the first world war. Nor do the current tensions have anything like the ideological and global dimensions that shaped the 40-year confrontation between the west and the Soviet Union.

But what is clear is that America's unipolar moment has passed - and the new world order heralded by Bush's father in the dying days of the Soviet Union in 1991 is no more. The days when one power was able to bestride the globe like a colossus, enforcing its will in every continent, challenged only by popular movements for national independence and isolated "rogue states", are now over. For nearly two decades, while Russia sunk into "catastroika" and China built an economic powerhouse, the US has exercised unprecedented and unaccountable global power, arrogating to itself and its allies the right to invade and occupy other countries, untroubled by international law or institutions, sucking ever more states into the orbit of its voracious military alliance. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/28/russia.usforeignpolicy

[thunder rising]

1. That which Senior had sown, Junior has wasted. It would be laughable except unlike illegal alliens

I don't have any place else to go.

[mmonk]

2. Yes, the door is closing on us running the world.

All of this is of course due to a shift from nuance to straight out 19th century classical imperialism.

[malaise]

3. Excellent article

and really good news for planet earth.

[oldskool]

4. no doubt

nice to know some people get it.

[RethugAssKicker]

5. Hopefully, the US will slow down its imperalism... and try to

do a little thinking first.

[tuckessee]

6. Let's hope that's all it will be a graveyard for.

Keep f*cking with the Ruskies and it may well become Arlington East.

[Junkdrawer]

7. "revival of a rules-based system of international relations"...

...

The real gripe is not with these states' lack of accountability - Russian public opinion is in any case overwhelmingly supportive of its government's actions in Georgia - but their strategic challenge and economic rivalry. For the rest of us, a new assertiveness by Russia and other rising powers doesn't just offer some restraint on the unbridled exercise of global imperial power, it should also increase the pressure for a revival of a rules-based system of international relations. In the circumstances, that might come to seem quite appealing to whoever is elected US president.



Hear! Hear!