What the Ukraine Crisis Reveals About American Power - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Guicciardini noted the danger of such moments. “If you see a city beginning to decline, a government changing, a new empire expanding,” he warned, “be careful not to misjudge the time they will take.”
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the problem is that while the rise or fall of a new power is typically obvious—China’s for example—the point at which the old power is likely to be replaced is far more difficult to judge. Guicciardini wrote that “such movements are much slower than most men imagine.”
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We know that the benign leviathan of Clintonian America has gone—a victim both of historic forces that weren’t within its control and of hubristic mismanagement that very much was.
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even the America of Donald Trump and Joe Biden remains the most powerful country on the planet—at least for now.
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The fact that the imperial center is gripped by a kind of psycho-political civil war, conflicted about who it is and what it wants to be, is troubling for many of its allies, but not yet enough to alter the fundamental reality of where power lies in the world.
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For the states of Eastern Europe and the Baltics, the immediate crisis has only proved that what matters to them above all is the American security guarantee.
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This realization of how little has changed in terms of the fundamental anchor of European security applies to Europe’s “big three” as well. Each of these powers—Germany, France, and Britain—is playing a role coordinated by Washington: Germany as economic leverage, France as diplomatic lead, Britain as the intelligence and military hawk.
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Successive American administrations are surely right that Europe needs to pay more for its own defense, and Macron is surely right that Europe risks drifting into geopolitical irrelevance if it does not, caught between a United States that wants to disengage and one that never quite seems able to.
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the picture that emerges is a strange one of impressive short-term Western unity and long-term incoherence. The Ukraine crisis has reinforced an American dominance that everyone believes is unsustainable.
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The result is conservative management of this crisis that is both sensible and admirable, but also limited (and, potentially, ineffective in actually deterring Putin).
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Whenever the EU has faced a crisis, it has tended to do just enough to get through the problem—and little else. The euro remains so structurally flawed that few think it can seriously rival the dollar; the EU has failed to build itself almost any foreign-policy clout, with little military-industrial capacity and barely any coordinated defensive capability. And the problem is, this is how Germany likes it.
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A former ambassador of a major EU power to Berlin told me that Germany will simply not change its position; its economy is too successful for it to do what is necessary for the EU to become an independent force. At heart, Berlin is happy with the status quo, weathering whatever storms blow in from Washington. If it is forced to change course, then it will, but sees no point in preempting this given the enormous benefits of being the preeminent economic power in Europe without the responsibilities of a decisive global power
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One former European ambassador to Washington told me he had come to the conclusion that nothing would change in Europe until America pulled out, leaving the continent to fend for itself.
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Like Germany but in reverse, does the United States really want to change the status quo that has worked so well for so long?
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The ambiguity in the American position is reflected in the current administration, which seems caught between wanting to be more hard-edged and nationalistic in its foreign policy—ending distracting “forever wars” without consultation, gazumping allies’ defense contracts and the like—and not being quite comfortable giving up its idea of itself as the force for rules-based internationalism.
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One frustrated former diplomat told me that Biden was a realist but members of his team were products of the old Washington consensus, “hence their half-baked internationalistic-nationalistic policy.”
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Russia’s challenge to the West today, as it amasses its troops on Ukraine’s borders, is predicated on its belief that American power is retreating, and with it the power of its example. Europe’s response, however, has been to reveal how powerful America remains. The truth is that it’s possible for both sentiments to be true at the same time.