"Captain
America, following Captain Russia, has completed its journey through the realm
of imperialism. The world is becoming a global empire, a global colony, a
global village. Simply put, we are now traveling in one ship and must fight as
hard as we can to make sure that it doesn't turn out to be another Titanic."
Managing America's return to a multilateral world is a difficult task for any American president. Barack Obama - whether he wins in 2012 or not - has his work cut out for him.
During the latest economic
shock, the syndrome of dependency on America, from which Russia and humanity in
general chronically suffer, has become especially apparent. Everyone hates the
States, but depends solely on it. Even now, what other nation can deal with the
responsibility of maintaining international order and pulling the global
economy up by its ears? Alas, the demands on “Captain America” critically exceed
the supply. The modern world can no longer afford just one "captain
country."
We live in an era not just of
the end of the U.S. as the world’s sole superpower, but of the superpower idea
as such.
Russia's superpower crash was
torturous. Even after twenty post-Soviet years, neither the man on the street
nor the nation's heads of state have managed to internalize that we are now inhabitants
of a large country that finds itself in a rapid and perhaps irreversible historical
decline. That there is no longer a throng of dependent countries behind us, eager
to demonstrate their loyalty and subservience in exchange for support. That we no
longer have the resources to impose our own rules outside our own geographical
borders. Even for ourselves, we can't establish any intelligible order.
The best sign of our gradual awakening
to the death of superpower Russia (the Russian empire, the Soviet Union) is
precisely our attempt to demonize the United States on every possible occasion.
We behave like a country manically-dependent on America. It is Americans who allegedly
dispense funds to Russian liberals and U.S. state propaganda that created the “color
revolutions” - none of which, by the way, succeeded. It was they who destroyed
the Soviet Union. It was they who organized our economic crises. And so, what
do we do? What can we do? Win a war against tiny Georgia? Pay the tiny
atoll nation of Nauru
[$50 million] to recognize the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia? Threaten the United
States with sanctions in response to U.S. sanctions on officials complicit in
lawyer Sergei
Magnitsky’s prison death? But a ban on an American’s entry into Russia
cannot in any way be considered a sanction: why would they want to come here? Our
inflated sense of influence is now based on gas imports to the E.U. - but even that
last shred of "superpowerdom" will last only a few more years: Europe
is diversifying its gas supplies and altering consumption toward different fuels.
The United States; the economically-accelerating
but politically-barbaric China; India, with the world’s second-largest
population; and the European Union, mired in an identity crisis coupled with
severe economic problems, are not in any way superpowers. None can unilaterally
set the rules of game on a global scale.
Of course, some nations are
more influential than others. But the United States cannot cope with today's
global crisis alone. It wasn't by chance, after the shocks of 2008, that only a
coordinated and to a large extent identical response by dozens of countries -
regardless of the nature of their political regimes - helped the world climb
out of the economic abyss. And the state of our economy is no longer in the hands
of the U.S. Federal Reserve, but the Russian government.
By the way, Russia is
behaving in a fundamentally differently way than a nation vying for the title "master
of the world" should. The key rule for any country with geopolitical
ambitions is to take responsibility and not shift blame to others. Russian leaders,
by contrast, categorically don't want to be responsible for the situation -
even in their own backyard.
But even countries that are trying
to conduct responsible policy and have relatively large financial resources to
draw on can no longer behave like superpowers. It is clear that manifestations
of "superpowerness," such as organizing emergency aid to millions of
starving people in Somalia, where in the past few months every tenth child
under the age of five has died of starvation, are appropriate and necessary.
But maintaining an active military presence far from one’s own territory and a
desire to establish certain political regimes in other countries by force are doomed
to failure. “A person is a person, no matter how small” wrote wonderful storyteller
Theodore Geisel. Right
now, the same can be said about nations.
International terrorism, the
global economy, information networks, a growing lack of essential natural
resources, the creation of history’s first weapons not simply of mass
destruction - but of total destruction - have made us, regardless of the size
of the countries in which we live - players of relatively equal significance.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
And so we play the game of
organizing, through joint efforts and even against our will, a world order the
likes of which might permit humanity to survive and develop without destroying ourselves
and the planet.
Like never before, the threat
of the humanity's and the earth's total self-destruction is real. The order under
by which in different times determined the course of individual countries,
tribes, and tyrants has been irreversibly changed.
Today, in a moment, the
strong become the weak, and the weakness of one country is felt by another,
even thousands of miles away.
Captain America, following
Captain Russia, has completed its journey through the realm of imperialism. The
world is becoming a global empire, a global colony, a global village. Simply
put, we are now traveling in one ship and must fight as hard as we can to make
sure that it doesn't turn out to be another Titanic.
*Semen Novoprudski is executive
editor of the Moscow News
