PREPARING FOR A NEW COLD WAR, Part 2
Asymmetric challenge to the US colossus
By W Joseph Stroupe
(Click here for Part 1, A war the West can't win)
Time and again informed leaders and experts have directly or indirectly employed the analogy of the Achilles' heel to warn that the US colossus currently faces very real danger. Even a "giant" has a pair of tendons which, if sliced, could bring the giant crashing helplessly to the ground.
If a knife is held against those very tendons in a credible and intractable threat, then the giant can be constrained, or even mastered and obliged to perform the will of players of comparatively much lesser stature. Does the analogy really fit mounting East-West rivalry and the efforts to end US global dominance? To answer that question we need to examine the principles of asymmetric challenge more closely and see if real-world, modern-day examples of its success exist.
The technique of asymmetric challenge involves the contest, not between equally matched opponents, but rather the assault of a smaller, but much more agile and clever challenger against a much larger, but clumsy and less brainy opponent:
The asymmetric challenger carefully studies and identifies precisely what are his bigger opponent's key vulnerabilities, strengths and his likely response to attack.
Carefully identified are how those vulnerabilities can be effectively and insidiously targeted with a minimum of backlash against the attacker, while simultaneously instigating the opponent to (mis)use his own strength to magnify the negative effects of the initial attack, or to otherwise cleverly leverage the strength, weight or size of his large opponent against him.
The aim is to instigate the opponent, if possible, to instinctively (unthinkingly) use his superior strength at his own peril, such that as he struggles ever harder to respond to attack he merely exacerbates on himself the negative effects of the initial attack(s).
His growing realization of increasingly being at disadvantage may instinctively (unthinkingly) cause him to struggle ever harder (not smarter), thereby further increasing the degree of his peril, and the process feeds on itself until his situation becomes entirely hopeless - he can find no way out of his predicament and his smaller challenger has won the contest.
The end result is less often the destruction or total collapse of the larger opponent, and more often his crippling to a sufficient extent that his smaller challenger can move into a position of dominance over him, with such a position guaranteed on an ongoing basis by the challenger's continued leverage over the key vulnerabilities that were targeted in the first place in the initial attack.
The technique is especially effective against large opponents who suffer from deep-seated over-confidence resulting from an inordinately exaggerated estimation of their own capabilities while simultaneously and unjustifiably estimating the capabilities of others as negligible by comparison.
Many real-world, modern-day examples of the proven success of the technique exist. The over-confident, miscalculating Soviets suffered a humiliating defeat by a few thousand insurgents in Afghanistan who were provided certain US weapons. Hezbollah has had a similar success against highly-militarized but over-confident, miscalculating Israel in the recent war in Lebanon, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is in serious and likely irreversible trouble in Afghanistan.
Of special significance, the US is on the verge of a massive and costly defeat in Iraq at the hands of only a few thousand insurgents employing bomb technologies from Iran and Syria. The net effect of the ever more desperate struggle of the US to turn Iraq into a "win" is that it has repeatedly miscalculated and genuinely deepened its own peril by further fueling sectarian divisions and strife, thereby helping to magnify the effectiveness of the clever asymmetric insurgent strategies and playing into their hands for a massive forfeiture.
That impending US forfeiture in Iraq will carry enormous global repercussions for the American colossus, further undermining its global position. Many other examples could be cited. Here, we find that the clever asymmetric challengers have entirely breached and utterly destroyed the former auras of Soviet, US, Israeli and NATO military and geopolitical invincibility. Those "giants" have all been significantly cut down to size on the world stage.
In each of these cases the overwhelming power of the larger opponent was not the key factor; it did not determine the outcome of the contest. Instead, the determining factor was the cleverness, determination and agility of the challenger in plying its strengths against the vulnerabilities of the opponent until success was achieved. Therefore, those who habitually resort to the argument of the US's possession of unequalled power in an effort to prove the US is not currently under grave threat of a loss of its global position are persons who are either ignorant of the facts or are in denial, or a combination of both.
These examples illustrate that "giants" are best and most often defeated, not by engaging in a "boxing match", that is, a conventional head-to-head contest between two matched opponents, but rather by mounting an asymmetric challenge as detailed here.
Consequently, the fact that the US is still the global colossus and still sits in the position of global dominance has little to do with the issue of whether or not the comparatively mini-sized rising East can successfully shift the US out of that position. If the rising East is proving to be clever, determined and agile enough in its challenge to US global dominance, then the US will increasingly find itself unable to hold onto its global position in the face of that mounting asymmetric challenge.
This is a reality check for the US colossus and for those who wrongly assume that its greater size and power is what somehow secures its continued global dominance. No such assurance exists. The recent history of the successful defeat of "giants" by very clever mini-sized opponents is not comforting from the US perspective.
An end to US dominance
Issues and problems of global importance that painfully demonstrate the increasingly divergent interests and ever-more incompatible approaches of East and West are rapidly coming to a head. As they continue to do so, they will increasingly bring to the surface and out into the open the true condition of East-West relations - that of a fundamental rivalry between two opposing poles.
What are the key issues and problems rapidly coming to a head?
The Iran crisis and prospects for a US attack on Iranian facilities and assets.
The North Korea crisis and the growing prospects for a war resulting from stringent US-led embargo and interdiction at sea.
Continued NATO/European Union expansion eastward and the creation of an anti-ballistic missile shield on Russia's doorstep.
The issue of international energy security and whether the current US-backed energy market order will continue to be dominant.
As these and other issues and crises inexorably and imminently come to a head, likely involving further military conflict and crisis as well as an intensified arms race and ever more strident East vs West energy geopolitics, then all the remaining fog with respect to the true condition of East-West relations will dissipate, and the full-blown arising of a neo-Cold War between the neo-West and the rising multifarious East, with the Russia-China axis at its center, will be more clearly discerned.
Under the surface, or behind the veil if you prefer, the foundations of that inevitable neo-Cold War have been building steadily for at least a decade. Inordinate US global dominance exercised in greedy, overly-muscular fashion and a growing wariness and determination on the part of the rising multifarious East to bring in a more equitable world order are fundamental forces fueling the inevitable arising of the neo-Cold War between East and West.
The deepening Russia-China axis and its growing constellation of strategic partners, though increasingly wary of US global dominance and not lacking in determination to bring it eventually to an end, of necessity have avoided directly confronting the US head-to-head in a conventional boxing-match-style economic or military conflict.
Such a conventional confrontation between the US and the comparatively smaller, less powerful Russia-China axis would quickly result in a catastrophe for the East. In fact, the rising East has intentionally kept its relations with the West as friendly as possible in order to avoid the terrible costs of a direct, conventional confrontation. This policy has facilitated, without needless interruption, the ongoing and massive transfer of wealth from the West to the emerging (rising) economies of the East. It is a very smart and pragmatic policy for the East.
Nevertheless, simultaneous with that policy another one is being actively pursued. The rising East is not content to merely assume that the US colossus will treat, or will learn to treat the globe's lesser powers in a fair and equitable manner, taking proper account of their legitimate views and interests.
Unilateralist, overly muscular and mostly self-serving US policies and actions since the 1991 collapse of the roughly balanced bipolar order of the two superpowers demonstrate that nothing can be taken for granted in that regard. Prudently, the rising multifarious East has been learning ever deeper and wider multilateral cooperation within itself in the energy, economic, diplomatic, political and military spheres aimed at developing and putting in place potent asymmetric leverages in all those same spheres.
Note how these are asymmetric leverages that match remarkably the precise strategic vulnerabilities of the US colossus:
US diplomatic-geopolitical vulnerability. Beginning dramatically in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003, the East and its sympathizers and allies began to exercise and perfect their collective diplomatic leverage within the UN Security Council, with the formation of the so-called anti-war bloc that opposed the US invasion of Iraq.
Russia, China, France and Germany used soft power and the threat of the veto to marshal united global opposition to the US and Britain. By successfully opposing and isolating the US and Britain at the UN and keeping it isolated, the rising East has slammed the door on the US goals of owning Iraq for itself, of using Iraq as the first step toward reordering the entire Middle East and the rest of the globe after its own interests, of gaining de facto control of global oil, of instigating world-wide regime change along the lines the US desired.
The potent asymmetrical diplomatic leverage of the rising East has hit the US where it was (and still is) extremely vulnerable, namely in its fundamental need for the rest of the world to acquiesce to its will in order that it (the US) can continue to dominate the globe virtually trouble-free and largely cost-free. The rising East, capitalizing on unprecedented US international disdain and isolation, continues to foment and fuel a building global wave of geopolitical-economic-ideological realignment away from the US and toward the East.
Consequently, the material (in terms of lives, military preparedness and money), ideological, political and diplomatic costs to the US of its continued dominance have been raised to exorbitant levels by the rising East's clever exercising of its asymmetric diplomatic leverage against the US colossus. The underpinnings of the US global position are being weakened as a result.
US addictions to foreign oil and cheap imported goods. Beginning dramatically in 2000/2001 when the price of oil had tripled from its 1999 lows of US$9 per barrel to $27 per barrel and when the US Federal Reserve began to radically lower interest rates to create economic growth through the housing "boom", Russia and China positioned themselves to capitalize via a massive transfer of wealth.
US dependence on foreign oil began to fill Russia's coffers, and US addiction to unrestrained debt-based consumer spending on cheap imports from China began to fill China's coffers. Soon other oil exporters and other Asian goods exporters got into the wealth transfer game. By now the most dramatic transformation of the global economic landscape in modern history is nearly completed - the emerging economies in the East is where the economic strength increasingly resides, with those economies massively operating in the black with gigantic forex reserves and trade surpluses while the US and the wider West are massively in the red with huge and growing deficits.
The rising East has hit the US where it is deeply vulnerable - its addiction to imported oil and cheap imported goods. This has come about by the rising East's adroit exercising of its asymmetrical export-based economic leverage against the US colossus.
US addiction to foreign financing and cash inflows. Beginning in late 2003 to early 2004, Russian and Asian central banks began the process of diversification of their reserves out of the dollar, with a target of rebalancing their reserves to 50% dollars versus 50% other currencies and precious metals.
Accompanying that process was the policy change enacted by Asian central banks wherein those banks ceased buying large sums of dollars and switched to accumulating their ongoing surpluses in non-dollar-denominated assets.
Consequently, the diversification is being accomplished without selling large sums of dollars. Russia reached the target of reducing the dollar portion of its reserves to 50% in the summer of this year - it was much closer to that target than experts realized, and Russia's official announcement of reaching its goal caught most experts by surprise.
Experts believe China's reserves are currently at least 70% denominated in dollars, but according to an April 18 report in the China Daily China's central bank had already, by the end of 2005, reduced the percentage of its dollar holdings to 60%, far less than what experts believed.
Central banks throughout the rising East have also dropped their direct dollar currency pegs and established new pegs to a basket of currencies. All such policies work to significantly unlink their economies from the dollar and insulate them from a dollar crash. The US has already lost its official source of crucial foreign financing to keep the US government solvent, with the source of foreign cash inflows switching from stable and long-term central bank purchases of dollars to much more fickle private investor purchases.
The rising East has positioned itself to be able to instigate and withstand a dollar crash in the event an economic war breaks out between East and West. Capitalizing on the colossal US addiction to foreign cash inflows, the rising East now holds far greater economic leverage over the US economy than the US can exercise over the East.
Inherent vulnerabilities of large and unwieldy US weapons platforms: Russia and the rising East have developed, proliferated and deployed an entire range of relatively cheap weapons systems that exploit the vulnerabilities of the huge and powerful weapons systems of the West. Heavily armored tanks are quite easily disabled and destroyed by anti-tank missiles such as the Kornet - Israel found out how potent such weapons are in its recent war with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Widely available Russian portable anti-aircraft missiles pose a real threat, as do its passive anti-aircraft radars and anti-aircraft defense complexes like the S-300 and S-400. Not even US stealth aircraft are safe. Jane's Defence indicates Iran has purchased sophisticated Russian radars and anti-aircraft and missile defense complexes.
Lethal asymmetric missile systems that threaten US aircraft carrier battle groups and every other major power projection platform of the US have been developed and proliferated by Russia and the East. Additionally, the constellation of US satellites is also at risk from an array of new weapons systems, including ground-based lasers that can blind those satellites and global positioning system jamming systems that can blind US military targeting operations. While the US continues to spend enormous sums of money on its military, the rising East spends comparatively little to acquire the assured ability to prevent US military successes and victories in the air and on the ground.
Colossal US vulnerability over energy. Russia and the rising East are establishing a new durable, exclusive circle of international energy security based on policies and principles that flow against the foundations of the current US-led liberal global oil market order.
The rising East has no say in the governing institutions of that liberal order, such as the IEA (International Energy Agency) and the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), and from their viewpoint they have little or no stake either in those institutions or in the liberal market order itself.
They, along with the vast bulk of the world's oil and gas exporting regimes, have already taken away from the West's oil majors control over 80% to 90% of global reserves. They are reviving the rigid bilateral long-term supply contract and locking up ever larger portions of global resources, making these less and less accessible to the current liberal global energy market order.
The rising East is establishing global control over such resources, opening the real possibility that the US could be left outside the circle of international energy security. Increasingly, the portion of global resources still accessible through the US-led liberal market order is becoming subject to the goodwill of Russia, the rising economies of the East and the East-friendly energy exporting regimes around the globe.
That development is one of enormous consequence for the deeply foreign-energy-dependent West because the rising East thereby increasingly controls that key lever over all the industrialized West. This has come about by the rising East's adroit exercising of its asymmetrical energy-based economic leverage against the US colossus.
All these spheres match the precise key strategic vulnerabilities of the US colossus. The reader must decide for himself or herself whether the development by the rising East of these very potent, virtually undefeatable leverages exactly matching all the key vulnerabilities of the US colossus is a result of random chance or of a significant measure of strategic forethought and planning.
Especially in the sphere of control of global energy resources, the rising East is increasing its global leverage far more quickly than most experts predicted, and the profound political effects across the globe are only now being recognized.
For example, in The Washington Times of October 29, David R Sands writes in his article entitled "Fueling US Adversaries" that America's most determined adversaries are being powerfully bolstered by exploiting the tight global supply situation and sustained high prices. He quotes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who admits she previously underestimated the ways the "energy question" has distorted international relations. On the potent worldwide political effects being wrought by energy, Rice stated before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April: "I can tell you that nothing has taken me aback more as secretary of state than the way the politics of energy is - I will use the word 'warping' - diplomacy around the world."
The Council on Foreign Relations released a report entitled, "National Security Consequences of US Oil Dependency" in October. In it the authors lament the fact that few in the West understand the full dimensions of growing US vulnerability with respect to the energy weapon. The report expresses alarm at the multi-pronged, potent global changes being wrought by the increasing energy-based political, economic and diplomatic leverage of Russia and the East and the corresponding collapse of US leverage in the same spheres. The report is an alarming, but certainly not an alarmist, wake up call for the US and for the wider West.
To illustrate how quickly the West is losing its grip on global oil resources, The Observer of October 29 carried the article entitled "Big Oil May Have to Get Even Bigger to Survive". The author notes that the West's international oil majors are in real trouble as respects the collapsing of their control over global energy reserves and are facing a global wave of nationalization, forced renegotiation of existing agreements, inability to get access to new exploration and production acreage and rising taxes - a caustic mix that is dissolving the glue that holds together the US-backed liberal oil market order.
While the current production levels of the international oil majors are still high, their reserve position is dramatically shrinking - they now control much less than 20% of global reserves, while the rest is already under the control of the rising East and the East-friendly producing regimes around the globe.
Unless the oil majors can adequately replace their reserves on an ongoing basis as they produce oil for the market, they risk becoming niche players in that global market. According to Morgan Stanley, the oil majors replaced 140% of their reserves in 1997, but in 2005 they were able to replace only 75% - they are rapidly shrinking, while state-owned companies around the globe are growing by leaps and bounds.
That trend threatens to cut ever more deeply into the reserve position of the oil majors. It also has the real prospect of affecting current production by the West's oil majors, leading to the potential of seeing a situation where shipments of oil to the West could be negatively affected - not in the next decade or two, but within this very decade. Behind the facade of current high production levels and unprecedented profits by the West's oil majors lurks the specter of a precipitous collapse of their market leverage and ability to serve the energy security interests of the West.
The wide array of reckless strategies and foreign-policy blunders conducted by the US itself adds significant cover for the rising East as it completes the development and putting in place of its asymmetric leverages. This is because the argument is often put forth that global realignment away from the US and toward the East is not occurring as a result of any strategy conceived and executed in the East, but simply as a result of a string of US strategic blunders.
For those not accustomed to looking beyond the mere surface, such an argument makes sense. However, it completely misses the facts with regard to how the Russia-China axis has so cleverly, quickly and triumphantly capitalized on every one of those US blunders, acting like an irresistible magnet pole to draw the world's key states into a new alignment facing East instead of West, and specifically employing key and compelling ideological, energy-based, economic and security strategies with which to do so.
Very soon the "coming out" for the neo-Cold War will demonstrate to all observers what the true, fundamental global situation and condition is between East and West. That true condition of East-West relations has been hiding just below the surface, behind the facade, as it were, but the "coming out" will soon bring it into full view above the surface to be clearly recognized as the neo-Cold War.
The old Cold War was characterized by the ideological rivalry in the forefront between liberal democratic capitalism and communism, which ideological rivalry gave thick cover to the underlying contest to control global strategic resources. The ideological rivalry merely provided convenient justification for the geopolitical/military/economic moves by both sides designed to extend control over such resources.
The neo-Cold War is also characterized by a facade made up of an ideological rivalry between East and West - but this time it's liberal democracy versus the authoritarian "managed democracy" or "sovereign democracy", if you prefer.
The difference this time around, however, is that the new ideological rivalry provides only a thin veil to conceal the ongoing and underlying contest over global control of strategic resources. When the West instigates "colored revolutions" in key, strategically (from the standpoint of energy) located states, and when Russia-China consolidate domestic state control and bolster like authoritarian regimes (especially resource-rich ones) around the globe, one can discern how the ideological rivalry inherent in the neo-Cold War is merely used to justify energy-based geopolitical moves, just as was the case in the old Cold War.
The rising East is fully preparing its array of potent asymmetric levers enabling it to win any form of conflict with the West, but it will not provoke a conflict. While it fully intends to complete very soon its rise in all the spheres noted above, it won't be the multifarious East that provokes conflict; instead, it will be the US and its allies that will do so. The impending provocation, whatever it turns out to be, will oblige the rising East to scrap the policy of striving to maintain peaceful relations with the US in favor of employing the full range of tools, alliances and strategies it has put in place in order to win a renewed conflict with the West.
And the provocation that will mark the "coming out" for the neo-Cold War is impending. What will it be?
Opportunity awaits
Iraq was the opportunity to isolate the US - one of the key strategies pursued by the East to lay the basis for undermining the US global position. And the US did not disappoint by staying out of Iraq. It went ahead with its invasion and has suffered enormously on the world stage as a result.
While it has been suffering, the rising East has been cleverly capitalizing and preparing to win any future conflict, whether direct or indirect, whether in the sphere of energy, economy, ideology, diplomacy, or military or a combination of all the foregoing.
Now, should the US engage in a new provocation, such as an attack on Iran, a war with North Korea that starts at sea over the interdiction of ships, a renewed push to instigate "colored" revolutions throughout the East in an effort to scupper its geopolitical rise, further eastward expansion of NATO and the EU and setting up missile complexes and other military installations on Russia's doorstep or in Taiwan, or other serious provocations not actually listed here, the West will find the assertiveness and self-confidence of Russia and the East to be much greater than when it pushed past all objectors to invade Iraq in 2003.
This time the East will possess the viable option of bringing into play its wider and much more potent array of asymmetric levers to enormously increase the costs to the US of provocation, putting at grave and imminent risk the very global position to which the US still tenaciously clings.
Can the still relatively mini-sized but rapidly rising multifarious East accomplish the desired shift of the US out of its global position? After a review of the array of potent asymmetric levers now held in the rising East's grasp, a much better question is whether the US can possibly find a way to hold onto that position in the face of the clever, multi-dimensional asymmetric assault that awaits the colossus if it further provokes its smaller rivals, which it most assuredly will do. The world is now poised for the dramatic "coming out" of the neo-Cold War, and it is one that the neo-West can't possibly win.
W Joseph Stroupe is author of the new book entitled Russian Rubicon: Impending Checkmate of the West and editor of Global Events Magazine online at www.GeoStrategyMap.com.
(Copyright 2006 W Joseph Stroupe)
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