The Last Gasp of Big Ideas

High-minded pursuit of ideals, now and then a feature of American foreign policy, is a fading factor in international relations. Economic self-interest and cultural identity—nationalism, ethnicity, and religion—seem to be trumping higher-order concerns (e.g. ending genocide, disposing of dictators, protecting human rights) everywhere. As America’s high-mindedness is discredited in Iraq, the world is witnessing the last gasp of “big ideas,” and elsewhere, their replacement by a new brand of international politics colored by Russia and China.

Today, Russia is a democracy in which the voters support the rolling back of democratic values, has a military that quietly suffered far greater humiliation in Chechnya than America could ever suffer in Iraq, and faces anti-Russian democratic “revolutions” in the Ukraine and Georgia that further humiliated the motherland. Yet Russian economic nationalism is more intense than ever, and, because of economic power from oil and natural gas, its ability to dominate its neighbors is growing, not diminishing. Last January, economically vulnerable Ukraine was threatened with a quadrupling of the natural gas price that Russia had been charging—revenge for attempting to escape Russia’s sphere of influence.

Similarly, Russia threatened an economically unstable Poland with de-stabilizing price hikes in the natural gas market. Poland’s neighbor and supposed European Union (EU) ally, Germany, hardly came to its rescue. Gerard Schroeder, then Germany’s chancellor, seemingly so idealistic in his opposition to the Iraq War and his shunning of George Bush, cultivated a close friendship with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president. He never criticized Russia’s brutal suppression of Chechnya and even negotiated an agreement between Russia and Germany to build a natural gas pipeline that punitively bypasses Poland—the Baltic gas pipeline, placing Warsaw in a precarious economic and political position. But no one heard any complaints from Poland’s EU partners about this frosty Baltic revenge, since they are all anxious customers of Russian natural gas.

Russia’s use of economic leverage to pursue nationalistic aims is rendered bolder by its cooperation with the real driving force of the economic interest/cultural identity juggernaut: China. Gone are the days of Sino-Russian conflicts over their 1000-mile border. Russia’s arms industry has been brought back to life by Chinese purchases, and China is an ever-growing customer for Russia’s natural resources. As a Security Council tandem, Russia and China can resist Western pressure on all but the most uncontroversial issues. For instance, what serious prospect is there for Security Council action on Iran’s nuclear program since Russia is building Iran’s nuclear power plant and China has signed a $70 billion oil deal with the Iranian theocracy? With no support from China and Russia, and with America having no serious military option, it is unclear how much Europe will be willing to compromise its own energy-supply relationship with Iran to prevent it from going nuclear. We can wonder whether any major country, except for maybe Britain and Japan, will back America on any issue where Russia and China are opposed.

China, for its part, promising nothing more than markets and carefully targeted economic assistance, is coldly pursuing its quest for new emporiums to sell its goods and feed its ever-growing need for natural resources without the least concern for human rights considerations. China is selling arms to the military junta in Myanmar, cutting deals with Zimbabwe, and heavily investing in Angolan oil. Most shamefully, it bought 40 percent of the Sudanese oil consortium last year and has become the biggest champion of Sudan, the planet’s current most egregious violator of human rights. Will the emergence of China result in a world that will have lost its ability to even take collective action against genocide?

Where, for example, does France, so proud of its authorship of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, stand on such matters? George Bush, “the leader of the free world,” has scarcely visited France in his presidency, most recently to celebrate the Normandy landing. But Hu Jintao, the colorless Chinese autocrat, who has turned back the clock on democratic reforms, was given a greeting during a Parisian state visit last year fit for an American president, the Pope, and the Dalai Lama rolled into one. For four days the Eiffel Tower was lit red. France, also heavily invested in Sudanese oil, joined with China in publicly rejecting American calls for international sanctions against Sudan.

Of course, the United States is guilty of pursuing its own economic self-interests at the expense of higher-minded concerns, the Kyoto Protocol being the world’s favorite example. Still, some combination of American and European idealism has remained an important force in international politics, such as intervention in the Balkans and in Somalia. One should wonder how much longer this can or will last.

While the United States is mired in a failing attempt to impose democracy in Iraq, other major powers are engaged in blatant pursuit of economic self-interest and nationalism. Today, the U.S possesses too little economic or political leverage to curb this trend. China is our greatest creditor—they finance the national debt. And at least for the foreseeable future, we will be forced to rely on the natural resources of countries with, at the very least, un-democratic governments, including Russia. This may indicate the slow demise of the ideals of Western democracies as the point of reference for the great human rights and environmental issues that the planet will be facing. Inevitably, something else will take their place, and the world’s governing values will emerge from other cultural traditions. For better or worse, America and Europe will learn what it’s like to be a bystander.



Clay A. Dumas ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Holworthy Hall.