Bin Laden’s Death Ends a Cycle in the Middle East

Strategic redeployment. The U.S. now has new global priorities, located in Asia. The tightening of military spending is unavoidable.

The elimination of Osama bin Laden is an example of global political reach, which validates and ratifies a previous event of great strategic significance. It is about the complete irrelevance — of him and his organization, al-Qaida — in the wave of insurrection that traveled throughout the Middle East, in particular the Arab world, after the events in Tunisia, with its epicenter in Egypt, the political, cultural and intellectual axis of the region.

From the outside, the disappearance of bin Laden closes the cycle of wars in the greater Middle East — Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya — that the U.S. triggered in response to the combined terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that caused more than 3,000 civilian deaths and made up the largest and most effective strategic blow in its history.

In the immediate future, it’s probable that the U.S. will accelerate its date of withdrawal for troops in Afghanistan that begins in July of this year and should conclude, at the latest, in 2014. That year also marks the complete withdrawal of all NATO forces, which constitute 49 countries.

This anticipated withdrawal would converge with the beginning of public negotiations with the Taliban (secret ones began two years ago) to find a political and non-military solution in the framework of an international agreement that five large neighbors of Afghanistan will participate in — primarily, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and by extension — and in an implicit way, at least initially — also Iran.

The closure of the cycle of wars in the Middle East leads the U.S. to set a new order of global priorities, situated in the axis of the world system after the crisis of 2008 and 2009, which is Asia — China and India — in the first place and in other emergent countries, primarily Brazil.

In this context, Osama bin Laden — after his physical disappearance — transforms into a historical figure of the first half of the 21st century, who was not only strategically defeated by American Navy SEAL commandos, but also by the insurrectionary wave of civil society that irreversibly transformed the Middle East. Thus, in the second decade of the century, bin Laden becomes a footnote in a page of world history.

In respect to Pakistan, it must be warned that the U.S. will not break its relations with the government in Islamabad, and less so with the Pakistani military — the only national institution in the country — for its omission in the search for the whereabouts of bin Laden, because its participation is essential for peace negotiations in Afghanistan. The new order of American priorities implicates a new foreign policy, with an axis on China, in the deliberate search of the construction of the G-2. It also requires a new pay structure for defense that significantly reduces the annual $800 billion that is spent on defense and security, a higher rate than the rest of the world, combined.

This is what Obama intends to do: He proposes reducing the expenses of the state sector by $400 billion by 2023, which would take 5.4 percent of GDP, less than 3 percent during that period. A reduction of that magnitude is equivalent to a complete demobilization of entire segments of the military establishment, similar to those tried and tested by the U.S. in other post-war situations (1946-1992).

Since 1998-2000, the budget of the Pentagon has risen 54 percent in real terms, the highest level of expansion in 50 years. If you add up the costs of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the real increase is more than 100 percent, a higher peak than the increase of the Kennedy (missile crisis, 1962), Johnson (Vietnam War, 1964-1975) and Reagan (final stage of the Cold War) years combined.

The elimination of Osama bin Laden implicates the end of an era in the world and becomes a point of inflection for the unavoidable adjustment of the U.S. before a qualitatively new situation.