The US and Russia: Gates to the World

The symptoms of the “sick man” are no longer secret. Europe has prematurely entered the club of cripples. United Europe suffers from an abundance of “wise men” and a scarcity of therapy. Its weakness in the extremities – Greece, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus… Italy – has caused it to gyrate and spin. The only remaining remedy is cauterization, and Europe will not resort to this; to cauterize would be to announce the union’s bankruptcy a bit early.

When the great leaders of the world meet, in Mexico for example, we miss the presence of Europe’s leaders – they only appear in the photograph. At the negotiating table and in the halls of debate, the names of Obama, Putin and Hu Jintao keep coming up. Europe’s leaders are leaders in their countries. Outside of their countries, they are either attachés or searching for a role taken from them by the others. Europe has become only European. The extent of its interests is not measured by its ambitions, but rather by its crises. Some among the hasty leaders go up to the front of the international stage, undertake adventures and then, because of their limited capabilities and curtailed influence, retreat: the American steps forward and stretches out like an octopus, or the Russian to reclaims his Soviet role, without the Marxism, or the smiling Chinese man to sneaks in with commercial savvy and his mighty international pocketbook.

Sick Europe has withdrawn from the Middle East. What it is capable of – hosting conferences – remains without effect, mere ink on paper. The Syrian crisis has dear friends in Europe. France is in the vanguard, but he who is drawing a road map to solve the crisis is not drawing it except in Chinese ink, with an American pen and in the Russian script….

It was anticipated at the Mexico summit that François Hollande would fight for the sake of the environment, and that his green allies were waiting for him. It was expected that he would defend his project calling for imposing taxes on bank transfers. This is part of his political platform; he considers it vital to relieve some aspects of the financial crisis. Hollande gave his speech and no one heard him. To keep quiet, he needed only the Americans to inform him of their refusal and China’s agreement to that.

Global summits have lost their effectiveness. They have turned into occasions of which no one expects any outcome other than the daily outcomes from precise market mechanisms, debt ceilings, environmental pollution, increasing poverty, strings of famines and the sequence of wars… into prearranged summits without the ability to convince anyone.

And it is not within Europe’s ability to play a political role, even under the leadership of Merkel, who is now alone, after the fall of the French circus acrobat Nicolas Sarkozy. Europe’s one and only concern today, under the leadership of the German central engine, is to convince Greece to stay in the leaking “Euro” boat, and to help Spain stop up the banking holes that are drowning the country in unprecedented unemployment. Europe’s one and only concern today is to save the leaking ship, so Greece does not fall out of it, Cyprus does not drown by itself, Spain does not drop off and Portugal does not slip away – in addition to the countries not yet free from the nightmares of the crisis.

Many factors have thrust Europe into senility. The most prominent of them is that an international partner was absent, so a new one came, with its legacy, history, geography, riches and economics, and it reclaimed the seat it lost in the era of Gorbachev. Russian financial solvency has come to draw the attention of Europeans, who see in Russia willing financial aid to get them out of the crisis. Cyprus did so. It takes loans from Russia, which was the target of plundering creditors and financial agents in the time of Boris Yeltsin. With Putin, Europe realized its size. The world today no longer has only one pole with the United States in front and Europe following it. Except for the brief period of aggression against Iraq, Russia has returned equilibrium to the world. The influence and importance of Russia has not spread to Europe or attached to the United States, nor did China want it – China that is playing the game of economic and financial beefing-up, and imposing political developments by its presence, not by being busy or working.

Today is a world of three poles. The United States, Russia and China – Europe’s place is safe in the U.S. annex. Likewise Turkey, which was a regional player, has been eclipsed by Russia and driven away by Iran.

Inside this three-pole world there are two other poles, the first of which is Iran. Iran is a pole of another kind, outside of the international system’s core of activity, its accords and its courses of action. Iran is alone, but pertinacious. It spoke, dictated, executed and did not retreat. It was isolated and came to be widely relevant. It was backwards and came to be revolutionary without weapons. It was a general in the Gulf taking U.S. orders and came to be a general giving the orders. As for the Syrian crisis, it has become the key to the map of the new world order. The Russians put it unambiguously: The new world order is contingent on how the Syrian crisis is solved. And there is no solution without Iran. Iran is not an addendum; rather, it is the source. It is the text and not the margin.

So now, the local and regional players have no other choice than to study the international variables and leave behind the old constants that brought the Middle East to a bursting point. The period before the Arab revolutions, the one-pole system – this has ended. So, let the sportsmen hurry before the signal is given to “aim.”