The Time of Great Chaos

In general, each of Vladimir Putin’s international initiatives provokes a double reaction in the West. Admiring, we are astounded in the presence of the Kremlin’s master strategist — a genius on the international stage. With an appalled countenance, a bit condescending, we wonder about Barack Obama’s passivity — this fainthearted man in a world of brutes. In Crimea in 2014 and this year in Syria, each time the judoka takes advantage of the basketball player. Like the Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is also holding out on Washington, we pronounce the inexorable fall of the American empire at this beginning of the 21st century. But it is not that easy.

These are the tectonic plates of strategic power moves, without a doubt. Each day, the world looks a little less like that of the immediate post-Cold War. Never has this truth seemed as obvious as in the recent past. In foreign policy, China and Russia have a central objective: to challenge the supremacy of American leadership in world affairs. The battle is ideological and strategic. Moscow and Beijing score points on the ground, physically and politically, united in the same desire: to call into question the legitimacy that America claims for itself, of being “the global sheriff,” even in spite of itself.

Disastrous Sequence for Washington

Its military machine renovated at great expense — the defense budget would represent over 4 percent of the GDP — Putin’s Russia is making a show of force in Syria. For the first time since the end of the Soviet Union and its setbacks in Afghanistan, Moscow is deploying its army far from its bases. Russia is rediscovering its place in the Middle East, which was, until now, American turf. China is proceeding in the same manner. It is equipping itself with a navy and with missiles capable of driving out the U.S. 7th Pacific Fleet.

Like Russia in Ukraine, Georgia or Syria, China relies on force and practices a philosophy of fait accompli on the ground. Eager to extend its sovereignty to the entire South China Sea, it seizes small islands whose ownership is contested and transforms them into military mini-bases. In its immediate surroundings, China intends to show that it is the sovereign power — not, or no longer, the United States.

Obama’s critics highlight the responsibility of the 44th U.S. president. They willingly blame him for a sequence that has been disastrous for the credibility of the United States. It is because Obama kept none of his commitments in Syria, particularly in the summer of 2013, they say, that Putin felt free to annex Crimea in 2014, while comrade Xi, in 2015, gently militarized the South China Sea. Obama’s despisers would happily paraphrase the great Michel Audiard: “Two walking brutes go further than one sitting intellectual.”

Quasi-Promethean Power

The intellectual in the White House is the first American president to take into account a reality that is difficult to admit in Washington and among U.S. allies: The immediate post-Cold War phase is over. This was the brief moment of “hyper-power,” when American domination was total: military-strategic, ideological, cultural, economic and technological. From this momentary supremacy, too many Americans and Europeans formed the impression of an America endowed for eternity with a quasi-Promethean power. Hence the perception, a disappointment for some, of a relatively passive Obama.

But the moment of “hyper-power” could not last. It was only a parenthesis — 1989-2001, for example — inevitably destined to close on the day when China would be sufficiently certain of its economic power to emerge as a political-strategic power and when, no less inevitably, Russia would rebuild in military power, its specialty. Here we are, not counting the arrival of other poles of medium power — from Turkey to Iran, and from Brazil to Indonesia.

In this world of lasting multipolar chaos, “Nobody should wonder that America’s pre-eminence is being contested,” wrote The Economist this week. It is no longer what it was. Conscious of the disaster that was the intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, and consequently enlightened on the limits of the capacities of the military tool in complex foreign lands, Obama felt, wrote Roger Cohen in The New York Times, “the need to redefine America’s foreign-policy” in its current framework: “an interconnected world” where new powers operate. Former Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine added: “Obama has a vision adapted to an America that is no longer a hyper-power” while it still remains the most powerful of the great powers.

‘Doctrine of Restraint’

The president drew from that a “doctrine of restraint,” continued Roger Cohen. Perhaps his Syrian policy has been a disaster. Without doubt “the preoccupation has been with the cost of action, not the cost of inaction,” observes Dennis Ross, one of the sages of American diplomacy. Richard Haass, another sage, continues: “I think Obama exaggerates the limits and underestimates the upside of American power, even if the trend is toward a more difficult environment for translating power and influence.”

But this environment, this world of the 21st century, this multipolar mess — Obama did not invent it. His successor, Democrat or Republican, will have the same constraints and will undoubtedly observe the same caution. She or he will have to manage an increasingly difficult relationship with Moscow and Beijing — where the possibilities of direct or indirect confrontation oscillate with the necessities of cooperation. Friends or foes? Both, according to the subject matter.