Has the US Become Comfortably Numb?
Jiayuguan, Gansu Province, China, March 28th, 2014.
Salaroche

Free trade is a double-edged sword. It can allow for competitive advantages to be shared across the different nations, thereby making affordable goods, resources and labor eventually benefit the whole world community, and it can also allow for the world economy to become so interlaced that it makes it awfully painful for everyone to punish a rogue nation whenever it decides to go it alone.

I’m talking, of course, about Russia’s boldfaced land-grab in Eastern Europe and the West’s insipid reaction to it. At the dawn of the year 2014 Crimea was part of the Ukraine, three months later it is now part of Russia.

Looking at it from a distance, Russia’s move resembles some of those imperialist episodes we used to read about in college history books, except that, alas, this is something we all just witnessed in real time, right in the middle of the second decade of the Twenty-first century. And the way the world has reacted to such naked imperialism also resembles other past timid reactions to blatant aggression that we all have read about as well.

How has it all come to this? Weren’t we supposed to have overcome, or at least considerably neutralized through economic interdependence, such flagrant disrespect for the territorial integrity of other nations? Well, yes, we were supposed to, but obviously we haven’t.

Just as some clouds suddenly vanish from the sky without a lightning, a thunder, or a storm, the Soviet Union officially collapsed in December of 1991 without a bang and without even a whimper or a tear worth mentioning. As a result, the world was from then on considered to be unipolar; no more rivalries between the United States and any other military world power, no more détente, no more Mutually Assured Destruction, no more ideological proxy wars.

The rump Russian Federation was now supposed to be a peaceful nation willing to modernize itself and eventually join the world’s economic community, which it officially did when it gained membership to the WTO in August, 2012. Free trade with Russia was now a blessing for Western Europe. Russian gas and oil kept flowing westward to the benefit of everyone involved and investment capital streamed toward Russia by the billions.

In the meantime, the West had kept on letting its military guard down. “Where there’s no imminent military threat”, the West thought, “there’s no need to maintain a large military force”. To illustrate: According to the New York Times, as the Cold War thundered, there were 400,000 US troops in Europe, now there are 67,000; by the time the USSR collapsed there were 800 US aircraft over there, now there are roughly 172; thirty years ago there were some 40,000 US sailors stationed in Europe, now there are barely 7,000.

All in all, American military presence in Europe is now estimated to be some 85% smaller than it was around 1989. And still, Chuck Hagel, the Secretary of Defense, has recently been going around proposing that the US needs to reduce the Army to its smallest pre-WWII size and, also for budgetary reasons, needs to eliminate entire Air Force fleets as well.

Sorry, Chuck, but Mr. Putin has once again taken the lead in world affairs and the latest changes he has imposed on everyone require a serious revision of all the proposals you have recently made. No more retrenching, Chuck, and that includes Europe as well. One way or another they’re going to have to start pitching in to beef NATO up to respectable levels again so that the Putins of the world won’t dare to disregard it (and by this I mean China too).

It may be true that, as International Relations theory proposes, the more trade and economic interdependence there is between any given number of countries, the less chances there will be for those countries to go to war against each other, but it is also true that, as the Crimean crisis demonstrates, the more a set of countries is tied together in common economic interests, the more those countries will be reluctant to break relations with any influential partner that decides to go rogue.  

Perhaps the International Relations theory in question is more applicable where there are more historical and cultural similarities between the nations involved and where those nations are also democratic, but now that globalization has largely broken continental and ideological barriers the situation has become a bit more complex.

The question that the present scenario clearly begs is how much trust can Western democratic countries continue to deposit in its economic relations with opaque authoritarian and autocratic regimes.

No developed or developing country in the world is self-sufficient, hence the need for free trade and for free trade associations to ensure that goods keep flowing across borders with relative frictionless ease. But such economic interdependence is a double-edged sword that can cut both ways, the acceptable and the unacceptable ones. Putin is clearly showing us the darkest side of free trade, the one that, because of vital economic interdependence, precludes some partners from seriously punishing an influential member that has utterly broken the rules.

This is not an argument against free trade, not at all, it is an argument against complacency of the sort that pushes Obama to pivot east from a position of weakness, makes him appear powerless before Russia’s clear revisionist military moves, and seems to make him take peace in the European continent and in the world at large for granted.

Most of all, it is an argument against whoever may want to follow any US isolationist instincts thinking that the world is no longer in need of any strong American leadership, both in the economic and the military fields, for the case is totally the opposite.

In a nutshell, and as Vladimir Putin has unmistakably shown us, no short or long term good can come to the world should the US become comfortably numb.

Salaroche