The Vulnerability of Peripheries
Up and down the frontier of American global power, from the South China Sea to the Middle East, from the Caucasus to the north Central European plain, U.S. allies are increasingly nervous. Along the littoral rim of East Asia, South Koreans, Japanese, Taiwanese and others in the region watched anxiously throughout 2010 as China ratcheted up efforts to assert control over strategic waterways and challenge the U.S. position in Asia. In the Middle East, too, Israel, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States ended the year less confident than ever that the United States would somehow bestir itself to contain an aspiring nuclear-armed Iran. And on Europe’s eastern fringe, despite efforts at détente with Moscow, Poland and the Baltic States entered 2011 with deep uncertainties about America’s long-term regional commitment in the face of a decrepit but atavistically revisionist Russia...
Amid the now globally accepted thesis of American decline, America’s global rivals are doing what aspirant powers have done at moments of transition for millennia: hypothesis-testing. They are probing the top state on the outer limits of its power commitments, where its strategic appendages are most vulnerable and its strength is most thinly spread. If history is any guide at all, they are reading America’s responses to gauge how much latitude they have to make low-cost revisions to the system in their favor. But both they and American allies are watching not just how America responds to probes in their own neck of the woods but also to the probes of powers—and to the needs of similarly situated allies—in other regions. Lacking the geopolitical equivalent of a stock market, they are gathering valuable cues about America’s intentions in their own neighborhood by tracking how it handles revisionists at other points on the U.S. strategic perimeter....
While a relative attenuation of the U.S. position due to the “rise of the rest” is a reality, an American power free-fall of the kind envisioned by some foreign and even U.S. commentators is not inevitable; how the United States responds to its competitors’ probes will be an important ingredient in determining the scale and pace of the change that does occur. In short, the hypothesis of precipitous American decline needs to be disproven before its growing momentum transforms it into a self-fulfilling juggernaut. And only America can disprove it....
In the period since the war [in Georgia], Moscow has seen its diplomatic and regional situation improve markedly: The United States cancelled agreements to place missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic; the West discarded NATO enlargement blueprints for Ukraine and Georgia; old patterns of influence in the post-Soviet space began to re-emerge; and America’s regional ally, Poland, made a major push for engagement with Russia. The U.S.-Russia “reset” may have improved the tone of relations, but the important thing from the Russian perspective is that U.S. concessions under the “reset” followed the most muscular act in the brief history of post-Cold War Russian foreign policy...
That the Chinese are actively measuring what U.S. response these actions elicit is clear from comments by high-ranking Chinese officials. In March, they told visiting U.S. officials James Steinberg and Jeffrey Bader that China would “not tolerate” a U.S. presence in the South China Sea, which they claimed as a “core interest” on par with Taiwan and Tibet....
Another revisionist power in a strategic fracture zone is also observing U.S. actions across the globe: In recent years Iran has ratcheted up its anti-American rhetoric and posturing. As with Russia and China, Iran’s probes often seem to intensify whenever the U.S. position in the Near East and Southwest Asia and in other regions seems to weaken. In addition to bold and highly publicized strides in the development of its nuclear capabilities, the Iranian government has armed, abetted and incited Shi‘a proxies in Iraq, and delivered SCUD missiles through Syria to Hizballah. Now, in what may be the strongest probe of the United States in the region to date, Iran is reportedly attempting to construct a medium-range missile installation in Venezuela within striking distance of the United States.3...
Confronted with this spike in assertiveness, geopolitically exposed allies in all three regions initially have done exactly what one would expect: They have sought verbal expressions and literal demonstrations of American reassurance. America’s hingepoint allies include some of the most security-conscious states in the world. Leaders in these states tend to analyze local power shifts for signs of changing threat possibilities. They also increasingly appear to be watching each other, monitoring the experiences of similarly situated U.S. allies and Washington’s reactions to their strategic concerns.
U.S. allies in the Middle East and Asia carefully noted the cancellation of Third Site Missile Defense in the fall of 2009 as a possible indicator of U.S. strategic thinking on their own neighborhoods. According to European diplomats, officials from the Gulf States and Taiwan expressed concern over the U.S. policy shift in Central Europe, noting parallels between their own strategic situations and those of Poland and the Czech Republic. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak traveled to Warsaw and Prague for “bilateral talks on military assistance”, but experienced observers saw instead an Israeli effort to gauge U.S. regional intentions.4 In Japan, observers expressed concerns about Russia’s role in the cancellation. They feared that China might draw lessons from it and increase its demands that Tokyo roll back its defense plans. As one Japanese expert noted, “Japan wants the United States to take a rigid stance on the missile defense plan in Europe.”5 Israelis frequently cite strategic parallels with U.S. security patronage of Taiwan.6 In Central Europe, government officials and the press showed interest in America’s reaction to the March 2010 Cheonan incident—unusual for a typically inward-focused region. Military maneuvers in South Korea like “Invincible Spirit” in the Sea of Japan and the larger “Ulchi Freedom Guardian” have made headlines in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia....
I hope that clears that up.
