Imperial Sunset?
by Aijaz Ahmad
For the first time since its rise as a superpower the United States is facing a serious threat to its hegemony across the globe.
In February this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed a security conference in Munich that had 250 of the world’s top leaders and officials in attendance, including such luminaries as the German Chancellor and the U.S. Secretary of State. He said some very rude words about the United States, denouncing its unilateralism and unipolar pretensions, its trampling of international law, its stoking of the arms race, its aggressions across the globe. These, Putin said, were factors that encouraged others to seek their own weapons of mass destruction and even commit terrorist acts.
He went further and warned Europe itself that the continuing eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was “a serious provocative factor” and that the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had been converted into “a vulgar instrument for advancing the foreign policy goals of one country or a group of countries against other countries”. The global missile defence system developed by the U.S. would, he said, “give it a free hand to launch not only local, but global conflicts” and the proposed deployment of U.S. missile interceptors in Europe to neutralise Russia’s nuclear arsenals would trigger “another round of the inevitable arms race”. Calling for a new “global security architecture”, Putin reminded the Europeans that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) had among them a larger gross domestic product (GDP) than the European Union. “There is no doubt that in the foreseeable future the economic potential of these new centres of power will inevitably get converted into political clout and will strengthen multipolarity,” he said.
To continue reading this article click go to MRZine.
This article originally appeared in the Indian magazine Frontline.
