\u00e2\u20ac\u0153By itself, \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6the war in Georgia isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that big a deal economically,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Krugman writes. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153But it does mark the end of the Pax Americana \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force. And that raises some real questions about the future of globalization.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The article brings in a number of pertinent examples of rising nationalism in the economic, as well as the strategic and political spheres, that today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s policymakers, politicians and publics might well consider before reflexively taking Georgia\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s side. Serb nationalists had a pretty good case against the Austro-Hungarian Empire back in 1914, too.<\/p>\n
The second article, by former Singaporean diplomat and veteran provocateur Kishore Mahbubani, appeared in yesterday’s Financial Times <\/em>under the headline \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The West is Strategically Wrong on Georgia<\/a>.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Mahbubani, who notes the hypocrisy of U.S. outrage (and how it appears to publics in Latin America and the Islamic world, in particular) over Russian actions, is particularly succinct about the strategic choices faced by the U.S. and the West at this juncture and argues for a fundamental strategic reassessment based on an understanding that the West can no longer \u00e2\u20ac\u0153dictate terms\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to the rest of the world as it has assumed it could do since the end of the Cold War. In fact, he argues, both the U.S. and the West have become terribly isolated from what the Bush administration loves to call \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the international community.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d His analysis of what strategic choices are now available to the West \u00e2\u20ac\u201cit can afford only so many enemies and so should be much more discriminating in its choices \u00e2\u20ac\u201d is particularly acute. Interestingly, Mahbubani, author of The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East<\/a><\/em> (2008), ends on a more optimistic note than Krugman (although I, presumably like Krugman, believe that nationalism in Asia is as likely to undermine the burgeoning \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Pacific Century\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as U.S. over-extension and arrogance have wreaked havoc with Bill Kristol\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s and Bob Kagan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cherished but chimerical \u00e2\u20ac\u0153New American Century\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.)<\/p>\n While the notion that the Georgia crisis takes us back to the end of the Cold War and the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153return of history\u00e2\u20ac\u009d has become a cliche among most of the commentariat (while some neo-cons predictably compare it to the Sudetenland, Munich and 1938), both columns see the present moment as signaling much deeper historical and even epochal challenges to U.S. and western hegemony in what is now, ever more clearly, a multipolar world that rejects Pax Americana. And, if U.S. leaders, actual and imminent, continue to insist on a hard line toward Russia, that rejection will very likely extend to Europe, as well. Indeed, western (or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153old\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) Europe, in particular, has some major strategic decisions of its own to make, having seen where its habitual deference to Washington has gotten it.<\/p>\n I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m still on vacation but, like everyone else, have been quite amazed at the ongoing Georgia crisis, particularly the failure so far of the administration and the campaigns of the two presidential candidates to absorb its potential significance and the need for Washington (and the West more generally) to fundamentally reassess its global position and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-4591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4591"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4592,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4591\/revisions\/4592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4591"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/lobe\/lobelog.jpg\")
<\/a>Visit Lobelog.com<\/a> for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"