Federico Bordonaro

Very interesting paragraph taken from the annual “Strategic Survey” published by London’s IISS. Every now and then, someone asserts that nation-states are dead and geopolitics obsolete. Now, almost in the year 2010, can we say that these fancy predictions were accurate? The answer is a resounding NO.

Moving into 2010, many of the ambitious foreign-policy agendas and practices established by Western powers in the previous decade and a half appear in retreat. What appetite will there be for the ‘nation-building’ projects that were thought at once strategically necessary and morally desirable? The efforts in Iraq are bound to become modest. Those in Afghanistan, especially as the economic crisis continues and the magnitude of the challenge becomes ever more evident, will naturally become minimalist, at least in comparison to the original design. New projects seem unlikely to be undertaken and would have trouble garnering public support except in the most exceptional of circumstances. What appeals for humanitarian intervention will be answered? The so-called ‘responsibility to protect’ has been advanced as an international imperative, though often with Western impetus, in the face of acts of genocide or equivalent natural tragedies. A sense of natural human charity persists even in times of grave economic crisis. But tragedies in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere have not resulted in the concerted international action for which so many campaigners have pleaded. The static or declining military budgets of European powers place limits on expeditionary capacities already stretched by operations thought to be of strategic vital national interest. Rising powers in Asia, and elsewhere, are still more reluctant to ‘interfere in the internal affairs’ of others. The survivability of doctrines like the responsibility to protect and humanitarian intervention will depend on countries outside the West adopting them more fully than has heretofore been evident.

The intellectual habit in the West has recently become to align national or alliance strategic interests with the delivery of a global public good. It may be that budgetary constraints and the disillusions of recent experience will inspire more political leaders to move from the poetic towards the more prosaic end of the strategic spectrum: defining goals more crisply in terms of clear national interest rather than acts of wider strategic charity. Emerging countries may need to move in the other direction and find some way to define the advance of a wider public good as in their national interest. Rising powers, if they are truly to rise, will only achieve genuine prominence if they are to shape the wider order in which they live. This rebalancing will take time, and may not have wholly beneficial effects. In some areas, like climate change, it may be that Western powers will continue to provide the impetus for an effective global regime, though one will not emerge without key participation from the bigger rising powers. But other causes will need champions from emerging power centres. As time passes, the limitations on Western and US foreign and security policy may become more evident. Domestically Obama may have campaigned on the theme ‘yes we can’; internationally he may increasingly have to argue ‘no we can’t’.