In a world measured by 140-character bursts and 60-minute news cycles, it's often hard to see the quiet but inexorable forces that will define what sort of world we'll see by mid-century and beyond.
But those factors are no less real. Take the contest for superpower status -- a competition several contenders are waging in earnest, while the world's indisputable member of the superpower club, the United States, seems unsure whether it can retain the title, or even wants to.
War-weary, strapped for cash and beset by serial scandals, America is beguiled by decidedly non-super concepts like "soft power," and "leading from behind." But while the U.S. may long for an international sabbatical, other major powers understand that the plate tectonics of the next global order are grinding into place today -- with consequences that may well shape the global power equation for a generation and more.
It often seems that America has been a superpower so long that we tend to discount its benefits and fixate on its burdens. And yet it's likely that the only thing worse than being a superpower in our uncertain world is no longer being one.
Consider Russia, more than 20 years after the Soviet demise. Former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton brought on her first trip to Moscow the famously mis-translated Russian Reset button -- the State Department version of Staples' "This is Easy" button -- as the symbol for a rebooted U.S.-Russian relationship. The U.S. may have been ready to turn the page on the Cold War past, but it's now clear that Russia -- whose leader termed the collapse of the Soviet empire "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century" -- had a different sort of reset in mind, one in which a core element of Russian strategy seems to revolve around one-off confrontations that sap America's strength and monopolize its strategic attention.
Witness Iran, where, on the wholesale level, Russia functions as the ruling mullahs' heat-shield, repeatedly blocking any tightening of the "biting sanctions" at the United Nations. At the retail level, Russia's Gazprom lumbers ahead in its long-term plan to help Iran modernize its oil and natural gas fields, while state corporation Rosatom is now finalizing Iran's Bushehr nuclear plant, with plans to put the commissioned facility in Iranian hands "in mid-2013."
Shift to Syria, where Vladimir Putin props up Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad without the slightest qualms at the body count he racks up or the weapons he employs to do it. As the U.S. and its allies reluctantly mull the necessity of aiding Syria's rebels, Russia counters with a vow to deliver Assad's forces not only S-300 air defense missiles, but also Yakhont surface-to-ship missiles, handy against efforts to deliver arms to the rebels by sea. In case that doesn't do the trick, Russia's Pacific Fleet has redeployed 12 warships to the eastern Mediterranean -- a sight not seen since Soviet days.
Nor is that the only instance of Soviet nostalgia. Consider the flights of Russian Bear-H nuclear-capable bombers to the edge of Alaskan airspace in late April -- just days after U.S. National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon visited Moscow in an attempt to smooth frictions with Russia over U.S. missile defense systems.
May alone has seen Secretary of State John Kerry kept waiting for three hours before he had his audience with President Putin, for discussions on Syria -- a word that Putin failed to utter even once in their post-meeting press conference. That was May 7; three days after Kerry's mission, Russia's defense chief announced they would move ahead with delivery of the S-300s to Syria, three days after that came the very-public arrest of an alleged U.S. spy, broadcast reality TV-style for the Russian public, complete with spy-gear less sophisticated than what's on sale in Washington's International Spy Museum gift shop. Three days after the spy snatch -- in a sharp departure from state-to-state spy-protocol -- Russian authorities outed the CIA's Moscow station chief.
