الحرب الباردة الثانية

بقلم: مايكل هيرش

نيوزويك - 30/5/2007

ان مواجهة جديدة ما بين واشنطن وروسيا أمر غير مستحيل الحدوث

Cold War II?

Compared to a decade or so ago, the belief in the messianic power of democracy and markets has reached a new low. Why another face-off between Washington and Moscow isn’t as impossible as you might think.

By Michael Hirsh

Newsweek

Updated: 4:43 p.m. ET May 30, 2007

May 30, 2007 - It wasn’t like Harry and “Uncle Joe” at all. Or was it? Sixty-two years ago, here at Potsdam, Harry Truman and Joe Stalin seemed to get along famously, putting on a display of bonhomie that belied how fast their relationship was about to go into a deep freeze. During the conference after the surrender of Nazi Germany, the U.S. president quietly received a message that said, “Babies satisfactorily born,” meaning the world’s first successful atomic test had just occurred at Los Alamos , N.M. The cold war—and the start of a four-decadelong arms race—was just a year or so away. On Wednesday, representatives of the major powers met again in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam , this time for a G8 meeting. Such gatherings are typically relentlessly amiable, and so the delegates tried to make it this time. But beneath the forced grins, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov exchanged icy, even scary, words that suggested a new cold war is not inconceivable. “The arms race is starting again,” Lavrov said flatly.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union , the conventional wisdom in Washington has been that a new cold war wasn’t possible because the vast ideological differences that separated America and Russia no longer existed. But is that so true any longer? Once an eager student of Washington ’s free-market, democratic reforms, the Russia of today has become another beast entirely, says a senior Bush administration official. The Putin government has come to operate by the rules of a new form of fascism, a blend of open markets and state control. And don’t try to talk to elite Russians about the glories of democracy any more: they’ve had their earful of advice from America . But perhaps nothing is more worrisome than the current clash represented by Bush’s missile shield and Putin’s countertest. Russia is “slowly becoming a revisionist power, seeking to revisit the settlements of ’89 to ’91” that ended the cold war, the official said.  “That’s an unsettling thought.” Among these: the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty limiting troops and weapons in Europe .

This is, sadly, a shift in the post-cold war world that is becoming all too familiar. Compared to a decade or so ago, the belief in the messianic power of democracy and markets has reached a new low. Bush has helped the trend along by allowing Iraq to disintegrate from a would-be model into a morass, turning the country into perhaps the most powerful example of democracy’s drawbacks since the Weimar Republic, and by hypocritically embracing the rhetoric of democracy while giving big hugs to its most flagrant detractors, like Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. Not only Russia but China—Washington’s other great cold war rival—has pressed the idea of an alternative model on the world (Beijing has shown, at least for the moment, that you can have a booming market economy with totalitarian rule).

Let’s hope that meeting in Kennebunkport goes well. Better, at least, than Potsdam .

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18945566/site/newsweek/page/2/

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نشرنا لهذه المقالات لا يعني أنها تعبر عن وجهة نظر المركز كلياً أو جزئياً

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من حق الزائر الكريم أن ينقل وأن ينشر كل ما يعجبه من موقعنا . معزواً إلينا ، أو غير معزو .ـ