By Vestnik Kavkaza
NATO extensive exercises called Steadfast Jazz were conducted in Europe. An active phase of the exercises took place on the territory of Poland and the Baltic republics. A maneuver legend named a country-aggressor which occupied a part of Estonia ‘Botnia.’ The deputy minister of Russia, Anatoly Antonov, stated that the exercises were directed against a certain country and they “were full of the Cold War atmosphere.” Russian military experts concluded that the maneuvers were aimed at improvement of military techniques against the Russian Armed Forces, and NATO still considers Russia as the main rival.
Meanwhile, political experts are not so pessimistic and believe that the U.S.A. has changed.
Alexei Filatov, senior scientist of the General History Institute of RAS, thinks that “the classic bipolar system didn't exist in the world throughout the whole post-war period. In the 1960s outlines of a multipolar world began to form. First of all, China separated from the so-called Socialist Commonwealth and started to provide an independent policy. In the West there was the France of De Gaulle. There was a ‘quartet’ in the world. And when one of the rings of the chain failed (the USSR), it ruined the whole game. As a result, American hegemony appeared to be an incontrovertible fact. However, when the Cold War ended, the Americans said that they also suffered great losses.”
According to Andrei Kortunov, director general of the Russian Council on International Affairs, “in the nineties there was some illusion that the United States could independently solve global problems, that the United States could build a world order based on their preferences. It was some kind of triumphalism that has affected not only the post Soviet states or the developing world, but if you look at Europe. They began to "copy" U.S. institutions in science, education and so on. Certainly, it was related to an illusion that a certain system, a certain ideology, a certain set of postulates prevailed. Already in the late nineties failures started to be observed, controversies began to emerge. From my perspective, the critical moment in the destruction of the illusion was the war in Iraq, when the leading American allies - Germany and France, not to mention Russia - voted against it.”
Kortunov believes that “the United States is no longer building a new world order, but is trying to preserve as much as possible the positions which it has accumulated, that have been assigned to U.S. policy over the past decades. That is, today the United States is a status quo state, which responds to external challenges, sometimes successfully, but for the most part not very successfully, and tends to, if not freeze the situation, keeping its military dominance, keeping the structure of financial and economic relations in the world beneficial to it, then at least slow down the inevitable changes. Hence, all the efforts to somehow embed China into the new, or rather the old system of relations, hence the intention to maintain NATO as much as possible, to preserve the system of military-political alliances, hence the desire to keep striving to maintain the military presence of the United States abroad, and so on. But with each new cycle, this maintenance game brings less and less success to the United States and it has to retreat, it has to make concessions, it has to declare a willingness to accept structural changes in the world, as well as in the world economy and world politics. Concessions are usually forced, concessions are usually made too late and that is why they are not always accepted by the partners, but the adaptation of the United States to the new situation is an inevitable process.”
Kortunov is sure that the American potential is very great, but in regard to other countries, in regard to the rest of the world, the United States will continue to weaken.”
