{"id":3025,"date":"2015-11-05T15:25:36","date_gmt":"2015-11-05T10:25:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/jwt2015\/?p=3025"},"modified":"2016-02-25T12:17:57","modified_gmt":"2016-02-25T07:17:57","slug":"united-nations-divided-world-obama-putin-and-world-order","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/internationalaffairs\/united-nations-divided-world-obama-putin-and-world-order\/","title":{"rendered":"United Nations, Divided World: Obama, Putin and World Order"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"United<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

For the past six years, President Barack Obama has dominated the annual opening of the UN General Assembly, his words and initiatives driving the agenda and media coverage. This year, it was Russian President Vladimir Putin, making his first UN appearance in a decade, who stole the diplomatic show.<\/strong> <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

While speaking at the 70th UN General Assembly session, Vladimir Putin called for a \u201cgrand coalition\u201d against the Islamic State, an idea backed by even some US allies. This call has placed the Obama administration, which has long clung to an \u201cAssad-must-go\u201d position in Syria, on the defensive. Although it would require at least a partial US climb-down, Putin\u2019s initiative could help resolve a grinding conflict that has killed more than 200,000 people, facilitated the rise of the Islamic State (IS), and generated a humanitarian catastrophe in Syria and neighbouring states and the worst migration crisis in the history of the European Union. At the same time, Putin\u2019s address underscored how different the world looks from Moscow\u2019s vantage point \u2014 and how inconsistent Russian authoritarianism and realpolitik is with President Obama\u2019s dream of an open, rules-based international order.<\/p>\n

Taking the podium, President Barack Obama described a turbulent world, balanced precariously between stability and chaos. At this critical juncture, the nations of the world had a choice to make. Would they rededicate themselves to the principles upon which the United Nations was founded seventy years ago, seeking shared security, prosperity, and human dignity through international cooperation? Or would they follow the siren song of those who still believe that \u201cmight makes right,\u201d both at home and abroad? Implicitly referring to Russia and China, the President Obama castigated \u201coppressive\u201d regimes that seek the illusory order of tyranny, the \u201cstrongmen\u201d who refuse to trust their people, who seek vainly to strangle the idea of freedom, and by their actions simply spark the \u201crevolutions of tomorrow.\u201d Abroad, those same governments too often abandon the international rule of law for the law of the jungle, ignoring that power politics inevitably backfires in an \u201cintegrated world.\u201d Consider, for example, Russia\u2019s aggression in Ukraine, which had brought such economic pain (in the form of sanctions) to Russia itself. How much better would Russia have fared, the president asked, had it simply pursued its goals through diplomatic means? Not for the first time, Obama seemed genuinely perplexed that Putin \u2014 or any other world leader \u2014 would regard realpolitik as a legitimate form of statecraft, rather than an atavism no longer appropriate in a world of shared transnational threats like climate change, Ebola and uncontrolled migration.<\/p>\n

The problem, of course, is that Putin never got the memo that power politics is obsolete. In recent days, the Obama administration has repeatedly warned that Russia\u2019s use of the UN Security Council (UNSC) veto in Syria threatens the credibility of that body. In his own speech from the UN podium, Putin reminded listeners that the postwar international order agreed at Yalta was founded explicitly on big power privilege. Each of the five permanent members (the P5) was endowed with a veto precisely to prevent a subset of the P5 from using the UNSC\u2019s enforcement power contrary to the will of one of its members. Putin also suggested that the United Nations should think long and hard before undermining or infringing upon state sovereignty through military interventions or the \u201cexport\u201d of democratic revolutions. As evidence, one needs to look no further than the Middle East and North Africa. According to Putin, \u201c\u2026 instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and a social disaster,\u201d as outside interventions in Iraq, Libya and Syria had created \u201cpower vacuums\u201d filled by \u201cextremists and terrorists,\u201d most notably the Islamic State. Implicitly addressing the West, he asked: \u201cThose who have caused this situation: Do you realize now what you have done?\u201d Rather than continuing down this path, the time had come for the international community to form \u201ca broad international coalition against terrorism,\u201d akin to the one that defeated Hitler seventy years ago. The government of Syria, he insisted, must be part of this coalition against the Islamic State.<\/p>\n

Putin\u2019s realpolitik was also on display in his discussion of the Ukraine conflict (a topic that caused the Ukrainian delegation to the UN to walk out). It was Nato\u2019s expansion into the post-Soviet space, he claimed, that had the created a \u201clogic of confrontation\u201d between the \u201cWest\u201d and \u201cEast.\u201d Indeed, he implied, the West had engineered the coup against Yanukovich that set off Ukraine\u2019s turmoil, seeking to force its exclusive alignment with the West. This was clearly too much for Moscow. Putin is determined to protect the rights of the twenty-five million Russian compatriots that the collapse of the Soviet Union left outside of Russia\u2019s borders. In sum, Russia will insist upon some degree of sphere of influence over its \u201cnear abroad.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite their contrasting world views and testy personal relationship, Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin may be forced to find some common ground on the way forward, at least when it comes to Syria. Russia\u2019s military buildup in that country has given it some leverage in negotiations with the United States, which was also taken by surprise by agreement among Russia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria to share intelligence related to the Islamic State. Moreover, a slew of foreign governments \u2014 including not only big emerging countries like China and India but also close US allies like Germany \u2014 are now convinced that Assad must be part of the solution in Syria. Given the apparently abject (and expensive) US failure to train \u201cmoderate\u201d Syrian forces, and the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of failing to resolve the Syrian conflict, the Obama administration may have little choice but to reach tacit agreement with Russia that Assad\u2019s government can play a part in the coalition against the Islamic State. The cost of that acquiescence should be some US insistence on Assad’s eventual exit following a defined political transition, including the reconstitution of an eventual successor government in Syria.<\/p>\n

Still, any US-Russian cooperation in Syria is unlikely to change facts on the ground in Ukraine. Russian cooperation in Syria may, in fact, further constrain US desire and ability to counter Russian aggression in Ukraine. In the end, it appears Russia \u2014 not China \u2014 poses the greatest challenge to the rules-based international order on which the UN is based.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the past six years, President Barack Obama has dominated the annual opening of the UN General Assembly, his words and initiatives driving the agenda and media coverage. This year, it was Russian President Vladimir Putin, making his first UN appearance in a decade, who stole the diplomatic show. While speaking at the 70th UN …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":153,"featured_media":3026,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1,2610],"tags":[2419,72,159,2414,2456,1669,2418,1000,460,548,160,2540,2455,2541,1305,2642,2457,1587],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3025"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/153"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3025\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}