Losing the American "Near Abroad"

Tom Engelhardt has written an excellent commentary in which explores the post Cold War times. He points out

"...how the victorious U.S. superpower attempted to finish off its former rival, the Russian remnant of the USSR and its last outlying regions of control, its "near abroad." ... We were concerned with winning over their "near abroad" and "poured money (direct and indirect), effort, and planning into the penetration of, and stripping away of, Russia's "near abroad.".... The U.S. now has military bases in the former Central Asian SSRs of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and may conceivably already have more military bases (and missions) in the far-flung imperial regions of the former USSR than do the Russians. (It's not even a contest if you throw in Afghanistan.)"

In our frenzy to defeat the Russian Bear we overloooked the formation of several power blocs - Greater Europe, Greater Asia and "...left-leaning democracies in Latin America determined to pursue their own collective interests whatever the Bush administration has in mind."

Engelhardt points out that one of the main reason's the USSR fell was the toll their war in Afghanistan had on their empire. Is Iraq our Afghanistan?

"With no end in sight, the draining Iraq War has already trumped much of the rest of the Bush administration's aggressive foreign policy (especially in Asia) and has left the administration thoroughly distracted when it comes to whole regions of the world...This, in turn, has opened a remarkable space for experimentation and change in, of all places, the little attended to "near abroad" of the winning superpower -- a space Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has recently been playing with for all he's worth. A former military man with his own shadowy past of coup d'états, Chavez, the twice elected and popular president of Venezuela, is the sort of figure that American administrations once dealt with decisively. But Chavez, who finds himself in control of the third largest source of U.S. imported oil (to the tune of 15% of all our oil imports, almost as much as Saudi Arabia), has in the last months managed to: make energy deals with super-competitor China and super-hated Iran (Hey, that's our energy!); form a thumb-your-nose informal economic alliance with super-hated Cuban leader Fidel Castro, part of an attempt to create an alternative to the U.S.-backed Free Trade Area of the Americas (from which Cuba is excluded); buy arms from Russia and Spain; threaten to cut off Venezuelan oil supplies to the U.S. if his government should be endangered or blockaded by Washington; and last week -- in the ultimate insult to the Bush administration (for whom foreign policy and military policy are almost the same thing) -- throw the U.S. military out of Venezuela."

"When imperial power anywhere begins to crumble, it naturally creates space for local and regional experiments in new kinds of power relations. Unfortunately, all our covert (and less than covert) help in "organizing" democracy movements from Ukraine and Georgia to Kyrgyzstan and Belarus gives our leaders the feeling, I fear, that they are actually creating democracies by manipulation in someone else's near abroad."

Are we stretching ourselves too thin? Is our empire building taking its toll? I think it is more likely that our concept of friends and enemies, our concept of blocs, our concept of alliances, and our concept of how to bring about democracy and peace has lately been mirroring the USSR's ill-fated vision. Let's hope it is not too late to change our approach.