From #Venezuela to #Ukraine, only clear & decisive US leadership can stop return of totalitarianism. #russiainvadesukraine #SOSVenezuela
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) March 3, 2014
Larison tackles Rubio:
Over the weekend, Rubio offered eight proposals for “punishing” Russia. Some are old stand-bys of symbolic retribution (e.g., condemnation at the U.N., boycotting the next G-8 summit, expelling Russia from the G-8) that are more or less easy enough to do and will have no effect, while others are much more reckless and foolish, such as pushing harder for Georgian membership in NATO, that will certainly make Russia more intransigent. Speeding up the process of bringing Georgia into NATO is just the sort of useless, ill-considered goading that will make it even more difficult to avoid further escalation in Ukraine. It is the sort of proposal one would make if one wanted U.S.-Russian relations and the situation in Ukraine to keep getting worse.
Daniel Berman sees Rubio’s op-ed as a symptom of America’s refusal to accept a multi-polar world:
The defenders of American preeminence while warning fearfully of the rise of China have in fact latched onto it as way of avoiding the more dreadful prospect of a multi-polar world and a return to great power politics. If China is a rising superpower seeking world domination, then the US can lead an alliance of the rest of the world, a force sure to trump whatever resources China can muster.
But China has been MIA in this crisis, revealing a dirty little secret. China has never been as interested in the reality of overseas empire in the same way the European powers have been, and its international efforts have mostly been used to block EU and American efforts to force their “norms” on the world, not to promote its own “Chinese Model” an invention of Thomas Friedman and the NYT editorial page.
The new world looks increasingly multipolar and based on state, not sub-state actors. China will throw its power into ensuring this takes place by blocking Western efforts to create a one-world order, but will at the same time refrain from giving the West its second choice, a two-world order. And that means that China is not going bail out Western geopolitical thinkers, they will have to do it on their own.