CIAO DATE: 07/03

U.S.-Russian Relations Ten Months After September 11

Introduction

By the morning after September 11 our generation too knew the world had changed, and we too seized on one side of the event's implications. In our case, the darker side. Then and since our minds have been on what lies ahead when the suicidally enraged show how limitless is the pain they would cause, given the chance. Behind the preoccupying fear over global terrorism looms the discomforting awareness that a whole segment of humanity identifies more with the terrorists than with us, so alienated are they. And, beyond that, in vaguer terms, Americans contemplate uneasily how their new vulnerability makes vulnerable accustomed ways of life and, worse, perhaps cherished values.

But the effect of September 11 has another less remarked side. It has created opportunity: at home by binding the community together, arresting the trivialization of our political life, and focusing our attention on tasks that should have been attended to long ago. Least noticed, however, it has also created radically new possibilities in international politics. First, were we to seize it, the chance now exists to put the decisive bilateral relationship of our age—that between the United States and China—on a more solid footing. Because, however, this relationship remains precariously balanced between progress and deterioration, if mismanaged, the opportunity could as well push in the wrong direction. The outcome in no small part links to a second area of opportunity, and the focus of this essay: the revolutionary shift in Russia's relations with the West, including with the United States. We will return to the China issue in that context.

The third opportunity is less evident, more elusive—yet, the most historic. For, September 11 faces the United States more sharply and clearly with the preeminent challenge of the 21st century: how and where the United States will lead. Such is the preeminent challenge, because U.S. primacy turns out to be the dominant fact of the new century, and no event has dramatized it more starkly than the war on global terrorism. Going back more than a decade, ever since Charles Krauthamer dubbed it the "unipolar moment," we have sidled up to and argued over the significance of America's hegemony. Much of the argument has been over how unapologetically unilateralist we should be or can be. Indeed, whether this much matters in a world in which untamed capital, the Internet, and the flows of desperate peoples, drugs, disease, and crime have rendered the state, any state, less sovereign. September 11 changed that. Its grim wake underscored how central the state remained—none more than the uniquely preponderant United States—and how much the dark, underside of globalization had increased the importance of the state performing its role well.

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