Geopolitics and the Broken West

David P. Calleo

• I am very pleased to be back inShanghai. My last visit here was wonderfully stimulating and encouraging. My wife and I greatly enjoyed the warm hospitality of our friends Professor Xiang and Dean Feng and their families. And now I am very pleased to see, first-hand the progress of your new European Institute. And, of course, I am absolutely delighted to be invited to join your faculty as an Honorary Professor. I am touched and pleased, and accept with pleasure.
• I should add that although this past year in Washington may not have been ideal in all respects, it was superb in one important detail – the visit of Professor Xiang as the Henry Kissinger Fellow at the Library of Congress. He brought fresh distinction to the Fellowship and was a great source of knowledge and stimulation to a wide group of scholars and practitioners in our capital.
• As always, we at European Studies atSAISwere very proud of our old student.
• Professor Xiang asked me to speak today on the geopolitical issues and tensions arising among the Western powers.
•  The West has entered a new age of geopolitical anxiety. Not only are deteriorating conditions in theMiddle Eastfuelling anti-Western terrorism throughout the world, but deep geopolitical fissures are opening within the West itself. This disarray seems remarkable from the perspective of barely a dozen years ago when the Soviet Union was disintegrating, the bipolar Cold War in Europe had been won and the US-led intervention inIraqhad succeeded easily. Western triumphalism was rampant, and it was fashionable to speak of the end of ideological and geopolitical struggles, and therefore of “history” itself. Victory, however, was being celebrated differently in Europe and the United States. Each side of the Atlantic was developing its own radical vision of the future. Today these visions are splitting the West.
• As we saw things in the early 1990s, the U.S. was the great winner from the Soviet collapse. Not only was America now the greatest military power – by far – but it also began enjoying an unprecedented economic boom. This triumphal moment provided the psychological environment for American elites to begin formulating their unipolar vision of the future – an integrated world system with the United States as its single, hegemonic superpower.
• Europe, too, saw itself as a great winner. With the Soviet empire gone, Europeans no longer depended militarily on the U.S, and finally felt restored to their old geopolitical space. “Eastern” Europe could rejoin the west, and the way seemed open for a new and productive relationship with Russia itself. Of course, the new opportunities also meant new dangers. A reunited Germany, with weak states all along its eastern border, together with an enfeebled Russia, raised the specter of a resurrected German Problem. Political elites, above all among the Germans themselves, feared that unless Europe went forward to greater unity it risked falling back into its old murderous disunity. Some also sensed that a dependent military relationship with America, enshrined in NATO, would be much less satisfactory without the Soviet Union. The Europeans had been free riders—not only on the American troops that contained the Soviets, but also on the Soviet troops that balanced the Americans. With the Soviet demise, Europe had no one but itself to balance the Americans.

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