It's now hard to remember that, when the Bush administration arrived in office in 2000, its hardcore members were all old Cold Warriors who hadn't given up the ghost. If the Soviet Union no longer existed, they were still quite intent on rolling back what was left of it, stripping off Russia's "near abroad," encircling it militarily, and linking various of its former Eastern European satellites and socialist republics to NATO, as well as further penetrating and, after 2001, deploying troops to the oil-rich former SSRs of Central Asia.

As Stephen Cohen wrote in a pathbreaking piece in the Nation, "The New American Cold War," back in 2006, even as the Bush administration began to claim that the U.S. had an overriding national interest in scores of nations around the planet (including Iraq and Iran), there was "a tacit… U.S. denial that Russia [had] any legitimate national interests outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin or contiguous former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia." As had been true in the 1990s under the Clinton administration, the new administration was eager to kick a former superpower when it was down on its luck and just beginning to emerge from its era of "catastroika."

While George Bush looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and declared him a soulmate, his vice president and various neocon allies were spoiling for a fight. And this isn't exactly ancient history either. As David Bromwich pointed out recently in a canny piece at the Huffington Post, Cheney essentially threw down the gauntlet to Russia in a speech in Vilnius, Lithuania, in May 2006 in which he "threatened Russia with a new Cold War if Russia did not capitulate to American demands of cheap oil for Russia's pro-American neighbors."

How the worm turns. A very energy-rich worm, as it happens, at a time when control over energy resources and their delivery is what makes the world spin. The events in Georgia this August, analyzed by Michael Klare, author of the new book Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (which explains just how the world turns), were but another reminder that the officials of the Bush administration have proven bush leaguers when it comes to assessing how power really works in the world. In his latest piece, "Putin's Ruthless Gamble," he concludes that Russian President Vladimir Putin is now "the reigning Grand Master of geostrategic chess" with "the Bush team turning out to be middling amateurs, at best." They were, from the beginning, fantasists in love with the supposedly unique power of the American military to cow the planet. For all the talk now about being at the beginning of the Cold War (Act II), this is also fantasy, as well as "home front" spin in an election year, and manna, of course, for worried U.S. arms makers. (The brief war in Georgia, reported the Wall Street Journal, was seen by some Wall Street stock analysts as "a bell-ringer for defense stocks.")

Right now, the Bush administration continues to have its hands militarily more than full just handling a low-level war in Iraq and a roiling one in the backlands of Afghanistan (and Pakistan). At the moment, it couldn't fight a "new Cold War" if it wanted to. Not only is the world no longer America's backyard, but for much of the world, when an American president says, "Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the twenty-first century," and the Republican Party candidate for president adds, "But in the twenty-first century, nations don't invade other nations" -- as each did in regard to the Russian war in Georgia -- it's only an indication of just how out of touch they are. (At least UN ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad was careful to qualify his version of this statement geographically: "The days of overthrowing leaders by military means in Europe -- those days are gone.")

For all their bluster, they now find themselves strangely powerless in a world that is increasingly anything but "unipolar."

Comments (9)

1. Actually the neo-cons here have continually explained since the Georgian invasion that....

   despite being "hailed in the future as a great leader who brought peace and democracy to the Middle East".....

   Bush is helpless on foreign policy crises like Russia and Georgia.

   Posted by Maskdelta at 09/02/2008 @ 2:30pm

2. It's funny --not in the "ha-ha" but ironic sense-- to reflect back on the hyper-hubristic statement by an anonymous Bush apparatchik in Ron Suskind's NY Times Magazine piece of a couple of years ago:

   "We are creating new realities while you sit and watch" or something to that effect.

   Yup.

   We've all been watching while the Bush administration has created the latest installment of "Jackass".

   The worst part of this "new reality" is that even an extremely competent Obama presidency will find it increasingly difficult to navigate the chaotic winds that have been conjured up.

   Exhibit A: "Afghanistan is the central front of the global war on terror".

   Frankly, our current course reads like the script for "Apocalypse Now" or perhaps "Aguirre: The Wrath of God".

   This can only end badly.

   Posted by b_kool_66 at 09/02/2008 @ 3:56pm

3. everybody with half of a brain knows these wars are all about securing energy resources; right now it is oil, in the future, water....wake up....neocons are failures.....we CANNOT militarily control the whole world...without partnerships, we are doomed, and the whole world hates mcsame....No, as some right winger xenophobic isolationists feverishly exhort on some blogs, europeans and asians don't vote in OUR election, but THEY DO control our destiny and own currently OVER half our foreign debt and control our entire economy......and what they do depends significantly on who WE pick for president....

   Posted by jrs112 at 09/02/2008 @ 4:21pm

4. I can just see McSame & Sarah "Annie Oakley" Palin

   McS: "Grrrrrr. Tough diplomacy is what's needed. Send some to the regions. Rattle the saber's"

   Palin: "Oh, we don't need that dontcha know. I'll just get my daddies moose gun and take of this Putin fella."

   Posted by leftofcenter at 09/02/2008 @ 5:36pm

5. Posted by JOMAMMA at 09/02/2008 @ 5:39pm

   McCain? He'll "be tough" with Putin....but deal with Feingold on campaign finance and Kennedy on immigration????

   Posted by Maskdelta at 09/02/2008 @ 6:53pm

6. Posted by JOMAMMA at 09/02/2008 @ 5:39pm | ignore this person | warn this person hey aparatchik, you are describing what Putin did to Bush.

   I said it way back when,

   Bush wishes he were Putin and Putin wishes he were Stalin.

   "Putins oil supplies are declining.."

   as are ours, genius

   Posted by emile duBois at 09/02/2008 @ 9:40pm

7. "...for Obama will fold faster than an old army cot..."

   Posted by JOMAMMA at 09/02/2008 @ 5:39pm

   And hows your boy bush doing with him?

   "...knowing MCCain will not allow it."

   Are you serious? Mccain is owned by big oil the MIC and now the fundyvangelists. He'll do what he's told.

   (Admittedly, so will obama. But I have no clue where you get this doddering old man/tough guy image from).

   Maverick, my ass.

   (Caution: Bad car humor)

   Maverick/Cougar '08? Another Ford administration?

   By the way, have you actually ever tried to fold an old army cot?

   Posted by Malcontent at 09/02/2008 @ 10:38pm

8. The parallels grow stronger every year. Is it any wonder that our history more closely parallels the country whose government we copied.

   Rome.

   The Republic is ending. The demands for cheap goods require further extension of military power to the furthest reaches of the earth.

   The militia is now a professional army enrolling foreign nationals with the promise of citizenship.

   It is only a question of time before some executive crosses the Rubicon er ... Potomac to avoid prosecution.

   Posted by jarmstrong52 at 09/03/2008 @ 3:43pm

9. The notion that we can demand that all nations allow unfettered access to all their markets while simultaneously maneuvering to insure control over any resource we cast our eye on speaks to both our grasp of reality and the likelihood of success. Agreed, we need a considerably more broad-minded strategy, one that recognizes our strengths and weaknesses and uses our relationships to balance both. It isn't going to happen quickly because we still see ourselves as king of the hill and as kingmakers.

   It does not help that the media speaks with such a singularly uninformative voice about what's really going on in the world. Either they trot out some State Department or Administration shibboleth, or they leave out important details such as the Georgian attack on UN sanctioned Russian security forces.

   This media-induced myopia clouds our vision of ourselves creating a self-image which increasingly diverges from how we are perceived by other nations. Until that changes this is going nowhere fast.

   Posted by ncimon at 09/04/2008 @ 01:13am