Who made the pivot to Asia? Putin; Obama empty-handed

OnWednesday, it finally happened— the pivot to Asia. No, not theUnited States. Itwas Russia that turned East.

In Shanghai, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping signed a spectacular energy deal—$400 billion of Siberian natural gas to be exported to China over 30 years.

This is huge. By indelibly linking producer and consumer— the pipeline alone is a $70 billion infrastructure project— it deflates the post-UkraineWestern threat to cut European imports ofRussian gas. Putin has defiantly demonstrated that he has other places to go.

TheRussia-China deal alsomakes a mockery ofU.S. boasts to have isolatedRussia because of Ukraine. Not even Germanywants to risk a serious rupture withRussia (hence the absence of significant sanctions). And nowPutin has just unveiled a signal 30-year energy partnership with theworld’s secondlargest economy. Some isolation.

The contrast with President Obama’s own vaunted pivot to Asia is embarrassing. He went to Japan last month also seeking a major trade agreement thatwould symbolize and cement a pivotal strategic alliance. He came home empty-handed.

Does the Obama foreign-policy team even understand what is happening? For them, the Russia-China alliance is simply more retrograde, 19th-century, balance-of-power maneuvering bymenof the past oblivious to the reality of a 21st century governed by lawand norms. Aplace where, for example, one simply doesn’t annex a neighbor’s territory. Indeed, Obama scoldsRussia and China for not living up to their obligations as major stakeholders in thisnewinterdependentworld.

The Chinese andRussians can only roll their eyes. These norms and rules mean nothing to them. They see these alleged norms as forms of velvet-glove imperialism, clever extensions of aWestern hegemony meant to keepRussia in its reduced postSoviet condition and China contained by a dominantU.S. military.

Obama cites modern rules; Russia and China, animated by resurgent nationalism, are governed by ancient maps. Putin refers to eastern and southern Ukraine by the old czarist term of “NewRussia.” And China’s foreign minister justifies vast territorial claims that violate maritime lawby citing traditional (“nine-dash”) maps that grant China dominion over the East and South China Seas.

Whichmakes this alignment of theworld’s two leading anti-Western powers all the more significant. It marks a major alteration in the global balance of power.

Putin to Shanghai reprisesNixon to China. To be sure, it’s not the surprise thatHenry Kissinger pulled off in secret. But it is the capstone of a gradual— nowaccelerated— Russia-China rapprochement that essentially undoes the Kissinger-Nixon achievement.

Their1972 strategic coup fundamentally turned the geopolitical tables onMoscow. Putin has nowturned the same tables on us. China andRussia together represent the core of anewcoalition of anti-democratic autocracies challenging theWestern-imposed, post-ColdWar status quo. Their enhanced partnership marks the first emergence of a global coalition against American hegemony since the fall of the Berlinwall.

Indeed, at lastweek’s Asian cooperation conference, Xi proposed a brand-new continental security system to includeRussia and Iran (lest anyone mistake its anti-imperialist essence) and exclude America. This is an open challenge to the post-ColdWar, U.S.dominatedworld that Obama inherited and thenweakened beyond imagining.

If carried through, itwould mark the end of a quarter-century of unipolarity. And herald a return to a form of bipolarity— two global coalitions: one free, one not— though, with communism dead, not as structurally rigid or ideologically dangerous as ColdWar bipolarity. Not a fight to the finish, but a struggle nonetheless— for dominion and domination.

To which Obama, whoonce proclaimed that “no one nation can or should try to dominate another nation,” is passive, perhaps oblivious. His pivot to Asia remains a dead letter. Yet his withdrawal fromthe Middle East— where fromEgypt to Saudi Arabia, fromLibya to Syria, U.S. influence is at its lowest ebb in 40 years— is a

The retreat is compounded by Obama’s proposed major cuts in defense spending (downto below3 percent ofGDPby 2017) even asRussia is rearming and China is creating a sophisticated military soon capable of denying America access to thewaters of the Pacific Rim.

Decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice, Obama’s choice. And it’s the one area where he is succeeding splendidly.