The three Rs: rivalry, Russia, 'ran.

• Author: Blackwill, Robert D.
• Position: Russia's relations with the western countries - Critical essay

Year after year the worriers and fretters would come to me with awful predictions of the outbreak of war. I denied it each time. I was only wrong twice.

--Senior British intelligence official, retiring in 1950 after 47 years of service

Man's most enduring stupidity is forgetting what he is trying to do.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

WE ARE witnessing a systemic decline in Russia's relations with the West. There is a long list of complaints from the industrial democracies regarding Moscow's behavior, many of them justified. But the U.S.-Russia relationship (and that of Europe and Russia) does not occur in a strategic vacuum. Many of Russia's contemporary offenses pale before what should be the West's highest policy priority in the period ahead: preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. According to a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released on December 3, 2007, it will be difficult to convince Tehran to forego the eventual development of nuclear weapons and Iran could produce sufficient quantities of highly enriched uranium (HEU) for a weapon as early as 2010.

Before we can assess Russia's relationship with the West, including on the question of Iran, we should first examine the international context in which those relations will occur. This allows us to address the fundamental question: How important is Russia's cooperation in the next several years on issues clearly most connected to American and allied vital national interests?

Henry Kissinger recently pointed out in a Wall Street Journal interview that the international structure that we have known for 300 years--the West-phalian system that arose after Europe's wars of religion and is based on the nation-state--is collapsing. The transforming effects of globalism and information technology, the rise of Asia, the relative decline of Europe's international influence, the surge of radical Islam and the increasing importance of non-state actors are together producing a new world order/disorder.

The increase in China's power and influence is now a permanent and critical feature of the global picture, and it is still far from clear whether Beijing will become a responsible stakeholder in the international system. Relations between China and Japan are edgy at best. We will have to see whether North Korea will give up its nuclear weapons. I remain skeptical. The long-term trends in Afghanistan are not good. Pakistan, with dozens of nuclear weapons, is vibrating with uncertainty.

The region that is most immediately pivotal to the security of the West--the Middle East--is violent and unsteady. A possible war between the United States and Iran lies ominously on the horizon, if somewhat postponed, according to the latest NIE. Iraq remains gripped in a destructive and bloody domestic political deadlock that prevents reconciliation and stability. Prospects for substantial progress in the Middle East peace process are grim. Lebanon teeters on the brink of chaos. Syria pursues corrosive policies throughout the area. Six years after 9/11, jihadi extremism and the terrorism it spawns are growing, not receding, in most of the region.

In short and as the Soviets used to say, the correlation of forces in the Greater Middle East is moving against the West. Many of our friends are confused and demoralized, and most of our enemies are emboldened--nearly everywhere in the region. Hizballah's successful resistance to the Israeli Defense Forces in July 2006 in Lebanon was a strategic setback for moderate forces, both Western and Arab. Most important, it again demonstrated that force of arms--the machinery of modern combined air and ground warfare--can be thwarted or at least neutralized by radical Muslim paramilitary forces; a lesson not only learned by Hizballah but also internalized by Hamas, the Mahdi Army and other Shi'a militias, and the Taliban.

ALL THIS obviously represents a perilous situation for the United States and its allies. It is certainly the most hazardous period in the region for the West at least since the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the possibility of U.S.-Soviet armed conflict. And it is exacerbated by the rapid rise of Iran, now the second-most powerful and influential country in the Greater Middle East after the United States and the most important foreign power operating in Iraq south of Baghdad.

Not...