Intelligence/ROGER COHEN

LONDON

When Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, nobody asked what the implication was for the Soviet stock market. There was none. Things are different today: the Russian market has plunged since the country’s little Georgian war.
That’s one illustration of how interconnected we’ve become. Post- Communist Russia’s grown rich on everything you can dig or pump out the ground, but it still needs foreign direct investment to develop a service and manufacturing sector. It also needs the rule of law to become a modern state.
Walls are down and won’t return, which is why all the talk of a new cold war is wrong. But the unipolar, American- dominated world that followed the cold war is dead as well. The rise of China, India and now Russia has ended that heady nanosecond of American ascendancy.
What is less clear is the meaning of these new powers’ rise in ideological terms. Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev, Russia’s ruling duo, have devoted countless words to attacking the United States and NATO. Until Georgia, they were big on the rule of law and the United Nations as the sole “legitimate” sanction for force: so much for that.
Beyond the stark message that Russia’s back, it’s hard to discern what, if anything, Moscow stands for.
With India, there is a similar difficulty. As the world’s largest democracy, it might, with Japan, stand in an Asian vanguard of democracy-promotion, alongside the United States But unlike Americans, Indians don’t regard democracy in idealistic terms.
Democracy is what they’ve got rather than what they’re bound to promote. They like it O.K., but don’t see it as inherently superior to other ways of organizing society. You don’t hear Indians shouting about dictatorial Burma, their neighbor.
China does have an international buzzword: harmony. Roughly, it means the prizing of peace, development and trade with no strings attached - the “strings” being American preoccupations like democracy and freedom. In practice, it means doing business in places like Sudan and prizing stability as the country rises.
Sometimes I try to imagine a world where the “quartet” trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was made up of China, India, the United States and Russia.
What would Asia bring to the quest? The region has shown a remarkable ability to subsume past conflict to present needs, witness the Vietnamese embrace of America. That’s what the Middle East requires. Yet there’s scarcely a think tank in New Delhi devoted to the issue.
The fact is the United States remains the world’s most restlessly ideological country. Even those who dislike it tend to look to it still for inspiration because of its capacity for reinvention.
It’s interesting that, at a moment of compromised United States ideals, a politician, Barack Obama, has emerged who presents a transformed image of America. He’s the man from everywhere and nowhere: hence the global fascination he provokes.
I suspect that interest is linked to a sense that he might articulate a new ideological framework for an uneasy world whose emerging powers have proved more vigorous in saying what they don’t like than what they do.