Some Power Play

How's that for a weighty club? The triumvirate of three world giants whose combined demographic amounts to 40% of the world population. These three can throw their weight around. In the sense, needless to say, of their status on the world market economy, their huge populations, the geographic places they occupy in the world, their steadily-emerging trade potential and advancing political presence in world affairs.

Think about it, Russia, India, China combining their strategic interests in the global economy, in the balance of power world-wide. That's a lot of influence. They've a whole lot of other nations dependent on them for their own well-being. Everyone sits up and listens carefully to discern how their newly-collective policies and concerns will affect them. All countries have their own very particular agendas, and these three have discovered common ground.

They've all, one time or another, run afoul of the world's remaining super-power, the United States. They can all look forward to greater clout in their combined interests in challenging U.S. interests abroad. Because that's where one finds U.S. interests generally; abroad. Doing what it does best, interfering for good or for ill. Not to belittle the U.S. presence too strongly in world affairs; she has proven often enough that the world has much to be grateful for on those occasions when good is done.

Russia under the soon-to-depart president Vladimir Putin has long chafed under its never-quite satisfactory relationship with the U.S., post Cold War era. Only one political/economic giant emerged from that era, and the U.S. has never let Russia forget that. Effectively locking Russia out of possible membership in NATO, revelling in offering said membership to the USSR's erstwhile satellites. Rubbing their nose in their failures.

Russia has belatedly discovered wealth and respect in its relatively-new oil revenues, and is herself swaggering, pushing her one-time member-countries around, eager to demonstrate their dependence now upon oil-and-gas-rich Mother Russia. She has extended the same courtesies to Europe, reminding them that she carries a big stick once again.

And Mr. Putin took the world off guard just this week in accusing the United States of "uncontained hyper-use of force, overstepping its national borders, behaving as though it were the ruler of the universe. Sigh, doesn't that position logically belong to Russia anyway? The world is such an unfair place. Doubtless, Mr. Putin would have much preferred to remain on good terms with the U.S., seen as an equal, not shoved into a corner of insignificance where the U.S. has placed it.

But Russia is once more ascendant, and has surrounded herself with two other giants soon to be in the ascendancy themselves, and then won't the fur fly as each agitates to surmount the other, in a bid for ultimate supremacy. But the three are talking world affairs and that can only be good in the short term. Their agenda is sweeping and covers issues ranging from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East and North Korea. Along with energy security, nuclear non-proliferation and trade.

Odd, that, all matters in which the United States, singly and also with her allies is engaged and active as the party of first-intervention. And, like the United States and at least several of her allies, China, India and Russia are nuclear powers. They're quick to point out that they don't see themselves as an alliance against the United States, but they do form an interesting counterbalance, given Russia's and China's positions with respect to Iran and North Korea.

Russian nuclear scientists, in fact, are busy giving tips and materiel to Iran. And Russia's bad behaviour with respect to its interior critics, be they newspeople or disaffected former scientists, or oligarchs critical of the current government doesn't earn her many plaudits in the United States or the EU, let alone Europe in general.

At the present time it's true that due to clumsy misadventure in the Middle East, the United States is the unruly elephant in the room, since the fall-out of her ill-considered interferences is making for a most unsettling world situation. The United States is feeling pinched, its economy in unhappy straits from prosecuting a war against terrorism that sees no end in sight, costing dearly in lives on all sides.

Yet you can only wonder about the three giants and what they foresee for their future, hoping for the structure of international relations to turn inexorably toward them, given their combined political/economic muscle. And.then.what?