00:00The United States is no longer the only great power in the world.
00:06China and Russia are now great powers,
00:09which means that American policymakers have to think differently about the world around them.
00:17To understand what unipolarity means for Europe,
00:22it's essential to consider the distribution of power among the world's three great powers.
00:28The United States is still the most powerful country in the world,
00:33but China has been catching up and is now widely regarded as a peer competitor.
00:41Its huge population, coupled with its truly remarkable economic growth since the early 1990s,
00:51has turned it into a potential hegemon in East Asia.
00:56For the United States, which is already a regional hegemon in the Western Hemisphere,
01:04another great power achieving hegemony, either in East Asia or Europe,
01:12is a deeply worrisome prospect.
01:15Remember that the United States entered both world wars to prevent Germany and Japan
01:22from becoming regional hegemons in Europe and East Asia, respectively.
01:29The same logic applies today to China in East Asia.
01:35Russia is the weakest of the three great powers,
01:39and contrary to what many Europeans think,
01:43I'm sure many Europeans in this institution,
01:46it is not a threat to overrun all of Ukraine, much less Eastern Europe.
01:53After all, it has spent the past three and a half years
01:57just trying to conquer the eastern one-fifth of Ukraine.
02:03The Russian army is not the Wehrmacht,
02:06and Russia is not the Soviet Union during the Cold War,
02:12or the Chinese in East Asia today.
02:15In other words, Russia is not a potential hegemon in Europe.
02:22Given this distribution of power,
02:26there's a strategic imperative for the United States to focus on containing China
02:32and preventing it from dominating East Asia.
02:36There is no compelling strategic reason, however,
02:41for the United States to maintain a significant military presence in Europe,
02:47given that Russia is not a threat to become a European hegemon.
02:54Indeed, devoting defense resources to Europe
03:00reduces the resources available for East Asia.
03:05This basic logic explains the U.S. pivot to Asia.
03:12But if a country pivots to one region,
03:15it means that it's pivoting away from another region.
03:20And, of course, that other region that we're pivoting away from is Europe.
03:26There's another important dimension,
03:29which has little to do with the global balance of power,
03:32that further reduces the likelihood the U.S. will remain committed
03:37to maintaining a significant military presence in Europe.
03:42Specifically, the United States has a special relationship with Israel
03:47that has no parallel in recorded history.
03:51That connection, which is the result of the tremendous power of the Israel lobby
03:57inside the United States,
04:00not only means that the United States will support Israel unconditionally,
04:06but it also means that American forces will be involved in Israel's wars,
04:14either directly or indirectly.
04:18In short, the United States will continue to allocate substantial military resources to Israel,
04:27as well as commit substantial military forces of its own to the Middle East.
04:34This obligation to Israel creates an additional incentive to draw down U.S. forces in Europe
04:44and push European countries to provide for their own security.
04:50The bottom line is that powerful structural forces associated with the shift
04:57from unipolarity to unipolarity coupled with America's peculiar relationship with Israel
05:05have the potential to eliminate the U.S. pacifier from Europe and cripple NATO,
05:12which would obviously have serious negative consequences for European security.
05:19It is possible, however, to avoid an American exit,
05:25which is surely what almost every European leader desires.
05:31Simply put, achieving that outcome, i.e. preventing the United States from leaving Europe in a serious way,
05:41requires wise strategies and skillful diplomacy on both sides of the Atlantic.
05:49But that is not what we have gotten so far.
05:52Instead, Europe and the United States foolishly sought to bring Ukraine into NATO,
06:01which provoked a losing war with Russia that markedly increases the odds that the U.S. will depart Europe
06:11and NATO will be...
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