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А. Россия и США в мировой политике. М.: Аспект Пресс, 2017. 336 с.; Shakleina T. A RussianPerspective on the Twenty-First Century Challenges / Challenge and Change. Global Threats and the State inTwenty-First Century International Politics. N.C. Noonan, V. Nadkarni, eds. N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp.39-69, Водопьянов К. Г.
Страдающий Левиафан: что спасет современное государство // Полис.Политические исследования. - 2018. - №3. С.182-191.61Pillar P. R. Why America Misunderstands the World: National Experience and Roots of Misperception. ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2016, pp. 51, 128, 132, 164, 140.6036Whether it’s from America’s founding days during the Revolutionary Warand its misunderstanding of King George III or the modern-day War on Syria,constructivist thought – whether formally recognized as such or not – haspermeated America’s decision-making and strategic culture due to bureaucraticand cultural reasons, namely those stemming from groupthink and the unwaveringbelief in American Exceptionalism. These in turn contribute to the formation of amilitant mindset that predisposes the US to warfare, but almost somewhatparadoxically leads to it underestimating supposed threats before they manifestthemselves and then overreacting to them afterwards, at least according to hisexplanation of this phenomenon.
Pillar raises very thought-provoking questions inthis book that can’t be easily answered by standard academics who are regularlyaccustomed to trying to neatly fit every foreign policy action into one of the twomain theories, but it’s precisely because of the explanative flexibility that heprovides through channeling constructivist thought that his work is essential toread in understanding the implementation of American grand strategy in practiceespecially as it relates to the Mideast.***By the end of the Obama administration there were doubts that America’spolicy in the Middle East can bring any constructive solution and settlement ofpolitical, socio-economic and security problems.
Final stage of Democrats’activities was marked by the aggravation of migration situation for the Europeancountries, and entry of Russia into Syrian conflict. Russia was defined as a threatto the United States, and it was not clear how America and Russia will manage tocoexist in Syria having their very diverse views of the situation and its settlement.One could hear statements that neoliberal and constructivist views of Americanstrategy aimed at establishing liberal world order failed. During 2016 presidentialelections and after Trump victory some IR scholars declared about the “crisis of37the liberal world order” 62.
The new strategic document introduced in December2017 stated that American policy will be pure realist, will be directed to establishfavorable for the US and its allies balance of power. BUT: it was also stated thatAmerican policy will be based on the American values that will inspire, revive andelevate, and will remain the decisive force in the world forever 63. Further actions ofthe Trump administration practically continued the main tracks of the Obamapolicy, the situation in the Middle East and in Syria demonstrated collisionbetween the United States and Russia, and some big regional players, like Turkey,Saudi Arabia and Iran.
One could say that still the official American ideology wasneoconservative but with elements of ‘real politic’ based on the military might andsuperpower domination, and neoliberal ideas of American values and institutespromotion.62Mearsheimer J. The Great Delusion. Liberal Dreams and International Realities. New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 2018. 328 p.; Walt S. The Hell of Good Intentions. American Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of USprimacy.
N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. 400 p.63National Security Strategy of the United States of America. December 2017. Pp. 1-2. Web. 1 December 2017.https://www.whitehouse.gov38CHAPTER 2US POLICY IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND IN SYRIAN CONFLICT2.1. From “Greater Middle East Initiative” to "Arab Spring"This second chapter of the dissertation focuses on the evolution of Americanpolicy towards the Middle East and Syria, beginning with a discussion of the USgrand strategy and then transitioning to its general application in the Mideast priorto describing the specific way that it’s been practiced towards Syria from the ColdWar up until the present day.
American grand strategy incorporates neorealist andneoliberal thought in order to introduce a brand-new paradigm that more accuratelydescribes the present-day state of the world before talking about the concepts thatformed US policies towards this region throughout and between the Clinton, Bush,and Obama Administrations.Whether the reader adheres to the neorealist idea that it was the HegemonicStability Theory which retained a semblance of global order since the end of theCold War or the neoliberal one that it was the Democratic Peace Theory which didthis instead, it’s clear that whatever presumption of relative stability that hadpreviously defined the international system is giving way to a renewed period ofglobal disorder. It’s important to set the appropriate context of the present-day stateof international relations in order for the subsequent sections about the US policytowards Syria to make proper sense to the reader, which is why the first part of thissubsection will discuss the global transition from order to disorder, the nature andinfluence of the Obama Doctrine, and the structural fusion between neorealism andneoliberalism.One of the most original ways to reconceptualize international relations isthrough the world systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein, who proposed in his1974 book “The Modern World-System” that the all states can be divided into one39of three categories – the core, semi-periphery, or periphery64.
His understanding ofthe international system was heavily influenced by Marxist theory, but theinfluence of his work has continued to resonate even after the end of the Cold Warbecause of its relevancy in describing the spread of Western-modeled globalizationin the 1990s and 2000s. The sudden evolution of bipolarity to unipolarity left agaping hole in the international structure which the US and its allies sought to fillthrough their institutions and soft power, working first to integrate whatWallerstein had defined as the semi-periphery before moving along to the actualperiphery. Prominent Russian expert Alexei Bogaturov, writing in his article “TheSyndrome of “Absorption” in International Politics”, remarks that the world orderis unreliably balanced between unipolarity and multipolarity, and that the Westhasn’t yet fully succeeded in expanding its “world society” (to rephrase classicBritish IR scholar Hedley Bull’s famous term “world international society”) intoall parts of the world, a process which he defines as “absorption” 65.Former Pentagon strategic planner and author Thomas P.
M. Barnett builtupon these ideas in his 2004 work about “The Pentagon’s New Map. War andPeace in the Twenty-First Century” 66. Barnett theorizes that the world can be splitup into what he terms the “functioning core” and the “non-integrated gap”, withthe former being subdivided into the “old core” of the US and its Western alliesand the “new core” of BRICS and others. Both cores, he says, are trying to – if onewill employ Bogaturov’s phraseology – “absorb” the non-integrated gap, with theUS being the most capable of any actor in the world to do this.
As part of thishistoric-structural mission, Barnett says that the US must behave as both a“Leviathan” and a “System Administrator”, or if classic International Relationsparlance is used, then the neorealist hegemon and the neoliberal institutionalorganizer.64Wallerstein I. The Modern World-System. New York: Academic, 1974, p. 442.Shakleina T., Melville A.
Russian Foreign Policy in Transition: Concepts and Realities. N.Y.: Central EuropeanUniversity Press, 2005, pp. 291-310.66Barnett T. The Pentagon’s New Map. War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. New York: G.P. Putnam’sSons, 2004, pp. 191-247.6540Russian scholar Alexei Bogdanov seems to agree with Barnett to a largeextent when he wrote that the US is still strong despite its hegemonic-systemicweaknesses because of its reliance on global and regional institutions and theparamount role that the US plays as the chief integrator in bringing other states intothe “neo-liberal bloc”, which he characterizes as being marked by neo-liberalvalues such as the market economy, “democracy”, and the Western conception of“human rights”67.The act of Great Powers spreading their influence, institutions, and softpower across the world and especially into neighboring countries, particularlythose that constitute the “second world”, the “periphery” and the “non-integratedcore”, was described by T.
Shakleina in her publications on such issues as worldorder formation, structural trends in the 21st international relations, great powers’accommodation”68. She states that one of the megatrends of the 21st century is theestablishment of a new world order through territorial reconfiguration, of whichregional integration and spheres of influence are a key part. The Great Powersfunction as the integrational cores while the neighboring states are relativeperipheries to it, and this pattern of influence aggrandizement is evidenced allacross the world, whether in the post-Soviet territories, the Mideast, or SoutheastAsia, for example.While this process could help to retain some sort of order in the internationalsystem amidst the transformational period that it’s presently in, it could alsoprovoke fierce competition between the Great Powers (integrational cores) overtheir peripheries (overlapping claims to regional subsystems), like what happenedwith Russia and the West over Ukraine from 2013 onwards.
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