A really rough stretch for Pax American

Whatever hopes the George W Bush administration may have had for using its post-September 11, 2001, "war on terror" to impose a new Pax Americana on Eurasia, and particularly in the unruly areas between the Caucasus and the Khyber Pass, they appear to have gone up in flames - in some cases, literally - over the past two weeks.

Not only has Russia reasserted its influence in the most emphatic way possible by invading and occupying substantial parts of Georgia after Washington's favorite Caucasian, President Mikheil Saakashvili, launched an ill-fated offensive against secessionist South Ossetians.

Bloody attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan also underlined the seriousness of the Pashtun-dominated Taliban insurgencies in both countries and the threats they pose to their increasingly beleaguered and befuddled US-backed governments.

And while US negotiators appear to have made progress in hammering out details of a bilateral military agreement that will permit US combat forces to remain in Iraq at least for another year and a half, signs that the Shi'ite-dominated government of President Nuri al-Maliki may be preparing to move forcefully against the US-backed, predominantly Sunni "Awakening" movement has raised the specter of renewed sectarian civil war.

Meanwhile, any hope of concluding a framework for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority by the time Bush leaves office less than five months from now appears to have vanished, while efforts at mobilizing greater international diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran to freeze its uranium enrichment program - the administration's top priority before the Georgia crisis - have stalled indefinitely, overwhelmed by the tidal wave of bad news from its neighborhood.

"The list of foreign policy failures this week is breathtaking," noted a statement released on Friday by the National Security Network (NSN), a mainstream group of former high-ranking officials critical of the Bush administration's more-aggressive policies. Prominent New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argued that the Russian move on Georgia, in particular, signaled "the end of the Pax Americana - the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force".

Indeed, Russia's intervention in what it used to call its ''near abroad'' was clearly the most spectacular of the fortnight's developments, both because of its unprecedented use of overwhelming military force against a US ally heavily promoted by Washington for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and because of the geo-strategic implications of its move for the increasingly-troubled Atlantic alliance and US hopes that Caspian and Central Asian energy resources could be safely transported to the West without transiting either Russia or Iran.

While Russia did not seize control of the Baku-Tbili-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline or approach the area proposed for the Nabucco pipeline further south, its intervention made it abundantly clear that it could have done so if it had wished, a message that is certain to reverberate across gas-hungry Europe. Indeed, investors now may prove considerably less enthusiastic about financing the Nabucco project than before, dealing yet another blow to Washington's regional ambitions.

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