One of President Obama's most important legacies is a sense that the U.S. is no longer the dominant global power: It can be ignored. It's a new reality that became apparent this year as various authoritarian regimes and populist movements have tested it out.
President Vladimir Putin's Russia has been at the forefront of the effort. For example, last week the foreign and defense ministers of Russia, Iran and Turkey met in Moscow to discuss a plan for Syria. The U.S. was not invited. Instead, the ministers adopted a statement saying the three countries were willing to serve as the guarantors of a deal between the Syrian government and the opposition. All other countries with "influence on the situation on the ground" are welcome to join, the statement said.
This is the kind of call the U.S. has grown accustomed to making during the post-Cold War decades of Pax Americana. Now, three authoritarian regimes — one of them, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's, an increasingly nominal U.S. ally, and the other two open U.S. adversaries — feel empowered enough to assume their role in an area where perhaps the biggest threat to the West, the Islamic State, operates.
Russia appears to be purposefully working with the less democratic U.S. allies. Earlier this month, it broke with long-standing practice and joined the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in a promise of oil-output cuts. In these talks, Russia had to deal with Saudi Arabia, helping it secure Iran's consent to a production cap. Qatar, another gulf state allied to the U.S., is taking part in a murky but politically important privatization deal as one of the buyers of a 19.5-percent stake in the Russian oil company, Rosneft.
Russia hasn't been averse to talking to the U.S. — it has done so repeatedly on Syria — but nothing came of it, in part because the Obama administration was never united on the very idea of doing deals with Putin. Kremlin officials appear to have hated the experience. "Contacts remain, but every time we agree on something, Americans steer away from what has been agreed," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a recent speech. "We get lectured."
So the Kremlin is openly building bypass routes to other Middle East players, whose decisionmaking processes are more like Moscow's than Washington's. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar don't have to betray the U.S. to talk to Moscow on their own — but nor do they feel the need to include it.
Another authoritarian country, China, has not just ignored U.S. demands that it stop reclamation projects in the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, but it has apparently militarized the islands. It hasn't attacked U.S. ships or planes in the area yet, but by seizing a U.S. underwater drone last week, it carefully showed that it might.
The British public, of course, also ignored U.S. warnings when it voted for Brexit. And now, the U.K. government, Washington's special ally in Europe, continues to ignore U.S. interests by maintaining uncertainty about its future deal with the European Union. Most of the remaining E.U. members are far less pro-American than the U.K., and U.S. influence in the bloc is on the wane. Even in Germany, which owes a historic debt to America, anti-U.S. sentiment is strong: Obama's proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is massively unpopular there. Even if the U.S. wanted to keep pushing it, it would probably stand no chance in today's EU.
