The Russian Bear and 21st
Century Geopolitics
William Sundwick
Many of us are old enough to remember a mid-century exposure
to national security, and the “way the world worked,” reinforced not just by
the competition with the Soviet Union (“The Communists”), but also by our understanding
of World War II, and modern world history, in general.
The planet was divided into big geographic zones, and the
Great Powers, throughout history, had always contested for control of these
zones. This was what was called “
geopolitics.” Both our
high school social studies curricula and real national security policy (i.e.,
military contingency planning) were governed by geopolitical considerations in
those days.
The roots of what we knew as geopolitics went back to the
age of 19th century European imperialism. The growth of capitalism
in Europe and the United States required access to resources, both natural and
human (labor). Nations with means could develop colonial empires to satisfy
those needs. Much like the Roman Empire, inhabitants of any given location in
the world had a choice of being dominated by a resource-rich Great Power,
maintaining their independence through a successful defensive war with the
Great Power, or striking a delicately balanced autonomy via alliances with one
or another Great Power. This was, we thought, the way the world had worked
through most of its history.
Mahan, Mackinder, and 20th Century Geopolitics
The first writer to codify this world system was
Alfred Thayer Mahan,
a Captain in the U.S. Navy. He was a student of modern European history and
published his monumental work, “The Influence of Sea Power on History,
1660-1783,” in 1890. Enormously influential throughout the imperialist world
for the next hundred years, Mahan’s thesis was that free trade, hence access to
those colonial resources (and markets), could only be secured by conscientious
attention to control of the
world ocean.
If a Great Power cannot maintain that control, it will soon be reduced to
merely regional importance … limited to overland communications channels.
Ultimately, its masters will be those who can freely conduct trans-oceanic
commerce with it. Mahan was a fan of the British Empire, and saw the United
States, if it were to prioritize the building of an ocean-going navy, as
clearly capable of the same level of greatness.
His views became accepted national strategy in the United
States for nearly a century, and in Great Britain, albeit reluctantly, for at
least half a century. It became the aspirational national strategy for the
German Empire, leading Tirpitz to construct his “High Seas Fleet” to fight the
British in the First World War. The other colonial empires -- France, Italy,
and Japan -- also relied on sea power, but in a more minimalist way (“we’ll protect
what is necessary, but we won’t compete for dominance on the world ocean”).
An alternative strategic paradigm emerged in Great Britain around
the turn of the 20
th century. Its main proponent was Halford
Mackinder, of the Royal Geographical Society. Mackinder published his paper “
The
Geographical Pivot of History” in 1904. He maintained that there was a
world island, where most of the world’s
population lived, not just a “world ocean” as Mahan observed. He was obsessed
with overland communication through Eurasia, facilitated by railroads, whereas
Mahan was impressed more by the development of steamships.
Mackinder’s pivot was based on a Mercator projection of the
world, with its core (he called it the “heartland”) being north central Eurasia.
This was an area dominated for at least 200 years by the Russian Empire, at the
time symbolically depicted in European cartoons as a
bear, crouching over that
Eurasian land mass.
Russia didn’t even deserve a mention by Mahan! Being
essentially land-locked, it would never achieve Great Power status, reasoned
the U.S. Naval officer.
Mackinder believed that whoever could control this strategic
center of the world island could ultimately control the world – control over
sea lines of communication would naturally follow expansion out from the
land-locked center, and include most great ports, for navigation. He explained
the British Empire’s success in the previous century was due mostly to alliances
with Russia (Crimean War notwithstanding?).
While Mahan overlooked Russia, Mackinder could be accused of
overlooking the United States. He considered the Americas peripheral islands, part
of an “outer crescent” … not central to the human drama. Nicholas Spykman, at
Yale, attempted to synthesize the two competing geopolitical theories with his
“
Rimland” hypothesis.
Rimland was comparable to Mackinder’s “inner marginal crescent” of central and
western Europe, the Middle East, India, and Japan. He postulated (1942) that it
was in this belt that control of the world truly rested. Unfortunately, the
diversity of interests vying for dominance in those areas remain, today as much
as in his time, way too fuzzy to generalize in a single geostrategic theory.
So, Mahan seems to imagine a world dominated from the sea,
probably by the United States, astride its two protective oceans, and Mackinder
envisions a central core of strength, dominated by Russia, with tentacles
reaching out and ultimately encompassing the rest of the world. 20th
century geopolitics was dominated by one or the other of these competing
theories.
Globalization and Geopolitics
But, something else happened in the second half of the
twentieth century. Whether through explosive developments in telecommunications
and information technology, or the worldwide acceptance of transnational
control of capital, we appear to have entered a post-geopolitical age in the 21st century. Neither Mahan
nor Mackinder hold much sway in our current thinking.
Undeniably, most world citizens are concerned more with
their own families and communities than they are with remote imperial (or
capitalist) authority. It has always been so -- something conveniently ignored
by all military geostrategic planning over the past two centuries. Save for proxy
wars waged between the Western powers and Communist powers during the Cold War
(Greece, Korea, Malaya, Vietnam), it seems that war between Great Powers has
become obsolete.
Globalization allows an interconnected world to be easily
influenced by advertising from any source -- so long as it is selling something
desirable. Aspirations can be monetized, or related back to knowable cultural
values of different populations. The age of global marketing, amplified by “big
data,” is upon us.
The mountains, deserts, oceans -- geographic barriers for
earlier geopolitical thinkers -- gone.
Globalization seems to have neutralized the imperialist
ambitions of would-be Great Powers. If capital and labor can both move freely
around the world, what good is imperialism?
There remains one important caveat: capital and labor reside
in different countries around the
world, and those nation states have the power to pass and enforce laws
restricting that free flow within and between nations. The polity in each sovereign
nation still maintains some independence, even if the political leaders may
have a financial stake in one transnational capitalist entity over another,
their allegiance is seldom to another
country, per se.
The state, then, persists. A new geopolitics emerges in the
21st century, based on national political frameworks, and individual
leaders’ ties, rather than features of physical geography. Cultural geography
becomes predominant. And, economic geography separates the rich from the poor,
within a given nation, as well as between them.
What About the Islamic State?
It is the combination of cultural and economic geography
which enables entities like the Islamic State to gain a foothold. They rule by
fear and intimidation. Their reach is enhanced, not by organized armies, but by
the global Internet, and the ability to play upon cultural and economic
sensibilities to “recruit” certain marginalized individuals to carry out
terrorist attacks -- often in the heart of the former imperialist powers --
ostensibly to further the goals of the Islamic State.
The declared “War on Terror,” waged against these groups by
the former imperialist powers, is an attempt to cast the struggle in
geopolitical terms. Yet, the usual understanding of geopolitics doesn’t quite
fit a semi-organized group holding a small, discontinuous, strip of territory
in parts of Syria and Iraq. The Islamic State’s hold on the populations of the
territories it occupies will always be weak.
Studies
have indicated that, as horrifying as deadly terrorist attacks are, they
have little impact on the real value of capital, worldwide (markets recover
quickly). It is certainly not a “war”, in the geopolitical sense of the 19
th
century colonial wars, or either World War of the 20
th century. If global capitalism is the true “Great
Power” of the 21
st century, it is not even fazed by terrorist groups
like ISIS or Al Queda.
But, what of that cultural motivation? Affiliations with the
world’s great religions are of great cultural consequence to many. And, if a
group, terrorist or not, can successfully inspire large numbers of people,
scattered throughout the world, by using cultural symbols, is that group not
wielding geopolitical power? There may
be only a few thousand “members” of ISIS, but they can certainly get a lot of
attention through
terrorist
acts! They are engaging in what nineteenth century European anarchists
called “
propaganda
of the deed.”
Can it be that such acts will raise the political stature of
the group, versus its competitors? In the case of ISIS, it could be following a
systematic plan to make the populations of the former imperialist powers feel
unsafe, unprotected by their own governments. In the case of a would-be Great
Power (or former Great Power,
like Russia?),
might not an organized
psy-ops
plan aimed at disheartening the population of an adversary, causing it to lose
confidence in its own government, accomplish a similar goal? This sort of action
may well be a salient characteristic of the “new geopolitics.”
Russian Psy-Ops
Imagining the possibilities of a coordinated Russian
cyber-attack on U.S. and west European democratic institutions, following much recent
speculation in the media, is clearly consistent with this new definition of
geopolitics. And, Russia has a
history
of expansion which tends to support such methods. From the 15
th
century onwards, the Principality of Moscow (Muscovy to the West) depended
largely on the cunninig of its diplomats, combined with treachery and bribes,
to cajole neighboring states into alliances, or vassal status.
It seldom resorted to war to accomplish its goals. Its
primary early threats were from less organized armed bands of raiders, Tatars
and Cossacks. Contrary to Mackinder’s thesis, the “heartland” of Russia never
succeeded in subduing a power as well organized, and resourceful, as itself. It
never conquered the Ottoman Empire, China, or Germany. Its expansion to the
north and east was essentially expansion into a vacuum. In the case of the 18
th
century partition of Poland, and the 20
th century emergence of
Communist Parties throughout Europe, it sewed weakness and dissension within
its rivals, leading to a
favorable
diplomatic outcome – ultimately, expansion of the Russian sphere of
influence. At the culmination of the Soviet period, it had even produced its
own follower of Mahan: Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, who thought the time was ripe
to pursue mastery of the world ocean. This, however, proved to be an unwelcome
import from the West, very un-Russian. The
Voennyi
Morskoi Flot, built by Gorshkov, was left to rust in Russian ports after
the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
But, a stealthy
cyber-attack
on the political process in the U.S. or France is entirely within the tradition
of Russian history. It, in many ways, is the same old geopolitics of previous
centuries, which the Russians have developed into a science. Let’s remember
that Russia’s current oligarch-in-chief, Vladimir Putin, cut his professional teeth,
before entering politics, as a practitioner of that scientific dark art of
geopolitical strategy. He was a KGB agent. And, increasingly, it seems that his
“useful idiot” in the White House is entirely naïve about this history.
We, in the United States, as well as the citizens of the EU,
China, South America and all other countries in Mackinder’s inner and outer
“marginal crescents” should be alert to the persistence of geopolitics from that
former Great Power, the once-and-future imperial Russia.
Sometimes, a sense of “history interrupted” can be a
powerful incentive for aggressive geopolitical action plans. We’ve seen several
cases of this syndrome, over the last century, motivating profound political
change. Vulnerable target populations were instrumental in the growth of
European fascism after the humiliating defeat of the Central Powers in World
War I, again in the “radicalization” of some segments of Islam who feel they were
handed a raw deal by former colonial powers. And, some say that the humiliating
toll of globalization on much of the world’s working poor is creating the same opportunity
for a “history interrupted” movement.
Perhaps, it is even a motivator right here in the United
States. Make America Great Again!
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