The invasion of Ukraine praised NATO, when it seemed doomed to insignificance. Trump had depreciated the strategic assessment of the Euro-North American axis and, with Biden, the United States and the United Kingdom including Australia in the AUKUS (the alliance that seeks to contain China in the Indian and Pacific Oceans) seemed to turn the page that definitely placed the center of attention in another corner of the planet. But everything changed when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.
Despite having rejected the Ukrainian request for troops, also refusing to establish a no-fly zone and any action that leads to a direct clash with Russia, the Atlantic alliance was revalued by this war. One would be justified in suspecting that Washington was aware of Putin’s plans and allowed him to carry them out so that NATO has a reason to exist again. Strictly speaking, the hypothesis would be that the CIA knew that the Kremlin was planning to invade Ukraine. That would explain the embarrassing US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the abrupt end to the anti-terrorist operation led by France in the Sahel, without having defeated the jihadists operating in Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Niger.
The invasion of Ukraine justifies suspecting that, aware of this plan, Western powers decided to withdraw of peripheral scenarios to reinforce central Europe. But in this hypothesis, the desired objective would not be to revive NATO forever. They would have let Putin perpetrate a humanitarian catastrophe to justify isolating Russia until the fall of the despot who took history back to the last period of expansionism in Europe: the 20th century.
If the footage looks like it’s from a World War II documentary, it’s because show a 20th century war, with invasion of countries and occupation of cities. By the way, there are other territorial expansion projects in the world that show that the cycle was not over when Iraq invaded Kuwait. But no one expected to see it in Europe, where territorial expansionism caused the catastrophic wars that marked the last century.
Putin developed advanced military technology, as evidenced by thermobaric bombs and hypersonic missiles, but did not adapt to the 21st century the vision of its world leadership. While the struggle for the global vanguard today takes place in the economic field and productive technology, the head of the Kremlin acts from a nationalism of tsarist origin and from nineteenth-century geopolitical theories that marked the last century.
In fact, geopolitics had been discredited because it was used by fascist leaderships devoted to wars of territorial expansion.
At the end of the 19th century, the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel provided arguments for the ideologues of expansionism, by proposing concepts such as “living borders” that fueled the “organicist” theories of the State, put forward by Rudolph Kjellen, of the University of Upsala. Both would influence Haushofer and other members of the German school. Meanwhile, the North American Alfred Mahan had a decisive influence on the maritime doctrine that led the United States to war against Spain, which turned the incipient American continental power into an overseas power by imposing itself on Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
The North American leap towards world leadership, reaching the United Kingdom and its oceanic “empire on which the sun never sets”, proved Mahan right, until the “Heartland” theory broke out with which the British Halford Mackinder reoriented the geopolitics. The heartland is the “island world”, that is, the largest landmass on the planet: Eurasia. There is the geographical bastion that Napoleon and Hitler wanted to conquer for what it implied as a territorial fortress to lead the world.
The approach that valued the continents over the oceans influenced Alekansdr Duguin, the author of the “fourth political theory” and main promoter of “Eurasianism” as the geopolitical foundation of Russia raised to the level of ideology.
Before those theories were written, the Russian tsars made such conceptions into the political culture. That is why Russian ultranationalism is tsarist, even if it wears communist or republican clothing. Russian ultranationalism is pan-Slavist -places Russia in the leadership of the other Slavic nations-, conceives politics as the exercise of power concentrated in the hands of a single man, and measures its success or failure with maps. If after managing it, the territory grew, it was successful; if it did not grow, it was mediocre and, if it decreased, it was a failure.
The tsars who created the Russian state expanded it from the start. In the 15th century, Ivan III Vasilievich started the war in Novgorod and by the time he died he had quadrupled the territory of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy. his grandson, Ivan IV, who was called “the terrible”, began his reign by annexing the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, and dying Muscovy reached the Caspian Sea in the south; to the Ural Mountains in the East and to the Baltic Sea in the North.
In Russian history, the outstanding tsars are those who, like Peter the Great and Catherine II, expanded the territory. And the Soviet Union was a geopolitical achievement of Russia, due to the phenomenal hinterland of fourteen countries that constituted its geographical wall.
Putin waged territorial conservation wars (Chechnya) and expansion towards the Caucasus (Georgia). Now he embarks on the expansion towards the West, with a model war of the 20th century that can lead Russia to a failure.
It will be able to prevail in the Ukraine, after which it is probable that it will advance on Moldova, a country that has already been amputated by Transnistria. But being left out of economic relations with the Western powers is bad business for Russia. The Eurasian giant had been strengthening its economy for decades. Russian society had never reached standards of living like those it reached in the post-Soviet era. And that was achieved with large private investments, local and foreign.
Through global warming, there are few decades of hydrocarbon use left. Losing customers as important as the European ones, in the discount time of these massive exports, is the bad business that Putin does for his expansionist desire and its addiction to geopolitical schemes.
It is possible that Washington let him execute his plan so that it collides with the present, where what empowers countries is global economic projection and not geopolitical arm wrestling. The risk is that Russia becomes “North Korean”, becoming a marginal giant that from time to time draws its missiles and targets Europe to impose perks that allow it to survive.
