At the end of the First World WarClemenceau took a term from medicine to explain the system of alliances that would be necessary so that Bolshevik Russia could not expand by Europe communism. That French Prime Minister called the geopolitical fence that he imagined a “cordon sanitaire”. The creation of NATO and its immediate consequence, the Warsaw pactwere the expression of the division of the world that began on the western side of the northern hemisphere.
The “cordon sanitaire” extended to the south-east when Mao Tse-tung created the People’s Republic of China. To surround the communist giant that had burst in at the beginning of the 1950s, with a Marxist threat that was expanding due to the victory of the Vietminh over the French in the Indochinese Peninsula, the SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) was created, a alliance between United States, Great Britain, and France with Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines. The second half of the 20th century began with the world split in two and thus the third decade of the 21st century is beginning.
In the previous Strategic Concept document of the Atlantic alliance, written in 2010, China is not mentioned, while with Russia the qualification of “strategic ally” is lurking. Twelve years later, Russia and China they are again considered fearsome enemies. That is why the last summit of the NATO establishes as an urgency to prevent Vladimir Putin from triumphing in Ukraine, or limit that victory as much as possible, militarily expanding and reinforcing the Euro-American siege to prevent new wars of territorial conquest. And at the same time, extending the “cordon sanitaire” to the east is raised as a substantive issue.
The objective of this extension is to contain the territorial expansion of China in the marine waters and in the islands and islets that they contain. That is why the other unprecedented fact of the summit in Madrid was the presence of Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia as special guests. In addition to being neighbors of China, they have the Asian giant as their main trading partner. For Tokyo, Seoul, Canberra and Wellington, confronting China has very high costs. A decade ago, Japan suffered a severe recession when China boycotted its products.
But the most important dimension of what the powers of West vs. Chinais to block the expansion of its influence and influence on other continents, which is growing rapidly through the development of infrastructure within the framework of the so-called “New Silk Road”.
Developing infrastructure, it penetrates continents and enlarges an orbit of influence. Countering that influence is among Washington’s geopolitical priorities. That’s what he meant Joe Biden when he raised the need of promoting north-south cooperation alliances for the development of infrastructure, something like a counter-Silk Road.
The fact is that the G7 and NATO summits drew the dotted line along which the scissors will pass. This is not an exclusively Western decision. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the part that the Kremlin contributed to this setback, while the Chinese contribution is the abrupt disregard of the agreement for the transfer of Hong Kong and the war drums that are beating Taiwan.
The world is splitting in two again and everything indicates that this is how it will go through the 21st century. The urgent challenge is the arm-wrestling between Russia and NATO with their elbows leaning on Ukraine. At the Madrid summit, after Turkey agreed with Helsinki and Stockholm what to do with the Kurds that Erdogan considers terrorists, the door of the Atlantic alliance was left open to the entry of Sweden and Finland.
The growth of NATO is the backfire for Putin, who invaded Ukraine to prevent just that. But the Russian president plans to respond by growing his country’s territory. To the territorial expansion that implies incorporating all of eastern and southern Ukraine into Russia, Putin will add the annexation of Belarus.
This territorial growth will bring Russia’s borders a few kilometers from kyiv, increasing the Russian siege on Ukraine, while increasing pressure on Poland and two Baltic countries: Lithuania and Latvia. The incorporation of Belarus into Russia will not imply a violent invasion. It will be an annexation by absorption, as was the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich through the Anschluss.
The Minsk regime will not resist because it has become a vassal of Moscow. First, Aleksandr Lukashenko took democracy away from Belarusians. And he will soon take the country from them and hand it over to Russia. This is how he will pay Putin for having saved his power from the popular outrage that erupted over electoral fraud in the 2020 presidential elections.
“I will not let anyone give away our country,” Lukashenko brazenly asserted to his supporters as he confronted the massive protests with repression. But it is he who now wraps it up and adorns it with a bow to deliver it to Russia. By annexing Belarus, Putin will somewhat offset the growth of NATO by adding Finland and Sweden.
In addition to achieving the goal of wresting the Black Sea coast from Ukraine by conquering Odessa and uniting Crimea with Transnistria, Putin will be in an excellent position to invade another country: Moldova.
These Russian plans, plus those that China is implementing and the US decision to retain world leadership, is what is splitting the world in two again. The powers put the reverse gear and the world order returns to the two decades prior to 1977.
That year SEATO was dissolved because Nixon and Mao’s embrace of the Washington-Beijing understanding that Kissinger and Chou En-lai had negotiated made that section of the cordon sanitaire lose meaning. But today, on the verge of turning one hundred years old, Kissinger affirms that “this Cold War is more dangerous than the previous one”.
What is certain is that dividing the world is much more difficult today than in the 20th century. It so happens that Soviet Russia and Communist China were disconnected from the Western powers and other world capitalisms. Instead, today’s Russia and China are capitalist and hyper-connected to the global economy. In particular the gigantic Chinese economy. And separating Siamese bodies will cause unknown pains.
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