by Maj. Danny Sjursen, USA (ret.)
\nAntiwar.com<\/p>\n
Academic historians reject anything smacking of inevitably. Instead they emphasize the contingency of events as manifested through the inherent agency of human beings and the countless decisions they make. On the merits, such scholars are basically correct. That said, there was something \u2013 if not inevitable \u2013 highly probable, almost (forgive me) deterministic about the two cataclysmic world wars of the 20th century. Both, in retrospect, were driven, in large part, by collective \u2013 particularly Western \u2013 nations\u2019 adherence to a series of geopolitical philosophies.<\/p>\n
The first war \u2013 which killed perhaps nine million soldiers in the sodden trench lines (among other long forgotten places) of Europe \u2013 began, in part, due to the continental, and especially maritime, competition between Imperial Great Britain, and a new, rising, and highly populous, land power, Imperial Germany. Both had pretensions to global leadership; Britain\u2019s old and long-standing, Germany\u2019s recent and aspirational \u2013 tinged with a sense of long-denied deservedness. Political and military leaders on both sides \u2013 along with other European (and the Japanese) nations \u2013 then pledged philosophical fealty to the\u00a0theories<\/a>\u00a0of an American Navy man, Alfred Thayer Mahan. To simplify, Mahan\u2019s core postulation \u2013 published from a series of lectures as\u00a0The Influence of Sea Power Upon History<\/i>\u00a0\u2013 was that geopolitical power in the next (20th) century would be inherently maritime. The countries that maintained large, modern navies, held strategic coaling stations, and expanded their coastal, formal empires, would dominate trade, develop the strongest economies, and, hence, were apt to global paramountcy. Conversely, traditional land power \u2013 mass armies prepared to march across vast land masses \u2013 would become increasingly irrelevant.<\/p>\n Mahan\u2019s inherently flawed, or at least exaggerated, conclusions \u2013 and his own clear institutional (U.S. Navy) bias \u2013 aside, key players in two of the major powers of Europe seemed to buy the philosophy hook-line-and-sinker. So, when Wilhelmine Germany took the strategic decision to rapidly expand its own colonial fiefdoms (before the last patches of brown-people-inhabited land were swallowed up) and, thereby necessarily embarked on a crash naval buildup to challenge the British Empire\u2019s maritime supremacy, the stage was set for a massive war. And, with most major European rivals \u2013 hopelessly hypnotized by nationalism \u2013 locked in a wildly byzantine, bipolar alliance system, all that was needed to turn the conflict global was a spark: enter the assassin Gavrilo Princip, a pistol, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and it was\u00a0game on<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Second World War \u2013 which\u00a0caused<\/a>\u00a0between 50-60 million deaths \u2013 was, of course, an outgrowth of the first. It\u2019s causes were multifaceted and complicated. Nonetheless, particularly in its European theater, it, too, was driven by a geopolitical theorist and his hypotheses. This time the culprit was a Briton, Halford John Mackinder. In contrast with Mahan, Mackinder postulated a land-based, continental power theory. As such, he\u00a0argued<\/a>\u00a0that the “pivot” of global preeminence lay in the control of Eurasia \u2013 the “World Island” \u2013 specifically Central Asia and Eastern Europe. These resource rich lands held veritable buried treasure for the hegemon, and, since they lay on historical trade routes, were strategically positioned.<\/p>\n Should an emergent, ambitious, and increasingly populated, power \u2013 say, Nazi Germany \u2013 need additional territory (what Hitler called “Lebensraum<\/a>\u201c) for its race, and resources (especially oil) for its budding war machine, then it needed to seize the strategic “heartland” of the World Island. In practice, that mean the Nazis theoretically should, and did, shift their gaze (and planned invasion) from their outmoded Mahanian rival across the English Channel, eastward to the Ukraine, Caucasus (with its ample oil reserves), and Central Asia. Seeing as all three regions were then \u2013 and to lesser extent, still \u2013 dominated by Russia, the then Soviet Union, the unprecedentedly bloody existential war on Europe\u2019s Eastern Front appears ever more certain and explainable.<\/p>\n Germany lost both those wars: the first badly, the second, disastrously. Then, in a sense, the proceeding 45-year Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union \u2013 the only two big winners in the Second World War \u2013 may be seen as an extension or sequel to Mackinder-driven rivalry. The problem is that after the end of \u2013 at least the\u00a0first<\/i>\u00a0\u2013 Cold War, Western, especially American, strategists severely\u00a0miscalculated<\/a>. In their misguided triumphalism, US geopolitical theorists both provoked a weak (but not forever so) Russia by expanding the NATO alliance far eastward, but posited premature (and naive) theories that assumed global finance, free (American-skewed) trade, and digital dominance were all that mattered in a “Post” Cold War world.<\/p>\n No one better defined this magical thinking more than the\u00a0still<\/i>\u00a0\u2013 after having been wrong about just about every US foreign policy decision of the last two decades \u2013 prominent\u00a0New York Times<\/i>\u00a0columnist<\/a>, Thomas Friedman. In article after article, and books with such catchy titles as\u00a0The World is Flat<\/i>, and\u00a0The Lexus and the Olive Tree<\/i>, Friedman argued, essentially, that old realist geopolitics were dead, and all that really mattered for US hegemony was the proliferation of McDonald\u2019s franchises worldwide.<\/p>\n Friedman was wrong; he always is (Exhibit A: the 2003 Iraq War). Today, with a surprisingly \u2013 at least with his prominent base \u2013 popular president, Donald J. Trump, impeached in the House and\u00a0just acquitted<\/a>\u00a0by the Senate for alleged crimes misleadingly summed up as \u201cUkraine-gate,\u201d a look at the\u00a0real issues<\/a>\u00a0at hand in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, demonstrate that, for better or (probably) worse, the ghost of Mackinder still haunts the scene. For today, I\u2019d argue, the proxy battle over Ukraine between the U.S. and its allied-coup-empowered government \u2013 which includes some\u00a0neo-nazi<\/a>\u00a0political and military elements \u2013 and Russian-backed separatists in the country\u2019s east, reflects a return to the battle for Eurasian resource and geographic predominance.<\/p>\n Neither Russia nor the United States is wholly innocent in fueling and escalating the ongoing Ukrainian Civil War. The difference is, that in post-Russiagate farce, chronically (especially among mainstream Democrat) alleged Russia-threat-obsessed America, reports of Moscow\u2019s ostensible guilt literally saturate the media space. The reporting from Washington? Not so much. The truth is that a generation of prominent “liberal” American, born-again Russia-hawks \u2013 Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, the whole DNC\u00a0apparatus<\/a>, and the MSNBC corporate media crowd \u2013\u00a0wielded<\/a>\u00a0State Department, NGO, and\u00a0economic<\/a>\u00a0pressure to help catalyze a pro-Western coup in Ukraine during and after 2014. Their opportunism seemed, to them, simple, and relatively cost-free, at the time, but has turned implacably messy in the ensuing years.<\/p>\n In the process, the Democrats haven\u2019t done themselves any political favors, further sullying what\u2019s left of their reputation by \u2013 in some\u00a0cases<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 colluding with Ukrainians to undermine key Trump officials; and consorting with\u00a0nefarious<\/a>\u00a0far-right nationalist local bigots (who\u00a0may have<\/a>\u00a0conspired to kill protesters in the Maidan “massacre,” as a means to instigate further Western support for the coup). What\u2019s more, while much of the conspiratorial Trump-team spin on direct, or illegal, Biden family criminality has proven false, neither Joe nor son Hunter, are exactly “clean.” The Democratic establishment, Biden specifically, may, according to an excellent recent\u00a0Guardian\u00a0<\/i>editorial<\/a>, have a serious “corruption problem” \u2013 no least of which involves explaining exactly why a then sitting vice president\u2019s son, who had no serious diplomatic or energy sector experience, was paid $50,000 a month to serve on the board of a Ukrainian\u00a0gas company<\/a>.<\/p>\n Fear not, the “Never-Trump” Republicans, and establishment Democrats seemingly intent on drumming up a new \u2013 presumably politically profitable \u2013 Cold War have already explanation. They\u2019ve dug up the long ago discredited, but still publicly palatable, justification that the US must be prepared to fight Russia “over there,” before it has no choice but to battle them “over here” (though its long been unclear where “here”\u00a0is<\/i>, or\u00a0how<\/i>, exactly, that fantasy comes to pass). First, there\u2019s the distance factor: though several thousands of miles away from the East Coast of North America, Ukraine is in Russia\u2019s near-abroad. After all, it was long \u2013 across many different generational political\/imperial structures \u2013 part of the Soviet Union or other Russian empires. A large subsection of the populace, especially in the East, speaks, and considers itself, in part, culturally, Russian.<\/p>\n Furthermore, the Russian threat, in 2020, is highly exaggerated. Putin is not Stalin. The Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union; and, hell, even the\u00a0Soviet<\/i>\u00a0(non-nuclear) military threat and geopolitical ambitions were embellished throughout Cold War “Classic.” A simple comparative \u201ctale-of-the-tape<\/a>\u201d illustrates as much. Economically and demographically, Russia is demonstrably an empirically\u00a0declining power<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 its economy, in fact, about\u00a0the size<\/a>\u00a0of Spain\u2019s.<\/p>\n Nor is the defense of an imposed, pro-Western, Ukrainian proxy state a vital American national security interest worth bleeding, or risking nuclear war, over. As MIT\u2019s Barry Posen has\u00a0argued<\/a>, “Vital interests affect the safety, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and power position of the United States,” and, “If, in the worst case, all Ukraine were to \u2018fall\u2019 to Russia, it would have little impact on the security of the United States.” Furthermore, as retired US Army colonel, and president of the restraint-based Quincy Institute, Andrew Bacevich,\u00a0has advised<\/a>, the best policy, if discomfiting, is to “tacitly acknowledge[e] the existence of a Russian sphere of influence.” After all, Washington would expect, actually demand, the same acquiescence of Moscow in Mexico, Canada, or, for that matter, the entire Americas.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, no such restrained prudence is likely, so long as the bipartisan American national security state continues to subscribe to some vague version of the Mackinder theory. Quietly, except among wonky regional experts and investigative reporters on the scene, the US has, before, but especially since the “opportunity” of the 9\/11 attacks, entered full-tilt into a competition with Russia and China for physical, economic, and resource dominance from Central Asia to the borderlands of Eastern Europe.\u00a0That\u2019s<\/i>\u00a0why, as a student at the Army\u2019s Command and General Staff College in 2016-17, all us officers focused almost exclusively on planning fictitious, but highly realistic, combat missions in the Caucasus region. It also partly explains why the US military, after 18+ years, remains ensconced in potentially $3 trillion\u00a0resource-rich<\/a>\u00a0Afghanistan, which, not coincidentally, is America\u2019s one serious physical foothold in land-locked Central Asia.<\/p>\n Anecdotally, but instructively, I remember well my four brief stops at the once ubiquitous US Air Force way-station into Afghanistan \u2013 Manas Airbase \u2013 in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Off-base “liberty” \u2013 even for permanent party airmen \u2013 was rare, in part, because the Russian military had a mirror base just across the city. What\u2019s more, the previous, earlier stopover spot for Afghanistan \u2013 Uzbekistan \u2013\u00a0kicked out<\/a>\u00a0the US military in 2005, in part, due to Russian political and economic pressure to do so.<\/p>\n Central Asia and East Europe are also contested spaces regarding the control of competing \u2013 Western vs. Russian vs. Chinese \u2013 oil and natural gas\u00a0pipeline routes<\/a>\u00a0and trade corridors. Remember, that China\u2019s massive \u201cOne Belt \u2013 One Road<\/a>\u201d infrastructure investment program is mostly self-serving, if sometimes mutually beneficial. The plan means to link Chinese manufacturing to the vast consumerist European market mainly through transportation, pipeline, diplomatic, and military connections\u00a0running through<\/a>\u00a0where? You guessed it: Central Asia, the Caucasus, and on through Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n Like it or not, America isn\u2019t poised to win this battle, and its feeble efforts to do so in these remarkably distant locales smacks of global hegemonic ambitions and foolhardy, mostly risk, nearly no reward, behavior. Russia has a solid army in close proximity, a hefty nuclear arsenal, as well as physical and historical connections to the Eurasian Heartland; China has an even better, more balanced, military, enough nukes, and boasts a far more powerful, spendthrift-capable, economy. As for the US, though still militarily and (for now) economically powerful, it lacks proximity, faces difficult logistical \/ expeditionary challenges, and has lost much legitimacy and squandered oodles of good will with the regional countries being vied for. Odds are, that while war may not be inevitable, Washington\u2019s weak hand and probable failure, nearly is.<\/p>\n Let us table, for the purposes of this article, questions regarding any environmental effects of the great powers\u2019 quest for, extraction, and use of many of these regional resources. My central points are two-fold: first, that Ukraine \u2013 which represents an early stage in Washington\u2019s rededication to chauvinist, Mackinder geostrategy \u2013 as a proxy state for war with Russia is not an advisable or vital interest; second, that Uncle Sam\u2019s larger quest to compete with the big two (Eur)Asian powers is likely to fail and symptomatic of imperial confusion and desperation. As the U.S. enters an increasingly bipolar phase of world affairs, powerful national security leaders fear its diminishing power. Washington\u2019s is, like it or not, an empire in decline; and, as we know from history, such entities behave badly on the downslope of hegemony. Call me cynical, but I\u2019m apt to believe that the United States, as perhaps the most powerful imperial body of all time, is apt, and set, to act poorest of all.<\/p>\n The proxy fight in Ukraine, battle for Central Asia in general \u2013 to say nothing of related American aggression and provocations in Iran and the Persian Gulf \u2013 could be the World War III catalyst that the Evangelical militarist nuts, Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, unwilling to wait on Jesus Christ\u2019s eschatological timeline, have long\u00a0waited for<\/a>. These characters seemingly possess the heretical temerity to believe\u00a0man<\/i>\u00a0\u2013 white American men, to be exact \u2013 can and should incite or stimulate Armageddon and the Rapture.<\/p>\n If they\u2019re proved \u201cright\u201d or have their way \u2013 and the Mikes just might \u2013 then nuclear cataclysm will have defied the Vegas odds and beat the house on the expected human\u00a0extinction<\/a>\u00a0timeline. Only contra to the bloody prophecy set forth in the New Testament book of Revelations, it won\u2019t be Jesus wielding his vengeful sword on the back of a white horse, but \u2013 tragic and absurdly \u2013 the perfect Antichrist stooge, pressing the red button, who does the apocalyptic deed\u2026<\/p>\n Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to\u00a0<\/i>Antiwar.com<\/i><\/a>. His work has appeared in the<\/i>\u00a0LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, Tom Dispatch,\u00a0among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War,\u00a0<\/i>Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge<\/a>. His forthcoming book,\u00a0<\/i>Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War<\/a>, is available for preorder on Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at\u00a0<\/i>@SkepticalVet<\/i><\/a>.\u00a0Check out his professional\u00a0<\/b><\/i>website<\/i><\/b><\/a>\u00a0for contact info, scheduling speeches, and\/or access to the full corpus of his writing and media appearances.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n Copyright 2020 Danny Sjursen<\/p>\n