The Battle Against Eurasia
ONE CENTURY OF THE US GEO-STRATEGY IN THE OLD WORLD
States are captives of the geographic conditions in which they historically emerge, evolve and exist. The "insularity" of the US power, which has no land ways of communication with the Eurasian continent, the world's richest storage of planetary resources determines the outright expansionism of the US foreign policy.
From 1823 the "Monroe Doctrine" (which provided for the interference of the US in the event of the newly independent states of South America being threatened by Europe) became an ideological tool of extending the US hegemony over the Western hemisphere. In 1895 the US State Secretary Richard Olney, referring to the Monroe Doctrine, frankly stated that "on this (American) continent the US is practically sovereign, and all it decrees becomes a law".
The US formulated the objective of becoming "practically sovereign" also beyond the Western Hemisphere by widening the limits of expansion as a top priority of its foreign policy, when the country became a great power at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The spirit of the American "frontier" - the advance of the first colonists from the coast deep into the mainland, seizing new lands and exterminating the native population there - became the spirit of the US foreign policy strategy - now on a global scale. As Zb. Brzezinski emphasized when tracing the really existing lines of "geo-strategic fronts" of a geopolitical struggle for domination over Eurasia on the map of the world, the front line of the US "defense" should always remain overseas.
Brzezinski wrote in his book "The Grand Chess Board: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives" in 1997 that from the moment the continents started interacting, i. e. more or less over the last five centuries, the center of world domination had been located in Eurasia … However, in the final decade of the 20th century a tectonic shift took place in the international relations. A non-European state became the main arbiter of domination-submission relations in Eurasia and the solely domineering power in the world for the first time in the history. The defeat and disintegration of the Soviet Union were the final acts in the ascension of the state of the Western Hemisphere, the US, to the role of the sole and truly global power.
Zb. Bjezinski's idea is simple: the shift of the "geographic axis of history", or the "heartland" (terms used by H.D. Mackinder to denote the expanse coinciding with the historical territory of Russia, and later on - the USSR) from Eurasia to the American continent should be considered as the result of a "tectonic shift" - the collapse of the Eurasian superpower. However, the postulate is false in its essential element. It proclaims a geostrategic objective of the US elite, but omits the fact that there is a great distance, far from being already overcome, between the objective and today's reality.
To become a new "heartland" the US dramatically lacks the essential -resources . Due to its extreme geographic eccentricity, a hypothetical world with the American continent as its heartland could only be a world of a "golden billion" forcing the remaining five billions of the population of Earth into a social and economic ghetto. The US elite is aware of this fact, yet it craves for "practical sovereignty" on a global scale. This forces the US to extend the action of the Monroe Doctrine over to the main continent of the Eastern Hemisphere as the planetary geostrategic center.
An important element of the US political tradition, the "frontier" has never been just an ordinary boundary in its European meaning. This is not a line dividing the states, but a front line of advancing movement to be pushed continuously outwards. This is an unlimited expansion of force , the main vector of which is nowadays the NATO eastward and south-eastward expansion, deep into heart of Eurasia as Earth's central continent. Without control over Eurasia the global primacy of the US would be a sheer impossibility for the geographically "peripheral" US.
In the context of the history of the 1990ies it is clearly visible that NATO, as a military-political bloc of the North Atlantic states, was designed to be a more complex structure than, so to say, just a battering-ram for the "cold war", destined to cease existing after the war is won. The USSR disappeared from the political map long ago, yet the US "frontier" keeps on moving, by means of NATO, into the countries (Czech Republic, Hungary) and territories (Kosovo, South Serbia), which, putting it plainly, have nothing to do neither with the basin of the North Atlantic nor with the notorious "Trans-Atlantic community". In view of the "humanitarian interventions" performed by the US in Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, in the light of Afghanistan being converted into the center of international terrorism by efforts of the Taliban movement (reared by the secret services of the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan), in view of the Caucasus, the basin of the Caspian and Central Asia being declared spheres of vital interests of the US, the historical meaning of the "cold war" is becoming retrospectively clear today.
The "cold war" was a battle against Eurasia, aiming at preventing the existence of a state or confederation of states on the Great Continent, which would be strong enough to defend its resources from being freely appropriated by the overseas "consumer civilization". The war is still going on and, in all evidence, its decisive battles are yet to come.
Today the leaders of the newly independent states on the territory of the former USSR are not yet sufficiently conscious of the fact that the United States are the historical adversary of any strong and independent national statehood in Eurasia. In fact, the notorious "fight against communism" was but an ideological pretext for the US, its information-propagandistic cover for the other struggle, aimed at destroying the continental superpower in Eurasia. There is a startling confession made Zb. Brzezinski on that score, dated 1986. Paradoxical as it sounds, - he wrote, - but communism in Russia was a blessing for the US, because communism locked up the talented and endurable Russian people within the system that strangulated the nation, squandering its strength and great potential. What a remarkable and instructive confession! Just as the ideologists of the US expansionism were once blessing communism, today they are blessing a transcontinental geopolitical combination that would be capable of preventing the peoples of the former USSR from national revival and their genuine sovereign development.
It is highly significant that in Zb. Bjezinski's work "Game Plan" (1986) we can find passages revealing the meaning of some new, more recent phenomena, for example NATO eastward expansion. Showing the contents of the so-called "transatlantic relation" between the US and Europe, the US strategist writes that forty years after the end of the Second World War and thirty years after the economic revival of Europe the westernmost extremity of the Eurasian continent is still the US military protectorate. Further on, among possible scenarios for changes of the situation ZB. Brzezinski mentions (in 1986!) that the extension of the bounds of NATO-involved Europe over entire Europe to the western borders of the Soviet Union. He visualizes a direct link between a possibility of such developments and major internal disturbances in the Soviet Union, the extent of which would expedite the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Central Europe and neutralize the Kremlin's will to defend the power. The political aspirations of non-Russians…, spurred up above all from outside should serve as the main tool of destabilizing the Eurasian statehood characterized by the multi-ethnic composition of its population.
The author of the "Game Plan" draws three lines of geostrategic fronts on the Eurasian continent - western, southern and Far-Eastern ones (with respect to the Eurasian geo-strategic center - the USSR). He also mentions the "linchpin states", the control over which, from the point of view of Zb. Brzezinski's strategic geography, would make it possible to either increase or on the contrary gradually decrease and finally destroy the geopolitical stability of large regions. Such key states are: Poland and Germany in the West, South Korea and the Philippines in the Far East, "either Iran, or a combination of Afghanistan and Pakistan " in the south. Zb. Brzezinski emphasizes that prevailing in the latter region would ensure a success reaching far beyond the regional geopolitical limits. The prime importance of the southern geostrategic front line lies in the fact that it has "catalysts" that, by analogy with a chemical reaction, could quicken the most important processes in the international relations.
What it means and how the designers of the US geostrategy set up the "combination of Afghanistan and Pakistan" remaining the main source of instability in Central and Southern Asia until now, is demonstrated by the famous French expert in political Islam Olivier Rua. He writes: it all started in 1983… Washington wanted to make Moscow pay the highest possible price for the occupation of Afghanistan by thrusting Islamic extremism against communism and at the same time against Iranian Shiism as well. It was a purely Sunnite radicalism with its demands to entirely subdue the society to Sheriate.., which met the interests of Saudi Arabia anxious to establish firmly its Islamic legitimacy to counterbalance Iran. As for the Pakistani secret service, it had and still has a more ambitious plan (O. Roi wrote about it in 1998): that of establishing control over Afghanistan and making a breakthrough into Central Asia by playing the card of Sunnite Islam. The CIA of the US, together with the chief of the Saudi secret service Prince Turki ibn Feisal and the Pakistani interdepartmental intelligence, had planned the operation… Arab Muslim brothers and the Pakistani Party Djamaat-i-Islami were entrusted to put it into effect. From 1984 onwards, thousands of Islamic soldiers ventured to Afghanistan from the Middle Eastern countries. It should be added that even after the disappearance of the USSR the ramified military-technical infrastructure set up by the Americans in the points of junction of the regions of Central and Southern Asia (camps, bases, weapon depots, communications for the soldiers etc) was kept (and so was NATO on the other side of Eurasia). The huge war machine of sabotage and terrorism was re-oriented to tackle new tasks.
"Game Plan" published five years before the collapse of the USSR was the one of successively enclosing the Eurasian geostrategic center into a circle of front lines all round its perimeter. As a result of the US superpower's victory in the "cold war" the geopolitical configuration of the central part of the Great Continent changed radically. Over the past decade the Eurasian geostrategic center has been considerably weakened in terms of its overall military and economic potential. However, the main objective set by the author of the "Game Plan" and the "Grand Chess Board" - territorial and political control to be established by the "practically global sovereign" over the vast regions in the heart of Eurasia - has not been attained. The newly independent states of Eurasia have not become the "buffer states", the formation of which is strictly necessary, in accordance with the classical principle of the British, and later on - the US geopolitics, in arranging a long-term offensive against its main continental adversary.
The collection of ideas at the disposal of the US geopolitical school is limited. The principles formulated by A.T. Mahen and H.J. Mackinder in the late 19th - early 20th centuries, N. Speakman's concept developed in the early 1940s, Zb. Brzezinski's ideas, repeating one another, belong to the one and the same circle of geopolitical views implying a strategy of siege and assault of the Eurasian "fortress" to be carried out by maritime and oceanic (insular) powers, destined to establish their domination over the world. In the series of three articles by Zb. Brzezinski, published by the US magazine "The National Interest" in 2000 (the titles of the articles reproduce the old scheme of the geo-strategic front lines - "Living with a New Europe", "Living with China", "Living with Russia") only the terminology changed as compared with the "cold war" period, with the basic emphases of meaning remaining the same. The "expansion of the transatlantic community gradually involving Russia" remains the quintessence of the US geostrategy in the Old World, while NATO as the striking force of the expansion is termed "the core of the transcontinental security system".
However, today's reality calls in question these geo-strategic calculations. The "transatlantic community" is a euphemism concealing increasingly problematic attempts undertaken by the US to retain its "military protectorate" over the European Union. The Balkan war of 1999, when the economic and ecological expenses were placed on the Europeans, gave an impulse to the formation of the European Rapid Deployment Force, the command of which will be subordinate neither to Washington, nor to NATO Headquarters. The second group of contradictions between the European Union and the US is related to the competition between the two global reserve currencies - the US dollar and the euro. The third and, in my opinion, basic group of contradictions is objectively conditioned by different geopolitical and geoeconomic situations of North America and Western Europe before a major battle for the rapidly exhausting natural resources of this planet and above all for oil and gas deposits in the most developed countries. This is exactly where the situation of the US claiming global primacy is far from being as favorable as it looks.
According to the 1999 statistical report by the "British Petroleum Amoco", there is less than 3 billion tons of oil left in the US, which may last for some 8 and a half years, if the current extraction level of 370 million tons a year is retained. Now the US imports approximately 500 million tons of oil a year. The US has the world's most power-consuming economy; its dependence on oil imports has exceeded 50% long time ago and keeps on growing. "We are hooked, in the full sense of the word, on cheap oil, and… now far less capable of reasonably comprehending the future than ever before", stated Robert Ibel, the expert of the Center of Strategic and International Studies in Washington, in March 2000 at a session of the US Congress. The situation with gas is even more alarming. Extracting 550 billion cubic meters of gas a year, the US has reserves of it estimated in 3.6 trillion cubic meters, which is enough for some 6.5 years. So, already in 6 or 7 years just to maintain the energy balance at the current level (let alone economic growth) the US will have to import 1.4 billion tons of oil, which is more than the entire global supply today (1,1-1,2 billion tons), leaving nothing at all for other major importers.
All that explains why the US is so anxious gain control of the greatest possible number of oil sources at any cost. A fierce struggle for the right to exploit them may break out in the near future, when absolutely all of them will be declared zones of the US strategic interests. Quite similarly, all of it forces the states of Eurasia, which are directly affected by the ongoing expansion of the US, and for which their sovereignty is not a good for sale, to adopt a repeatedly adjusted line of conduct formulated as clearly as possible in forming international and political alliances for the sake of protecting and preserving their natural resources.
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By © MAXIMENKO Vladimir, senior scientific officer of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences
24.04.2001
Update: Berlin, 03.05.2001
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