THE
EMERGING RUSSIAN GIANT, Part 1 Moscow
plays its cards
strategically By F William
Engdahl
On October 10, Russian President
Vladimir Putin flew to the German city of Dresden
for a summit on energy issues with Germany's
Chancellor Angela Merkel, including proposed plans
to more than double German import of Russian
natural gas.
Putin told the German
chancellor that Russia would "possibly" redirect
some of the future natural gas from its giant
Shtokman field in the Barents Sea. The US$20
billion project is due to come online 2010.
Putin's Dresden talks followed an earlier summit
in
Paris in late September with
Putin and French President Jacques Chirac and
Merkel.
A week after his Dresden talks,
the Indonesian Navy chief of staff announced a
remarkable shift away from that country's
traditional purchases of North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) military equipment. Indonesia
will buy 12 modern Kilo-Class and Lada-Class
Russian submarines. Indonesia cited advantages of
cost and reliability over French or German
equivalents.
These developments underscore
the re-emerging of Russia as a major global power.
The new Russia is gaining in influence through a
series of strategic moves revolving around its
geopolitical assets in energy - most notably its
oil and natural gas. It's doing so by shrewdly
taking advantage of the strategic follies and
major political blunders of Washington. The new
Russia also realizes that if it does not act
decisively, it soon will be encircled and trumped
by a military rival, the US. The battle, largely
unspoken, is the highest stakes battle in world
politics today. Iran and Syria are seen by
Washington strategists as mere steps to this great
Russian End Game.
In recent years, major
attention has been paid to the emergence of a
Chinese economic colossus. What is generally
missing in these discussions is the fact that
China will not be able to emerge as a truly
independent global power over the coming decade
unless it is able to solve two strategic
vulnerabilities - its growing dependence on energy
imports for its economic growth and its inability
to pose a credible nuclear deterrence to a US
nuclear first strike.
Russia is the one
remaining power which still has sufficient
military deterrence potential in its strategic
nuclear arsenal, and is expanding same, as well as
abundant energy to make a credible counterweight
to global US military and political primacy. A
Eurasian combination of China and Russia and
allied Eurasian states, essentially the states in
and around the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO), do present a potential counterweight to
unilateral US dominance. An understanding of
recent Russian developments in this light is
essential to understand US foreign policy as well
as global politics at present.
Russia's
strategic dilemma Since the devastating
setbacks two years ago from the US-sponsored
"color revolutions" in Georgia and then Ukraine,
Russia has begun to play its strategic cards
extremely carefully, from nuclear reactors in Iran
to military sales to Venezuela and other Latin
American states, to strategic market cooperation
deals in natural gas with Algeria.
At the
same time, the Bush administration has dug itself
deeper into a geopolitical morass, through a
foreign policy agenda which has reckless disregard
for its allies as well as its foes. That reckless
policy has been associated with former Halliburton
chief executive officer and now vice president,
Dick Cheney, more than any other figure in
Washington.
The "Cheney presidency", which
is what historians will no doubt dub the George W
Bush years, has been based on a clear strategy. It
has often been misunderstood by critics who had
overly focussed on its most visible component,
namely, Iraq, the Middle East and the strident
war-hawks around the vice president and his old
crony, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The "Cheney strategy" has been a US
foreign policy based on securing direct global
energy control, control by the Big Four US or
US-tied private oil giants - ChevronTexaco or
ExxonMobil, BP or Royal Dutch Shell. Above all, it
has aimed at control of all the world's major oil
regions, along with the major natural gas fields.
That control has moved in tandem with a growing
bid by the US for total military primacy over the
one potential threat to its global ambitions -
Russia. Cheney is perhaps the ideal person to
weave the US military and energy policies together
into a coherent strategy of dominance. During the
early 1990s under father Bush, Cheney was also
secretary of defense.
The Cheney-Bush
administration has been dominated by a coalition
of interests between Big Oil and the top
industries of the American military-industrial
complex. These private corporate interests
exercise their power through control of the
government policy of the US. An aggressive
militaristic agenda has been essential to it. It
is epitomized by Cheney's former company,
Halliburton Inc, at one and the same time the
world's largest energy and geophysical services
company, and the world's largest constructor of
military bases.
To comprehend the policy
it's important to look at how Cheney, as
Halliburton chief, viewed the problem of future
oil supply on the eve of his becoming vice
president. "Where the Prize Ultimately Lies",
Cheney's 1999 London speech, was a full year
before the US elections which made him the most
powerful vice president in history. In it, Cheney
gave a revealing speech before his oil industry
peers at the London Institute of Petroleum. In a
global review of the outlook for Big Oil, Cheney
made the following comment:
By some estimates there will be an
average of 2% annual growth in global oil demand
over the years ahead along with conservatively a
3% natural decline in production from existing
reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the
order of an additional 50 million barrels a day.
So where is the oil going to come from?
Governments and the national oil companies are
obviously controlling about 90% of the assets.
Oil remains fundamentally a government business.
While many regions of the world offer great oil
opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds
of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still
where the prize ultimately lies. Even though
companies are anxious for greater access there,
progress continues to be slow.
It is
true that technology, privatization and the
opening up of a number of countries have created
many new opportunities in areas around the world
for various oil companies, but looking back to
the early 1990s, expectations were that
significant amounts of the world's new resources
would come from such areas as the former Soviet
Union and from China. Of course that didn't turn
out quite as expected. Instead it turned out to
be the deep water successes that yielded the
bonanza of the 1990s.
The Cheney
remarks are worth a careful reading. He posits a
conservative rise in global demand for oil by the
end of the present decade, ie in about four years.
He estimates the world will need to find an added
50 million barrels of daily output. Total daily
oil production at present hovers around the level
of some 83 million barrels oil equivalent. This
means that to avert catastrophic shortages and the
resultant devastating impact on global economic
growth, by Cheney's 1999 estimate, the world must
find new oil production equal to more than 50% of
the 1999 daily global output, and that by about
2010. That is the equivalent of five new oil
regions equal to today's Saudi Arabian size. That
is a whopping amount of new oil.
Given
that it can take up to seven years or more to
bring a new major oilfield into full production,
that's also not much time if a horrendous energy
crunch and sky-high oil and gas prices are to be
averted. Cheney's estimate was also based on an
overly conservative estimate of future oil import
demand in China and India, today the two
fastest-growing oil consumers on the planet.
A second notable point of Cheney's 1999
London comments was his remark that, "the Middle
East with two thirds of the world's oil and the
lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately
lies". However, as he revealingly remarked, the
oil "prize" of the Middle East was in national or
government hands, not open to exploitation by the
private market, and thus, hard for Cheney's
Halliburton and his friends in ExxonMobil or
Chevron or Shell or BP to get their hands on.
At that time, Iraq, with the
second-largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia in
the Middle East, was under the rule of Saddam
Hussein. Iran, which has the world's
second-largest reserves of natural gas, in
addition to its huge oil reserves, was ruled by a
nationalist theocracy which was not open to US
private company oil tenders. The Caspian Sea oil
reserves were a subject of bitter geopolitical
battle between Washington and Russia.
Cheney's remark that "Oil remains
fundamentally a government business", and not
private, takes on a new significance when we do a
fast forward to September 2000, in the heat of the
Bush-Gore election campaign. That month Cheney,
along with Rumsfeld and many others who went on to
join the new Bush administration, issued a policy
report titled, "Rebuilding America's Defenses".
The paper was issued by an entity named Project
for the New American Century (PNAC).
Cheney's PNAC group called on the new US
president-to-be to find a suitable pretext to
declare war on Iraq, in order to occupy it and
take direct control over the second-largest oil
reserves in the Middle East. Their report stated
bluntly, "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq
provides the immediate justification [sic], the
need for a substantial American force presence in
the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of
Saddam Hussein ..."
Cheney signed on to a
policy document in September 2000 which declared
that the key issue was "American force presence in
the Gulf", and regime change in Iraq, regardless
whether Saddam was good, bad or ugly. It was the
first step in moving the US military to "where the
prize ultimately lies".
No coincidence
that Cheney immediately got the task of heading a
presidential energy task force review in early
2001, where he worked closely with his friends in
Big Oil, including the late Ken Lay of Enron, with
whom Cheney earlier had been involved in an Afghan
gas pipeline project, as well as with James Baker
III.
Buried in the debate leading to the
US bombing and occupation of Iraq in March 2003
was a lawsuit under the US Freedom of Information
Act brought by Sierra Club and Judicial Watch.,
initially to find data on Cheney's role in the
California energy crisis. The suit demanded that
Cheney make public all documents and records of
meetings related to his 2001 energy task force
project.
The US Commerce Department in the
summer of 2003 ultimately released part of the
documents, over ferocious Cheney and White House
opposition. Amid the files of the domestic US
energy review was, curiously enough, a detailed
map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and
terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi
oil and gas projects, and "Foreign Suitors for
Iraqi Oilfield Contracts". The "foreign suitors"
included Russia, China and France, three UN
Security Council members who openly opposed
granting the US UN approval for invading Iraq.
The first act of post-war occupation by
Washington was to declare null and void any
contracts between the Iraqi government and Russia,
China and France. Iraqi oil was to be an American
affair, handled by American companies or their
close cronies in Britain, the first victory in the
high-stakes quest, "where the prize ultimately
lies".
This was precisely what Cheney had
alluded to in his 1999 London speech. Get the
Middle East oil resources out of independent
national hands and into US-controlled hands. The
military occupation of Iraq was the first major
step in this US strategy. Control of Russian
energy reserves, however, was Washington's
ultimate "prize".
Deconstruction of
Russia: The 'ultimate prize' For obvious
military and political reasons, Washington could
not admit openly that its strategic focus, since
the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, had been the
dismemberment or deconstruction of Russia, and
gaining effective control of its huge oil and gas
resources, the "ultimate prize". The Russian Bear
still had formidable military means, however
dilapidated, and she still had nuclear teeth.
In the mid-1990s, Washington began a
deliberate process of bringing one after the other
former satellite Soviet states into not just the
European Union, but into the Washington-dominated
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). By 2004
Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and
Slovenia all had been admitted into NATO, and the
Republic of Georgia was being groomed to join.
This surprising spread of NATO, to the
alarm of some in Western Europe, as well as to
Russia, had been part of the strategy advocated by
Cheney's friends at the PNAC, in their "Rebuilding
America's Defenses" report and even before.
Already in 1996, PNAC member and Cheney
crony, Bruce Jackson, then a top executive with US
defense giant Lockheed Martin, was head of the US
Committee to Expand NATO, later renamed the US
Committee on NATO, a very powerful Washington
lobby group.
The US Committee to Expand
NATO also included PNAC members Paul Wolfowitz,
Richard Perle, Stephen Hadley and Robert Kagan.
Kagan's wife is Victoria Nuland, now the US
ambassador to NATO. From 2000-2003 she was a
foreign-policy advisor to Cheney. Hadley, a
hardline hawk close to Cheney, was named by Bush
to replace Condoleezza Rice as his national
security adviser.
The warhawk Cheney
network moved from the PNAC into key posts within
the Bush administration to run NATO and Pentagon
policy. Bruce Jackson and others, after
successfully lobbying Congress to expand NATO to
Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in 1999,
moved to organize the so-called Vilnius Group that
lobbied to bring 10 more former Warsaw Pact
countries on Russia's periphery into NATO. Jackson
called this the "Big Bang". Bush repeatedly
used the term "New Europe" in statements about
NATO enlargement. In a July 5, 2002, speech
hailing the leaders of the Vilnius group, Bush
declared, "Our nations share a common vision of a
new Europe, where free European states are united
with each other, and with the United States
through cooperation, partnership, and alliance."
Lockheed Martin's former executive, Bruce
Jackson, took credit for bringing the Baltic and
other members of the Vilnius Group into NATO.
Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee on April 1, 2003, Jackson claimed he
originated the "Big Bang" concept of NATO
enlargement, later adopted by the Vilnius Group of
Baltic and Eastern European nations.
As
Jackson noted, his "Big Bang" briefing "proposed
the inclusion of these seven countries in NATO and
claimed for this enlargement strategic advantages
for NATO and moral [sic] benefits for the
democratic community of nations". On May 19, 2000,
in Vilnius, Lithuania, these propositions were
adopted by nine of Europe's new democracies as
their own. It became the objectives of the Vilnius
Group. Jackson could also have noted the benefits
to US military defense industry, including his old
cronies at Lockheed Martin, with the creation of a
vast new NATO arms market on the borders to
Russia.
Once that NATO goal was reached,
Bruce Jackson and other members of the NATO
eastern expansion lobby, closed the US Committee
on NATO in 2003, and, seamlessly, in the very same
office, re-opened as a new lobby organization, the
Project on Transitional Democracies, which
according to their own statement was "organized to
exploit the opportunities to accelerate democratic
reform and integration which we believe will exist
in the broader Euro-Atlantic region over the next
decade".
In other words, to foster the
series of "color revolutions" and regime change
across Russian Eurasia. All three principals of
the Project on Transitional Democracies worked for
the Republican Party, and Jackson has close ties
with major military contractors, notably Lockheed
Martin and Boeing.
Jackson and other PNAC
and US Committee on NATO members also created a
powerful lobby organization, the Committee for the
Liberation of Iraq (CLI). CLI's advisory panel
included hardline Democrats such as Representative
Stephen Solarz and Senator Robert Kerrey. It was
dominated by neo-conservatives and Republican
Party stalwarts like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Robert
Kagan, Richard Perle, William Kristol and former
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director James
Woolsey. Serving as honorary co-chairs were
Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain.
Jackson related that friends in the White
House had asked him to create the CLI in 2002 to
replicate the success he had had pushing for NATO
expansion through his US Committee on NATO by
establishing an outfit aimed at supporting the
administration's campaign to convince Congress and
the public to support a war. "People in the White
House said, 'We need you to do for Iraq what you
did for NATO'," Jackson told American Prospect
magazine in a January 1, 2003, interview.
In brief, NATO encirclement of Russia,
"color revolutions" across Eurasia and the war in
Iraq, were all one and the same American
geopolitical strategy, part of a grand strategy to
ultimately deconstruct Russia once and for all as
a potential rival to a sole US Superpower
hegemony. Russia - not Iraq and not Iran - was the
primary target of that strategy.
During a
White House welcoming ceremony to greet the 10 new
NATO members in 2004, Bush noted that NATO's
mission now extended far beyond the perimeter of
the alliance. "NATO members are reaching out to
the nations of the Middle East, to strengthen our
ability to fight terror, and to provide for our
common security," he said. But NATO's mission now
would extend beyond even global security. Bush
added, "We're discussing how we can support and
increase the momentum of freedom in the greater
Middle East." Freedom, that is, to come into the
orbit of a Washington-controlled NATO alliance.
The end of the Boris Yeltsin era put a
slight crimp in US plans. Putin began slowly and
cautiously to emerge as a dynamic national force,
committed to rebuilding Russia, following the
International Monetary Fund-guided (IMF) looting
of the country by a combination of Western banks
and corrupt Russian oligarchs.
Russian oil
output had risen since the collapse of the Soviet
Union to the point that, by the time of the 2003
US war on Iraq, Russia was the world's
second-largest oil producer behind Saudi Arabia.
The real significance of the Yukos
affair The defining event in the new
Russian energy geopolitics under Putin took place
in 2003. It was just as Washington was making it
brutally clear it was going to militarize Iraq and
the Middle East, regardless of world protest or UN
niceties.
A brief review of the
spectacular October 2003 arrest of Russia's
billionaire "oligarch" Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and
state seizure of his giant Yukos oil group, is
essential to understand Russian energy
geopolitics.
Khodorkovsky was arrested at
Novosibirsk airport on October 25, 2003, by the
Russian Prosecutor General's office on charges of
tax evasion. The Putin government froze shares of
Yukos Oil because of tax charges. They then took
further actions against Yukos, leading to a
collapse in the share price.
What was
little mentioned in Western media accounts, which
typically portrayed the Putin government actions
as a reversion to Soviet-era methods, was what had
triggered Putin's dramatic action in the first
place.
Khodorkovsky had been arrested just
four weeks before a decisive Russian duma or lower
house election, in which Khodorkovsky had managed
to buy the votes of a majority in the duma using
his vast wealth. Control of the duma was to be the
first step by Khodorkovsky in a plan to run
against Putin the next year as president. The duma
victory would have allowed him to change election
laws in his favor, as well as to alter a
controversial law being drafted in the duma, "The
Law on Underground Resources". That law would
prevent Yukos and other private companies from
gaining control of raw materials in the ground, or
from developing private pipeline routes
independent of Russian state pipelines.
Khodorkovsky had violated the pledge of
the oligarchs made to Putin, that they be allowed
to keep their assets - de facto stolen from the
state in the rigged auctions under Yeltsin - if
they stayed out of Russian politics and
repatriated a share of their stolen money.
Khodorkovsky, the most powerful oligarch at the
time, was serving as the vehicle for what was
becoming an obvious Washington-backed putsch
against Putin.
The Khodorkovsky arrest
followed an unpublicized meeting earlier that year
on July 14, 2003, between Khodorkovsky and Cheney.
Following the Cheney meeting, Khodorkovsky began
talks with ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, Rice's
old firm, about taking a major state in Yukos,
said to have been between 25% and 40%.
That was intended to give Khodorkovsky de
facto immunity from possible Putin government
interference by tying Yukos to the big US oil
giants and, hence, to Washington. It would also
have given Washington, via the US oil giants, a de
facto veto power over future Russian oil and gas
pipelines and oil deals. Days before his October
2003 arrest on tax fraud charges, Khodorkovsky had
entertained George H W Bush, the representative of
the powerful and secretive Washington Carlyle
Group in Moscow. They were discussing the final
details of the US oil company share buy-in of
Yukos.
Yukos had also just made a bid to
acquire rival Sibneft from Boris Berezovsky,
another Yeltsin-era oligarch. YukosSibneft, with
19.5 billion barrels of oil and gas, would then
own the second-largest oil and gas reserves in the
world after ExxonMobil. YukosSibneft would be the
fourth-largest in the world in terms of
production, pumping 2.3 million barrels of crude
oil a day. The Exxon or Chevron buy-up of
YukosSibneft would have been a literal energy coup
d'etat. Cheney knew it; Bush knew it; Khodorkovsky
knew it. Above all, Putin knew it and moved
decisively to block it.
Khodokorvsky had
cultivated very impressive ties to the
Anglo-American power establishment. He created a
philanthropic foundation, the Open Russia
Foundation, modelled on the Open Society
foundation of his close friend George Soros. On
the select board of Open Russia Foundation sat
Henry Kissinger and Kissinger's friend, Jacob Lord
Rothschild, London scion of the banking family.
Arthur Hartman, a former US ambassador to Moscow,
also sat on the foundation's board.
Following Khodorkovsky's arrest, the
Washington Post reported that the imprisoned
Russian billionaire had retained the services of
Stuart Eizenstat - former deputy treasury
secretary, under secretary of state, under
secretary of commerce during the Bill Clinton
Administration - to lobby in Washington for his
freedom. Khodorkovsky was in deep with the
Anglo-American establishment.
Subsequent
Western media and official protest about Russia's
return to communist methods and raw power politics
conveniently ignored the fact that Khodorkovsky
was hardly Snow White himself. Earlier,
Khodorkovsky had unilaterally ripped up his
contract with British Petroleum. BP had been a
partner with Yukos, and had spent $300 million in
drilling the highly promising Priobskoye oil field
in Siberia.
Once the BP drilling had been
done, Khodorkovsky forced BP out, using gangster
methods that would be unlawful in most of the
developed world. By 2003, Priobskoye oil
production reached 129 million barrels, equivalent
to a value on the market of some $8 billion.
Earlier, in 1998, after the IMF had given billions
to Russia to prevent a collapse of the ruble,
Khodokorvsky's Bank Menatep diverted an
eye-popping $4.8 billion in IMF funds to his
hand-picked bank cronies, some US banks among
them. The howls of protest from Washington at the
October 2003 arrest of Khodorkovsky were
disingenuous, if not outright hypocritical. As
seen from the Kremlin, Washington had been caught
with its fat hand in the Russian cookie jar.
The Putin-Khodorkovsky showdown signaled a
decisive turn by the Putin government toward
rebuilding Russia and erecting strategic defenses
from the foreign onslaught led by Cheney and
friend Prime Minster Tony Blair in Britain. It
took place in the context of a brazen US grab for
Iraq in 2003 and of a unilateral Bush
administration announcement that the US was
abrogating its solemn treaty obligations with
Russia under their earlier Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty, in order to go ahead with development of
US missile defenses, an act which could only be
viewed in Moscow as a hostile act aimed at her
security.
By 2003, indeed, it took little
strategic military acumen to realize that the
Pentagon hawks and their allies in the military
industry and Big Oil had a vision of a United
States unfettered by international agreements and
acting unilaterally in its own best interests, as
defined, of course, by the hawks. Their
recommendations were published by one of the many
Washington hawk conservative think tanks.
In January 2001, The National Institute
for Public Policy issued "Rationale and
Requirements for US Nuclear Forces and Arms
Control", just as the Bush-Cheney administration
began. The report, demanding a unilateral US end
to nuclear force reduction, was signed by 27
senior officials from past and current
administrations. The list included the man who
today is Bush's national security adviser, Stephen
Hadley; it included the special assistant to the
secretary of defense, Stephen Cambone, and it
included Admiral James Woolsey, the former head of
the CIA and chairman of the Washington
non-governmental agency (NGO), Freedom House.
Freedom House played a central role in Ukraine's
US-sponsored "Orange Revolution" and all other
"Color revolutions" across the former Soviet
Union.
These events were soon followed by
the Washington-financed series of covert
destabilizations of a number of governments in
Russia's periphery which had been close to Moscow.
It included the November 2003 "Rose Revolution" in
Georgia which ousted Eduard Shevardnadze in favor
of a young, US-educated and pro-NATO president,
Mikheil Saakashvili. The 37-year-old Saakashvili
had conveniently agreed to back the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that would avoid
Moscow pipeline control of Azerbaijan's Caspian
oil. The US has maintained close ties with Georgia
since President Mikheil Saakashvili came to power.
American military trainers instruct Georgian
troops and Washington has poured millions of
dollars into preparing Georgia to become part of
NATO. Following its "Rose Revolution" in
Georgia, Woolsey's Freedom House, the National
Endowment for Democracy, the Soros Foundation and
other Washington-backed NGOs organized the
brazenly provocative November 2004 Ukraine "Orange
Revolution". The aim of this was to install a
pro-NATO regime there under the contested
presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, in a land
strategically able to cut the major pipeline flows
from Russian oil and gas to Western Europe.
Washington-backed "democratic opposition"
movements in neighboring Belarus also began
receiving millions of dollars of Bush
administration largesse, along with Kyrgyzstan,
Uzbekistan and more remote former Soviet states
which also happen to form a barrier between
potential energy pipelines linking China with
Russia and the former Soviet states like
Kazakhstan.
Again, energy and oil and gas
pipeline control lay at the heart of the US moves.
Little wonder, perhaps, that some people inside
the Kremlin, notably Putin, began to wonder if
Putin's new born-again Texan partner-in-prayer,
George W Bush, was in fact speaking to Putin with
a forked tongue, as the Native Americans would
say.
By the end of 2004 it was clear in
Moscow that a new Cold War, this one over
strategic energy control and unilateral nuclear
primacy, was fully underway. It was also clear
from the unmistakable pattern of Washington
actions since the dissolution of the Soviet Union
in 1991, that End Game for US policy vis-a-vis
Eurasia was not China, not Iraq and not Iran.
The geopolitical "End Game" for Washington
was the complete deconstruction of Russia, the one
state in Eurasia capable of organizing an
effective combination of alliances using its vast
oil and gas resources. That, of course, could
never be openly declared.
After 2003,
Putin and Russian foreign policy, especially
energy policy, reverted to their basic response to
the "heartland" geopolitics of Sir Halford
Mackinder, politics which had been the basis of
Soviet Cold War strategy since 1946.
Putin
began to make a series of defensive moves to
restore some tenable form of equilibrium in the
face of the increasingly obvious Washington policy
of encircling and weakening Russia. Subsequent US
strategic blunders have made the job a bit easier
for Russia. Now, with the stakes rising on both
sides - NATO and Russia - Putin's Russia has moved
beyond simple defense to a new dynamic offensive,
to secure a more viable geopolitical position,
using its energy as the lever.
Mackinder's heartland and Brzezinski's
chess game It's essential to understand
the historic background to the term geopolitics.
In 1904, an academic British geographer named
Halford Mackinder made an address before the Royal
Geographic Society in London which was to give the
British Empire and later the United States a
roadmap to change history.
In his speech,
titled, "The Geographical Pivot of History",
Mackinder sought to define the relation between a
nation's or region's geography - its topography,
relation to the sea or land, its climate - with
its politics and position in the world. He posited
two classes of powers: sea powers including
Britain and the United States as well as Japan;
and he posited the large land powers of Eurasia,
which, with development of the railroad, were able
to unite large land masses free from dependency on
the seas.
For Mackinder, an ardent empire
advocate, the implicit lesson for continued
hegemony of the British Empire following the
1914-1917 World War, was to prevent at all costs a
convergence of interests between the nations of
East Europe - Poland, Czechoslovakia,
Austria-Hungary - and the Russia-centered Eurasia
"heartland" or "pivot" land, as he termed it.
After the Versailles peace talks, Mackinder summed
up his ideas in the following famous dictum:
Who rules East Europe commands
the heartland; Who rules the heartland
commands the World-island; Who rules the
world-island commands the world.
Mackinder's heartland was the core
area of Eurasia, and the world-island was all of
Eurasia, including Europe, the Middle East and
Asia. Great Britain, never a part of continental
Europe, he saw as a separate naval or sea-power.
The Mackinder geopolitical perspective
shaped Britain's entry into the 1914 Great War, it
shaped her entry into World War II. It shaped
Winston Churchill's calculated provocations of an
increasingly paranoid Joseph Stalin, beginning
1943, to entice Russia into what became the Cold
War.
From a US perspective, the 1946-1991
Cold War era was all about who shall control
Mackinder's world-island, and, concretely, how to
prevent the Eurasian heartland, centered on
Russia, from doing just that. A look at a polar
projection map of US military alliances during the
Cold War makes the point: The Soviet Union had
been geopolitically contained and prevented from
any significant linkup with Western Europe or the
Middle East or Asia. The Cold War was about
Russian efforts to circumvent that NATO-centered
Iron Curtain.
Former US national security
adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, writing in the
post-Soviet era in 1997, drew on Mackinder's
geopolitics by name, in describing the principal
strategic aim of the US to keep Eurasia from
unifying as a coherent economic and military bloc
or counterweight to the sole superpower status of
the United States. To understand US foreign policy
since the onset of the Bush-Cheney presidency in
2001, therefore, it's useful to cite a revealing
New York Council on Foreign Relations Foreign
Affairs article by Brzezinski from
September/October 1997:
Eurasia is home to most of the
world's politically assertive and dynamic
states. All the historical pretenders to global
power originated in Eurasia. The world's most
populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China
and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the
potential political or economic challengers to
American primacy. After the United States, the
next six largest economies and military spenders
are there, as are all but one of the world's
overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the
covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75% of the
world's population, 60% of its GNP [gross
national product], and 75% of its energy
resources. Collectively, Eurasia's potential
power overshadows even America's.
Eurasia is the world's axial
supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia
would exercise decisive influence over two of
the world's three most economically productive
regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance
at the map also suggests that a country dominant
in Eurasia would almost automatically control
the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now
serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard,
it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for
Europe and another for Asia. What happens with
the distribution of power on the Eurasian
landmass will be of decisive importance to
America's global primacy ...
If we
take the words of Washington strategist Brzezinski
and understand the axioms of Mackinder as the
driving motive for Anglo, and later American
foreign policy for more than an entire century, it
begins to become clear why a reorganized Russian
state under the presidency of Putin has gone into
motion to resist the overtures and overt attempts
at deconstruction being promoted by Washington in
the name of democracy. How has Putin acted to
shore up Russian defenses? In a word: energy.
Tomorrow: Washington's nightmare
F William Engdahl is author of
the book, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil
Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press
Ltd. He has completed a soon-to-be published book
on GMO titled, Seeds of Destruction: The
Hidden Political Agenda Behind GMO. He may be
contacted through his website,
www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
(Copyright 2006 F William Engdahl. Used
by permission)
