Russian Geopolitics from Ivan the Terrible to Vladimir Putin
According to the geographer George Friedman, nations are like chess players who act in the narrow limits of a series of rules that reduce the range of good moves. The more logic a player is, the more predictable he is because he’s able to chose the best tactics “until that one brilliant unexpected stroke” […]
Is it necessary to prove that Vladimir Putin is poorly regarded by the western press? He’s so despised that the review L’Express wrote about a report addressed to the Pentagon that asserts that « Putin’s neurological development was significantly interrupted in infancy » and that « the Russian President carries a neurological abnormality. » The authors of the report say that “ his behaviour and facial expressions reveal someone who is defensive in large social settings.”
The implicit conclusion of such a report that was acted on by the Pentagon, is that Putin can’t communicate, that he is unable to have an open and constructive dialog with the others and also that he could be dangerous, declare a war without prior judgment. The credulous reader is frightened and wonders how such a man can be the leader of Russia. He has a glance at what has happened in the past few years and suddenly understands why Putin invaded Georgia in 2008, why he annexed Crimea, why he supported the separatists in Donbas and why he’s bombing the Islamic fundamentalists in Syria right now to support the torturer Al-Assad! What’s the difference between mentioning this report and spreading propaganda?
What if Putin weren’t the man they describe? Just suppose there were some kind of logic in his foreign policy
According to the geographer George Friedman, nations are like chess players who act in the narrow limits of a series of rules that reduce the range of good moves. The more logic a player is, the more predictable he is because he’s able to chose the best tactics “until that one brilliant unexpected stroke”. George Friedman believes nations don’t act irrationally. “Nations are constrained by reality. They generate leaders who would not become leaders if they were irrational” (Friedman, p.29). He thinks leaders “understand their menu of next moves and execute them”. When they fail it’s not because they are stupid but just because the circumstances didn’t provide them the right possibilities.
Then following George Friedman’s approach to Geopolitics, let’s ask ourselves: is it possible to understand the initiatives taken by Vladimir Putin on the international chessboard?
In his book The Next 100 Years, George Friedman insists on the fact that Russia is landlocked while the United States has “easy access to the world’s oceans”. During the Cold War, the United States – which wanted to “contain and thereby strangle the Soviets” – created a “massive belt of allied nations” extending from the North Cape of Norway to Turkey to the Aleutian Islands” (Friedman, p.45). “Blocked by geography”, the USSR couldn’t win the Cold War and finally collapsed in 1991. Friedman forecasts that in the 21st century, after a second Cold War, Russia will collapse again for the same geographical reason.
But being landlocked is not the only drawback of Russian geography. To understand this, the journalist Tim Marshall invites us to take a look as this map of Europe where the European plain have been darkened.
This plain that goes from the Atlantic coasts to the Ural Mountains and from Finland to the Black Sea and the Caucasus is a huge and open corridor through which all the invasions have passed in the last 500 years: the Poles in 1605, the Swedish in 1707, the French in 1812 and finally the Germans in 1914 and 1941. Such invasions were made possible because the plain offers no resistance to invaders. There you will find “no mountains, no deserts, and few rivers” to cross. In order to face this problem, the Russian leaders decided to attack first. The only way to avoid insecurity was to move their borders to places easier to control and defend where they could reach natural obstacles to invasions. Ivan the Terrible was the first to move outward. “He extended his territory east to the Ural Mountains, south to the Caspian Sea, and north toward the Arctic Circle”. He “gained access to the Caspian, and later the Black Sea, thus taking advantage of the Caucasus Mountains as a partial barrier between itself and the Mongols”. He also “built a military base in Chechnya to deter any would-be attacker”. Then came Peter the Great and after him Catherine the Great. They “expanded the empire westward, occupying Ukraine and then reaching the Carpathian Mountains”. They took control of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to defend themselves “against attacks from the Baltic Sea”. And after WWII, Stalin occupied eastern Europe and put there allied regimes, just to create a buffer zone to close off the European plain, pushing westward until they reach a narrow area, easier to control against the enemies. We can see actually that the border between West and East Germany is easier to defend than the current Russian border. And this data doesn’t depend on the personality of a leader, whether he is an emperor, a dictator or an elected president. This point of view is largely shared by Alexander Dugin.
Alexander Dugin is a geographer but not only that. He’s also a fervent Russian moved by a love for his country. For him, Russia is more than a landlocked and vast country, more than a flag. It’s a besieged civilization that must be defended. “Russia is not the Federation of Russia, Russia is the Russian world, a civilization, one of the poles of a multipolar world” he says in an interview given to Katehon.com under the title: “War in Ukraine Will Resume Soon”.
Like Tim Marshall, Alexander Dugin leans on geography to justify, and even prolong, President Putin’s foreign policy. According to him, the war against Georgia, the Crimea annexation and the bombing campaign in Syria – where Russia has a naval base in Tartus (the western readers don’t know that Syria is, like Crimea or Transcaucasia, an outpost that allows Russia not to get imprisoned in his own borders) – were actions dictated by a geopolitical necessity that transcends the personality of its leaders. According to him, Russia should have annexed the Russian-speaking provinces of Ukraine and he believes that sooner or later it will have to do this. Not because Russians are avid of territories or imperialistic. By doing that, Russia will guarantee its own survival. “If we loose the Donbas, then we’ll lose Crimea and then all of Russia” he says. Annexing Ukraine is not an objective. Ukraine doesn’t need to become a vassal state. “I’m not against a sovereign Ukraine, if only it would be our ally or partner or, in the least, a neutral, intermediate space” he says. And he adds: “What shouldn’t be allowed is an Atlanticist occupation of Ukraine”. Here, Dugin speaks from the realm of necessity. That’s what he means when he says that it is “geopolitical axiom”. “Our enemies perfectly understand that Russia can become great again only together with Ukraine”. According to him, “There is no other way. The Russian Spring is impossible without a Eurasian pivot in Ukraine, no matter what form, peaceful or not, that it takes”. Dugin thinks that keeping independent the Donetsk and Lugansk republics between Ukraine and Russia is a categorical imperative. “He who controls the borders of the DPR and LPR with Russia controls everything” he says, imitating Mackinder’s famous slogan.
Syria is part of the same issue. Alexander Dugin thinks Syria « is a more distant goal, but not less important». He assures that the existence of ISIL is «a plan of the Americans». According to him, «The Islamic State is a special operation directed against the opponents of American hegemony in the Middle East and in particular against us [Russians]» and he adds that “Islamic fundamentalism has traditionally been an instrument of American and Atlanticist geopolitics”. I suggest that those who might consider Alexander Dugin a conspiracy theorist read the confessions of Zbigniew Brzezinski who, when he was Jimmy Carter’s Security Adviser received, on July 3rd, the presidential authorization to finance battalions of mujahedeen in order to offer the Russians their own “Vietnam War” in Afghanistan.
Dugin thinks that to confront the American threat, Russia has to show its own force and stop using the diplomatic solution.
War seems unavoidable for Russia, this vast and landlocked country that the American oligarchy wants to chase away from everywhere, from the Baltic Coasts, from the Caucasus, from the Black Sea and from the Mediterranean, expecting to chase it away from Siberia during the next step. And this war won’t be the consequence of President Putin’s personality but the result of a geopolitical turmoil deliberately organized by the western oligarchs.
Nevertheless, no doubt the idiots will keep on braying that Putin is a bloodthirsty dictator and that Russia is a dangerous and barbarian country.
Those idiots are not only the enemies of Russia. They’re also the enemies of Truth and their omnipresence in the media landscape and in the political world has made Europe a big diseased body whose members are gradually being eaten by the Atlanticist gangrene.
Author: Bruno Adrie
Sources:
George Friedman, The Next 100 Years, Allison & Busby, London, 2009
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!
Donate to Support Us
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
No city in Iraq is more symbolic of the criminal consequences of the US invasion of Iraq than Fallujah. Prior to 2003, the 300,000-strong, prosperous, predominantly Sunni Muslim community on the Euphrates River, one of humanity’s oldest continuous urban settlements, was known as the “city of mosques.” After 13 years of destruction at the hands of the US military and its client state in Baghdad, it is today a labyrinth of ruins, a city of the dead.Following weeks of air strikes by US, British and Australian bombers, a combination of Iraqi government forces and Shiite militias is reportedly on the ...
The Russian government’s sincere and diligent effort to prevent chaos in Syria and additional massive refugee flow into Europe, all the while avoiding conflict with Washington and its vassals, has been brought to an end by Washington’s intentional attack on a known Syrian army position, thus wrecking the cease fire agreement that Russia sacrificed so much to achieve.The response to this fact by the Obama regime’s ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, reveals that Washington will lie to the hilt in order to achieve its agenda of reducing Syria to the same chaos as Washington has reduced Iraq and Libya. ...
PrefaceThe “Macedonian Question” is today actual for several reasons of whom two are of the fundamental importance: 1. The Albanian secession in the FYROM; and 2. The Greek dispute with the FYROM authorities over several issues.[1] For the matter of illustration, for instance, Greece is so far blocking Macedonia’s joining NATO and the EU because of an on-going dispute between the FYROM and Greece. The main disputable issue is the title of “Macedonia” used in the country’s Constitution in the form of the official state-name as the Republic of Macedonia.[2] When the ex-Yugoslav Socialist Republic of Macedonia voted for independence ...
"If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible…”Harry S. Truman, 33rd POTUS, 1941Since the end of the Second World War, the bourgeois historiography has tried to distort various incidents in order to vilify Socialism and the USSR. One of these incidents- which has been a “banner” of imperialism’s apologists and other anticommunists- is the so-called “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact“* which was signed in 1939. In it’s unscientific, unhistorical effort to equate Communism with Nazism, the bourgeois propaganda presents ...
A map of historical spreading of the Ukrainian territorial imperialistic project. A nation which occupied and annexed parts of ethnohistorical lands of all its neighbors. A historical map of evidence:Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]A Crimea census of 1926 (done by anti-Russian USSR's authorities): ...
What constitutes water can be scientifically proven beyond any doubt, now what constitutes a nation-state is a far more organic question than it would seem. Each of us is very used to seeing maps with the same countries and lines on it throughout the years and take their existence as a given. But depending on where a map comes from its borders may actually look very different. One of these countries to some and non-countries to others is Kosovo which gradually continues to lose the support of the states that recognized it into existence. Furthermore, this sheds light on how ...
It has been 200 years since the birth of Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor who unified Germany.Otto von Bismarck emphasized the importance of good relations with Russia. "The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia", he said. Bismarck was convinced that a European security system without Russia would be impossible and war with Russia would be disastrous. Bismarck had been Prussia's ambassador to the Russian Empire. He was no Russophile, but he had an understanding of the geopolitical situation that almost no politician today possesses.Let's imagine that Bismarck left a letter to the following rulers of Germany, ...
"We are a peaceful nation," claimed Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson in an interview with Katie Couric late last year.Carson voiced a view that is held by many in our society. Like most people around the world, we naturally like to think of ourselves as a peace loving country.Unfortunately, the record does not bear this out. It, in fact, indicates something quite opposite: The United States has had a long and bloody history of aggression and war making.A survey of history shows that America has either been involved in armed conflict or conducted some form of military operations during 223 ...
Edward S. Herman died on November 11, 2017, at the age of 92. Fortunately, it was a peaceful death for a supremely peaceful man. In all he did, Ed Herman was a tireless champion of peace.Ed Herman could be considered the godfather of antiwar media critique, both because of his own contributions and because of the many writers he encouraged to pursue that work. Thanks to his logical mind and sense of justice, he sharply grasped the crucial role and diverse techniques of media propaganda in promoting war. He immediately saw through lies, including those so insidious that few dare ...
Note: This article was original published by GR in May 2003“It is easy. All you have to do is tell the people they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” - Hermann GoeringGenocide used to be a crime without a name. Although the most heinous of all crimes, the concept was not introduced into international language until after World War 2. Until then, military invasion and destruction of other peoples and cultures masqueraded under such slogans as progress and spreading civilisation.I was shocked many years ago when I heard Noam ...
The wars in the Middle East continue to rage unabated. Over the weekend a Russian war plane was struck down by an Al Qaeda affiliated group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and once again stoked fears of widening the struggle in Syria between US and Russian proxy forces. It is yet another reminder of the ongoing and seemingly endless wars being waged in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere around the globe.Our transition into this never-ending war paradigm, fashioned out of the events of the post 9/11 era, seeks only to benefit and further cement the pre-existing alliance between the US military ...
May 19, 1919 has different and even opposing meanings in Turkey and Greece, just as May 15, 1948, marks both the establishment of Israel and, for Palestinians, the start of the Nakba (“catastrophe”).In Turkey, this date marks the first step that led to the establishment of the Turkish Republic, while for descendants of Ottoman Greeks and Greece it marks the end of the centuries-long Pontic Greek presence on the shores of the Black Sea. Whereas Turks celebrate May 19, Greeks mourn it. Researcher Tamer Çilingir summarised the issue in a 2016 interview with the Turkish-Armenian daily Agos:“The Pontic Genocide is the ...
Arrest and detention of three days for Joanikije, Bishop of Budimlye and Niksic, and eight priests of the Orthodox Cathedral of St. Basil of Ostrog in Nikšić has sparked tensions in Montenegro again. Namely, after the prayer procession that had been held in Nikšić on May 12th, on the feast-day of St. Basil of Ostrog, a 72-hour detention was ordered for Bishop Jonikije, Fr. Slobodan Jokic, Fr. Danilo Zirojevic, Fr. Zeljko Rojevic, Fr. Ostoja Knezevic, Fr. Mirko Vukotic, Fr. Vasilije Brboric, Fr. Dragan Krusic and Fr. Nikola Marojevic.Protests in support of those arrested have taken place in several cities across ...
Over the past 50 years the US and European powers have engaged in countless imperial wars throughout the world. The drive for world supremacy has been clothed in the rhetoric of “world leadership”, the consequences have been devastating for the peoples targeted. The biggest, longest and most numerous wars have been carried out by the United States. Presidents from both parties direct and preside over this quest for world power. The ideology which informs imperialism varies from “anti-communism”in the past to “anti-terrorism”today.Washington’s drive for world domination has used and combined many forms of warfare, including military invasions and occupations; proxy ...
Yet another scandal is exploding on the Internet. The administration of free encyclopedia Wikipedia removed an article by a Russian researcher, devoted to assessing the loss of US citizens as a result of the Great Depression of 1932-33. Outraged bloggers began mass distribution of articles in the Russian segment of the popular blogging service Live journal. The material led to heated debates, while the so-called historical flash mob continues.Russian researcher Boris Borisov touched a really hot topic in his material on the estimated number of victims of the American Great Depression, which in turn, apparently caused a very strong reaction ...
As recounted in the unjustly neglected German television report “It Began with a Lie,” in April 1999, in the midst of NATO’s illegal bombing campaign against what had remained of Yugoslavia, then German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping repeatedly accused the Serbian side of installing a Nazi-style “concentration camp” in the soccer stadium in Pristina, the capital of Serbia’s Kosovo and Metohija province. Pressed by the media for proof, Scharping offered “witness testimony” – which he never subsequently produced.A month earlier, just as the bombing had started, Scharping stated that “we never would have taken military action if there weren’t this ...
The United States approaches the November 2020 election with growing apprehension, even dread.Among the possibilities:Protracted uncertainty about the presidential contest. Think Florida 2000 but with several states’ results unresolved for weeks or even months (“Experts held ‘war games’ on the Trump vs. Biden election. Their finding? Brace for a mess”);A disputed outcome, perhaps with Donald Trump and Joe Biden both claiming victory, compounded by a “blue shift,” where states are claimed by Trump on election night but flip over to Biden as additional absentee and mail-in ballots conveniently turn up days or weeks later;Violent civil conflict, spurred on in the ...
“A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it”. – Frederick Douglass (former slave who would later become a great American statesman and diplomat)It has always been an utmost necessity to exercise caution when reading the historical accounts of great periods that threatened to change the course of the world. As is widely recognised though not reflected upon enough, ‘history is written by the victors’, and if this be indeed the truth, than we must be aware of what lens we ...
The so called "Croatian scenario", is something that has been periodically brought up after the start of the armed conflict in Donbass. (Among other instances, yours truly noted this in articles from this past December 17 and August 24, 2015.) Promoted at Johnson's Russia List, the December 28 Euromaidan Press article "What Ukraine Can Take from the 'Croatian Scenario' of Conflict Resolution", omits some key factors for being apprehensive about the probability for success of an Operation Storm like strike against the Donbass rebels.In 1995, the Serb Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, had essentially dropped the Krajina Serbs, with the hope that he could improve his relationship with the West. At ...
The political settlement in the former Yugoslavia is unraveling. In Bosnia, the weakest state in the region, both Serbs and Croats are mounting a concerted challenge to the Dayton peace accords, the delicate set of compromises that hold the country together. In Macedonia, political figures from the large Albanian minority are calling for the federalization of the state along ethnic lines. In Kosovo, the Serb minority is insisting on the creation of a network of self-governing enclaves with effective independence from the central government. In Serbia’s Presevo Valley, Albanians are agitating for greater autonomy. In Montenegro, Albanians have demanded a ...
According to the geographer George Friedman, nations are like chess players who act in the narrow limits of a series of rules that reduce the range of good moves. The more logic a player is, the more predictable he is because he’s able to chose the best tactics “until that one brilliant unexpected stroke”. George Friedman believes nations don’t act irrationally. “Nations are constrained by reality. They generate leaders who would not become leaders if they were irrational” (Friedman, p.29). He thinks leaders “understand their menu of next moves and execute them”. When they fail it’s not because they are stupid but just because the circumstances didn’t provide them the right possibilities.
Syria is part of the same issue. Alexander Dugin thinks Syria « is a more distant goal, but not less important». He assures that the existence of ISIL is «a plan of the Americans». According to him, «The Islamic State is a special operation directed against the opponents of American hegemony in the Middle East and in particular against us [Russians]» and he adds that “Islamic fundamentalism has traditionally been an instrument of American and Atlanticist geopolitics”. I suggest that those who might consider Alexander Dugin a conspiracy theorist read the confessions of Zbigniew Brzezinski who, when he was Jimmy Carter’s Security Adviser received, on July 3rd, the presidential authorization to finance battalions of mujahedeen in order to offer the Russians their own “Vietnam War” in Afghanistan.
