Just as the relentless grinding of the earth\u2019s tectonic plates produces earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, so the endless superpower struggle for dominance over Eurasia is fraught with tensions and armed conflict. Beneath the visible outbreak of war in Ukraine and the U.S.-Chinese naval standoff in the South China Sea, there is now an underlying shift in geopolitical power in process across the vast Eurasian landmass \u2014 the epicenter of global power on a fast-changing, overheating planet. Take a moment to step back with me to try to understand what\u2019s now happening on this increasingly embattled globe of ours.<\/p>\n
If geology explains the earth\u2019s eruptions, geopolitics is the tool we need to grasp the deeper meaning of the devastating war in Ukraine and the events that led to this crisis. As I explain in my recent book,\u00a0To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change<\/a><\/em>, geopolitics is essentially a method for the management of empire through the use of geography (air, land, and sea) to maximize military and economic advantage. Unlike conventional nations, whose peoples can be readily mobilized for self-defense, empires are, by dint of their extraterritorial reach and the perils inherent in any foreign military deployment, a surprisingly fragile form of government. To give an empire a fighting chance of survival against formidable odds requires a resilient geopolitical architecture.<\/p>\n For nearly 100 years, the geopolitical theories of an obscure Victorian geographer, Sir Halford Mackinder, have had a profound influence on a succession of leaders who sought to build or break empires in Eurasia \u2014 including Adolf Hitler, U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and, most recently, Vladimir Putin. In an academic essay published in 1904, when the Trans-Siberian Railway was completing its 5,700-mile crawl from Moscow to Vladivostok, Mackinder\u00a0argued<\/a>\u00a0that future rails would knit Eurasia into a unitary landmass that, along with Africa, he dubbed the tri-continental \u201cworld island.\u201d When that day came, Russia, in alliance with another land power like Germany \u2014 and, in our time, we might add China \u2014 could expand across Eurasia\u2019s endless central \u201cheartland,\u201d allowing, he predicted, \u201cthe use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would be in sight.\u201d<\/p>\n As the Versailles Peace Conference opened in 1919 at the end of World War I, Mackinder\u00a0turned<\/a>\u00a0that seminal essay into a memorable maxim about the relationship between East European regions like Ukraine, the Central Asian heartland, and global power. \u201cWho rules East Europe commands the Heartland,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWho rules the Heartland commands the World-Island. Who rules the World-Island commands the World.\u201d<\/p>\n At the core of recent conflicts at both ends of Eurasia is an entente between China and Russia that the world hasn\u2019t seen since the Sino-Soviet alliance at the start of the Cold War. To grasp the import of this development, let\u2019s freeze frame two key moments in world history \u2014 Communist Chinese leader Mao Zedong\u2019s Moscow meeting with the Soviet Union\u2019s Joseph Stalin in December 1949 and Vladimir Putin\u2019s summit in Beijing with Xi Jinping just last month.<\/p>\n To avoid facile comparisons, the historical context for each of those meetings must be kept in mind. When Mao came to Moscow just weeks after proclaiming the People\u2019s Republic in October 1949, China had been ravaged by a nine-year war against Japan that killed\u00a020 million<\/a>\u00a0people and a five-year civil war that left\u00a0seven million<\/a>\u00a0more dead.<\/p>\n In contrast, having defeated Hitler, seized an empire in eastern Europe, rebuilt his socialist economy, and tested an atomic bomb, making the Soviet Union a superpower, Stalin was at the peak of his strength. In contrast to China\u2019s army of ill-equipped infantry, the Soviet Union had a modern military with the\u00a0world\u2019s best tanks<\/a>,\u00a0jet fighters<\/a>, and missiles. As the globe\u2019s top communist, Stalin was \u201cthe boss\u201d and Mao came to Moscow as essentially a supplicant.<\/p>\n When Mao Met Stalin<\/strong><\/p>\n During his two-month trip to Moscow starting in December 1949, Mao sought desperately needed economic aid to rebuild his ravaged land and military support for the liberation of the island of Taiwan. In a seemingly euphoric telegram sent to his comrades in Beijing, Mao\u00a0wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cArrived in Moscow on the 16th and met with Stalin for two hours at 10 p.m. His attitude was really sincere. The questions involved included the possibility of peace, the treaty, loan, Taiwan, and the publication of my selected works.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n But Stalin surprised Mao by refusing to give up the territorial concessions in northern China that Moscow had won at the 1945 Yalta conference, saying the issue couldn\u2019t even be discussed until their subsequent meeting. For the next 17 days, Mao literally cooled his heels\u00a0waiting<\/a>\u00a0during a freezing Moscow winter inside a drafty dacha where, as he later recalled, \u201cI got so angry that I once pounded the table.\u201d<\/p>\n Finally, on January 2, 1950, Mao\u00a0cabled<\/a>\u00a0the communist leadership in Beijing:<\/p>\n \u201cOur work here has achieved an important breakthrough in the past two days. Comrade Stalin has finally agreed to\u2026 sign a new Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n With Russia giving up its territorial claims in exchange for assurances about demilitarizing the long border between the two countries, their leaders signed a Treaty of Friendship and Alliance in February 1950. It, in turn, sparked a sudden flow of Soviet aid to China whose new constitution hailed its \u201cindestructible friendship\u201d with the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n But Stalin had already planted the seeds for the Sino-Soviet split to come, embittering Mao, who later\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0Russians \u201chave never had faith in the Chinese people and Stalin was among the worst.\u201d<\/p>\n At first, the China alliance proved a major Cold War asset for Moscow. After all, it now had a useful Asian surrogate capable of dragging the U.S. into a costly conflict in Korea without the Soviets suffering any casualties at all. In October 1950, Chinese troops crossed the Yalu River into a Korean maelstrom that would drag on for three years and cost China 208,000 dead troops as well as 40% of its budget.<\/p>\n Following Stalin\u2019s death in May 1953 and the Korean armistice two months later, the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev tried to repair relations by presiding over a massive, yet distinctly inequitable program of economic aid to China. However, he also refused to help that country build an atomic bomb. It would be a \u201chuge waste<\/a>,\u201d he said, since China was safe under the Soviet nuclear umbrella. At the same time, he demanded the joint development of uranium mines Soviet scientists had discovered in southwest China.<\/p>\n Over the next four years, those initial nuclear tensions grew into an open Sino-Soviet split. In September 1959, Khrushchev visited Beijing for a disastrous seven-hour meeting with Mao. In 1962, Mao finally ended diplomatic relations entirely, blaming Moscow for failing to launch a nuclear strike on the U.S. during that year\u2019s Cuban missile crisis.<\/p>\n In October 1964, China\u2019s successful test of a 22-kiloton nuclear bomb marked its arrival as a major player on the world stage. That bomb not only made it an independent world power but transformed the Sino-Soviet split from a war of words into a massive military confrontation. By 1968, the Soviet Union had 16 divisions, 1,200 jet aircraft, and 120 medium-range missiles arrayed along the Sino-Soviet border. Meanwhile, China was planning for a Soviet attack by\u00a0building<\/a>\u00a0a nuclear-hardened \u201cunderground city\u201d that spread for 30 square miles beneath Beijing.<\/p>\n Washington\u2019s Cold War Strategy<\/strong><\/p>\n More than any other event since World War II, the short-lived Sino-Soviet alliance changed the course of world history, transforming the Cold War from a regional power struggle over Eastern Europe into a volatile global conflict. Not only was China the world\u2019s largest nation with 550 million people, or 20% of all humanity, but its new communist government was determined to reverse a half-century of imperialist exploitation and internal chaos that had crippled its international influence.<\/p>\n The rise of China and the conflict in Korea forced Washington to radically revise its strategy for fighting the Cold War. Instead of focusing on NATO and Europe to contain the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain, Washington now forged mutual defense pacts from Japan to Australia to secure the offshore Pacific littoral. For the past 70 years, that fortified island rim has been the fulcrum of Washington\u2019s global power, allowing it to defend one continent (North America) while dominating another (Eurasia).<\/p>\n To tie those two axial ends of Eurasia into a strategic perimeter, Cold War Washington ringed the Eurasian continent\u2019s southern rim with chains of steel -\u2013 including three navy fleets, hundreds of combat aircraft, and a string of mutual-defense pacts stretching from NATO in Europe to ANZUS in the South Pacific. It took a decade, but once Washington accepted that the Sino-Soviet split was the real thing, it belatedly began to cultivate an entente with Beijing that would leave the Soviet Union ever more geopolitically isolated, contributing to its ultimate implosion and the end of the Cold War in 1991.<\/p>\n That left the U.S. as the world\u2019s dominant power. Nonetheless, even without a near-peer rival on the planet, Washington refused to cash in its \u201cpeace dividend.\u201d Instead, it maintained its chains of steel ringing Eurasia \u2014 including those three naval fleets and\u00a0hundreds of military bases<\/a>, while making multiple military forays into the Middle East (some disastrous) and even recently forming a new\u00a0Quadrilateral alliance<\/a>\u00a0with Australia, India, and Japan in the Indian Ocean. For 15 years following Beijing\u2019s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001, a de facto economic alliance with China also allowed the U.S. sustained economic growth.<\/p>\n When Putin Met Xi<\/strong><\/p>\n Last month, when Vladimir Putin met Xi Jinping in Beijing at the start of the Winter Olympics, it proved a stunning reversal of the Stalin-Mao moment 70 years earlier. While Russia\u2019s post-Soviet economy remains smaller than Canada\u2019s and overly dependent on petroleum exports, China has become the planet\u2019s industrial powerhouse with the world\u2019s largest economy (as measured in purchasing power) and 10 times the population of Russia. Moscow\u2019s heavy-metal military still relies on Soviet-style tanks and its nuclear arsenal. China, on the other hand, has built the world\u2019s\u00a0largest navy<\/a>, its most secure global satellite system, and its most agile missile armada, capped by cutting-edge\u00a0hypersonic missiles<\/a>\u00a0whose 4,000 miles-per-hour speed can defeat any defense.<\/p>\n This time, therefore, it was the Russian leader who came to China\u2019s capital as the supplicant. With Russian troops massing at Ukraine\u2019s borders and U.S. economic sanctions looming, Putin desperately needed Beijing\u2019s diplomatic backing. After years of cultivating China by offering shared petroleum and natural-gas pipelines and joint military maneuvers in the Pacific, Putin was now cashing in his political chips.<\/p>\n At their February 4th meeting, Putin and Xi drew on 37 prior encounters to\u00a0proclaim<\/a>\u00a0nothing less than an ad-hoc alliance meant to shake the world. As the foundation for their new \u201cglobal governance system,\u201d they promised to \u201cenhance transport infrastructure connectivity\u2002to keep\u2002logistics on the Eurasian continent smooth and\u2026 make steady progress on major oil and gas cooperation projects.\u201d These words gained weight with the\u00a0announcement<\/a>\u00a0that Russia would spend another $118 billion on new oil and gas pipelines to China. (Four-hundred billion dollars had already been invested<\/a>\u00a0in 2014 when Russia faced European sanctions over its seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.) The result: an integrated Sino-Russian oil-and-gas infrastructure is being built from the North Sea to the South China Sea.<\/p>\n In a landmark 5,300-word\u00a0statement<\/a>, Xi and Putin proclaimed the \u201cworld is going through momentous changes,\u201d creating a \u201credistribution of power\u201d and \u201ca growing demand for\u2026 leadership\u201d (which Beijing and Moscow clearly intended to provide). After denouncing Washington\u2019s ill-concealed \u201cattempts at hegemony,\u201d the two sides agreed to \u201coppose the\u2026 interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the pretext of protecting democracy and human rights.\u201d<\/p>\n To build an alternative system for global economic growth in Eurasia, the leaders planned to merge Putin\u2019s projected \u201cEurasian Economic Union\u201d with Xi\u2019s already ongoing trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative to promote \u201cgreater interconnectedness between the Asia Pacific and Eurasian regions.\u201d Proclaiming their relations \u201csuperior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era,\u201d an oblique reference to the tense Mao-Stalin relationship, the two leaders asserted that their entente has \u201cno limits\u2026 no \u2018forbidden\u2019 areas of cooperation.\u201d \u00a0On strategic issues, the two parties were adamantly opposed to the expansion of NATO, any move toward independence for Taiwan, and \u201ccolor revolutions\u201d such as the one that had ousted Moscow\u2019s Ukrainian client in 2014.<\/p>\n Given the Ukraine invasion just three weeks later, Putin got what he so desperately needed. In exchange for feeding China\u2019s voracious appetite for energy (on a planet already in a climate crisis of the first order), Putin got a condemnation of U.S. interference in \u201chis\u201d sphere. In addition, he won Beijing\u2019s\u00a0diplomatic support<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 however hesitant China\u2019s leadership might actually be about events in Ukraine \u2014 once the invasion started. Although China has been Ukraine\u2019s main trading partner since 2019, Beijing\u00a0set aside<\/a>\u00a0those ties and its own advocacy of inviolable sovereignty to avoid calling Putin\u2019s intervention an \u201cinvasion.\u201d<\/p>\n A Planet Mackinder Would Hardly Recognize<\/strong><\/p>\n In fact, even before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia and China were pursuing a strategy of ratcheting up slow, relentless pressure at both ends of Eurasia, hoping the U.S. chains of steel ringing that vast continent would sooner or later snap. Think of it as a strategy of push-push-punch.<\/p>\n For the past 15 years, Putin has been responding to NATO in just that manner. First, through surveillance and economic leverage, Moscow has tried to keep client states in its orbit, something Putin learned from his\u00a0four years<\/a>\u00a0as a KGB agent working with East Germany\u2019s Stasi secret police in the late 1980s. Next, if a favored autocrat is challenged by pro-democracy demonstrators or a regional rival, a few thousand Russian special forces are sent in to stabilize the situation. Should a client state try to escape Moscow\u2019s orbit, however, Putin promptly moves to massive military intervention and the expropriation of buffer enclaves, as he did first in Georgia and now in Ukraine. Through this strategy, he may be well on his way to reclaiming significant parts of the old Soviet sphere of influence in East Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East.<\/p>\n Due south of Moscow in the ever-volatile Caucasus Mountains, Putin\u00a0crushed<\/a>\u00a0NATO\u2019s brief flirtation with Georgia in 2008, thanks to a massive invasion and the expropriation of the provinces of North Ossetia and Abkhazia. After decades of fighting between the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, Russia recently\u00a0sent in thousands<\/a>\u00a0of \u201cpeace-keeping\u201d forces to resolve the conflict in favor of the loyal, pro-Moscow regime in Azerbaijan. Further east, when democratic protesters challenged Moscow\u2019s local ally in Kazakhstan in January, thousands of Russian troops \u2014 under the rubric of Moscow\u2019s version of NATO \u2014\u00a0flew into<\/a>\u00a0the former capital, Almaty, where they helped crush the protests, killing dozens and wounding hundreds.<\/p>\n In the Middle East where Washington backed the ill-fated Arab spring rebels who tried to topple Syria\u2019s ruler, Bashar al-Assad, Moscow\u00a0operates<\/a>\u00a0a massive air base at Latakia in that country\u2019s northwest from which it has bombed rebel cities like Aleppo to rubble, while serving as a strategic counterweight to U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf.<\/p>\n But Moscow\u2019s main push has been in Eastern Europe. There, Putin\u00a0backed<\/a>\u00a0Belarus\u2019s strongman, Alexander Lukashenko, in crushing the democratic opposition after he had rigged the 2020 elections, and so making Minsk a virtual client state. Meanwhile, he\u2019s been pressing relentlessly against Ukraine since his loyal client there was ousted in the 2014 Maidan \u201ccolor revolution.\u201d First, he\u00a0seized<\/a>\u00a0Crimea in 2014 and then he armed separatist rebels in that country\u2019s eastern region adjacent to Russia. Last month, after\u00a0proclaiming<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cmodern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia,\u201d Putin\u00a0recognized<\/a>\u00a0the \u201cindependence\u201d of those two separatist enclaves, much as he had done years before in Georgia.<\/p>\n On February 24th, the Russian president\u00a0sent<\/a>\u00a0nearly 200,000 troops across the Ukraine\u2019s borders to seize much of the country and its capital, Kyiv, as well as replace its feisty president with a pliable puppet. As international sanctions mounted and Europe\u00a0considered<\/a>\u00a0providing Ukraine with jet fighters, Putin ominously put his nuclear forces on\u00a0high alert<\/a>\u00a0to make it clear he would brook no interference with his invasion.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, at the eastern end of Eurasia, China has pursued a somewhat similar, if more subtle push-push strategy, with the punch yet to come. Starting in 2014, Beijing began dredging a half-dozen military bases from atolls in the South China Sea, slowly ramping up their role from fishing ports to full-fledged military bases that now challenge any passing U.S. naval patrol. Then came swarming fighter squadrons over the Taiwan Strait and East China Sea, followed, last October, by a joint Chinese-Russian fleet of 10 ships that\u00a0steamed<\/a>\u00a0provocatively around Japan in what had previously been considered unchallenged U.S. waters.<\/p>\n If Xi follows Putin\u2019s playbook, then all that push\/push could indeed lead to a punch \u2014 possibly an invasion of Taiwan to reclaim lands Beijing sees as an integral part of China, much as\u00a0Putin sees<\/a>\u00a0Ukraine as a former Russian imperial province that should never have been given away.<\/p>\n Should Beijing attack Taiwan, Washington might find itself hamstrung to do anything militarily except express admiration for the island\u2019s heroic yet futile resistance. Should Washington send its aircraft carriers into the Taiwan Straits, they would be sunk within hours by China\u2019s formidable DF-21D \u201ccarrier-killer<\/a>\u201d missiles or its unstoppable\u00a0hypersonic<\/a>\u00a0ones. And once Taiwan was gone, Washington\u2019s position on the Pacific littoral could be effectively broken and a retreat to the mid-Pacific preordained.<\/p>\n All of this looks possible on paper. However, in the grim reality of actual invasions and military clashes, amid the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians, and on a planet that\u2019s\u00a0seen better days<\/a>, the very nature of geopolitics is likely to be up for grabs. Yes, it\u2019s possible that, if Washington is whipsawed between the eastern and western edges of Eurasia with periodic eruptions of armed combat from the Xi-Putin entente, its chains of steel could strain and finally snap, effectively evicting it from that strategic land mass.<\/p>\n As it happens, though, given a Sino-Russian alliance so heavily based on the trade in\u00a0fossil fuels<\/a>, even if Vladimir Putin doesn\u2019t himself\u00a0go down<\/a>\u00a0thanks to his potentially disastrous invasion of Ukraine, both Beijing and Moscow may find themselves whipsawed in the years to come by a troubled energy transition and climate change. The ghost of Sir Halford Mackinder might then point out to us not just that U.S. power will fade with the loss of Eurasia, but that so much other power may fade as well on an ever hotter, ever more endangered planet he couldn\u2019t in his lifetime have truly imagined.<\/p>\n Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just as the relentless grinding of the earth\u2019s tectonic plates produces earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, so the endless superpower struggle for dominance over Eurasia is fraught with tensions and armed conflict. Beneath the visible outbreak of war in Ukraine and … Continue reading \n
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