The Greater Game

In the 1800s, tsarist Russia and the British Empire squared off against one another. One based in the breadbaskets of eastern Europe, one based in the legal fiction that was Mughal India, they made alliances and conquests across central Asia in order to keep the other off balance.

Geopolitics isn't destiny, but a similar sort of game was played in Soviet times for the same sorts of reasons. Tsarist Russia and the USSR were radically different regimes, but they held in common the same geography, and therefore the same geopolitical imperatives. Russia is easy to defend from the Pacific due to thousands of miles of virtually nothing that the enemy's supply lines would have to stretch across, from the north by the barren Arctic clogged with icebergs, shorn of useful ports, and possessing few viable ways inland to the south from the coast, any of which can serve as natural chokepoints for the Russian defender. The Caucasus isn't a good direction of invasion either; so long as Russia or its allies control land up to the northern ridge of the range, and they do, it's as iron a gate to invasion as any Alexander could ever build.

Really, the only directions a successful invasion of Russia in the modern era could come from are from eastern Europe, or central Asia. The Russian heartland has little in the way of natural barriers and is best defended with the largest buffer possible. This is always why Russian governments, regardless of regime, always strive to move their sphere of influence west towards the Carpathian Mountains and south towards the Iranian Plateau and the Pamirs. Everything Russiaward from those points is flat, indefensible land whose chief strategic value is that it can be traded to the enemy for time.

When Gorbachev's hyperutopian ass traded the Red Navy to Pepsico for history's most ill-advised slice of Pizza Hut, when he named Soviet foreign policy after an American lounge singer and let the Soviet satellite states of eastern Europe fall to capitalist revanchism, he was operating out of an assumption that the Americans would honor their gentleman's agreement with him that NATO wouldn't advance eastwards. May the Russian people never forgive him his abject stupidity.

So with that backstory out of the way, let's focus on Francis Fukuyama being wrong, history not ending, and these same geopolitical tensions revving up again. I'm going to explain them, and also explain how they're all connected, because it's useless to just see "oh this happened, oh that happened, oh this other thing over here happened" without looking at the bigger picture, the wider chess game being played between the two sides.

NATO broke that gentleman's agreement, and now everything west of Russia but Belarus is firmly in the imperialist camp.

I could offer different starting points for the most recent tensions in a lot of places, but having provided the Gorbachev backstory, I think I'll start with Belarus. CIA-sponsored color revolutions were flaring up in Belarus recently after elections disputed by liberal Western-aligned parties, and they were crushed by naked force. Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, in an inspired act of trolling, invited Syrian refugees to cross the Belarusian-Polish border to apply for asylum in Europe. Lukashenko did this to send a clear message: do not meddle in internal Belarusian affairs.

This both annoyed Europe, and demonstrated their liberal hypocrisy about refugees in one fell swoop. The European liberals, who were uncomfortable with the conservative Polish and Hungarian position of building border walls and keeping out Muslims because it reminded them of the fascism their ancestors had gleefully collaborated with, swallowed their liberal guilt and got behind the Trumpiest policies on offer because they finally had no choice. Fortress Europe is now an undisputable reality, and the EU is definitely sliding towards fascism. Conservative Poland and Hungary can be thanked for their part in exposing and ending this liberal ruse, and letting us see Europe's true self in all its hideous disfigurement.

Putin's internal strategists must have calculated that this was either the best, the last, or the last best chance to halt NATO's eastward expansion, so a big chunk of the Russian military moved to the Ukrainian border. This was approximately 100,000 troops - enough to liberate those portions of Ukrainian territory that were Russian for centuries and are still pro-Russian today, but not as many as NATO sent to invade Iraq (that was 170,000). So NATO complaining about "aggression" here is hilariously hypocritical.

The first NATO response was coordinated. Germany hasn't yet opened up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline connecting them directly to the Russian natural gas fields, and President Brandon evidently persuaded them to delay doing so, in order to have something to negotiate with. A delay is about all that Germany is prepared to offer, however. Natural gas is very expensive in Europe right now, which is a boon for American exporters of liquefied natural gas to the continent, and also a boon to the Ukrainian government that can charge passage fees for the bulk of Russian natural gas exports to the EU, as most of the pipelines run through their territory. So Germany's national interest will not permit permanent obstruction of this pipeline project, and a delay is about all they are prepared to offer to the service of NATO.

This is probably a good place to delve into the diverging interests of NATO here. American imperialism is devoted to stoking tensions with Russia, both to push NATO as far east as possible and to keep the price of fossil fuels high. One of the threats Brandon made was to remove Russia from the SWIFT financial transaction network, which would end Russia's ability to export its natural gas to Europe. This would require EU buy-in, which they are not prepared to do. Croatia flatly refused to contribute troops. Germany's warmongering has been confined to shipping 5,000 helmets and a field hospital to Ukraine, while blocking NATO arms transshipments through Germany and a joint EU training mission in Ukraine. In the latter, they are not alone; Italy, Spain, Austria, and Greece also don't support this NATO warmongering. Denials of this through joint communiques are just so much papering over irreconcilable interests. The chief of the German navy resigned after stomping all over these warmongering actions, but his only real crime was likely to speak the truth of official German feeling out loud.

NATO has been splintering for a while into the Anglosphere and Europe. It began over French and German opposition to Dubya's invasion of Iraq. This opposition was not out of the kindness of their hearts, of course. The invasion came shortly after Saddam began conducting oil sales in euros instead of dollars. The petrodollar is a form of exporting inflation, and the European bourgeoisie were hoping to be able to export a little bit of inflation of their own. But they were shot down by the invasion and subsequent re-dollarization of Iraqi oil sales, which is why they protractedly played at pacifist pieties. Not long after that, Brexit sundered the homeland of the Anglosphere from the EU; soon after that, Trump sealed America's divergence too. Europe's bourgeoisie got used to having heated and fruitless meetings with native English speakers that they couldn't just throw a troika at like they had Greece.

There had been hope, mostly in Germany, that the election of Biden would signal a resumption in former transatlantic ties. Biden okayed Nord Stream 2 in principle, a huge win for the Germans and a huge loss for the eastern Europeans who are more closely allied to American imperialism. This was mostly done to keep them happy and repair the ties Trump frayed. But American warmongering against Russia has merely confirmed to the German bourgeoisie that American imperialism no longer serves their interests, regardless of which party is in power in Washington.

France had already abandoned any such hopes. The most neocolonial of the European powers, whose former colonies are barely former colonies and still used the franc long after France itself abandoned it, France has retained the most independent military power of all the former European colonial powers. It even remained aloof from NATO itself for several years, although it's currently a member. But within the EU, France has been leading the charge for Europe to establish and maintain strategic autonomy from the United States. Besides their traditional skepticism of "perfidious Albion" turbocharged by Brexit and their bare-knuckle fight with Blighty over fishing rights in the English Channel, France was blindsided by the AUKUS pact and the subsequent cancellation of a major Australian order for French submarines.

The upshot of all of this is that the French position of strategic autonomy is gaining currency in the EU. Europe's constitutional order is poorly-designed for strategic autonomy in practice, but the obvious slow-walking and Twitter concern-trolling of major EU member states over the Ukraine crisis is an example of the ad hoc organization of European strategic autonomy already taking place.

This divergence between the Anglosphere and Europe is good for several reasons. For starters, it removes the worst influences of each on the other. With eastern Europe sandwiched between Russia and a more Russophilic western Europe, its revanchist governments will have less prospect of working effectively against Russia, leaving American imperialism much less room to maneuver on the continent.

But this weakening of imperialism works both ways. Europe's "strategic autonomy" will amount in the end to European imperialism in practice. The European Union was founded by liberals and has always been in danger of backsliding into fascism the moment the social democratic benefits are cut off. That process began to happen in 2008 with the financial crisis, and through Brexit, Britain has extricated itself from that. Britain may be a mess, but it is a conservative mess, not a fascist mess; and likewise with America. The difference is not tiny, either; it is the difference between Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler.

All in all, the messy divorce of the Western imperialist countries can only be good for the world. This Ukraine crisis, born out of the natural imperialist urge for overreach, may well be remembered as the straw that broke the camel's back, the event that ended NATO for good. Perhaps NATO will continue on in some form, but its relevance is already broken by this event and newer, more relevant alliances between the main players will be established to replace it.

Having looked at Europe's response, let's analyze the moves on the chessboard. Soon after most of Europe refused to evacuate their diplomats from Ukraine, and even Ukraine itself criticized the step and the American stoking of tensions, NATO attacked from a different direction: Kazakhstan. Belarusian President Lukashenko revealed to the media that the Kazakh protests were of a piece with other CIA-backed color revolutions, and the Serbian President corroborated this. The US turned in particular to NATO ally Turkey to help foment unrest there, as Turkey is hoping to expand its influence in the broader Turkic world at the expense of Russia and China. But this attempted color revolution failed, despite armed militants opening fire on Kazakh security forces and killing hundreds and destroying hospitals and airports. The Collective Security Treaty Organization, a sort of successor to the Warsaw Pact of which Kazakhstan and Russia are founding members, deployed troops to Kazakhstan at the Kazakh government's request. Economic reforms have been announced in Kazakhstan, so the ostensible reason for the protests is now ameliorated and the Western agents can be isolated from broader society.

While NATO blew its ineffectual load in Kazakhstan, Russia decided to threaten to station troops in Venezuela and Cuba. Having withstood decades of American pressure and countless coup attempts, the two countries are well-positioned to act as a bulwark against American imperialism in the Western Hemisphere. Together with Iran and China, the Monroe Doctrine is looking more outdated than ever, and American imperialism is threatened with credible counter-actions in Latin America to its moves in eastern Europe. Moreover, Russia has deployed at least one nuclear-armed submarine to neutral waters off the US East Coast, giving Russia a quicker second-strike capability in the event of nuclear war. Should Venezuela or Cuba permit the construction of submarine bases, such deployments may become routine; should these tensions in Ukraine continue, Russia may well cut the deals necessary to make this happen.

All in all, it is a very dangerous and self-defeating game that the American imperialists are playing with Russia. Russia has played an inferior hand adroitly, and NATO is beginning to crack apart under the weight of its many contradictions. While there are many signs for hope for those who know where to look, we are not out of the woods just yet. 8,500 American troops are on standby to be deployed to Ukraine, and the bourgeois need to fight the falling rate of profit by seeking profits abroad continues to guide American foreign policy, leading to misguided imperial adventures like this.

The time has never been more ripe to contact your Congresscritter and tell them to stop stoking tensions with Russia, to organize anti-war rallies and protests, and to get the word out to the American people to peacefully and constitutionally resist the evils done in our name.