
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been widely described as the beginning of a new cold war, much like the old one in both its cast of characters and ideological nature. “In the contest between democracy and autocracy, between sovereignty and subjugation, make no mistake — freedom will prevail,” President Biden assertedIn a televised address to nation, he described the day that the Russian tanks invaded Ukraine. While Russia and the West may disagree on many matters of principle, this isn’t a repeat of the Cold War. It’s an all-too-geopolitical twenty-first-century struggle for advantage on a highly contested global chessboard. If you’re looking for comparisons, this moment is more like the one Europe faced in the aftermath of World War II than the one in the present.
Geopolitics — the relentless struggle for control over foreign lands, ports, cities, mines, railroads, oil fields, and other sources of material and military might — has governed the behavior of major powers for centuries. Think of Pearl Harbor, Gibraltar, the diamond mines in Africa, and the oil fields of Middle East. Aspiring world powers, from the Roman Empire on, have always proceeded from the assumption that acquiring control over as many such places as possible — by force if necessary — was the surest path to greatness.
It was considered uncouth for governing circles to openly speak of such blatantly utilitarian motives during Cold War. Instead, both sides created lofty ideological explanations for intense rivalry. But even then, geopolitical considerations often won out. The Truman Doctrine was an early example of Cold War ideological ferocity. devised to justify Washington’s efforts to resist Soviet incursions in the Middle East, then a major source of oil for Europe (and of revenue for American oil firms).
Today, ideological appeals are still deployed by top officials to justify predatory military moves, but it’s becoming ever more difficult to disguise the geopolitical intent of so much international behavior. Russia’s assault on Ukraine is the most ruthless and conspicuous recent example, but hardly the only one. For years now, Washington has sought to counter China’s rise by bolstering U.S. military strength in the western Pacific, prompting a variety of countermoves by Beijing. Other major powers, such as India and Turkey, also seek to expand their geopolitical reach. The risk of wars in such a global chessboard is likely increase, so it’s important to be aware of geopolitics today. Let’s begin with Russia and its quest for military advantage.
Fighting for Position in the European Battlespace
Yes, Russian President Vladimir Putin justified his invasion ideologically by claiming that Ukraine was an artificial country unjustly separated from Russia. He’s also denigrated the Ukrainian government as infiltrated by neo-Nazis still seeking to undo the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II. These considerations seem to have grown more pervasive in Putin’s mind as he assembled forces for an attack on Ukraine. These should not be viewed as a series of grievances overlaid by a complex set of geopolitical calculations.
From Putin’s perspective, the origins of the Ukrainian conflict date back to the immediate post-Cold War years, when NATO, taking advantage of Russia’s weakness at the time, relentlessly expanded eastward. In 1999, three former Soviet-allied states, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, all previously members of the Warsaw Pact (Moscow’s version of NATO), were incorporatedIn 2004, the alliance was expanded to include Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia, as well as three former Soviet Union republics (Estonia and Latvia) and three former Soviet Union actual republics (Lithuania, Lithuania, and Latvia). NATO’s staggering enlargement has pushed its defense frontlines further from its industrial centers along the Atlantic coast and Mediterranean coasts. Meanwhile, Russia’s front lines shrank hundreds of miles closer to its borders, putting its own heartland at greater risk and generating deep anxiety among senior officials in Moscow, who began speaking out against what they saw as encirclement by hostile forces.
“I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe,” Putin declaredMunich Security Conference 2007. “On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?”
It was, however, NATO’s 2008 decision to offer membership to Georgia and Ukraine, two former Soviet republics, that thoroughly inflamed Moscow’s security anxieties. Ukraine shares a 600-mile border to Russia, which overlooks a large portion of its industrial heartland. Russian strategists feared that if Ukraine ever joined NATO, powerful weapons such as ballistic missiles could be deployed by the West right at its border.
“The West has explored the territory of Ukraine as a future theater, future battlefield, that is aimed against Russia,” Putin declaredIn a fire-breathing speech on February 21st just before Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian frontier. “If Ukraine was to join NATO it would serve as a direct threat to the security of Russia.”
For Putin and his top security aides, the invasion was primarily intended to preclude such a future possibility, while moving Russia’s front lines farther from its own vulnerable heartland and thereby enhancing its strategic advantage in the European battlespace. As it happens, they seem to have underestimated the strength of the forces arrayed against them — both the determination of ordinary Ukrainians to repel the Russian military and the West’s unity in imposing harsh economic sanctions — and so are likely to emerge from the fighting in a worse position. However, any geopolitical maneuver of this scale carries such grave risks.
Mackinder, Mahan and U.S. Strategy
Over the past century, Washington has also been guided by geopolitical considerations. This has led to resistance, much like Russia. The United States is a major trading nation that relies on foreign markets and raw material for its trade. Therefore, it has sought to control strategic islands around the world, including Cuba, Hawaii and the Philippines. It also used force when necessary to do so. The Biden administration continues this quest to expand or preserve U.S. access in Australia, Okinawa, Singapore, etc.
Two major strands in geopolitical thinking have influenced U.S. strategists in such endeavors. One, informed and informed by the English geographer Sir Halford Mackinder(1861-1947) believed that the combined Eurasian continent held such a large portion of global wealth, resources and population that any nation capable to control that space would functionally dominate the world. The rest is history. argument that “island states” like Great Britain and, metaphorically speaking, the United States, had to maintain a significant presence on the margins of Eurasia, intervening if necessary to prevent any single Eurasian power from gaining control over all the others.
The American naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) similarly held that, in a globalizing world where access to international commerce was essential to national survival, “control of the seas” was even more critical than control of Eurasia’s margins. Mahan, who was a keen student of British naval history and served as the president of Newport’s Naval War College from 1886-1893. He believed that to make his country a major global trading power, it needed a powerful navy and several overseas bases.
Since 1900, the United States has pursued both diplomatic and geopolitical strategies, However, they are on opposite sides of Eurasia. With respect to Europe, it has largely hewed to Mackinder’s approach. Despite widespread domestic concerns, President Woodrow Wilson was convinced to intervene in World War I by the Anglo-French argument, that a German victory would create a single power capable to dominate the world, and thus threaten vital American interests. This reasoning led President Franklin Roosevelt (and his successors) to support U.S. entry in World War II Europe and to send substantial forces to the continent to stop the Soviet Union, which is today Russia, dominating the continent. This, in fact, is NATO’s essential reason for existing.
In the Asia-Pacific theater, however, the United States has largely followed Mahan’s approach, seeking control over island military bases and maintaining the region’s most powerful naval force. However, when the U.S. went to war on the Asian mainland as in Korea and Vietnam it was met with disaster and eventual withdrawal. As a result, Washington’s geopolitical strategy in our time has focusedto maintain island military bases throughout the region and ensure that this country retains its vast naval superiority.
Great-Power Competition in Twenty-First Century
In this century, Washington’s increasingly fraught post-9/11 global war on terror (GWOT), with its costly and futile invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, came to be viewed by many strategists in Washington as a painful and misguided diversion from a long-established focus on global geopolitics. It was a fear that only grew. China and RussiaThey had the opportunity to further their geopolitical ambitions while the U.S. was distracted from terrorism and insurgency. By 2018, America’s senior military leadership, reaching the end of its patience with the endless war on terror, proclaimed a new strategic doctrine of “great-power competition” — a perfect euphemism for geopolitics.
“In this new era of great power competition, our warfighting advantages over strategic competitors are being challenged,” explained2019: Mark Esper, Secretary of Defense. As the Pentagon winds down the GWOT, he noted, “we are working to re-allocate our forces and equipment to priority theaters that enable us to better compete with China and Russia.”
He explained that this would require coordinated action on two fronts: Europe against an increasingly assertive and well-armed Russia, as well as Asia against a more powerful China. There, Esper sought an accelerated buildup of air and naval forces along with ever closer military cooperation with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and — increasingly — India.
In the wake of this country’s Afghan War defeat, such an outlook has been embraced by the Biden administration which, at least until the current crisis over Ukraine, saw China, not Russia, as the greatest threat to America’s geopolitical interests. China was seen as the only nation capable of challenging American dominance of the geopolitical chessboard because of its growing wealth, improved technological capabilities, and ever improving military. “China, in particular, has rapidly become more assertive,” the White House statedIn its Interim National Security Strategic Direction of March 2021. “It is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system.”
In early February, to provide high-level guidance for a “whole-of-nation” struggle to counter China, the White House issued a new “Indo-Pacific Strategy,” just as Russia was mobilizing its forces along Ukraine’s borders. Describing the Indo-Pacific as the true epicenter of world economic activity, the strategy called for a multifaceted effort to bolster America’s strategic position and — to use a word from another age — contain China’s rise. It stated:
“Our objective is not to change [China] but to shape the strategic environment in which it operates, building a balance of influence in the world that is maximally favorable to the United States, our allies and partners.”
In implementing this blueprint, Biden’s national security team views key islands and sea passages as vital to its strategy for containing China. Its senior officials have emphasized the importance of defending what they call the “first island chain” — including Japan and the Philippines — that separates China from the open Pacific. In the middle of this chain is Taiwan, which China claims as its own. Washington views Taiwan (in typical Mahanian fashion), as vital to U.S. security.
In this context, Ely Ratner, Assistant Secretary of Defense to Indo-Pacific Affairs, is toldThe Senate Foreign Relations Committee in December
“I’d like to begin with an overview of why Taiwan’s security is so important to the United States. As you know, Taiwan is located at a critical node within the first island chain, anchoring a network of U.S. allies and partners that is critical to the region’s security and critical to the defense of vital U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific.”
From Beijing’s point of view, however, such efforts to contain its rise and prevent its assertion of authority over Taiwan are intolerable. Its leaders have repeatedly insisted that U.S. interference there could cross a “red line,” leading to war. “The Taiwan issue is the biggest tinderbox between China and the United States,” said Qin Gang, China’s ambassador to the U.S., recently. “If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road for independence, it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in the military conflict.”
Many observers are alarmed at the presence of Chinese warplanes and U.S. warships patrolling Taiwan Strait. expectedTaiwan would be the location of the first major military confrontation arising from the great power competition of this era. Some are now. suggestingOminously, failure to respond effectively against Russian aggression in Ukraine may lead to Chinese leaders initiating an invasion of Taiwan.
Other Flashpoints
However, Taiwan and Ukraine are not the only places of contention on the international chessboard. Other potential flashpoints have emerged due to their strategic location, access to vital materials, or both, as great-power rivalry has grown in momentum. They include:
- The Baltic Sea AreaIt contains the three Baltic republics (and ex-SSRs), Estonia and Latvia, as well as Lithuania, which are all members of an expanded NATO. Vladimir Putin would love to take them out of NATO and place them under Russian hegemony.
- The South China Sea This country borders China along with Brunei Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, Vietnam, and Brunei. China has laid claimTo almost the entire maritime expanse and all the islands within it, while using force to stop other claimants exercising their development rights in the area. The U.S. under Presidents Trump & Biden has vowed to help defend those claimants against Chinese “bullying.”
- The East China Sea Its uninhabited islands were claimed by Japan and China. Each of them has sentTo assert their interests, they sent ships and combat planes into the region. Antony Blinken, Secretary of State, was elected to the position late last year. assured Japan’s foreign minister that Washington recognizes its island claims there and would support its forces if China attacked them.
- The border between India & ChinaThe site of, which was the home of periodic clashesbetween the militaries from those two countries. The U.S. has expressed sympathy for India’s position, while pursuing ever closer military ties with that country.
- The Arctic Canada, Greenland and Norway claim part of the title. The United States claims the remainder. harborThere are huge reserves of oil and natural gas, as well as valuable minerals, in some areas that are claimed by at least two of these countries. It is. also seenRussia as a safe harbor for its nuclear-missile submarines, and China as a potential trade route between Asia and Europe.
There have been minor clashes and incidents in these locations over the years, and their frequency is increasing. Tensions will only increase worldwide in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Keep an eye out for these flashpoints. History has shown that global geopolitics does not always end peacefully. Under the circumstances, a new cold war — with militaries largely frozen in place — might just prove good news and that’s about as depressing as it gets.