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The New Geopolitics
By Michael Klare
02/01/06 "
Monthly
Review" -- -- The war in Iraq has
reconfigured the global geopolitical landscape in many ways,
some of which may not be apparent for years or even decades to
come. It has certainly altered the U.S. relationship with Europe
and the Middle East. But its impact goes well beyond this. More
than anything else, the war reveals that the new central pivot
of world competition is the south-central area of Eurasia.
The term “geopolitics” seems at first to come from another era,
from the late nineteenth century. By geopolitics or geopolitical
competition, I mean the contention between great powers and
aspiring great powers for control over territory, resources, and
important geographical positions, such as ports and harbors,
canals, river systems, oases, and other sources of wealth and
influence. If you look back, you will find that this kind of
contestation has been the driving force in world politics and
especially world conflict in much of the past few centuries.
Geopolitics, as a mode of analysis, was very popular from the
late nineteenth century into the early part of the twentieth
century. If you studied then what academics now call
international relations, you would have been studying
geopolitics.
Geopolitics died out as a self-conscious mode of analysis in the
Cold War period, partly due to echoes of the universally
abhorred Hitlerite ideology of lebensraum, but also because
there were a lot of parallels between classical geopolitical
thinking (which came out of a conservative wing of academia) and
Marxist and Leninist thinking, which clashed with the
ideological pretensions of Cold War scholars. So it is not a
form of analysis that you see taught, for the most part, in U.S.
universities today.
Geopolitics was also an ideology in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries—a self-conscious set of beliefs on
which elites and leaders of the great powers acted. It was the
thinking behind the imperialism of that period, the logic for
the acquisition of colonies with specific geographical
locations. The incidents leading up to the First World War came
out of this mode of thinking, such as the 1898 Fashoda incident
over the headwaters of the Nile River that gave rise to a near
conflict between Third Republic France and late Victorian
Britain.
In the case of the United States, it became the dominant mode of
thinking at the time of Teddy Roosevelt and led very
self-consciously to the decision by Roosevelt and his cabal of
associates to turn the United States into an empire. This was a
conscious project. It was not an accident. The Spanish-American
War was an intentional device by which the United States
acquired an empire. The Spanish-American War and the occupation
of the Philippines were followed quickly by the seizure of
Panama, openly justified by geopolitical ideology. To see just
how self-conscious this process was, I recommend Warren
Zimmermann’s First Great Triumph (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2002). The parallels to the current moment are striking.
Geopolitical ideology was later appropriated by Hitler and
Mussolini and by the Japanese militarists to explain and to
justify their expansionist behavior. And it was this
expansionist behavior—which threatened the geopolitical interest
of the opposing powers—that led to the Second World War, not the
internal politics of Germany, Italy, or Japan.
This ideology disappeared to some degree during the Cold War in
favor of a model of ideological competition. That is to say,
geopolitical ideology appeared inconsistent with the high-minded
justifications (in which “democracy” and “freedom” largely
figured) given for interventions in the third world.
But really, if you study the history of the Cold War, the overt
conflicts that took place were consciously framed by a
geopolitical orientation from the American point of view. The
United States had to control the Middle East and its oil. That
was the basis of the Truman Doctrine and the Eisenhower Doctrine
and the Carter Doctrine. The United States had to control parts
of Africa because of its mineral wealth in copper, cobalt, and
platinum. That’s why the United States backed the apartheid
regime in South Africa. And the reason for both the Korean War
and the Vietnam War was understood at the highest levels in
terms of the U.S. interest in control of the Pacific Rim.
Today, we are seeing a resurgence of unabashed geopolitical
ideology among the leadership cadres of the major powers, above
all in the United States. In fact, the best way to see what’s
happening today in Iraq and elsewhere is through a geopolitical
prism. American leaders have embarked on the classical
geopolitical project of assuring U.S. dominance of the most
important resource areas, understood as the sources of power and
wealth. There is an ideological consistency to what they’re
doing, and it is this geopolitical mode of thinking.
Perhaps there is some question as to exactly how conscious this
is, but you can see this way of thinking in the overt discourse
of many contemporary leaders. Dick Cheney and some prominent
neoconservatives especially, but also Democrats such as Zbigniew
Brzezinski, speak in this manner. They openly state that the
United States is engaged in a struggle to maintain its power
vis-à-vis other contending great powers and that America must
prevail.
Now, you might ask, what contending great powers? From our point
of view it is far from obvious that any exist. But if you read
what these folks write and hear what they say, you will find
that they are absolutely obsessed by the potential emergence of
rival great powers; Russia, China, a European combination of
some sort, Japan, and even India.
This is the essence of the Wolfowitz Doctrine, first articulated
in the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guidance document for
1994–1999, first leaked to the press in February 1992. This
document calls for proactive U.S. military intervention to deter
and prevent the rise of a contending peer (or equal) competitor,
and asserts that the United States must use any and all means
necessary to prevent that from happening. At the time this
statement was met with such howls of outrage from U.S. allies
that then President Bush had to squelch the document, and it was
revised to take out this language.
But this doctrine lingered in the think-tank writings of the
1990s, re-emerging as the official global military policy of the
Bush II administration. It has now been incorporated as the core
principle of the document known as the National Security
Strategy of the United States of America (September 2002),
available for download from the White House website. This
document states explicitly that the ultimate purpose of American
power is to prevent the rise of a competing great power, and
that the United States shall use any means necessary to prevent
that from happening, including preventive military force when
needed, but also through spending so much money on defense that
no other peer competitor can ever arise.
Against this background, it can hardly be questioned that the
purpose of the war in Iraq is to redraw the geopolitical map of
Eurasia so as to insure and embed American power and dominance
in this region vis-E0-vis these other potential competitors.
Now let us step back for a minute and return to the classical
geo-political thinking of the early part of the last century,
particularly the views of Sir Halford Mackinder of Great
Britain. This perspective held that Eurasia was the most
important part—the “heartland” of the civilized world, and that
whoever controlled this heartland by definition controlled the
rest of the world because of the concentration there of
population, resources, and industrial might. In classical
geopolitical thinking, world politics is essentially a struggle
over who will control the Eurasian heartland.
The strategists of the turn of the twentieth century saw two
ways through which global dominance could arise. One was through
the emergence of a continental power (or a combination of
continental powers) that dominated Eurasia and was, therefore,
the master of the world. It was precisely this fear—that a
German-controlled continental Europe and Russia, together with a
Japanese-dominated China and Southeast Asia, would merge into a
vast continental power and dominate the Eurasian heartland,
thereby reducing the United States to a marginal power—that
galvanized American leaders at the onset of the Second World
War. Franklin D. Roosevelt was deeply steeped in this mode of
analysis, and it is this ideological–strategic view that
triggered U.S. intervention in the Second World War.
The other approach to global dominance perceived by early
twentieth century geopolitical strategists was to control the
“rimlands” of Eurasia—that is, Western Europe, the Pacific Rim,
and the Middle East—and thereby contain any emerging “heartland”
power. After the Second World War, the United States determined
that it would in fact maintain a permanent military presence in
all of the rimlands of Eurasia. This is what we know of as the
“containment” strategy. And it was this outlook that led to the
formation of NATO, the Marshall Plan, SEATO, CENTO, and the U.S.
military alliances with Japan and Taiwan. For most of the time
since the Second World War, the focus was on the eastern and
western ends of Eurasia—Europe and the Far East.
What is happening now, I believe, is that U.S. elites have
concluded that the European and East Asian rimlands of Eurasia
are securely in American hands or less important, or both. The
new center of geopolitical competition, as they see it, is
South-Central Eurasia, encompassing the Persian Gulf area, which
possesses two-thirds of the world’s oil, the Caspian Sea basin,
which has a large chunk of what’s left, and the surrounding
countries of Central Asia. This is the new center of world
struggle and conflict, and the Bush administration is determined
that the United States shall dominate and control this critical
area.
Until now, the contested rimlands of Eurasia were the base of
U.S. power, while in the south-central region there was but a
very modest presence of U.S. forces. Since the end of the Cold
War, however, the primary U.S. military realignment has entailed
the drawdown of American forces in East Asia and Europe along
with the buildup of forces in the south-central region. U.S.
bases in Europe are being closed, while new military bases are
being established in the Persian Gulf area and in Central Asia.
It is important to note that this is a process that began before
9/11. September 11 quickened the process and gave it a popular
mandate, but this was entirely serendipitous from the point of
view of U.S. strategists. It was President Clinton who initiated
U.S. military ties with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, and
Azerbaijan, and who built up the U.S. capacity to intervene in
the Persian Gulf / Caspian Sea area. The U.S. victory in Iraq
was not a victory of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld; it was Clinton’s
work that made this victory possible.
The war against Iraq was intended to provide the United States
with a dominant position in the Persian Gulf region, and to
serve as a springboard for further conquests and assertion of
power in the region. It was aimed as much, if not more, at
China, Russia, and Europe as at Syria or Iran. It is part of a
larger process of asserting dominant U.S. power in south-central
Eurasia, in the very heartland of this mega-continent.
But why specifically the Persian Gulf/Caspian Sea area, and why
now? In part, this is so because this is where most of the
world’s remaining oil is located—approximately 70 percent of
known petroleum reserves. And you have to think of oil not just
as a source of fuel—although that’s very important—but as a
source of power. As U.S. strategists see it, whoever controls
Persian Gulf oil controls the world’s economy and, therefore,
has the ultimate lever over all competing powers.
In September 1990, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney told
the Senate Armed Services Committee that Saddam Hussein would
acquire a “stranglehold” over the U.S. and world economy if he
captured Saudi Arabia’s oilfields along with those of Kuwait.
This was the main reason, he testified, why the United States
must send troops to the area and repel Hussein’s forces. He used
much the same language in a speech last August to the Veterans
of Foreign Wars. I believe that in his mind it is clear that the
United States must retain a stranglehold on the world economy by
controlling this area. This is just as important, in the
administration’s view, as retaining America’s advantage in
military technology.
Ten years from now, China is expected to be totally dependent on
the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea area for the oil it will
need to sustain its economic growth. Europe, Japan, and South
Korea will be in much the same position. Control over the oil
spigot may be a somewhat cartoonish image, but it is an image
that has motivated U.S. policy since the end of the Cold War and
has gained even more prominence in the Bush-Cheney
administration.
This region is also the only area in the world where the
interests of the putative great powers collide. In the
hotly-contested Caspian Sea area, Russia is an expanding power,
China is an expanding power, and the United States is an
expanding power. There is no other place in the world like this.
They are struggling with one another consciously and actively.
The Bush administration is determined to dominate this area and
to subordinate these two potential challengers and prevent them
from forming a common front against the United States. (For more
on the emerging power struggle in the Caspian Sea basin, see my
Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict [Henry
Holt/Metropolitan, 2001].)
What then are the implications of this great realignment of U.S.
geo-political strategy made possible by the Cold War defeat of
the Soviet Union?
It is obviously much too early to draw any definitive
conclusions on this, but some things can be said. First, Iraq is
just the beginning of a U.S. drive into this area. We will see
further extensions and expressions of U.S. power in the region.
This will provoke resistance and self-conscious opposition to
the United States by insurgent groups and regimes. But the
United States will also become enmeshed in local conflicts that
arose long before America’s involvement in the region. For
example, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and that
between Abkhazia and Georgia—both of which have a long
history—will come to impact on U.S. security as the United
States becomes dependent on a newly-constructed trans-Caucasian
oil pipeline. The Chechen and Afghani wars continue and bracket
the region. In all such disputes there is a likelihood of
indirect or direct, covert or overt intervention by the United
States and the other contending powers.
We are at the beginning, I believe, of a new Cold War in
south-central Eurasia, with many possibilities for crises and
flare-ups, because nowhere else in the world are Russia and
China directly involved and supporting groups and regimes that
are opposed to the United States. Even during the height of the
Cold War, there wasn’t anything quite comparable to this.
American troops will be there for a long time, with a high risk
of violent engagement and the potential for great human
suffering. It appears, then, that the U.S. and international
peace movement will have a lot of work ahead!
All material © copyright 2003 Monthly Review
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