The Curse of Geopolitics
Geopolitics has been the bane of modern history. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche told the Mexican Journalists’ Club in December of 2022, “Geopolitics was the underlying reason for the two world wars in the 20th century, and now the danger of a third world war.”
What is geopolitics? There are dry, euphemistic definitions of this term, which echo grandiloquently through the halls of English-speaking academia. But in practice, geopolitics is the applied science of how to maintain an empire and suppress any challenge to it, either from its vassal states, or from a competing power. As a field of academic study, it was developed principally by the British, who drew upon their experience with running the largest empire in recorded history. Their version includes a somewhat cultish fixation on what geopolitical theoretician Sir Halford Mackinder called the “Heartland,” which just happens to be located in the general neighborhood of Russia. Mackinder famously wrote, “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.”
In this regard, geopolitics is an extension of what was called, during the 19th century, the “Great Game,” a term used to describe the competition between the British and Russian Empires for control of central Asia. Britain, by that time, had seized India and some neighboring states, and was looking for ways to expand northward in the direction of Russia.
With the advent of the 20th century, it became necessary to formalize the doctrine and apply a cosmetic gloss of academic rationale for public consumption. However, there are two essential foundations of geopolitics which are not advertised to the public.
- The first of these is that geopolitics is what is called a “zero-sum game”; cooperation among nations on policies for their mutual benefit is strictly prohibited. Instead, ways must be found to sabotage the other fellow. This is to ensure that the imperial center is always stronger than its vassals or competitors. “Win-Win” policies, of the sort championed by Chinese President Xi Jinping, are taboo; those nations who subscribe to the geopolitical doctrine can only make themselves stronger, by making other nations weaker.
- A second important feature of geopolitics that is not discussed in polite company is the tactic of managed conflict, including the time-honored imperial practice of divide et impera, divide and rule. This has always been the automatic response by Britain to any independence movements in its colonies (including the United States; the American Civil War was in most respects a British project, with Britain cultivating the Confederacy as its proxy. And which major power aligned itself with the Union? Bonus points if you answered “Russia.”) Regarding larger powers who are potential competitors, the approach was to manipulate them into fighting each other so as to exhaust themselves, leaving the British relatively stronger. They attempted to do this with Germany and Russia in WWII; at first, the British establishment was openly enthusiastic about Hitler, a geopolitics aficionado who had his eye on expanding his Reich into the Russian “heartland” in the pursuit of Lebensraum. But things went awry when Hitler decided not only to march to the east, but to the west as well.
The British establishment feared that the wartime cooperation during WWII between Russia, China and the US might extend into peacetime after the war ended, potentially resulting in all sorts of undesirable “Win-Win” activity that would relegate the British to the sidelines. They heaved a collective sigh of relief when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an opponent of colonialism, died, prior to the conclusion of the war. Sir Winston Churchill was swiftly deployed to orchestrate the new Cold War. The American hoi polloi were informed that this new conflict was necessary to combat the insidious spread of communism, but Churchill knew better. The Cold War was about geopolitics.
What followed were four decades of nuclear brinksmanship and a long series of proxy conflicts, until the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991, which created a new potential for cooperation between the US and the no-longer-communist Russia. But the practitioners of British imperialism, both in the Commonwealth and among the neocon faithful in the US, pushed hard in the opposite direction. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published his triumphalist The End of History and the Last Man, and five years later William Kristol and Robert Kagan founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which became a sort of command center for the ascendant neoconservative movement. This was the genesis of the “Rules-Based Order”, a hoped-for global dictatorship based on the precepts of British Liberalism, where the “rules” would essentially be made up on the fly by the dominant Anglo-American axis.
This outlook was concretized in the “Wolfowitz Doctrine”, named for US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz. An unauthorized, candid version of this document was leaked to the New York Times in 1992. This excerpt became notorious:
Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.
Two of America’s most loud-mouthed advocates of geopolitics published influential books during this period. Former National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, in Diplomacy, wrote that “…Russia, regardless of who governs it, sits astride the territory which Halford Mackinder called the geopolitical heartland, and it is the heir to one of the most potent imperial traditions.” This suggests that the decades-long fixation on the purported menace of communism was nothing more than a smokescreen to conceal the traditional geopolitical lust for global dominance. Another former National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote in The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives that “Eurasia is thus the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played, and that struggle involves geo-strategy–the strategic management of geopolitical interests… But in the meantime it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America…”
Thus, for the dominant Anglophile faction in the US, the sabotage of Russia as a potential competitor remained a primary concern, despite Russia’s abandonment of communism. The initial strategy to accomplish this involved posing as Russia’s friend and benefactor, supposedly assisting that nation in making the transition to a capitalist economy. The “useful idiot” in this operation was the inebriated Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who agreed to implement a US/IMF-designed economic restructuring plan called “shock therapy.” This radical scheme for deregulating and privatizing the Russian economy resulted in a collapse of physical production and a precipitous decline in living standards, culminating in the staggering depopulation of Russia, as documented by leading Russian economist Dr. Sergei Glazyev in his book, Genocide: Russia and the New World Order.
All of this was a source of delight for the neocons, but it came to an abrupt halt in 1999 with the election of Vladimir Putin, who began to systematically repair the damage that had been done to Russia, earning him the lasting hatred of the Anglophile faction. When “Shock Therapy” failed to produce the desired result, it was back to Plan A, the so-called “Bernard Lewis Plan”: produce a zone of instability and chaos around the borders of Russia and China, with the hoped-for result of spreading it into both of those nations in order to sabotage their development. This strategy led to the neocon-sponsored Maidan Coup in Ukraine in 2014, then to the subsequent ethnic cleansing, and now to the full-blown war in that country.
During a March 14, 2023 visit to the Republic of Buryatia, Putin made these remarks during a conversation with Ulan-Ude Aviation Plant workers:
“…the Soviet Union collapsed, whether we missed it or not, but any reasons for confrontation between the former Soviet Union (and the new Russia) with the Western world ended, too, we had no ideological grounds for confrontation. It seemed things would be bright and clear from then on.
“It turned out that we were wrong. It turned out that, as I said earlier, our so-called partners’ geopolitical interests were far more important to them than any ideological contradictions with the former Soviet Union. …
“…for us this [the Ukraine war] is not a fight to achieve some geopolitical status. For us, it is about a fight for the survival of Russian statehood, because our adversary or, as I referred to them previously, our partners, have one goal–and we know this from previous decades–which is to destabilize us and pull our country apart. That’s the point. So, for us, this is not a geopolitical goal, but a matter of survival of Russian statehood and the creation of proper conditions for further development of our country and our children. This is what is at stake for us.”
This awareness underscores the significance of the Russian government’s Dec. 15, 2021 request for security guarantees from the US and NATO in the form a draft treaty, which was ignored by the collective “West.” It is important to recall that in June 2020, Putin signed a decree titled “the Basic Principles of the Russian Federation’s State Policy in the Domain of Nuclear Deterrence.” It states that the only circumstances under which Russia will use nuclear weapons are either in response to the use of nuclear weapons against it or its allies, or “in the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is put under threat.”
For the leaders of the Anglophile axis, geopolitics is a sort of religious doctrine that blinds them to the realities of the emerging new paradigm, premised on “win-win” relationships and the wholesale rejection of geopolitics. The “West” hopes to pit Russia and China against each other, as Kissinger managed to do in the past. That’s not going to work again.
The Chinese leadership has demonstrated a propensity to learn quickly. The spectacular rise of China has an ironic aspect to it, as the methods they have employed — strict regulation of finance à la Glass-Steagall, directed state credit into giant infrastructure projects and basic science — are highly reminiscent of the United States during its more enlightened periods under Lincoln and FDR. The U.S., having completely abandoned those policies, complains bitterly about China and designates the latter as first a “competitor” and then an “adversary.” The US foreign policy establishment hoped to bully China into adopting different policies that would make them vulnerable to sabotage, but China has seen through these gambits.
Consequently, panic-stricken neocons have opted for intensified sabre-rattling and provocative military deployments all over China’s neighborhood. This, too, has backfired, causing China to move beyond its diplomatic and economic relationship to Russia in the BRICS, to a growing military alliance. It remains to be seen just how reckless the Anglophile geopoliticians will become as their Untergang progresses.
