WeeklyWorker

22.09.2022

America’s ‘great game’

With Russia facing humiliation in Ukraine, Daniel Lazare provides his own assessment of US ambitions in the global ‘Heartland’

In his article last week, Mike Macnair had this to say about what the US hopes to get out of the war in Ukraine:

The strategic object is that Russian military defeat should lead to regime change in Moscow, replacing the Putin administration either directly or indirectly with a new Yeltsin: that is to say, a new pro-American ‘shock therapy’ advocate, who will then shut down Russian aerospace and arms manufacturing, and probably accept the separation of at least the north Caucasus. This would then give the US direct access though allied states to the Caspian, and thereby the possibility of immediate linkage into the central Asian republics … (original emphasis).1

The remarks were well-timed. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, which began in Samarkand just as the article came out, seemed to highlight a shrunken Russia in the wake of Ukraine’s devastating September 6 Kharkiv offensive. Chinese President Xi Jinping caused a stir by telling Vladimir Putin that he had “concerns and questions” about the war - sentiments he never voiced when the war was going well - while India’s Narendra Modi lectured him outright: “I know that today’s era is not an era of war, and I have spoken to you on the phone about this.” To which Putin could only reply: “I know your position on the conflict in Ukraine, the concerns that you constantly express. We will do everything to stop this as soon as possible.”

So the Russian regime has definitely been humbled, even if it is still in place. When Armenia approached the post-Soviet Collective Security Treaty Organisation for help in its border war with Azerbaijan last week, it came away empty-handed. Plainly, Russia, which leads the CSTO, was too busy with one war to involve itself in another. Russian efforts to tamp down a border war between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan were likewise ineffective. That is why thousands of people lined the streets of Yerevan when US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi flew in on Sunday to offer her support, why Putin billboards were torn down, and why at least one Armenian protestor held up a sign saying: “CSTO, go screw yourself.”2

The region is fracturing, as Russian power fades and Washington gains “direct access” to the Caspian region as result, just as Macnair said it would.

Beyond Armenia lies central Asia, and beyond that lies the even grander prize of Xinjiang, the far-western Chinese province that is the focus of a major Washington campaign aimed at convincing the world that the People’s Republic is engaged in genocide against the native Uyghur population. The campaign is pure propaganda: while Beijing is no angel when it comes to human rights, there is no question that it faced a major terrorist threat in Xinjiang and that a clampdown on pro-al Qa’eda elements was no less predictable than in France, the UK or the US.

But that is not the point. The real goal is not to combat terrorism (which the US endorses or opposes, as it sees fit). Rather, it is to surround China by promoting Uyghur separatism on one side and Taiwanese independence on the other, while joining with Australia and Great Britain to build up an anti-Chinese alliance in the western Pacific. Last week thus provided evidence that the strategy of encirclement described by Macnair is beginning to intensify. The 82-year-old Pelosi is nobody’s idea of a strategic genius, but her triumphant visit to Yerevan may have helped kick-start the process.

Mackinder

All of which brings to mind not only the ‘great game’, as the 19th century Anglo-Russian struggle over central Asia is known, but a previously obscure academic named Halford Mackinder who found himself at the centre of attention when he presented a paper entitled ‘The geographical pivot of history’ at the Royal Geographical Society in 1904.

The paper’s argument was simple. The “Heartland” - Mackinder’s name for the central Asian steppe - is the key to global domination because it is at the core of a “world island”, consisting of Europe, Asia and north Africa that is home to roughly two-thirds of the global population. Hence, as Mackinder later summed up. “Who rules east Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the world island; who rules the world island commands the world.”3 The audience could almost hear the Golden Horde’s thundering hooves.

Mackinder caused such a sensation among British jingoists that, at Winston Churchill’s behest, the UK cabinet named him special high commissioner for southern Russia in 1919-20.4 He may also have influenced German Nazism via an academic named Karl Haushofer who helped write Mein Kampf and who passed along Mackinder’s theories to Rudolf Hess.

But there is no evidence that Mackinder influenced Hitler himself since his ideas, needless to say, were less geopolitical than racial: ie, based on killing and subjugating Jewish and Slavic Untermenschen rather than some abstract concept of mastering the steppe. Moreover, skewering Mackinder has turned into a popular academic sport ever since. As international relations experts delight in pointing out, no great power had arisen on the steppe since Genghis Khan, because the area is too thinly populated and too far removed from the centres of global trade to support any sort of sustained industrial leap. If the United States rules the world, it is not because it follows Mackinder’s teachings, but because it does the opposite by focusing on air and sea power in the form of aircraft carriers, ICBMs, B-52s and nuclear subs.

Indeed, the US goal since Vietnam, and more recently Afghanistan, has been to avoid anything resembling a land-based showdown and use finance, diplomacy and lapdog agencies like the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and World Bank to gain control instead. Mackinder thus had it backwards: it is not the ‘heartland’ that rules the world, but global capitalism that rules the ‘heartland’!

Still, there is a reason why Mackinder will not go away: despite his exaggerations, he at least brought the region’s potential significance into sharper focus. Central Asia seemed to be a backwater, once Russian and Chinese Stalinists completed their control in 1949. But it gained prominence following the Soviet breakup in 1991, and its role has positively exploded since US-China relations took a nosedive under Donald Trump.

Hence, it is now seen as the soft underbelly of America’s top two rivals. Zbigniew Brzezinski - Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor and a mentor to Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state - was an explicit Mackinderian who was as obsessed with central Asia as his master.5 After proposing to “decentralize” Russia in 1997 by reducing it to a loose confederation “composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic and a Far Eastern Republic”, he followed up by suggesting: “Large-scale international investment in an increasingly accessible Caspian-central Asian region would not only help to consolidate the independence of its new countries, but in the long run would also benefit a post-imperial and democratic Russia.”

Brzezinski went into raptures over the economic wonders that would unfold under US auspices:

The tapping of the region’s energy and mineral resources would generate prosperity, prompting a greater sense of stability and security in the area, while perhaps also reducing the risks of Balkan-type conflicts. The benefits of accelerated regional development, funded by external investment, would also radiate to the adjoining Russian provinces, which tend to be economically underdeveloped … In time, a non-imperial Russia could thus gain acceptance as the region’s preeminent economic partner, even though no longer its imperial ruler.6

Conquer

This is a vision of combined expansion and contraction, in which Russia expands economically, even as its political power wanes. It is also bunk, since reducing Russia’s profile will do nothing to ‘reduce the risks of Balkan-type conflicts’, but, on the contrary, will do everything to accelerate them. With the Afghan branch of Islamic State firing rockets into neighbouring Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and Uzbekistan exploding in major ethnic violence in its far-western province of Karakalpakstan, the process is already underway.7 The more it advances, the greater the opportunities for the US to insert itself as mediator-in-chief in a growing number of regional disputes.

It is also a variation on the theme of ‘divide and conquer’, in which the US ‘settles’ disputes without ever fully resolving them, thereby insuring that they will continue to fester and grow and that its own role as arbitrator and overlord will grow too. This is what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s, and it is what is all but certain to happen in central Asia in the coming decades - although on a far grander scale.

Besides, who says destabilisation is a bad thing? On the contrary, it is good from a US perspective - if it helps undermine Russia and China, while deepening American leverage. As Macnair points out, the aim is to de-industrialise China and shatter the Chinese state, even though the upshot could well be a return to the warlords of the 1920s and 30s. As he put it, “This is fully predictable, because all of the US interventions for the last 50 years have had this character: what is produced is not any new sort of order, but merely forms of localised warlordism, corruption and endemic civil-war conditions ...”

Warlords are not a problem, as long as they protect US mining interests and the like. Neither are local despots. To be sure, the US state department will issue reports from time to time bemoaning the sorry state of human rights in this or that ‘…stan’, while newspapers publish articles about environmental activists and other dissidents disappearing into the maw of the political police. But otherwise it will be business as usual, as Washington sees to it that “America, not China, sets the international agenda, working alongside others to shape new global norms and agreements that advance our interests and reflect our values” - to quote a Biden administration position paper cited by Macnair.

The US must destroy rival states so as to maintain its own hegemony and, if warlordism and militant fundamentalism flourish as a consequence, then so be it. As Madeleine Albright said in 1996, when asked about the death of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children due to US economic sanctions, “I think this is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.”

  1. M Macnair, ‘Grand strategy and Ukraine’ Weekly Worker September 15: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1410/grand-strategy-and-ukraine.↩︎

  2. www.politico.eu/article/nancy-pelosi-visit-armenia-debate-alliance-russia.↩︎

  3. www.iwp.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/20131016_MackinderTheGeographicalJournal.pdf.↩︎

  4. asiatimes.com/2018/12/five-academics-who-unleashed-the-demon-of-geopolitical-power.↩︎

  5. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/theparanoidpole.↩︎

  6. Z Brzezinski The grand chessboard: American primacy and its geostrategic imperatives New York 1997, pp201-02.↩︎

  7. www.cacianalyst.org/publications/analytical-articles/item/13731-iskp-attacks-in-uzbekistan-and-tajikistan.html. See also Geopolitical Intelligence Services, ‘Uzbekistan’s bumpy ride out of Russia’s orbit’, August 24: www.gisreportsonline.com/r/uzbekistan-russia-relations.↩︎