By Sean Nevins
Sweden announced that it is sending out leaflets to 4.7 million households with instructions on what to do in case of war with Russia. “Their publication comes amid concerns over Russia’s military activities and the rise of terrorism and fake news. Similar instructions were distributed during World War Two,” the BBC reported.
The possibility of conflict between Russia and other European states is rising, in part, because the United States is transforming its strategic priorities and pulling away from the security and economic promises it made to the world following World War II. From a realist perspective, this is sensible for the US since it no longer faces off against a rival superpower like the USSR. Plus, the American electorate supports it.
Whether it was Obama minimally interfering in Syria, Trump discarding the TPP and threatening NATO, Clinton learning on the campaign trail that being hawkish was a liability, or Sanders supporting leftist non-interventionism, the establishment and its voters don’t want American resources going toward supporting world order.
What that means is that the US will slowly, but surely, end the free trade system it set up in Bretton Woods in 1945, which entrenched a strategic advantage over the Soviet Union. Most importantly, it means that the American Navy and international security apparatus will no longer be used to safeguard shipping lanes around the world, encourage free trade, and maintain peace 1.
Consequently, according to Peter Zeihan, a geopolitical strategist and security expert, the prospect of massive disorder is surfacing over much of the world, think Russia invading Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and the rest of Ukraine, Iran and Saudi Arabia going directly to war with one another, and tanker wars erupting between nations (e.g. China, Japan, South Korea, and Germany) attempting to move oil and gas out of the Middle East and Africa without the American security blanket. Catastrophic disruptions to energy supply loom as just one early consequence of this disorder.
Russia’s Twilight War
As far as Russia and Europe are concerned, the outlines of what Zeihan calls “The Twilight War,” to hint at the former’s plummeting birth rate and aging population, are taking shape now. Russia desires to conquer its neighbors to create buffer states to fend off potential invaders, who it believes will see the country’s demographic twilight as a weakness. Zeihan predicts that Russia’s current actions in Syria serve to distract Turkey away from Europe so that it can begin those invasions. Once it does so, the Scandinavians and Germany will likely rise up (and in the case of Germany rearm) to resist Russian aggression. According to Zeihan, the Russians believe they can handle the Scandinavians and Germany, but not the Scandinavians, Germany, and Turkey all together, since Turkey has a 500,000-strong land force and another 380,000 reservists. The Russian play is being used to embroil the Turks in Syria so that they don’t join in a European war against them.
They need to create problems for Turkey, which borders Russia across the Black Sea to the south. It’s also one of the reasons Russia invaded, occupied, and annexed Crimea in 2014. The formerly Ukrainian island peninsula would have been a great staging point for the Turks to fight the Russians in case of a war.
Zeihan argues, convincingly, in his book The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America that Russia intervened in the Syrian War to make problems for Turkey. In 2015 when Russia entered the war, the Islamic State in Syria was weakening. “In this Moscow sensed an opportunity, and… deployed about 1,000 servicemen to Syria,” wrote Zeihan.
According to the Kremlin, the deployment was about battling international terrorism. According to Western and Arab governments and media, the deployment was half to bolster the failing Assad government (a longtime Soviet/ Russian ally), and half to inject Russian interests into the Middle East in general. The reality was somewhat more complicated. And sinister. For the first nine months of Russian involvement, Russian forces barely took notice of IS forces, instead concentrating their airstrike campaign on the coalition of rebel groups facing off against the Assad government in the Syrian heartland. While the Syrian government was certainly able to take advantage of some of these strikes, the real goal was to transform the static conflict into a war of movement. And in a war of movement, IS could play. As a result of the airstrike campaign, IS was able to advance from the desert along several vectors into the Syrian heartland, threaten both the government and the rebels directly, and expand the reach of its particular version of economic and cultural management.
The result, as the Russians intended, was the generation of a wave of refugees.
Russia’s intention, according to Zeihan, was to force upon Turkey three different “unpalatable” options.
1) Invade Syria to manage the security situation. “This would keep the Turkish military preoccupied with issues to the south of Turkey, granting Russia a free hand in the Caucasus, Ukraine, and the Balkans.”
2) Let in the refugees. “Such a task would engage all of the Turkish government’s political bandwidth, granting Russia a free hand in the Caucasus, Ukraine, and the Balkans.”
3) Send the refugees to Europe. “This would wreck Turkey’s relationship with Europe, making any coordination between the Turks and Europeans on, well anything, nearly impossible, and granting Russia a free hand in the Caucasus, Ukraine, and the Balkans.”
It worked brilliantly.
Turkey has done all three. There are roughly 4,000 to 8,000 Turkish troops in northern Syria, over 3 million Syrian refugees in their country, and the relationship between Ankara and Europe has soured precipitously. Meanwhile, the Russian military has conducted its largest war games since the end of the Cold War along the borders of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine.
And all of this started before Trump came into office or was even considered a serious candidate. Zeihan points out that we should be thinking about American foreign policy geopolitically rather than based on personalities and attitudes. The free trade system would’ve been threatened under a Clinton or Sanders presidency as well. It would have just been sold differently.
However, it certainly doesn’t hurt Russia that the current American president is attentive to its needs.