Alexandros Petersen: The World Island: Eurasian Politics and the Fate of the West. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011.
Writing in 2011, a few years after a worldwide financial crisis, the late Alexandros Petersen (murdered by the Taliban in 2014) clearly saw that the “geopolitical bubble” was over, too, that the “unipolarity of Western preponderance following Russia’s imperial implosion” had ended, as Russia under the command of Vladimir Putin began to recover and China sought “to challenge the institutionalized setting of Western power as it exist[ed] beyond the borders of the Euro-Atlantic community.” He also understood that this was not only a ‘power struggle’ but a regime struggle, since for both Russia and China, “the watchword is authoritarianism,” it being “increasingly conspicuous” that a “free nation-authoritarian struggle…goes to the heart of the East-West schism.” And although, unlike commercial republics, ‘authoritarian’ regimes, whether tyrannical or oligarchic, often fight wars against one another, by now “Moscow and Beijing do find themselves sharing a common short- to medium-term goal of banishing Western political and economic influence from the larger part of the Eurasian pace and undermining it in its peninsular stronghold of western Europe.” If successful, this effort would reverse commercial-republican advances worldwide, reduce access to natural resources by those regimes, and possibly end in the “demise of Western power altogether.” In the “fissiparous climate of Eurasia,” especially, China is “best placed to exploit” weakness; “eventual dominance by some form of Chinese informal hegemony is a distinct possibility.”
Why so? At the beginning of the twentieth century, Europeans ruled much of the world, thanks to ‘modernity’—their conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, made possible by the technologies invented by modern experimental science. For imperialist purposes, these technologies included coal-powered warships bearing advanced weaponry. This notwithstanding, “shipboard coercion” wielded by Europeans, North Americans, and by then Japan had a limitation described by the British geopolitician Halford Mackinder. The “World Island,” as he called it—the vast landmass including Asia, Europe, and northern Africa—could be ruled on its peripheries by sea power, but sea power could not reach into its “Heartland,” soon to be spanned by the Soviet empire. This was a serious problem for the West because, as Mackinder wrote in 1904, “If the whole World Island, or the larger part of it, were to become a single united base of seapower, then would not the insular nations”—the commercial republics of Great Britain, the United States, France, and other maritime nations—be “out-built as regards ships and out-manned as regards seamen?” Hence the two world wars and the Cold War that followed them: all struggles aimed at preventing or at least containing the regime enemies of commercial republicanism, would-be rulers of the Heartland of the World Island.
Petersen wrote in the knowledge that geopolitics often no longer commanded the attention of citizens who thought about foreign policy. From the 1990s through the first decade of the new century, many assumed that geopolitics had become largely obsolete, now that the Internet had made borders porous; more, they assumed, international trade would surely liberalize ‘authoritarian’ regimes. Few noticed that trade hardly prevents wars, as Germany had proved in its several assaults on its principal trading partner, France, in the decades between 1870 and 1940; few considered the fact that the ability to exchange ideas with some newfound friend in Tashkent requires a secure place in which to sit in front of a computer keyboard, peacefully tapping. And so, Petersen attempts to remind his fellow citizens of these realities, beginning with a reprise of Mackinder’s original analysis.
At the time of Mackinder’s writing, geopolitical strategy in the west was animated by U. S. Naval War College historian Alfred T. Mahan’s 1890 book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, followed two years later by The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793-1812. The latter, especially, drew attention to the fatal error of Napoleon I, who dismissed the sea-going Brits as a merely commercial people, incapable of seriously threatening mighty France, dominant on continental Europe. Nor did Mahan ignore Asia. Dividing the world among Northern, Southern, and what he understatedly called the “Debated and Debatable” zones between the 30th and 40th parallels, he called for “the development of the Panama Canal as a critical U.S.-controlled choke point to complement its British-controlled counterpart at Suez” while advocating Western naval control of other “critical bottlenecks,” including the entrances to the Black and Baltic seas. From America’s Theodore Roosevelt to Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, to Imperial Japan’s admirals Yamamoto Gombei and Satō Tetsutarō, statesmen found in Mahan confirmation of their own insights. Accordingly, they undertook massive shipbuilding programs in an effort to compete with British dominance of the seas.
While understanding and accepting Mahan analysis of the geopolitical importance of sea power in the modern world, beginning with Columbus, Mackinder “foresaw the demise of the relative advantage that seapower had recently enjoyed over landpower and on which Britian’s power wholly rested.” After all, a sufficiently powerful army could block enemy navies from occupying bases while using those ports to radiate naval power of its own. A few years later, Great Britain’s failed Dardanelles campaign during the First World War proved, “contrary to Mahan’s assumptions, that seapower could quite easily be prevented from penetrating critical strategic areas,” such as the Black and Baltic seas. Accordingly, “the power that would ultimately control the seas, he predicted, would be the one based on the greater resources of landpower.” For example, could not the Suez Canal readily be taken from the British by a military power controlling Arabia? And could not the Heartland be united with the help of another form of modern technology, railroads?
The Heartland of the World Island went from Eastern Europe (the Elbe River in Germany) through Siberia (to the Amur River between the Russian Far East and China) and north-south from the Arctic Circle to South Asian deserts in the east to the isthmus between the Black and Baltic seas in the west. West of Suez and on the southern coast of the Mediterranean, the Heartland’s southern border was the Sahara Desert. Mackinder considered the southern spur of the Ural Mountains “the very pivot of the pivot area,” the “heart of the Heartland.” “Inaccessible to the shipborne coercion of the islanders,” the Heartland was “the greatest natural fortress on earth,” contended over by “waves of nomadic warriors” for centuries. Those shipborne powers consisted of two “crescents”: the inner crescent consisted of western Germany, Austria, Turkey, and India; the outer crescent consisted of the British Isles, Japan, South Africa, North and South American, and Australasia. But “the three so-called new continents” of North America, South America, and Australia “are in point of area merely satellites of the old continent,” the World Island, which is double their size. Since Russia sits on “the essential territory of the Heartland,” it will maintain its geopolitical importance, absent conquest. Mackinder foresaw that the central conflict of the new century would occur between Russia and Germany. Unless the countries between them allied, they would be the victims of the coming struggles.
Petersen duly notes that Mackinder’s insights were not original. Bismarck had said, “Who rules Bohemia rules Europe.” Nonetheless, “Mackinder made the clearest statement of the problem and its underlying geographical reasons.”
Writing some four decades later, Nicholas Spykman refined Mackinder’s analysis by emphasizing what he called the “Rimland” countries—his renaming of Mackinder’s inner crescent. Judging that Russia would never rival the sea powers, he viewed India, Turkey, and the easternmost areas of western Europe as access points to the Heartland, points that not only looked ‘inward’ toward the Heartland but ‘outward’ as places with viable seaports. And so, “Who controls the Heartland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.” Petersen cites the rise of China in the twenty-first century as the most salient example of Spykman’s point. For Spykman, “history was not primarily a story of seapower contesting landpower, but rather a struggle between mixed seapower/landpower alliances to prevent domination of the Rimland.” The invention of nuclear weapons deliverable by intercontinental ballistic missiles has vastly increased the risks of military adventurism, but it has not removed “the struggle for relative power” over territory. In this struggle, Spykman’s “fear [was] that America would slide back into an isolationist repose.” Mackinder, too, understood the potential significance of China “as a possible Heartland organizer with designs to overthrow the Russian Empire,” although at the time it seemed that modernizing Japan would rule then-unmodern China. And Petersen sees that, for the time being, Russia has aligned with China against the commercial republics of the inner and outer crescents, perhaps counting on its nuclear arsenal to deter Chinese encroachment.
The post-World War Two American strategy of ‘containing’ the Soviet empire, famously enunciated by the State Department’s Russia expert, George F. Kennan, drew upon Mackinder and Spykman. Seeing that Soviet rulers deployed an ideology mixing Marxism-Leninism with Russian nationalism in order to unite their empire spiritually (as it were), Kennan understood that the liberal internationalism of Woodrow Wilson, then regnant among his colleagues at State, could not adequately respond to the geopolitical realities of the postwar any better than it had responded to the realities prevailing between the world wars. Echoing Mackinder but also the British Viscount Castlereagh at the Congress of Vienna, “Kennan acknowledge that the heart of the problem was to prevent the gathering together of the military-industrial potential of the entire Eurasian landmass under a single power.” Fortunately, geography imposed limits on “Russia’s political development,” which was likely also to be stunted in the long run by its Marxist “pseudoscience.” These handicaps made containment possible, if the West remained united, Russia, China, and Germany separated. Western unity included observance of Kennan’s “rules” for behavior, vis-à-vis the Soviets; these rules included recognition that there would never be “a community of aims” between the United States and the Soviets, coordination of public and private activities relating to the Soviet Union, and not being ‘diplomatic’ with a regime that would never reciprocate. Liberal-internationalist “hope for a Soviet Union that converged with the Western model of liberal-democratic capitalism was a chimera and transmogrification that would never happen.” The Soviets themselves understood that “there could be no permanent peaceful coexistence between the capitalist and Communist countries,” so Americans had better understand that, too. “There was, moreover, an underground operating directorate of world communism, a concealed Comintern tightly coordinated and directed by Moscow, intended to set the poor against the rich, black against white, young against old, newcomers against established residents, and so forth.” That is, the Cold War would be another world war, in its own way.
Kennan confined his strategy to what is now called ‘soft power’—the establishment of Radio Free Europe, negotiations, building political alliances. He eschewed the use of military power, opposing the formation of NATO. And he quickly abandoned even his rather dilute version of containment after Stalin died and the Sino-Soviet split occurred. This, despite the fact that he understood “that the Russian were impervious to the logic of reason but highly sensitive to that of force.” Petersen imagines that Kennan’s softer approach might have shortened the Cold War by reducing the Politburo’s sense of insecurity, but gives no real evidence that the Soviet rulers, buoyed by Marxist optimism, were really all that insecure.
Petersen has his eye on current circumstances, however, in particular the tensions between Russia and Ukraine, which were soon to heighten with the Russian conquest of Crimea in 2014. He regards Ukraine as a lost cause for the West, preferring a renewal of a strategy designed by the Polish statesman Josef Pilsudski in the interwar period. “Pilsudski argued that any great Eurasian power would crumble if its many minorities were empowered from without.” To do so, Pilsudski recommended what he called “Prometheism” and the “Intermarium.” Prometheism was a policy of fomenting rebellion against Russia by supporting nationalist sentiments in nations under Russia’s control; in the interwar years, newly-independent Poland recognized the governments of Georgia and Azerbaijan, subsidized Armenian nationalists, and established firm contact with the Ukrainian nationalist, Symon Petliura. The Intermarium—meaning “Between the Seas,” namely, the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic Seas—was an envisioned federation of small states “united in their desire to be independent from both Russia in the east and Germany in the west—the two great Eurasian powers of their day.”
The Intermarium proposal had precedent: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had been a major power in the fifteenth century. “The Commonwealth enjoyed almost two centuries gathering new territories, mostly in the Baltics, Ukraine, and Belarus, and swelling in wealth and culture,” becoming “a hive of artistic and scientific advancement,” even at the time other European nations were being wrought apart by the Thirty Years War. And it really was a commonwealth, with its monarch subordinated to a unicameral aristocratic parliament. This proved its undoing, however, when czarist Russia, unencumbered by restrictions on monarchic power, pushed back against the Commonwealth’s encroachments (it had even occupied Moscow for a couple of years) while the parliament dithered. Between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the Commonwealth “was totally dismembered” by the end of the eighteenth century.
Pilsudski’s hopes of effectually reconstituting something along the lines of the Commonwealth faltered. Born in 1867, he had begun his political career on the Left, possibly as an expression of hostility toward Russia. He organized paramilitary units that later entered World War I against the Russians. By then, he had abandoned Marxism for nationalism, but this made him no more palatable to the victorious Allies, who suspected him of continued sympathies with what had been the Central Powers, on whose side he had fought. In the event, however, he headed the forces of the Second Polish Republic in its the victorious war on Ukraine immediately after the world war, and then, allied with Ukraine against the Bolsheviks—Lenin intended to recover territories surrendered in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and continue westward, linking up with Communists in Germany—he halted the Soviet advances in 1920. Had his plan for the Intermarium been realized, “Russia could be pinned back to her natural frontier in the east and the Germans prevented from overspilling into Slavic lands from the west.”
Pilsudski seized power in Poland in May 1926 and pursued his twin strategies. These never came to fruition, lacking support from the West and from the neighboring Slavic countries, fearful of Polish hegemony in any federation. He fell back to signing peace treaties with Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1930s, rightly believing that neither parchment barrier would hold for long. He died in 1935. Mackinder, too, had “thought it vitally necessary that the tier of independent states between Russia and Germany should be properly linked with infrastructure and with secure access to the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic seas,” but he enjoyed no more success in persuading his British colleagues than Pilsudski did within the region itself.
Petersen calls attention to the expansion of the European Union and NATO into Central and Eastern Europe in the early years of the twenty-first century. This means “that Pilsudski’s Intermarium federation has been realized in outline,” and the previous entry of a united Germany into the western block of commercial republics removed any threat to the region from that quarter. (As seen throughout the twentieth century, “German orientation can make or break the continent.”) As of 2011, Petersen writes, “The EU numbers over 500 million citizens and is Russia’s most obvious and necessary market in which to sell its vast energy resources.” The difficulty, obviously, was (and is) resembles that of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Russia is united under a (neo-)czar, whereas “the incoherence and provincial character of the EU approach to its dealings with all these countries has meant that Moscow has been able to extract maximum political advantage from what ought to be recognized as the weaker of the two positions.” Weaker in terms of population and economic power, to be sure, but political and military unity matter more, and, as Charles de Gaulle once said of the much smaller but similarly organized Common Market, “Good luck to this federation without a federator!”
In this century, “Beijing and Moscow have made quietly but concerted common cause to muscle Western actors out of Eurasia, while Iran’s nuclear ambitions threaten to spark the security vacuum that could provide the two great Eurasian powers with the opportunity to finally do so.” For Russia’s Putin, “the Orange Revolution in Ukraine was the pivotal event that convinced Russia the West was attempting to deliver a geopolitical knockout in the post-Soviet space,” while “for China, U.S. insistence on criticizing its approach to human rights, currency valuation, and unbending stance over Taiwanese and Tibetan autonomy all emphasized the way the West was unwilling to accept the larger process of economic and societal development being undertaken by the Communist Part as a quid pro quo for authoritarian governance.” In response, Russia invaded Georgia and China began to build a substantial navy supplemented by naval bases—a “fundamental extraterritorial expansion for China beyond its traditional ‘Middle Kingdom’ territory.” In Central Asia, both countries have increased their economic and political presence.
For its part, Russia formed the Collective Security Treaty Organization in 2002, which today consists of five former Soviet satellites (Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan) in addition to Russia. The CSTO is “Moscow’s preferred vehicle for safeguarding its sphere of influence in Eurasia,” whereby it offers to participate in United Nations peacekeeping efforts worldwide while stipulating a monopoly on such efforts not only within the member states but in Moldova and other states nearby. This threatens “to seriously undermine the true pillars of European security: the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, the 1990 Charter of Paris, and the pivotal roles of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance.” This leaves Russia as “the last European empire in Asia, with a territorial extent that would have delighted Peter the Great.” In the long run, “Russia cuts a poor economic and demographic picture,” and Petersen inclines to discount it as a geopolitical force.
He takes China much more seriously. “For 18 of the past 20 centuries China has ranked as the world’s preeminent global economic power,” and today it has the second-largest GDP, which it “increasingly devote[s] into military” power while doing much more to enable its people to prosper than Mao ever did. It is true that Washington can “decimate China’s export economy instantly by shutting its markets with massive tariff barriers,” a vulnerability the Chinese under Xi Jinping have attempted to remedy. China is also geopolitically contained, at least potentially, by surrounding countries, principally Japan, South Korea, India, the Philippines, and Taiwan, although they have systematically built up their military with the obvious intention of seizing Taiwan. Although currently an ally, Russia might be able to resist some Chinese encroachments on its long border. Meanwhile, China has taken care to reduce its dependence on Russia as a source of energy, building a gas pipeline from methane-rich Turkmenistan through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
A year before the founding of the CSTO, Russia and China formed the Shanghai Cooperation Association with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. The organization has since admitted India, Pakistan, Iran, and Belarus, its members encompassing 65% of Eurasia and 42% of the world population. “China appears to form the linchpin and driving force of the organization.” Whatever their suspicions of the West generally and of the United States especially, and whatever misgivings they may entertain concerning China’s intentions, the Russians give priority to blocking Western influence in Eurasia. As of 2011, “practically the entire Heartland and a majority of the World Island” are under “the strong influence, if not direct control, of two powers.” In Petersen’s judgment, containment will not suffice. “If Eurasia is to be preserved from domination by authoritarian, mercantilist powers, and its resources made competitively available for the benefit of both its people and the West…then the West must be grown into Eurasia and its values and institutions transplanted there.”
What to do? Looking at what was then the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovich, Petersen writes off Ukraine as “geopolitically lost for the near future.” This turned out to be premature, as Yanukovich, who tilted Ukraine toward Russia during his four years in office, fled to Russia after his countrymen got fed up with him; when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, anticipated a quick conquest, Yanukovich was rumored to be their choice for puppet. And while things did not work out as planned, if Ukraine eventually returns to the Russian orbit, Petersen, had he lived to see it, presumably would recommend his own preferred strategy.
This consists of a combination of Kennan’s containment and Pilsudski’s Prometheist and Intermarian strategy centered in Eurasia. Although the claim that commercial republics don’t fight one another has been questioned, thanks to some minor counter-examples, commercial republicanism “is clearly the best system on offer and in the overwhelming majority of cases its triumph favors the full spectrum of Western values, from rule of law to free trade and beyond.” While this is so, as Americans have learned in Afghanistan and to some extent in Iraq, commercial republicans “must reckon with reality.” “The trends paint a picture of a future marked by Western decline relative to the Asian ascendency,” and in light of this probability, the West had better cultivate some friends there, recognizing that “the pivot of world politics remains more or less where Mackinder first identified it to be—in the Heartland.”
“The Russia-China nexus is represented less by the prospect of a genuine alliance than by some sort of agreement to partition Central and Inner Asia—whether actively or in terms of spheres of influence—and thus to effectively control the trade and strategic potential of the World Island.” Petersen proposes U.S.-European collaboration in a “forward Eurasian strategy.” This strategy will require increased “coherence” among the Western states themselves “about who they are, where they have come from, and what are their immutable shared values,” a coherence that will buttress institutional coherence in the European Union and NATO. Lack of such coherence led to stumbles in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Once such coherence has been established, or at least approached, the Western powers should address the Heartland countries in terms of three principles: independence, integration, and institutions. By independence, Petersen means an appeal to the smaller Eurasian states’ desire to retain their sovereignty against Chinese and Russian pressure. In this, the West’s weakness is also its advantage: it is too distant from most of those states to threaten them but sufficiently prosperous and militarily powerful to shore them up with investment, training, education, and foreign aid. This also means backing off from hectoring Eurasian governments “with unconstructive criticism of human rights issues and electoral procedures,” a policy that “push[es] them further into the hands of Russia and China,” which have no qualms concerning such matters. Better to offer them “concrete offers of advice about how to remedy some of those ills.” Since “foreign-directed coups and revolutions are a very real danger faced by any of the small Eurasian states that display the desire to diverge from the well-worn paths of corruption and authoritarianism,” the West should emphasize not abrupt regime change but the introduction of the rule of law and “personal security advice for the leaders” of governments that display interest in adopting or enhancing the rule of law. This can be supplemented by assistance in “reorganizing the armed forces and security apparatus hierarchy”—prime sources of ambitious men inclined toward coups d’état.
He offers some welcome, country-by-country specifics. As mentioned, he more or less writes off Ukraine on the grounds that it “will always hold more significance for Russia than for any Western actor” and “Moscow will not give up Ukraine without a fight, a real fight”—a point subsequent events have confirmed. “The West is at a strategic disadvantage” there, a disadvantage “it will have to accept and adapt to.” However, “the corresponding reality is that Ukraine is not essential for Western integration to continue in Eurasia”; it can be “bypassed” if the Western allies “focus on the far more strategically important Caucasus-Central Asia region.” “Low-yield fumbling in Ukraine…fritters away the opportunity to engage in a truly Eurasian strategy, not just a Black Sea strategy.”
Petersen also deprecates the need to engage with Belarus, which isn’t Western-leaning, Kyrgyzstan (of “little geopolitical significance”), Moldova (the same), and Tajikistan (“the smallest and poorest of the lot” and “politically volatile,” as well). This leaves Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Georgia, Mongolia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. Petersen hopes (so far in vain, as it has transpired) for the West “to remain a determining player among the many other players” there, in order “to prevent Afghanistan from reverting to being a geopolitical black hole with nothing but drugs and extremism to export to its neighbors and beyond.” He doesn’t have any specific suggestions on how that might be done, eschewing regime change efforts there. Azerbaijan, one of “the most geopolitically important of the small Eurasian states,” located as it is between Russia and Iran and constituting the only route between Europe and Central Asia, makes much more sense for Western attention. As does Kazakhstan, “the regional leader of the smaller Central Asian states” and one with “a deliberate multivectored foreign policy.” Currently, both Russia and China have more influence there than the West does, but the government is open to Western influence precisely in order to avoid subordination to the nearer great powers.
With its major undeveloped energy resources, Turkmenistan “forms a natural gateway between the Caspian Sea and the rest of Central and South Asia and China.” Moreover, “a nonradical, more commercial, better governed Turkmenistan would add to the pressure on the Iranian regime. Unfortunately, “it is increasingly becoming Beijing’s most powerful pawn in the Caspian,” given its status as the source of supply for China’s energy demands. As the most industrialized of the Central Asian countries, Uzbekistan is a potential field for Western investment.
In southeastern Europe, Turkey has substantial ambitions of its own in Eurasia, “something that is ultimately to the West’s advantage if not mishandled through historical or racial prejudice,” given the centuries of encroachment practiced by the long-defunct Ottoman Empire. It can be “better integrate[d]” into the West by offering it EU membership (France, Germany, and Austria have opposed this), with a reciprocal agreement from Turkey to open the Turkish Straits to NATO and U.S. warships, especially in view of Russian dominance of the Black Sea subsequent to the Russian fleet’s presence at Crimea. “Europe is at grave geopolitical risk should Turkey become a Middle Eastern- or Russia-Iran-orientated power.” For its part, Georgia “is, and will remain, the needle’s eye through which the West must pass to reach the Caspian and Central Asia.” With its neighbor, Azerbaijan, Georgia forms a link from Europe to the Caspian Sea and Central Asia. It is “the most anti-Russian actor in the Caucasus and, indeed, of all the small Eurasian states,” thanks to Russia’s annexation of the northern portion of the country in 2008. Finally, Armenia, isolated and “estranged from its neighbors” (still alienated from Turkey since the massacre of Armenians by the Ottomans in 1915), might be brought closer to the West if that tension could finally be resolved. “Armenia’s large, well-educated, and very successful diaspora is a wasting asset while the country retains its current Russian-Iranian geopolitical orientation.”
To the north, Mongolia “is a democratic success story in Eurasian terms and contrasts favorably with Russia and China, which it is sandwiched between.” It has substantial mineral assets and a solid manufacturing base, selling most of its products to China. Having emerged first from Chinese rule in the early 1920s, then from Soviet domination after the collapse of that empire in 1991, it concentrates its attention on staying out of East-West confrontation; prudently, it has its main Western trading partner neutral Switzerland.
Petersen is optimistic about Western prospects in this decidedly mixed bag. While upholding a policy of political independence for these states, he hopes for increased economic integration. “The EU has a highly dynamic role to play in integrating the smaller Eurasian states, both among themselves and with the West,” thanks to its status as a free trade association. Several “transport corridors” between Europe and East Asia already exist, although it must be noted that the Northern Distribution Network’s roads and railroads run through Russia and the Modern Silk Road depends for its viability on a stable Afghanistan—neither situation being a cloudless sky.
Accordingly, Petersen puts most of his chips on the third dimension of his policy, political institutions. “Unlike Russian or Chinese nationalism many Western institutions, the EU and NATO foremost among them, stand for a set of values” that actually have some universal appeal. “One does not need to be a so-called neoconservative to support the agenda of democracy promotion—it is right to advocate what is simply the best system of government available.” To do so will take time, when dealing with nations that have “no history” of republican government. That “lengthy, incremental process [is] not one that should be doted upon to the detriment of spreading trade and other aspects of good governance.” Unlike the Russian and Chinese regimes, Western alliances are not coerced alliances. Their actions “do not represent unwilling empires or…hegemons but are, in fact, clubs”—a fact seen when a country decides to depart from them, as France did from NATO in the 1960s and Britain would do from the EU in 2020. “This is the West’s great advantage in Eurasia.” Promoting practices of good governance through “institutional links” is “best achieved not through criticism of human rights or electoral procedures but rather through the gradual process of growing functional links with, and institution-building in Eurasian states.” The rule of law and investment are reciprocal drivers of such links, along with education, which can “inculcate a better understanding of Western values.”
Petersen concludes by remarking that “the overbearing influence of…geography remains undiminished and from this emerges the land’s timeless politics.” Although “it is tempting for the West to respond” to Russian and Chinese dominance of the Heartland of the World Island “with an act of retrenchment,” the “wise course is in fact quite the opposite.” The Western powers have proved “increasingly ignorant of what stands to be lost and indeed gained by their strategy in Eurasia,” and that ignorance will prove increasingly unblissful. “It is in Eurasia that the West’s level of involvement will determine its geopolitical prowess and eventual survival.” The West should pursue a policy of containment and of engagement “to secure the partnership of Russia’s former satellites before China does the same on terms much more disadvantageous for the West and those small states themselves.” I can do so by demonstrating “that it can provide an alternative to the Russo-Chinese system of authoritarian government as a way of ensuring sovereignty.” Emphasis added.
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