The Revenge of Geography

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, argues that in the twenty-first century, “the power of attraction trumps that of coercion,” and, therefore, “Soft power should be central to Russia’s foreign policy.” In other words, a truly reformed Russia would be in a better position to project influence throughout its Eurasian peripheries. For the Russian language is the lingua franca from the Baltics to Central Asia, and Russian culture, “from Pushkin to pop music,” is still in demand. A Russian-language television station could, in the event of an intellectually revitalized Russia, “become a sort of al Jazeera for Russophones.” In this way of thinking, liberal democracy is the only ideal that could allow Russia to once again achieve what in its eyes is its geographic destiny.37 Such an idea dovetails with Solzhenitsyn’s remark in 1991 that “the time has come for an uncompromising choice between an empire of which we ourselves are the primary victims, and the spiritual and physical salvation of our own people.”38

  In fact, there is a geographic side to Trenin’s analysis. He argues that Russia should put more emphasis on its extremities—Europe and the Pacific—than on its Eurasian heartland. A stress on cooperation with Europe would move Russia attitudinally westward. The population map of Russia shows that despite a territory that occupies eleven time zones, the overwhelming majority of Russians live in the extreme west adjacent to Europe. Thus, true political and economic reform merged with demographics could make Russia an authentic European country. As far as the Pacific is concerned, “Russia would do well to think of Vladivostok as its twenty-first-century capital,” Trenin writes. Vladivostok is a cosmopolitan seaport, in close proximity to Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, and Tokyo, the world’s most economically dynamic region.39 Indeed, because the old Soviet Union regarded its Far East as an area to exploit for raw materials rather than as a gateway to the Pacific Rim, the economic rise of East Asia that began in the 1970s and has continued through the present completely bypassed Russia.40 Trenin says that it is past time to rectify that—for Russia is suffering as a result. China, which, rather than Russia, followed the lead of its fellow Pacific Rim countries Japan and South Korea in adopting market capitalism, is now emerging as the great power in Eurasia. Beijing has given $10 billion in loans to Central Asia, helped Belarus with a currency swap, gave a billion dollars in aid to Moldova at the other end of the continent, and is developing an area of influence in the Russian Far East. For Russia, a corresponding strategy would be to politically attach itself to Europe and economically attach itself to East Asia. Thus would Russia solve its problems in the Caucasus and Central Asia—by becoming truly attractive to those former Soviet republics, whose peoples are themselves desirous of the freedoms and living standards that obtain at the western and eastern edges of Eurasia.

  Russia actually had a chance for a similar destiny a century ago. Had power in Russia at a particularly fragile moment in 1917 not been wrested by the Bolsheviks, it is entirely possible, likely even, that Russia would have evolved in the course of the twentieth century into a poorer and slightly more corrupt and unstable version of France and Germany, anchored nevertheless to Europe, rather than becoming the Stalinist monster that it did. After all, the ancien régime, with its heavily German czardom, its French-speaking nobles, and bourgeois parliament in the European capital of St. Petersburg, was oriented westward, even if the peasantry was not so.41 Again, while the relief map of Russia spreads across Asia, Russia’s population map favors Europe.

  The Bolshevik Revolution was a total rejection of this quasi-Western orientation. Likewise, the low-dose authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin since 2000, both as president and later as prime minister, is a rejection of the cold turkey experiment with Western democracy and market capitalism that brought a chaotic Russia to its knees in the 1990s, following the collapse of communism. Putin and Russian president Dimitri Medvedev in recent years have not been quite orienting Russia toward Europe and the Pacific, and consequently have not been reforming Russia in order to make it more of an attractive power to its former subject peoples. (Indeed, in trade, foreign investment, technology, infrastructure, and educational attainment, the “clouds have darkened” for Russia under Putin.42) Though Putin is not strictly speaking an imperialist, Russia’s latest empire-in-the-making is being built on the wealth of Russia’s immense natural resources which are desperately needed at the European periphery and in China, with the profits and coercion that go along with that. Putin and Medvedev have had no uplifting ideas to offer, no ideology of any kind, in fact: what they do have in their favor is only geography. And that is not enough.

  Russia boasts the world’s largest natural gas reserves, the second largest coal reserves, and the eighth largest oil reserves, much of which lie in western Siberia between the Urals and the Central Siberian plateau. This is in addition to vast reserves of hydropower in the mountains, rivers, and lakes of eastern Siberia at a time in history when water shortages are critical for many nations, especially China. Putin has used energy revenues for a quadrupling of the military budget, the air force in particular, during his first seven years in office. And the military budget has gone up ever since. Because of geography—Russia, as I’ve said, has no clear-cut topographical borders save for the Arctic and Pacific oceans—Russians appear to accept “the deep-seated militarization” of their society and the “endless search for security through the creation of a land-based empire,” which Putin through his energy caliphate has given them.43 Rather than liberalize Russia and unleash its soft power potential throughout the former Soviet Union and the adjacent Eurasian rimland, Putin has opted for neo-czarist expansionism, which his country’s abundant natural resources make possible for the short term.

  Yet even Putin has not altogether given up on the European dimension of Russian geography. To the contrary, his concentration on Ukraine as part of a larger effort to re-create a sphere of influence in the near-abroad is proof of his desire to anchor Russia in Europe, albeit on nondemocratic terms. Ukraine is the pivot state that in and of itself transforms Russia. Abutting the Black Sea in the south and former Eastern European satellites to the west, Ukraine’s very independence keeps Russia to a large extent out of Europe. With Greek and Roman Catholics in the western part of Ukraine and Eastern Orthodox in the east, western Ukraine is a breeding ground for Ukrainian nationalism while the east favors closer relations with Russia. In other words, Ukraine’s own religious geography illustrates the country’s role as a borderland between Central and Eastern Europe. Zbigniew Brzezinski writes that without Ukraine, Russia can still be an empire, but a “predominantly Asian” one, drawn further into conflicts with Caucasian and Central Asian states. But with Ukraine back under Russian domination, Russia adds 46 million people to its own Western-oriented demography, and suddenly challenges Europe, even as it is integrated into it. In this case, according to Brzezinski, Poland, also coveted by Russia, would become the “geopolitical pivot” determining the fate of Central and Eastern Europe and, therefore, of the European Union itself.44 The struggle between Russia and Europe, and in particular between Russia and Germany-France, goes on, as it has since the Napoleonic Wars, with the fate of countries like Poland and Romania hanging in the balance. Communism may have collapsed, but Europeans still need natural gas from Russia, 80 percent of which comes via Ukraine.45 The victory in the Cold War changed much, to be sure, but it did not altogether mitigate the facts of geography. And a resurgent Russia, writes Australian intelligence analyst Paul Dibb, might be willing to “contemplate disruption in order to create strategic space.”46 As the 2008 invasion of Georgia showed, Putin’s Russia is not a status quo power.

  Ukraine, under severe pressure from Russia, has agreed to extend the lease of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet base in return for lower natural gas prices, even as the Kremlin tries to put Ukraine’s network of gas pipelines under its control. (Ukraine is also dependent on Russia for much of its trade.) Not all pipeline geography in Eurasia works in Russia’s favor, though. There are the pipe
lines that bring Central Asian hydrocarbons to China. Pipelines bring Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea oil across Georgia to the Black Sea and via Turkey to the Mediterranean, thus avoiding Russia. There is also a plan for a natural gas pipeline from the Caspian across the southern Caucasus and Turkey, through the Balkans, to Central Europe, which also avoids Russia. Meanwhile, though, Russia is planning its own gas pipeline southward under the Black Sea to Turkey, and another westward under the Black Sea to Bulgaria. Turkmenistan, on the far side of the Caspian, exports its natural gas through Russia. Thus, even with diverse energy supplies, Europe—especially Eastern Europe and the Balkans—will still be dependent on Russia to a significant degree. The future of Europe, as in the past, hinges in Mackinderesque fashion to a significant extent on developments to the east.

  Russia has other levers, too: a powerful naval base lodged between Lithuania and Poland on the Baltic Sea; the presence of large Russian-speaking minorities in the Baltic States, Caucasus, and Central Asia; a pro-Russian Armenia; a Georgia that is threatened by the pro-Russian breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia; missile test sites and an air base in Kazakhstan; an air base in Kyrgyzstan in range of Afghanistan, China, and the Indian Subcontinent; and a Tajikistan that permits Russian troops to patrol its border with Afghanistan. Moreover, it was a Russian-orchestrated media campaign and economic pressure that helped oust Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiyev from power in 2010, for the crime of hosting an American air base.

  In many of these places, from Chechnya in the north Caucasus to Tajikistan next door to China, Russia must deal with a resurgent Islam over a vast southern frontier that is historically part of a Greater Persian cultural and linguistic realm. Therefore, Russia’s recovery of its lost republics, by the establishment of a sphere of influence over them, definitely requires a friendly Iran that does not compete with Russia in these areas, and does not export Islamic radicalism. Russia, for reasons rooted in geography, can only offer meager help in America’s campaign against the Iranian regime.

  Yet despite all these advantages, history will likely not repeat itself in the sense of another Russian empire emerging in the early twenty-first century. This is because of particular historical and geographical circumstances that adhere in Central Asia.

  Russia began to solidify control in Central Asia in the early nineteenth century, when Russian trade in the area increased, even as on the Kazakh steppe, for example, anarchy reigned with no point of political domination above that of local clan authorities.47 The Soviets in the early twentieth century created individual states out of the vast Central Asian steppe and tableland that did not cohere with ethnic borders, so that if any tried to secede from the Soviet Union it would have been impossible—leading to interethnic war. The Soviets were afraid of pan-Turkism, pan-Persianism, and pan-Islamism, for which the splitting up of ethnic groups was a partial panacea. This created a plethora of anomalies. The Syr Darya valley begins in an Uzbek-populated part of Kyrgyzstan and passes through Uzbekistan, then through Tajikistan before returning to Uzbekistan and ending up in Kazakhstan. The road linking the Uzbek capital of Tashkent to the Uzbek province of Ferghana must pass through Tajikistan. To get from Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, to the ethnic-Tajik areas of Khojent and Khorog one must pass through Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The town of Chimkent, close to Uzbekistan, is predominantly Uzbek, but is “attached” to Kazakhstan. The predominantly Tajik-populated city of Samarkand is in Uzbekistan, and so forth. What emerged in Central Asia, therefore, was less ethnic nationalism than “Sovietism” as a technique of control and power. But while Sovietism survives, even after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the ethnic Russians in the region have been marginalized, and in some places there exists strong hostility against them. Nevertheless, pan-Turkism and pan-Persianism remain relatively weak. Iran has been Shiite since the sixteenth century, whereas Tajiks and the other Persianized Muslims of Central Asia are mainly Sunni. As for the Turks, only recently has modern Turkey sought to become a focal point of the Muslim world.48

  Sovietism and the lack of complete identification of each state with a single ethnic group has ironically led to a modest stability in Central Asia, occasional unrest in the Ferghana valley and elsewhere notwithstanding. (Though, I must say, the region remains a potential tinderbox.) This dynamic, buttressed by extreme wealth in natural resources, has given some of these states significant bargaining power with the principal Eurasian states—Moscow and Beijing—who can be played off one against the other. (Russia needs Central Asian gas to transport to European markets, which gives Russia leverage over Europe; but Russia’s position is being threatened by China’s own purchase of Central Asian gas.)49 Central Asia’s bounty is immense. Kazakhstan’s Tengiz oil fields alone are thought to contain twice as much oil as the Alaskan North Slope.50 Turkmenistan’s annual natural gas output is the third highest in the world. Kyrgyzstan was the largest producer of mercury and antimony in the Soviet Union, and has large deposits of gold, platinum, palladium, and silver.51 This wealth in natural resources, as well as lingering resentment over Soviet occupation, has led, for instance, to Uzbekistan opening its railway bridge to Afghanistan to NATO traffic without at least initially consulting Russia; to Turkmenistan diversifying its energy routes rather than relying completely on Russia; and to Kazakhstan turning to European rather than Russian engineers to exploit its geologically “tricky” petroleum reserves in the Caspian Sea shelf.52

  Thus, a Russian sphere of influence will be challenging to preserve, and will be held hostage in some degree to the fickleness of global energy prices, given how Russia’s own economy essentially runs on natural resources, just like the Central Asian ones. Russia’s new empire, if it does emerge, will likely be a weak reincarnation of previous ones, limited not just by flinty states in Central Asia but by the rising influence in Central Asia of China, and to a lesser extent of India and Iran. China has invested over $25 billion in Central Asia. It is paying for a two-thousand-mile highway across Kazakhstan. There are daily flights between the Kazakh city of Almaty and the western Chinese city of Urumqui, and Chinese goods fill Central Asian markets.53

  Kazakhstan may be the ultimate register of Russian fortunes in Eurasia. Kazakhstan is a prosperous middle-income state by Central Asian standards that is geographically the size of Western Europe, with a GDP larger than all the other Central Asian states combined. Kazakhstan’s new capital, Astana, is located in the ethnic Russian north of the country, which hothead Russian nationalists wanted to annex after the fall of the Soviet Union: at that time, of nine oblasts along Kazakhstan’s three-thousand-mile northern border with Russia, in eight of them, in their northern parts, the population was almost 90 percent non-Kazakh.54 The ceremonial buildings of Astana, designed by Sir Norman Foster, constitute a Kazakh rebuke to Russian ambitions regarding their country. The reinvention of Astana cost $10 billion. It is linked to the south of the country by high-speed trains.55 Kazakhstan is truly becoming an independent power in its own right. It is developing three super-giant “elephant” oil, gas, and condensate fields, two on the Caspian Sea, with major investment from Western multinationals. A new oil pipeline from the Caspian to western China will soon be completed. Kazakhstan is about to become the world’s largest producer of uranium. It has the world’s second largest chromium, lead, and zinc reserves, the third largest manganese reserves, the fifth largest copper reserves, and ranks in the top ten for coal, iron, and gold.

  Kazakhstan is Mackinder’s Heartland! It is rich in all the world’s strategic natural resources and smack in the middle of Eurasia—overlapping, as it does, western Siberia and Central Asia—and stretches 1,800 miles from the Caspian Sea in the west to Outer Mongolia in the east. The Urals peter out in Kazakhstan’s northwest; the foothills of the Tien Shan begin in Kazakhstan’s southeast. Kazakhstan’s climate is so continental in its extremes that before dawn in winter Astana’s temperature can be minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Mackinder believed that some great power or superpower would contr
ol the Heartland. But in our age the Heartland lies in the hands of its indigenous inhabitants, even as great powers like Russia and China fight over its energy resources. Russia may influence Kazakhstan, and in ways severely pressure it. In the final analysis, the Russian and Kazakh economies are interwoven and Kazakhstan cannot defend itself against the Russian military. But Kazakhstan will always have the option of turning toward China if the likes of Putin or his successor become too heavy-handed; in any event, the chances that Russia would be willing to suffer the international disapproval and diplomatic isolation that an invasion of Kazakhstan would precipitate are slim. In 2008, Georgia, a country forty times smaller than Kazakhstan, with a third the population and with few natural resources, may have exposed the limits of Russian military adventurism on the super-continent. Indeed, when Kyrgyzstan made a subtle plea for Russian troops to intervene against ethnic riots in 2010, Russia did not opt for a major intervention, afraid of getting bogged down in a mountainous Central Asian country on the far side of Kazakhstan.

  Another restraining factor against Russian military action in Central Asia is China, whose influence in the region has grown at the expense of Russia, and with whom Russia shares a long border in the Far East. Reasonably good Russian-Chinese relations will provide momentum to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization: a group of which Kazakhstan is a member, which seeks to unite Eurasian powers, mainly autocratic, in an effort to counter the influence of the United States. The wages of Russian-Chinese enmity are greater influence for the United States and Europe in Eurasia. Thus, Russia will discipline its behavior in Central Asia and likely forswear any attempt to reclaim parts of Mackinder’s Heartland by force.

  One word of caution regarding this analysis: Russia’s hand may be weakened in Central Asia because of the rise of China and the desire of Central Asians to do more business with nonthreatening, high-technology countries like South Korea and Japan. But while Russia’s military options are somewhat constrained, Russia can still move troops around Central Asia in a way that no other power can, and Central Asians do harbor a certain nostalgia in these politically volatile times for the peace and security that was the old Soviet Union.