Prisoners of Geography E-Book

Tim Marshall

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: Tim Marshall on Geopolitics
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 630

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

THE PHENOMENAL INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER – 3 MILLION COPIES SOLD The iconic bestseller Prisoners of Geography, now fully updated with brand new content to reflect the changing global geopolitical landscape since it was first published in 2015 'One of the best books about geopolitics you could imagine.' Evening Standard Prisoners of Geography is the book people need to understand what's happening in the news today, from China's ambitions to the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. Bestselling author and geopolitics expert Tim Marshall looks at the past, present and future to offer crucial insights into one of the major factors that determines world history – because if you don't know geography, you'll never have the full picture. This completely revised and updated edition brings the classic text up to date with the events and trends of the past decade, with new material including: • the Russia–Ukraine war and Moscow's alliances with authoritarian states • the conflicts in the Middle East • China's growing military and strategic power, and its stance on Taiwan • American global power and pivot to the Pacific • Europe's leaning towards more extreme politics, increased defence spending, and the new 'Iron Curtain' • Japan's remilitarisation and increasing power • great power play in Africa • the growth of Indian economic and military strength Read Tim Marshall's geopolitical primers (Prisoners of Geography, The Power of Geography and The Future of Geography) to understand what's happening in our fast-changing world. *Want to test your world knowledge? Challenge friends and family with Prisoners of Geography: The Quiz Book, and discover who is the ultimate armchair explorer! *

Leseprobe

For Grace and Franklin,Graceful and Free

CONTENTS

Foreword by Lord Mark Sedwill

Preface to the New Edition

Introduction

  1  Russia

  2  China

  3  USA

  4  Western Europe

  5  Africa

  6  The Middle East

  7  India and Pakistan

  8  Korea and Japan

  9  Latin America

10  The Arctic

Conclusion

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

Preview of Prisoners of Geography: The Quiz Book

FOREWORD

IHAVE ALWAYS BEEN FASCINATED BY MAPS. ONE OF MY prized possessions growing up was The Times Atlas of World History. As soon as I could, I put on a backpack and started to explore the world. And I became a diplomat, spending most of my career in dusty and dangerous but intriguing places rather than the salons of the Western world.

As National Security Advisor, I used maps to bring alive key issues at the National Security Council: a map with Moscow at the centre illuminated Putin’s aggressive defensive world view, or one that corrected the Mercator flat-Earth illusion and demonstrated that a North Korean missile that could reach the western seaboard of the United States could also reach Western Europe.

Tim Marshall’s 2015 seminal work Prisoners of Geography stands in that tradition. In just ten maps, he shone a spotlight onto the key geopolitical issues of the time.

Ten years later, this perspective has become even more relevant. As we enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century, Western governments are wrestling with stuttering economies, eroded public confidence, and huge environmental and socio-economic disruption, from climate change to AI to ageing populations. Tackling these challenges effectively requires deeper and more sophisticated international cooperation than ever before, but at a time of rising geopolitical tensions and complexity. Can the USA–China relationship be stabilised so that they can collaborate as well as compete? How will the rising non-aligned powers – India, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and others – respond? Where will the next crisis be?

Geopolitics now matters not just in its own right but because it determines whether we can tackle the other existential issues effectively. It is a sobering picture. Prisoners of Geography paints that picture.

Lord Mark Sedwill(UK National Security Advisor 2017–20)

PREFACETO THE NEW EDITION

THE FUTURE IS ANOTHER VERSION OF THE PAST. IN that past are eras which reflect our times – they help us to understand our own turbulent age at the end of the post-Cold War period. The invasion of Ukraine, tensions over Taiwan, the dawn of the Age of AI, climate change and numerous other recent events fit into patterns of history. They show how the last decade has shaped where we are, and where we are going.

Many events of the last ten years made the headlines; others, no less influential in the long term, barely made the news. Some from both categories feature in this updated version of Prisoners of Geography; others did not make the cut. Such is their volume that if they’d all been included, you’d need a forklift truck to lift the book . . .

However, the trends are clear. Authoritarian states, led by China, are uniting to overturn the ‘rules-based order’ constructed by the USA and its allies after the Second World War. The Americans invited Beijing into the club, helped make China stronger, and then discovered it wouldn’t play by their rules. This led to another trend – ‘de-risking’ from China. Some companies have moved out of the country and many governments are trying to diversify their supply chains and restrict sales of high-tech knowledge and products to suppress China’s advance in certain industries.

The USA is belatedly looking for a new system in which the advanced industrialised democracies band together – under its leadership. Washington is not starting from scratch. There are the residual partnerships forged post-Second World War – most notably NATO. However, the ties that once bound have loosened. We have moved from a bipolar world, through the unipolar decade of American hegemony, and into a multipolar world in which countries have more choices about who to trade and build alliances with.

At the end of the Cold War a poor reading of history led many European policymakers and intellectuals to believe that liberal democracy was the continent’s future, and that war was an anachronism consigned to the twentieth century. This naivety did not consider what might happen if a reasonable argument came face to face with unreasonable violence, such as that perpetrated against Ukraine. Nor did they suspect that, with the Soviet system defeated, waves of ‘old-fashioned’ nationalism, religious supremacy and populist authoritarianism would resurface throughout the new map of Europe. The canny Soviet diplomat Georgy Arbatov warned of this as early as 1988. Arbatov, an advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev, knew that part of the glue that held the Western powers together was the collective fear of the USSR. ‘We are going to do a terrible thing to you,’ he said. ‘We are going to deprive you of an enemy.’

The Europeans thought they could take care of themselves. Military budgets were slashed, munitions factories closed and arms stockpiles depleted. Successive administrations in Washington asked the Europeans to share more of NATO’s burden but were ignored. Hubristic talk of a common European defence force came to little. And then Russia invaded Ukraine and Europe was reminded of something from antiquity: Sallust’s Theorem.

Sallust was a Roman historian who believed that alliances are only truly strong when they are formed due to fear of a common enemy. In his case it was the Roman Republic’s fear of Carthage. Now most European nations once again share a collective fear of a perceived threat from the east and are scrambling to meet it.

A key difference from the Cold War is that America’s foreign policy priority has shifted to the Indo-Pacific, specifically to China. It’s not that Washington is untroubled by Russia’s behaviour, it’s that the world has moved on, money is tight and America’s patience is limited, especially when its president is Donald Trump. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reminded NATO’s European members why the organisation exists and, alongside the re-election of Trump, made them aware of the parlous state of their defences.

The European countries have another problem that has come into sharper focus in the last decade. Those in the EU may have reached the limits of their populations’ willingness to cede sovereignty to Brussels. All Western Europeans are confronting another issue – the effects of the mass movement of people. Both the EU and the modern European nation states were built on shared common cultural, historical and, to a lesser extent, religious norms. These are among the reasons the continent has struggled to integrate the large numbers of people from outside Europe who arrive seeking a better life. This calls into question the number of migrants European countries can accept without seriously destabilising their political systems. But any debate about that must also include discussion of how many newcomers are needed to sustain the level of workforce required to support an ageing population.

Sallust’s Theorem also applies to the authoritarian states such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. They fear that unless they overturn the world order, the USA will dominate them. Hence the ‘friendship without limits’ announced by Presidents Xi and Putin in 2022, and Russia’s attempts to grow the influence of the BRICS+ organisation (founding members Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). It’s also why Putin has spent this decade trying to undermine the dollar as a global currency.

The manner of fighting in Ukraine is another reminder of lessons from history. Nations that get a head start on new technologies, and then become dominant in those industries, tend also to dominate their neighbourhood, and sometimes even the world. From the Romans to the British Empire, and most recently the USA, this has been true.

Russia’s invasion began the first ‘space war’: a conflict in which both sides could access space-based assets. It is also the first war that has seen mass drone warfare come to the public’s attention, and the first time hypersonic missiles have been fired in anger. All require technologies such as lasers, sensors, semiconductor chips, and all use, or will use, AI. Future wars will demand huge quantities of such things.

And who has these things? China. Well, it has a majority of them, and command of much of the supply chain. That’s a large part of why Donald Trump, in both of his presidential terms, repeatedly declared he wants control of Greenland. As well as being a key location for space surveillance and spotting ballistic missiles heading to the USA, the world’s largest island has deposits of titanium, graphite, nickel, zinc, tungsten and lithium. A 2023 survey by the European Commission found that twenty-five of thirty-four minerals it deemed ‘critical raw materials’ could be found there.

The location of such materials is a key part of the twenty-first-century geopolitical map. To be a player in AI, quantum computing, biotechnology, the space industry and telecommunications requires a secure supply of critical raw materials. This is why in the last decade serious moves have been made by major countries and companies, usually under the news radar, in places such as the ‘Lithium Triangle’ in South America and the Central African ‘Copper Belt’.

The biggest moves have been made by the USA and China, which brings us to another lesson from history: Thucydides’ Trap. A few years after the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) the Greek historian wrote: ‘It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.’ For Sparta read America, and for Athens, China. This does not mean war between them will happen, but it is a warning that without imaginative statecraft, and compromise on both sides, it might.

I believe the multipolar world will morph back into a form of Cold War/bipolar world. It will be different from that era most notably because China is an economic power in the way that the USSR/Russia never was, and because India has the potential to become a superpower later this century. Nevertheless, as a broad-brush concept, and one we are familiar with, it is a useful template.

A Chinese-led order is emerging, as are new forms of American leadership, notably in the Indo-Pacific. Details of how the last decade fits into the ongoing construction of the twenty-first-century geopolitical architecture are found in each chapter of this new edition. Covid-19 helped grow suspicions of China, climate change in the Arctic has magnified the importance of the Northern Sea Route along the Russian coastline, and the rise of the machines has focused attention on minerals and their locations just as the need for oil did in the twentieth century.

Something else happened in the last decade as well. We added another billion people to the global population. Each birth was an important event. Each person now shares the geography that continues to shape our lives.

INTRODUCTION

VLADIMIR PUTIN SAYS HE IS A RELIGIOUS MAN, A GREAT supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church. If so, he may well go to bed each night, say his prayers and ask God: ‘Why didn’t you put some mountains in Ukraine?’

If God had built mountains in Ukraine, then the great expanse of flatland that is the North European Plain would not be such encouraging territory from which to attack Russia repeatedly. As it is, Putin has no choice: he must at least attempt to control the flatlands to the west. So it is with all nations, big or small. The landscape imprisons their leaders, giving them fewer choices and less room to manoeuvre than you might think. This was true of the Athenian Empire, the Persians, the Babylonians and before; it was true of every leader seeking high ground from which to protect their tribe.

The land on which we live has always shaped us. It has shaped the wars, the power, politics and social development of the peoples that now inhabit nearly every part of Earth. Technology may seem to overcome the distances between us in both mental and physical space, but it is easy to forget that the land where we live, work and raise our children is hugely important, and that the choices of those who lead the 8 billion inhabitants of this planet will to some degree always be shaped by rivers, mountains, deserts, lakes and seas – as they always have been.

There is no one geographical factor of greater consequence than another. Mountains are no more influential than deserts, nor rivers than jungles. In different parts of the planet, different geographical features are among the dominant factors in determining what people can and cannot do.

Broadly speaking, geopolitics looks at the ways in which international affairs can be understood through geographical factors; not just the physical landscape – the natural barriers of mountains or connections of river networks, for example – but also climate, demographics, cultural regions and access to natural resources. Factors such as these can have an impact on many different aspects of our civilisation, from political and military strategy to human social development, including language, trade and religion.

The physical realities that underpin national and international politics are too often disregarded both in writing about history and in contemporary reporting of world affairs. Geography is clearly a fundamental part of the ‘why’ as well as the ‘what’. It might not be the determining factor, but it is certainly the most overlooked. Take, for example, China and India: two massive countries with huge populations that share a very long border but are not politically or culturally aligned. It wouldn’t be surprising if these two giants had fought each other in several wars, but apart from one month-long battle in 1962, they never have. Why? Because between them is the highest mountain range in the world, and it is practically impossible to advance large military columns through or over the Himalayas. As technology becomes more sophisticated, ways are emerging of overcoming this obstacle, but the physical barrier remains a deterrent, and so both countries focus their foreign policy on other regions while keeping a wary eye on each other.

Individual leaders, ideas and technology play a role in shaping events, but they are temporary. Each new generation will still face the physical obstructions created by the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas; the challenges created by the rainy season; and the disadvantages of limited access to natural minerals or food sources.

I first became interested in this subject when covering the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s. I watched close at hand as the leaders of various peoples, be they Serbian, Croat or Bosniak, deliberately reminded their ‘tribes’ of the ancient divisions and, yes, ancient suspicions in a region crowded with diversity. Once they had pulled the peoples apart, it then didn’t take much to push them against each other.

The River Ibar in Kosovo is a prime example. Ottoman rule over Serbia was cemented by the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389, fought near where the Ibar flows through the city of Mitrovica. Over the following centuries the Serb population began to withdraw behind the Ibar as Muslim Albanians gradually descended from the mountainous Malesija region into Kosovo, where they became a majority by the mid-eighteenth century.

Fast-forward to the twentieth century and there was still a clear ethnic/religious division roughly marked by the river. Then, in 1999, battered by NATO from the air and the Kosovo Liberation Army on the ground, the Yugoslav (Serbian) military retreated across the Ibar, quickly followed by most of the remaining Serb population. The river became the de facto border of what some countries now recognise as the independent state of Kosovo.

Mitrovica was also where the advancing NATO ground forces came to a halt. During the three-month war there had been veiled threats that NATO intended to invade all of Serbia. In truth, the restraints of both geography and politics meant the NATO leaders never really had that option. Hungary had made it clear that it would not allow an invasion from its territory, as it feared reprisals against the 350,000 ethnic Hungarians in northern Serbia. The alternative was an invasion from the south, which would have got NATO to the Ibar in double-quick time; but it would then have faced the mountains above them.

I was working with a team of Serbs in Belgrade at the time and asked what would happen if NATO came: ‘We will put our cameras down, Tim, and pick up guns,’ was the response. They were liberal Serbs, good friends of mine and opposed to their government, but they still pulled out the maps and showed me where the Serbs would defend their territory in the mountains, and where NATO would grind to a halt. It was some relief to be given a geography lesson in why NATO’s choices were more limited than the Brussels PR machine made public.

An understanding of how crucial the physical landscape was in reporting news in the Balkans stood me in good stead in the years that followed. For example, in 2001, a few weeks after 9/11, I saw a demonstration of how, even with today’s modern technology, climate still dictates the military possibilities of the world’s most powerful armies. I was in northern Afghanistan, having crossed the border river from Tajikistan on a raft, in order to link up with Northern Alliance (NA) troops who were fighting the Taliban.

American fighter jets and bombers were already overhead, pounding Taliban and Al-Qaeda positions on the cold, dusty plains and hills east of Mazar-e-Sharif to pave the way for the advance on Kabul. After a few weeks it was obvious the NA were gearing up to move south. And then the world changed colour.

The most intense sandstorm I have ever experienced blew in, turning everything a mustard-yellow colour. Even the air around us seemed to be this hue, thick as it was with sand particles. For thirty-six hours nothing moved except the sand. At the height of the storm you couldn’t see more than a few yards ahead of you, and the only thing clear was that the advance would have to wait for the weather.

The Americans’ satellite technology, at the cutting edge of science, was helpless, blind in the face of the climate of this wild land. Everyone, from President Bush and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the NA troops on the ground, just had to wait. Then it rained, and the sand that had settled on everything and everyone turned into mud. The rain came down so hard that the baked-mud huts we were living in looked as if they were melting. Again, it was clear that the move south was on hold until geography finished having its say. The rules of geography, which Hannibal, Sun Tzu and Alexander the Great all knew, still apply to today’s leaders.

Later, in 2012, I was given another lesson in geostrategy: as Syria descended into full-blown civil war, I was standing on a Syrian hilltop, overlooking a valley south of the city of Hama, and saw a hamlet burning in the distance. Syrian friends pointed out a much larger village about a mile away, from where they said the attack had come. They then explained that if one side could push enough people from the other faction out of the valley, then the valley could be joined onto other land that led to the country’s only motorway, and as such would be useful in carving out a piece of contiguous viable territory that one day could be used to create a mini-statelet if Syria could not be put back together again. Where before I saw only a burning hamlet, I could now see its strategic importance and understand how political realities are shaped by the most basic physical realities.

Geopolitics affects every country, whether at war, as in the examples above, or at peace. There will be instances in every region you can name. In these pages I cannot explore each one: Canada, Australia and Indonesia, among others, get no more than a brief mention, although a whole book could be devoted to Australia alone and the ways in which its geography has shaped its connections with other parts of the world, both physically and culturally (I’ve discussed Australia and other countries in The Power of Geography). Instead I have focused on the powers and regions that best illustrate the key points of the book, covering the legacy of geopolitics from the past (nation-forming); the most pressing situations we face today (war in Ukraine, the expanding influence of China); and looking to the future (growing competition in the Arctic).

In Russia we see a struggling former empire that looks nervously to its west, as well as the influence of the Arctic, and how its freezing climate limits Russia’s ability to be a truly global power but conversely how climate change is opening new opportunities for Moscow. In China we see the limitations of power without a global navy. The speed at which China is seeking to change this is becoming apparent. The chapter on the USA illustrates how shrewd decisions to expand territory in key regions allowed it to achieve its modern destiny as a two-ocean superpower. Europe shows us the value of flat land and navigable rivers in connecting regions and producing a culture able to kick-start the modern world, while Africa is a prime example of the effects of isolation.

The chapter on the Middle East demonstrates why drawing lines on maps while disregarding the topography and, equally importantly, the geographical cultures in a given area is a recipe for trouble. We will continue to witness that trouble this century. The same theme surfaces in the chapters on Africa and India/Pakistan. The colonial powers drew artificial borders on paper, completely ignoring the physical realities of the region. Violent attempts are now being made to redraw them; these will continue for several years, after which the map of nation states will no longer look as it does now.

Very different from the examples of Kosovo or Syria are Japan and Korea, in that they are mostly ethnically homogeneous. But they have other problems: Japan is an island nation devoid of natural resources while the division of the Koreas is a problem still waiting to be solved. Meanwhile, Latin America is an anomaly. In its far south it is so cut off from the outside world that global trading is difficult, and its internal geography is a barrier to creating a trading bloc as successful as the EU.

Finally, we come to one of the most uninhabitable places on Earth – the Arctic. For most of history humans have ignored it, but in the twentieth century we found energy there, and twenty-first-century diplomacy will determine who owns – and sells – that resource.

Seeing geography as a decisive factor in the course of human history can be construed as a bleak view of the world, which is why it is disliked in some intellectual circles. It suggests that nature is more powerful than humans, and that we can only go so far in determining our own fate. However, other factors clearly have an influence on events too. Any sensible person can see that modern technology is now bending the iron rules of geography. It has found ways over, under, or through some of the barriers. The Americans can now fly a plane all the way from Missouri to Mosul on a bombing mission without needing concrete along the way on which to refuel. That, along with their partially self-sustaining great Aircraft Carrier Battle Groups, means they no longer absolutely have to have an ally or a colony in order to extend their global reach around the world. Of course, if they do have an air base on the island of Diego Garcia, or permanent access to the port in Bahrain, then they have more options; but it is less essential.

So air power has changed the rules, as in a different way has the internet. But geography, and the history of how nations have established themselves within that geography, remains crucial to our understanding of the world today and our future.

Some conflicts in Africa and the Middle East are rooted in colonial powers ignoring the rules of geography, whereas the Chinese occupation of Tibet is rooted in obeying them; America’s global foreign policy is dictated by them, and even the technological genius and power projection of the world’s biggest superpowers can only mitigate the rules that nature, or God, handed down.

What are those rules? The place to begin is in the land where power is hard to defend, and so for centuries its leaders have compensated by pushing outwards. It is the land without mountains to its west: Russia.

CHAPTER 1

RUSSIA

Vast (adjective; vaster, vastest): of very great area or extent; immense.

RUSSIA IS VAST. IT IS VASTEST. IMMENSE. IT IS 6 MILLION square miles vast, eleven time zones vast; it is the largest country in the world.

Its forests, lakes, rivers, frozen tundra, steppe and mountains are all vast. This size has long seeped into our collective consciousness. Wherever we are, there is Russia, perhaps to our east or west, to our north or south – but there is the Russian Bear.

It is no coincidence that the bear is the symbol of this immense nation. There it sits, sometimes hibernating, sometimes growling, majestic but ferocious. The Russians themselves are wary of calling this animal by its name, fearful of conjuring up its darker side. They call it medved, ‘the one who likes honey’.

At least 120,000 of these medveds live in a country that bestrides Europe and Asia. To the west of the Ural Mountains is European Russia. To their east is Siberia, stretching all the way to the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Even in the twenty-first century, to cross it by train takes six days. Russia’s leaders must gaze across these distances, and differences, and formulate policy accordingly; for several centuries now they have looked in all directions, but concentrated mostly westwards.

When writers seek to get to the heart of the Bear they often use Winston Churchill’s famous observation of Russia, made in 1939: ‘It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, but few go on to complete the sentence, which ends: ‘but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.’ Seven years later he used that key to unlock his version of the answer to the riddle, asserting: ‘I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than weakness, especially military weakness.’

He could have been talking about the current Russian leadership, which, despite being wrapped in a now threadbare cloak of democracy, is authoritarian by nature, imperial in action, and has nationalism at its core. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine, an attempt to subjugate its people and wipe the country from the map, laid bare the depravity of what, under Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, has become a gangster state.

When Putin isn’t thinking about God or mountains, he’s thinking about pizza. In particular, the shape of a slice of pizza – a wedge.

The thin end of this wedge is Poland. Here, the North European Plain stretching from France to the Urals (which extend 1,000 miles south to north, forming a natural boundary between Europe and Asia) is at its narrowest – only 300 miles wide from the Baltic Sea down to the Carpathian Mountains.

For Russia this is a double-edged sword. Poland represents a corridor through which Russia can be attacked, but also one into which Russia could drive its armed forces if necessary and thus block an enemy from advancing towards Moscow. Eastwards from Poland the wedge begins to broaden; by the time you get to Russia it is over 2,000 miles wide and flat all the way to Moscow and beyond. Even with a large army you would be hard-pressed to defend in strength along this line. However, Russia has never been conquered from this direction, partially due to dominating countries to its west and partially due to its strategic depth. By the time an army approaches Moscow it already has unsustainably long supply lines, a mistake that Napoleon made in 1812 and Hitler repeated in 1941.

Likewise, in the Russian Far East it is geography that protects Russia. It is difficult to move an army from Asia up into Asian Russia; there’s not much to attack except snow, and you could only get as far as the Urals. You would then end up holding a massive piece of territory, in difficult conditions, with long supply lines and the ever-present risk of a counter-attack.

You might think that no major power is intent on marching into Russia, but that is not how the Russians see it, and with good reason. In the past 500 years they have been invaded several times from the west. The Poles came across the North European Plain in 1605, followed by the Swedes under Charles XII in 1708, the French under Napoleon in 1812 and the Germans twice, in both world wars, in 1914 and 1941. If you count from Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, but this time include the Crimean War of 1853–56, up to 1945 the Russians were fighting on average in or around the North European Plain once every thirty-three years. Ukraine’s counter-attack into Russia’s Kursk region in 2024 took place on this flat ground, although in this case the aim was simply to have a bargaining chip for eventual ceasefire talks.

At the end of the Second World War in 1945, the Russians occupied territory conquered from Germany in Central and Eastern Europe, some of which then became part of the USSR as it increasingly began to resemble the old Russian Empire. In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed by European and North American states for the defence of Europe and the North Atlantic against the danger of Soviet aggression. In response, most of the communist states of Europe – under Russian domination – formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955, a treaty for military defence and mutual aid. The pact was supposed to be made of iron, but with hindsight by the early 1980s it was rusting, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 it crumbled to dust.

President Putin is no fan of the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev. He blames him for undermining Russian security and has referred to the break-up of the former Soviet Union during the 1990s as ‘a major geopolitical disaster of the century’.

Since then the Russians have watched anxiously as NATO has moved steadily closer, incorporating countries that Russia claims it was promised would not join: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia in 2004, Albania in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, North Macedonia in 2020 and now, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Finland and Sweden. NATO says no such assurances were given. It also points out that it did not permanently deploy forces in all new member states, and even created the NATO–Russia Council, which allowed Russia to open an office with a staff of twenty in the alliance’s Brussels HQ. That closed in 2022 after eight Russian officials were expelled for spying.

Russia, like all great powers, is thinking in terms of the next 100 years and understands that anything could happen. A century ago, who could have guessed that American armed forces would be stationed a few hundred miles from Moscow in Poland and the Baltic States? By 2004, just fifteen years from 1989, every single former Warsaw Pact state bar Russia and Albania was in NATO or the European Union (EU).

The Moscow administration’s mind has been concentrated by that, and by Russia’s history.

As a concept Russia dates to the ninth century and a loose federation of East Slavic tribes known as Kievan Rus’, based in Kyiv and other towns along the River Dnieper, in what is now Ukraine. The Mongols continually attacked the region from the south and east, eventually overrunning it in the thirteenth century. The fledgling Russia then relocated north-east in and around the city of Moscow. This early Russia, known as the Grand Principality of Muscovy, was indefensible. There were no mountains, no deserts and few rivers. In all directions lay flatland, and across the steppe to the south and east were the Mongols. The invader could advance at a place of his choosing.

Enter Ivan the Terrible, the first tsar. He put into practice the concept of attack as defence – i.e., begin expansion by consolidating at home and then move outwards. This led to greatness. Here was a man to give support to the theory that individuals can change history. Without his utter ruthlessness and vision, Russia’s story would be very different.

A moderate expansion had begun under Ivan’s grandfather, Ivan the Great, but that accelerated after the younger Ivan was crowned Tsar and Grand Prince of all Russia in 1547. He encroached east to the Urals, south to the Caspian Sea and north towards the Arctic Circle. Russia gained access to the Caspian, and later the Black Sea, thus taking advantage of the Caucasus Mountains as a partial barrier between it and the Mongols. A military base was built in Chechnya to deter would-be attackers, be they the Mongol Golden Hordes, the Ottoman Empire or the Persians.

There were setbacks, but over the next century Russia pushed past the Urals and edged into Siberia, eventually incorporating all the land to the Pacific coast far to the east.

Now the Russians had a partial buffer zone and a hinterland – strategic depth – somewhere to fall back to in the event of invasion. No one was going to attack them in force from the Arctic Sea, nor struggle over the Urals to get to them. Their land was taking the shape we know now as Russia, and to reach it from the south or south-east you had to have a huge army, a very long supply line, and fight your way past defensive positions.

In the eighteenth century, Peter the Great, who founded the Russian Empire in 1721, and then Empress Catherine the Great looked westwards, expanding the empire to become one of the great powers of Europe. A more secure and powerful Russia was now able to occupy Ukraine and reach the Carpathian Mountains. It took most of what we now know as the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, thus protecting it from incursion via land that way or from the Baltic Sea.

Now there was a huge ring protecting Moscow, the heart of the country. Starting at the Arctic, it came down through the Baltic region, across Ukraine, then the Carpathians, the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Caspian, swinging back round to the Urals, which stretched up to the Arctic Circle.

The extent of the vast Russian Empire in 1914.

In the twentieth century communist Russia created the Soviet Union. Behind the rhetoric of ‘Workers of the World Unite’, the USSR was simply the Russian Empire writ large. After the Second World War it stretched from the Pacific to Berlin, from the Arctic to the borders of Afghanistan – a political and military superpower rivalled only by the USA.

When the Soviet Union fell, the Russian Empire shrank back to more or less the shape of the pre-communist era, but now its European borders ended at Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Finland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan.

Russia remains the biggest country in the world, twice the size of the USA or China, five times the size of India, seventy times the size of the UK. However, it has a relatively small population of about 144 million, fewer people than Nigeria or Pakistan, but struggles to distribute food adequately around its vast land mass. The relatively small Central Federal District, which includes Moscow and borders Belarus and Ukraine, has a population of 40 million and is where the country’s financial wealth is concentrated.

Russia, up to the Urals, is a European power insofar as it borders the European land mass, but it is not a strong Asian power despite bordering Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China and North Korea, and having maritime borders with several countries including Japan and the USA.

Former US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin was mocked when, in 2008, she said: ‘You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska’, but she was right. A Russian island in the Bering Strait is two and a half miles from Little Diomede Island. You can see Russia from America.

High up in the Urals there is a cross marking the place where Europe stops and Asia starts. When the skies are clear it is a beautiful spot and you can see through the fir trees for miles towards the east. In winter it is snow-covered, as is the Siberian Plain stretching towards the city of Yekaterinburg. Tourists like to visit to put one foot in Europe and one in Asia. It’s a reminder of just how big Russia is when you realise that the cross is placed merely a quarter of the way into the country. You may have travelled 1,500 miles from St Petersburg, through western Russia, to get to the Urals, but you still have another 4,500 miles to go before reaching the Bering Strait, and a possible sighting of Mrs Palin in Alaska.

Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union I was in the Urals, at the point where Europe becomes Asia, accompanied by a Russian camera crew. The cameraman was a taciturn, stoic, grizzled veteran of filming, the son of a Red Army cameraman who had shot a great deal of footage during the German siege of Stalingrad. I asked him, ‘So, are you European or are you Asian?’ He reflected on this for a few seconds, then replied: ‘Neither – I am Russian.’

Whatever its European credentials, Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 per cent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 per cent of its population lives there. Siberia may be Russia’s ‘treasure chest’, containing most of the mineral wealth, oil and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with taiga (huge forests), poor soil for farming and large stretches of swampland. Only two railway networks run west to east – the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal– Amur Mainline. There are few land transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southwards into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so.

Russia’s east also lacks a warm-water port which does not freeze in winter and has free access to the world’s major trading routes. Some Russian Arctic ports freeze for several months each year: Vladivostok, the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean, is ice-locked for weeks on end and is enclosed by the Sea of Japan, which is dominated by the Japanese. This does not just halt the flow of trade; it prevents the Russian fleet from operating as a global power.

The lack of a warm-water port with direct access to the oceans has always been Russia’s Achilles heel, as strategically important to it as the North European Plain. This weakness was why many people in Europe believed in what we now know was a forged ‘will’ of Peter the Great. It emerged decades after his death at a time when it suited various governments to promote the idea that he had advised his descendants to ‘approach as near as possible to Constantinople and India. Whoever governs there will be the true sovereign of the world. Consequently, excite continual wars, not only in Turkey, but in Persia . . . Penetrate as far as the Persian Gulf, advance as far as India.’ He may not have written the words, but they made strategic sense. Russia is at a geographical disadvantage, saved from being a much weaker power only because of its oil and gas.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, in support of the communist Afghan government against anti-communist Muslim guerrillas, had never been about bringing the joys of Marxist-Leninism to the Afghan people. It was always about ensuring that Moscow controlled the space to prevent anyone else from doing so.

Crucially, the invasion of Afghanistan also gave hope to the great Russian dream of its army being able to ‘wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean’, in the words of the ultra-nationalist Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and thus achieve what it never had. However, with the imposing plains of Kandahar and mountains of the Hindu Kush, no invading power has ever succeeded in Afghanistan, earning it the label of ‘the Graveyard of Empires’. The Afghan experience is sometimes called ‘Russia’s Vietnam’; Moscow’s dream of warm-water open access to the oceans has seeped away ever since, and is perhaps further away now than it has been for 200 years.

Late in the last century, overstretch, spending more money than was available, the economics of the madhouse, and defeat in the mountains of Afghanistan contributed to the fall of the USSR. When the Soviet Union broke apart, it split into fifteen countries. Geography had its revenge on the ideology of the Soviets and a more logical picture reappeared on the map, one in which mountains, rivers, lakes and seas delineate where people live, are separated from each other and thus how they develop different languages and customs. The exceptions to this rule are the ‘Stans’, such as Tajikistan, whose borders were deliberately drawn by Stalin to weaken each state by ensuring it had large minorities of people from other states.

If you take the long view of history – and most diplomats and military planners do – then there is still everything to play for in each of the states that formerly made up the USSR, plus some of those previously in the Warsaw Pact military alliance.

By no coincidence, many of the pro-Western countries formerly in the Warsaw Pact were the states that suffered most under Soviet tyranny: for example, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania. Add to these Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, which would all like to join both NATO and the EU but have been held at arm’s length because of their proximity to Russia. In recent years all three have had Russian troops on their soil. NATO membership of any of these three could spark another war.

All the above explains why, in 2013, as the political battle for the direction of Ukraine heated up, Moscow concentrated hard.

As long as a pro-Russian government held sway in Kyiv, Russia could be confident that its buffer zone would remain intact and guard the North European Plain. Even a studiedly neutral Ukraine, which would promise not to join the EU or NATO and to uphold the lease Russia had on the warm-water port at Sevastopol in Crimea, would be satisfactory. That Ukraine was reliant on Russia for energy also made its increasingly neutral stance acceptable, albeit irritating. But a pro-Western Ukraine with ambitions to join the two great Western alliances, and which threw into doubt Russia’s access to its Black Sea port? A Ukraine that one day might even host a NATO naval base? That could not stand.

President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine tried to play both sides. He flirted with the West, but paid homage to Moscow – thus Putin tolerated him. When he came close to signing a massive trade agreement with the EU, one that could lead to membership, Putin began turning the screw.

For the Russian foreign policy elite, membership of the EU is a stalking horse for membership of NATO, and Ukrainian membership of NATO is a red line. Putin piled the pressure on Yanukovych, made him an offer he chose not to refuse, and the Ukrainian president scrambled out of the EU deal to make a pact with Moscow, thus sparking the protests that would overthrow him. The Germans and Americans had backed the opposition parties, with Berlin in particular seeing former world boxing champion turned politician Vitali Klitschko as its man.

Street fighting erupted in Kyiv and demonstrations across the country grew. Then, on 22 February 2014, after dozens of deaths in the capital, the president fled, fearing for his life. Anti-Russian factions, some of which were pro-Western and some pro-fascist, took over the government. From that moment the die was cast. President Putin felt he had no choice – he had to annex Crimea, which contained not only many Russian-speaking Ukrainians but, most importantly, the port of Sevastopol.

This geographical imperative, and the whole eastward movement of NATO, is exactly what Putin had in mind when, in a speech about the annexation, he said: ‘Russia found itself in a position it could not retreat from. If you compress the spring all the way to its limit, it will snap back hard. You must always remember this.’

Sevastopol is Russia’s only true major warm-water port. However, access out of the Black Sea into the Mediterranean is restricted by the Montreux Convention of 1936, which gave Turkey – now a NATO member – control of the Bosporus.

Even after crossing the Bosporus the Russians need to navigate the Aegean Sea before accessing the Mediterranean and would still either have to cross the Gibraltar Straits to gain access to the Atlantic or be allowed down the Suez Canal to reach the Indian Ocean.

Crimea was part of Russia for two centuries before being transferred to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine in 1954 by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at a time when it was envisaged that Soviet man would live forever and so be controlled by Moscow forever. Now that Ukraine was no longer Soviet, or even pro-Russian, Putin knew the situation had to change. Did the Western diplomats know? If they didn’t, then they were unaware of Lesson One, Rule A, in ‘Diplomacy for Beginners’: when faced with what is considered an existential threat, a great power will use force.

A generous view is that the Americans and the Europeans were looking forward to welcoming Ukraine into the democratic world as a full member of its liberal institutions and the rule of law, and that there wasn’t much Moscow could do about it. That is a view which does not consider the fact that geopolitics still exists in the twenty-first century, or that Russia does not play by the rule of law.

Flushed with victory, the new interim Ukrainian government immediately made some foolish statements, not least of which was the intention to abolish Russian as the official second language in various regions, including Crimea. The Kremlin has a law that compels the government to protect ‘ethnic Russians’. A definition of that term is, by design, hard to come by because it will be defined as Russia chooses in each of the potential crises that may erupt in the former Soviet Union. Several million ethnic Russians remain inside what was the USSR, but outside Russia. Approximately 60 per cent of Crimea’s population is ‘ethnically Russian’, so the Kremlin was pushing against an open door.

Putin helped anti-Kyiv demonstrations in Crimea and stirred up so much trouble that eventually he ‘had’ to send his troops out of the confines of the naval base and on to the streets to protect people. Crimea was once again a de facto part of Russia.

You could make the argument that Putin did have a choice: he could have respected the territorial integrity of Ukraine. But, given that he was dealing with the geographical hand which God has dealt Russia, this was never really an option. He would not be the man who ‘lost Crimea’, and with it the only proper warm-water port his country had access to.

No one rode to the rescue of Ukraine as it lost territory equivalent to the size of Belgium or the US state of Maryland. Ukraine and its neighbours knew a geopolitical truth: that unless you are in NATO, Moscow is near and Washington DC is far away. For Russia this was an existential matter: it could not cope with losing Crimea; the West could.

The EU imposed limited sanctions – limited because several European countries, Germany among them, were reliant on Russian energy to heat their homes in winter. The pipelines run east to west and give the Kremlin the power to turn the taps on and off.

Energy as political power began to be used more regularly, and the concept of ‘ethnic Russians’ utilised to justify Russia’s moves.

In a speech in 2014 Putin briefly referred to ‘Novorossiya’ or ‘New Russia’. Kremlin-watchers took a deep breath. He had revived the geographical title given to what is now southern and eastern Ukraine, which Russia had won from the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century. Catherine went on to settle Russians in these regions and demanded that Russian be the first language. ‘Novorossiya’ was only ceded to the newly formed Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1922. ‘Why?’ asked Putin rhetorically, ‘Let God judge them.’ In his speech he listed the Ukrainian regions of Kharkov, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odesa before saying, ‘Russia lost these territories for various reasons, but the people remained.’

It is no surprise that, after seizing Crimea, Russia went on to encourage the uprisings by pro-Russians in the Ukrainian eastern industrial heartlands in Luhansk and Donetsk. Russia could have tried to drive its tanks all the way to the eastern bank of the River Dnieper in Kyiv. But at the time it did not want the headache that would bring. Having got away with annexing Crimea, it could wait. It was far less painful, and cheaper, to encourage unrest in the eastern borders of Ukraine and remind Kyiv who controlled energy supplies, to ensure that Kyiv’s infatuation with the flirtatious West did not turn into a marriage consummated in the chambers of the EU or NATO.

Covert support for the uprisings in eastern Ukraine was also logistically simple and had the added benefit of deniability on the international stage. Barefaced lying in the great chamber of the UN Security Council is simple if your opponent does not have concrete proof of your actions and, more importantly, doesn’t want concrete proof in case he or she must do something about it. Many politicians in the West breathed a sigh of relief and muttered quietly, ‘Thank goodness Ukraine isn’t in NATO or we would have had to act.’ The annexation of Crimea showed how Russia is prepared for military action to defend what it sees as its interests in what it calls its ‘near abroad’. It took a rational gamble that outside powers would not intervene and Crimea was ‘doable’. It is close to Russia, could be supplied across the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and could rely on internal support from large sections of the population of the peninsula.

Russia had not finished with Ukraine. The Donbas region remained volatile and sporadic fighting continued. An international incident occurred when, in late 2018, the Russian coastguard intercepted three Ukrainian ships heading from Odesa, in the Black Sea, towards the Ukrainian base in Mariupol, in the Sea of Azov. NATO suggested that it would find ways for ships to have safe passage, but a Crimean representative to the Russian parliament, Ruslan Balbek, responded by saying, ‘No matter how much NATO beats its chest, the ships will pass through it only in accordance with Russian rules.’

That further action would be taken in Ukraine should not have come as a surprise. The fundamentals of geography and history, added to Putin’s obsessive Russian nationalism and imperialist aims, meant it was a matter of time. He would rather wreck Ukraine than allow it to choose its own future. The time came on 24 February 2022.

There is weakness in Western thinking when it comes to geopolitics and the threat of war. Too many policymakers overestimate logic and underestimate emotion. They logically conclude that conflict is bad, but then mistake their own thinking for that of others. Others such as Vladimir Putin.

Many Russians, Putin among them, are like many Americans in that they think they live in a providential country endowed with a special mission. The year before the invasion the Russian president spelled out his beliefs about Ukraine in a lengthy essay titled ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’. He quoted the words of Oleg the Prophet (d. 912) about Kyiv: ‘Let it be the mother of all Russian cities.’ The idea of Ukraine as a nation separate from Russia was blamed on the ‘Polish elite’ and the Austro-Hungarian authorities. Putin appears to believe the theory that Moscow is the ‘Third Rome’ and the capital of Christianity following the fall of Rome and Constantinople. A separate Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which exists, is anathema to him.

There are also more traditional rationales for the land grab. Ukraine, with its vast fields of wheat and corn, is one of the world’s leading producers and exporters of grain. Underneath the famously fertile black soil is something even more valuable to Moscow – metal. The list is long: nickel, iron, cobalt, manganese, titanium, all proven, and within Ukraine’s sedimentary basins may lie Europe’s largest reserves of the white gold that is lithium.

Most of the mines in these industries were closed when war broke out and foreign investment in long-term projects dwindled. The Kremlin wants the grain and metal for itself while depriving the European countries of access to it and slowing their long-term aim of reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Full dominance of Ukraine would achieve this, with the bonus of controlling Odesa and the country’s long border with Poland.

That rapacious logic was missing from Putin’s essay, but not from the Kremlin’s thinking. The final paragraphs should have set alarm bells ringing: ‘We will never allow our historical territories and people close to us living there to be used against Russia . . . we are one people.’

Within days of invading he found out how misinformed he was, but the price for his delusion and violence was many tens of thousands of lives lost, 6.8 million refugees, and the return to Europe of imperialism and changing borders by force.

With almost 200,000 Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders many observers thought it was a bluff. They were wrong. Most also said that if there was an invasion the Russians would roll over Ukraine in a matter of days. Wrong again.

The plan appeared to be to quickly reach Kyiv from the north, and the River Dnieper from the east. Once the land corridor connecting Crimea to the Donbas was secure, the Russians in the south could turn westwards and fight their way to Odesa. If Ukraine’s most important port fell, the country would essentially be landlocked. The drive to the Russianspeaking breakaway Moldovan province of Transnistria would be easy.

The reality was very different. It showed the ineptitude and brutality of the Russian forces and the resilience of Ukraine. After a fierce fight, a humiliating withdrawal from the Kyiv region followed. When the Ukrainians entered the suburb of Bucha they found the bodies of murdered civilians lying in the streets, evidence of torture and mass graves. The Europeans and Americans were shocked into action. Weapons and money slowly began to arrive in Ukraine, although there was no talk of sending troops.

The Russians were in disarray, but sheer weight of numbers meant that by June they had occupied about 20 per cent of Ukraine. Having failed in the quick war, they settled in for the long haul along a 600-mile front line.

President Biden visited Kyiv and vowed that the USA would always have Ukraine’s back, while Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of Russian mercenary organisation the Wagner Group, tried to stab Putin’s. In 2023, frustrated at Russia’s progress, he called on his private army to advance on Moscow. The Kremlin quickly brokered a deal assuring his safety but, unsurprisingly, he died in a plane crash two months later. The year ended with Putin annexing parts of the Donbas and ordering the call-up of 300,000 reservists. In 2023 there was a steady flow of Western military equipment into Ukraine, although often of a standard below what the high command said they needed. The country’s grain, blocked in Black Sea ports, was allowed to leave, ending a potential global food security crisis.

In 2024 the possibility of victory for Putin’s Plan B came into focus. Plan B was to win a war of attrition both on the battlefields and in the diplomatic corridors of power and hope that Donald Trump returned to the White House and pulled US support for Ukraine. With Russia having a four-to-one advantage in manpower, and a five-to-one advantage in shells fired, a Ukraine detached from its Western backers would lose. Western support had begun to waver the previous autumn after Ukraine’s major summer counter-offensive had failed. The thinking in many capitals was ‘We gave them a lot. It didn’t work. Why keep giving?’

This was exactly what the Russians were hoping. The British, Swedes, Balts, Czechs and others were still firm in their support, but France vacillated, Germany dithered, and Spain, Italy and Hungary were among those hinting that the time had come for Ukraine to sue for peace. Everything rested on the Americans and the 2024 election.

In August, with the clock ticking, the Ukrainians made an audacious move, sending several thousand troops into Russia’s Kursk region and taking 500 square miles of territory. Kyiv needed a victory narrative, and land to swap for a potential peace deal. As winter set in the Russian counter-offensive got under way, with 50,000 soldiers, backed by several thousand North Korean troops, battering away at Ukraine’s marginal gains.

Kyiv watched the US election closely. The Americans had given more weapons and money than the European countries combined. Without them Ukraine could not have fought on through the first two and a half years. What was in it for Washington? Support for democracy, and . . . US interests.

Ukraine is the biggest country based entirely in Europe and has a long coastline on the strategically important Black Sea. Washington knew that a total Ukrainian defeat could mean Russian troops on the Polish border and in Odesa. As NATO’s senior member, the USA would be required to respond by deploying extra forces and equipment in the European theatre just at the time when it wanted to focus on the Pacific. Russian troops hard up against NATO’s borders would also increase the possibility of conflict. Since the First World War part of America’s foreign policy in Europe has been to ensure that no single power dominates the continent and becomes powerful enough to threaten the USA. This was partially behind America’s entry into both world wars, and why it stayed in Europe for the Cold War.

Joe Biden bought that argument, Donald Trump didn’t. Within days of his crushing victory in November 2024 it was clear that most of his senior cabinet appointees were on the same page. With just nine weeks left in his presidency Biden responded, finally allowing Ukraine to fire long-range missiles into Russia in a last bid to shore it up ahead of potential peace talks. He was continuing a pattern begun early in the war in which Ukrainian requests for assets such as tanks, jet fighters and medium-range missiles were refused for months on end for fear of provoking Moscow and then granted, but only after Russia had inflicted massive damage on the country.

For the Trump team the Indo-Pacific region was the focus, Europe was secondary, to some it was just an afterthought. President Trump wanted to end the war to save money, replenish the USA’s military arsenal, meet the rising challenge from