Federico Bordonaro

Excellent analysis written by Zaki Laidi in today’s Financial Times. Mainstream media and analysts incessantly repeated for more than 15 years that the world was unipolar, that globalization dynamics had replaced geopolitical ones, and that U.S. power was unassailable. Now, since some years, it has become almost “conventional wisdom” that the U.S. is in irreversible decline and that a multi-polar world is rapidly taking shape. Most analysts even count India and Brazil among the “great powers”, and many more define the EU a power-pole, notwithstanding the obvious fact that it is not a single geopolitical entity with a functioning foreign, security and defense policy. Laidi brilliantly sums it up.

Power is currently expressed in terms of three assets: material wealth, without which nothing is technically possible (the collapse of the Soviet Union is a case in point); strategic power, which implies the capacity to project force to one’s periphery and beyond; and, finally, what might be called the power instinct – that is, the will to weigh in on world affairs. This last can be through one’s ideas, capabilities or attractiveness.

The evolution in power relations is most palpable on the material front, even if, contrary to general wisdom, the shift in power from the west to Asia has been a relatively slow process. There are now four great economic centres of power: the US, Europe, China and Japan. They are very distantly followed by India, Brazil and Russia. However, it is important to note that Russia’s gross domestic product, for instance, accounts for only 1 per cent of global GDP, compared to a 22 per cent share for the US. This is a long way from economic multipolarity, which would require that the power of various centres should be roughly equivalent.
On the strategic front, the imbalance is even more striking: there is one military superpower that surpasses all the others by far (the US); a rising power (China); a power that lives on its past and can only maintain its rank by dint of its energy resources (Russia); and a plethora of middle-sized actors whose projection capacity remains very weak.

There is no evidence whatsoever of movement towards strategic multipolarity; aside from China, which has the will and the means, and Russia, which has the will but not necessarily the means, no credible aspiring global power has emerged. Brazil and India are certainly becoming stronger militarily. Their strategic ambitions will, nonetheless, remain regional for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, China’s ascendance might reinforce Japan’s strategic dependence on the US, notwithstanding any short-term rifts in Japanese-American relations.

[…]

Meanwhile, Europe runs up against the fact that it is not a state. The only influence it commands is a normative one, a capacity to shape the world through the diffusion of norms in global regulation – finance, environment, food security, and so on. This is far from negligible, but cannot make up for the lack of strategic power.

Leonard Hochberg, author of numerous authoritative essays on the impact of geography upon history and strategy, offers a brilliant analysis of Afghanistan’s geopolitics and its implications for U.S. strategy. Published by the Mackinder Forum, Hochberg’s article is a must-read for all those who wish to go beyond the news, at a time when Obama’s decisions on Afghanistan are making the Asian country the centre of global politics.

Article written by Kevin Whitelaw for the NPR Radio, with bits of an interview of this Author.

Homegrown Terrorist Risk

Publicly, U.S. officials have sought to downplay the risk from independent, homegrown terrorists.

“Homegrown Muslim extremists who have little if any connection to known terrorist organizations have not launched a successful attack in the United States,” Michael Leiter, who runs the National Counterterrorism Center, told Congress in September. “The handful of homegrown extremists who have sought to strike within the homeland since 9/11 have lacked the necessary tradecraft and capability to conduct or facilitate sophisticated attacks.”

But a recent case in Italy has some experts wondering whether radicalization patterns may be shifting, at least in Europe.

A Libyan man named Mohamed Game attacked an Italian army barracks in Milan on Oct.12 with an improvised explosive device similar to the one used to attack the London Underground in 2005. The bomb was poorly constructed, leaving the bomber seriously wounded and lightly injuring an Italian soldier.

Frederico Bordonaro, an Italian security analyst, says the case is important because Game and his two accomplices do not fit the typical profile of a homegrown terrorist.

“They were only moderately involved in local religious activities,” he writes in an upcoming article in the CTC Sentinel, a journal published by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “They have no experience fighting in wars, and they do not have criminal records. As in the case of two Moroccans arrested in December 2008, the three men formed a terrorist cell independently without logistical support of established organizations.”

At the same time, he agrees with U.S. intelligence officials that these independent extremists have, up to now, been less dangerous.

“I think it can be harder to detect and track, but that it’s not more effective than the more typical radicalization,” he said in an interview. “However, we shouldn’t underestimate the danger of ‘do-it-yourself’ terrorism.”

Max Hastings in today’s Financial Times says that, in spite of Vaclav Klaus’ recent signature of the Lisbon Treaty, the EU may confront a much more difficult crisis if — as expected — David Cameron will win British general elections later this year.

Gordon Brown on Monday contrasted his party’s commitment to Europe with Tory Euroscepticism, and it is hard to say he was unjust. Opposition leader David Cameron displayed considerable courage in his response to the EU Lisbon Treaty ratification, rejecting a referendum if he takes office next year. Reaction from the Tory right was muted. Its standard-bearers recognise the priority of an election victory, which would be imperilled by disunity.

Thereafter, however, Europe will become a serious issue for a future Cameron government. There will be relentless pressure from the Tory grassroots to loosen, if not break, bonds linking Britain to the EU.

The new Tory MPs will create the most Eurosceptic parliament since Britain’s 1972 entry into the Common Market. Public sentiment is at best tepid, and among a minority, pathologically hostile, in a way that transcends party and class boundaries.

Many look upon Europe as an obstacle to their security and prosperity. Arguments that, for all its flaws, the Union should be perceived as a historic success story make little impact. It is blamed for all manner of domestic social and economic difficulties, and perceived as a drain on British pockets. President Charles de Gaulle of France insisted the British are irredeemably anti-continental, and there are grounds for thinking he was right. […]
It is unlikely Britain will leave the EU, but highly plausible that Mr Cameron will sooner or later feel obliged to force a crisis on specific issues of sovereignty and jurisdiction, of which the outcome is anybody’s guess.

“The essence of war is violence, and moderation in war is imbecility”, wrote Lord Macaulay in 1831.
Does the nature of war change? Or does only its character do?
In light of the recent deterioration of the Afghan situation, it’s worth reading this piece written by Stanley Kober in the Guardian. It’s called “Misunderstanding modern war”.

America’s biggest mistake in Afghanistan and Iraq was to think its modern military would make winning easy
[…] in its overconfidence, the US overlooked several things.
Like Napoleon, it underestimated the resentment many people feel at foreign occupation.
Napoleon had also achieved a revolution in military affairs, and consequently he was exceptionally effective in defeating armies in battle. His invasion of Russia, culminating in the occupation of Moscow, seemed initially like a stunning triumph.
But the people did not submit, and he had to abandon Moscow. With his army in retreat, his allies deserted him. He lost the war and was sent into exile.
Napoleon thought the message of French democracy would be welcomed. When France began to send its armies abroad following the revolution, its leaders thought they would be greeted as liberators. “It will be a crusade for liberty,” confidently proclaimed one of its leaders, Jacques-Pierre Brissot.
Not everyone was convinced. “No one loves armed missionaries,” responded Robespierre. But his caution, which proved prescient, was overruled.

There are two types of historians: the vivid historian or butterfly and the technical historian or caterpillar. The former believes that complete history is neither possible nor desirable. Selection is necessary, and proper selection distinguishes good historians from bad ones. Facts are unimportant in themselves but are used to find underlying principles. The latter puts a premium on the discovery of new facts, letting interpretation take care of itself. While the technical historian’s truths are too small, the vivid historian’s truth is too big. The differences between the two types, in part temperamental, are also based on the periods in which they work; non-modern historians tend to be technical and modern historians vivid because the former are faced with a scarcity of sources, the latter with an overabundance.

Ihor Ševčenko, Two Varieties of Historical Writing, “History and Theory”, 8, October 1969, 332-345.

Apparently, classical geopolitical dynamics are active, even at times when cooperation and transparency prevail over conflict between historically rival nations.
Therefore, the following news reported by the Telegraph and by other world media are not so “incredible” as one may think at first sight. However, Europe should take into consideration that both the Baltic and the Black Sea areas need special attention in the following years…

Russia has provoked outrage in Poland by simulating an air and sea attack on the country during military exercises.

Documents obtained by Wprost, one of Poland’s leading news magazines, said the exercise was carried out in conjunction with soldiers from Belarus. The manoeuvres are thought to have been held in September and involved about 13,000 Russian and Belarusian troops.

Poland, which has strained relations with both countries, was cast as the “potential aggressor”.

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Disponibile online e in libreria.

Questo volume presenta al lettore italiano i principali autori del pensiero geopolitico anglosassone dalle origini ai giorni nostri, attraverso l’analisi dei testi teorici e della loro influenza politico-culturale. Particolare attenzione è rivolta al pensiero dei classici (Mahan, Mackinder, Spykman) e a quello dei loro eredi nel periodo dalla Guerra Fredda. Infine, lo studio prende in esame le diverse scuole scaturite dalla rinascita della disciplina, in tutto il mondo anglofono, nel tardo Novecento.

Analysis written for the CTC Sentinel. The October 2010 issue can be downloaded in PDF format here.

[…] findings show that what initially appeared to be the work of a lone wolf or of a totally independent cell may instead be the act of a small unit linked to a wider network.

[…] A possible conclusion is that a new type of terrorist model is taking shape in Europe. It is in the form of several small, independent cells whose main “fuel” is a militant ideology spread mainly through the internet, which try to target a variety of civilian and military sites, apparently without an overall strategy and unified command.

Interesting commentary written by Reuters’ analyst Paul Taylor:

Turkey’s bid to join the European Union is fading away with surprisingly little drama because investors no longer see the prospect of accession as an essential policy anchor.
But EU leaders should keep Ankara’s entry negotiations alive on the back burner rather than trying to engage Ankara on alternatives to membership, as French President Nicolas Sarkozy would like to do.
In a version of the old Soviet workers’ joke, “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work,” the buzz on Turkey in the European Commission’s enlargement department is, “they pretend they’re reforming and we pretend we want them”.

Since too many years, EU rotating presidencies simply pass the buck on the next one when it comes to Turkey’s accession bid. However, in the last couple of years the issue has been discussed less heatly than it was before.
While Europe may choose to “indirectly” exhaust Turkey’s patience on the bid issue, it also fears that Ankara might turn less Western-oriented, as this analysis explains:

For decades, Turkey was a junior player in the West’s Cold War alliance, run by military generals; now it has its own voice and enough clout to spar at times with its NATO partners.
Despite harsh rhetoric, Turkish pragmatism has kept military business with Israel largely intact. Israel is involved in two major military projects — tank and fighter plane upgrades — worth more than US$1 billion in Turkey. The Turkish military has also bought Israeli drones to help fight Kurdish rebels, whose strength has waned since their heyday in the 1990s.
“Relations between Israel and Turkey are strategic and decades-old,” said Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. “Despite the ups and downs, Turkey continues to be a key player in our region. We shouldn’t be drawn into frenzied statements about it.”
Alon Liel, who was Israel’s No. 1 diplomat in Turkey in the 1980s, described the situation as a “crisis” and said Israel had received “very harsh signals” from an increasingly assertive government.
“Today there is a new foreign policy that doesn’t rely only on the West. They see themselves as a player in many regional circles,” he said. “All this assertiveness in the region gives Turkey a self-confidence that allows it to be tougher to us.”

Interview for RFERL quoted by Brian Whitmore in his article on the Azeri-Turkish gas row:

Azerbaijan has apparently decided to play its energy card.

As much of the world applauded Turkey’s historic rapprochement with Armenia last week, Azerbaijan felt left out in the cold and abandoned by its closest ally.

Baku had argued strenuously that a deal to reestablish relations between Ankara and Yerevan should not be signed while Armenia continued to occupy Nagorno-Karabakh, and it threatened to take unspecified countermeasures if one was.

Speaking at a nationally televised cabinet meeting on October 16, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev revealed one of those steps: “It is not a secret to anyone that for many years Azerbaijan has been selling its gas to Turkey for one-third of market prices.”

Aliyev added: “What state would agree to sell its natural resources for 30 percent of world market prices, especially under current conditions? This is illogical.”

E’ in uscita per Guerini e Associati la mia monografia sulla geopolitica anglo-americana dalle origini ai nostri giorni.

Dalla quarta di copertina:

La disciplina geopolitica si occupa dell’influenza della geografia sul carattere politico degli Stati, sulla loro storia e sulle loro istituzioni, e soprattutto sulle loro relazioni politico-strategiche. È anche, però, il frutto di una cultura e di una visione del mondo influenzate dalle rappresentazioni geopolitiche. In quanto tale, la riflessione geopolitica risente inevitabilmente degli interessi nazionali e diviene ispiratrice di «grandi strategie».
Comprendere la tradizione geopolitica anglo-americana è quindi importante per l’analisi della politica estera statunitense e delle strategie della NATO. Ciò è tanto più vero alle soglie del secondo decennio del XXI secolo, in una fase in cui Washington e l’asse euro-atlantico, seppure indubbiamente dominanti sul piano tecnologico-militare, sono più che mai condizionati dai mutamenti geopolitici in atto, dall’Eurasia orientale al Medio Oriente, dall’America latina all’Africa.
Questo volume presenta al lettore italiano i principali autori del pensiero geopolitico anglosassone dalle origini ai giorni nostri, attraverso l’analisi dei testi teorici e della loro influenza politico-culturale. Particolare attenzione è rivolta al pensiero dei classici (Mahan, Mackinder, Spykman) e a quello dei loro eredi nel periodo dalla Guerra fredda. Infine, lo studio prende in esame le diverse scuole scaturite dalla rinascita della disciplina, in tutto il mondo anglofono, nel tardo Novecento.

Very interesting paragraph taken from the annual “Strategic Survey” published by London’s IISS. Every now and then, someone asserts that nation-states are dead and geopolitics obsolete. Now, almost in the year 2010, can we say that these fancy predictions were accurate? The answer is a resounding NO.

Moving into 2010, many of the ambitious foreign-policy agendas and practices established by Western powers in the previous decade and a half appear in retreat. What appetite will there be for the ‘nation-building’ projects that were thought at once strategically necessary and morally desirable? The efforts in Iraq are bound to become modest. Those in Afghanistan, especially as the economic crisis continues and the magnitude of the challenge becomes ever more evident, will naturally become minimalist, at least in comparison to the original design. New projects seem unlikely to be undertaken and would have trouble garnering public support except in the most exceptional of circumstances. What appeals for humanitarian intervention will be answered? The so-called ‘responsibility to protect’ has been advanced as an international imperative, though often with Western impetus, in the face of acts of genocide or equivalent natural tragedies. A sense of natural human charity persists even in times of grave economic crisis. But tragedies in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere have not resulted in the concerted international action for which so many campaigners have pleaded. The static or declining military budgets of European powers place limits on expeditionary capacities already stretched by operations thought to be of strategic vital national interest. Rising powers in Asia, and elsewhere, are still more reluctant to ‘interfere in the internal affairs’ of others. The survivability of doctrines like the responsibility to protect and humanitarian intervention will depend on countries outside the West adopting them more fully than has heretofore been evident.

The intellectual habit in the West has recently become to align national or alliance strategic interests with the delivery of a global public good. It may be that budgetary constraints and the disillusions of recent experience will inspire more political leaders to move from the poetic towards the more prosaic end of the strategic spectrum: defining goals more crisply in terms of clear national interest rather than acts of wider strategic charity. Emerging countries may need to move in the other direction and find some way to define the advance of a wider public good as in their national interest. Rising powers, if they are truly to rise, will only achieve genuine prominence if they are to shape the wider order in which they live. This rebalancing will take time, and may not have wholly beneficial effects. In some areas, like climate change, it may be that Western powers will continue to provide the impetus for an effective global regime, though one will not emerge without key participation from the bigger rising powers. But other causes will need champions from emerging power centres. As time passes, the limitations on Western and US foreign and security policy may become more evident. Domestically Obama may have campaigned on the theme ‘yes we can’; internationally he may increasingly have to argue ‘no we can’t’.

Moldova Urges Russian Troops to Quit Rebel Region

Moldova’s new Western-leaning leadership, in an early challenge to Moscow, said on Thursday it would press Russia to withdraw its soldiers from the country’s breakaway Transdniestria region.

Russia has a peacekeeping force of around 1,200 soldiers stationed since 1992 in the rebel territory, a mainly Russian-speaking sliver of land bordering Ukraine.

The context is fluid. Transnistria, together with Crimea, is one of the potential flashpoints in Eastern Europe. Let’s see how this develops and what ramifications it may cause for the WBSR.

In light of this week’s decision by the Obama Administration to scrap U.S. plans for an anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, and of NATO Secretary Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s proposal of a possible joint U.S.-Russian-NATO missile shield, I re-post an analysis that I wrote for PINR with Dr. Giuseppe Anzera back in July 2006 on the ballistic missiles issue.

25 July 2006
‘‘Ballistic Missiles: A Crucial Strategic Issue for the United States and Europe'’

hile the mainstream media has covered the question of nuclear proliferation in recent years, ballistic missile proliferation is emerging as an increasingly crucial, yet less publicized, strategic issue. On July 4, for example, North Korea tested a Taepodong-2 missile. Five days later, India fired an Agni class missile. Both tests failed, but they signaled how enhanced missile technology will soon be available for these two states. While India is a solid democracy and is even courted by Washington as a new strategic partner, the same is not true for North Korea.

There are two fundamental aspects in the evolution process of today’s ballistic missiles. The first one is the effort made by so-called rogue states, such as North Korea and Iran, to upgrade their offensive capabilities quickly as a result of more powerful and longer range ballistic missiles. The second one is the different perceptions existing in the United States and the European Union about both offensive and defensive missile technologies. Such divergence, caused by historical and geostrategic issues, may hinder the birth of an integrated, transatlantic, missile defense system.

Historical Background

Ballistic missiles have been at the core of global security matters before, such as during the Cold War. In the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union gradually reached the conclusion that increasingly sophisticated anti-ballistic missile defense systems were responsible for bringing more instability to the global military balance since better defenses stimulated an offensive arms race to counter those defenses. Therefore, in 1972, Washington and Moscow signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (A.B.M.) treaty, widely considered as one of the pillars of global security agreements.

The A.B.M. treaty had been signed in a broader historical context when the two world powers were already engaged in a series of talks called the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (S.A.L.T.) aimed at limiting the number of strategic ballistic missiles possessed by the superpowers. According to such agreements, new Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (I.C.B.M.), as well as Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles (S.L.B.M.), could only be added to existing arsenals after older ones were eliminated.

The period between 1969 and 1972 set the stage for a new military balance that lasted until the end of the Cold War, notwithstanding a serious crisis in Soviet-American politico-strategic relations in the early 1980s as a result of the Reagan-sponsored Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I.), launched on March 26, 1983, when Reagan declared the S.D.I. to be consistent with the A.B.M. treaty. However, already in the 1990s, the altered geostrategic context as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union caused many U.S. strategists to rethink the missile defense issue.

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