Federico Bordonaro

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.

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.

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.

(more…)

Interview for RFERL on the hypothesis of a gas cartel.

It’s enough to send a chill, figuratively and literally, down the spines of energy consumers: the creation of a cartel of natural-gas producers. It would be an organization akin to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the body so many blame when the price of gasoline starts to rise.

“A gas cartel, should it see the light, would mean that producer countries would augment their power even more and that they could have a stronger say on gas prices,” says Federico Bordonaro, a senior analyst with equilibri.net, an Italian-based analytical group specializing in risk assessment.

A “New Great Game” of Geopolitical Control Surfaces in Russia’s Old Backyard. An analysis written by Nadya Ivanova for Circle of Blue, with bits of my interview on the energy issues of the South Caucasus and Caspian regions.

Last December, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) completed an intensive seven-year project to understand the ecological dynamics of the Kura-Araks. NATO convened scientists from Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan to propose technical solutions for ecological restoration and cleanup.

The campaign, which also involved technical experts from the United States and several European Union (EU) nations, aimed to be more than a classic environmental initiative. Instead, NATO and OSCE focused on the river basin and its cleanup as a tool for using science, collaboration and strategic investment to design solutions to equally important competition over energy and diplomacy that might thrust the South Caucasus into an international conflict.
Reducing those conflicts is essential to cleaning up the river basin and to resolving the important issues that wrack the strategic region, where the EU, U.S. and Russian spheres of influence coalesce over politics, energy and diplomacy.

Bruce Pannier writes on Gazprom for RFERL — the analysis contains bits of my interview for the Radio:

It’s been a tough year for Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled gas giant.

Just a year ago, Russia’s state-owned gas giant Gazprom was the third-most valuable company in the world, worth some $350 billion. Now, it has shrunk by two-thirds to about $120 billion, declining to the world’s 40th-largest company, according to “The Moscow Times” on May 27.

And the company appears set to fall another notch or two, thanks to a ruling by Russian antimonopoly authorities on June 2 that Gazprom must share its export pipelines with independent gas producers.

An interview for RFERL on the evolution of European-Central Asian diplomatic and commercial ties.

Just a few years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine an official from Turkmenistan visiting Brussels to discuss exporting natural gas directly to the EU.

But when Turkmen Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov meets with European Union officials in Brussels, discussing his country’s participation in projects to bring natural gas to Europe will be high on his agenda.

Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have traditionally been the most resistant of the Central Asian states to Western influence, but both are increasingly showing an interest in breaking that mold.

“The number of people who consider French membership of the EU a good thing has fallen from a peak of 74 per cent in 1987 to 47 per cent last year”, Ben Hall reports in today’s Financial Times. “The reluctance of the parties to debate during the campaign reflects how French enthusiasm for Europe has soured into cynicism and indifference in the past decade”.
Such a process, however, is unfolding since some years. In 2005, after French voters rejected the proposed E.U. Constitution, this author wrote that political Europe was experiencing a paradox, in which “sovereignism” was gaining influence - particularly in France:

The historical context in which pro-sovereignty movements are gaining strength is a fairly paradoxical one. For instance, it is incorrect to say that “Europe does not exist” due to the result of the recent referenda, an argument that many in this movement are making. On the contrary, the European main states such as France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium — the “core” of the integration process — obtained, at least formally, the strategic goals they had set in the early nineties. The E.U. now has a common currency, functioning political institutions like the European Council, the European Commission, and the European Parliament, in addition to security and defense assets such as the Political Committee for Security, the European Headquarters, a secretary general for foreign policy, and even a Rapid Reaction Force.

At the same time, this complex political, economic and military framework does not work in the way some Europeanists dreamt it would, and the E.U. simply has not become what French visionary personalities such as former French President François Mitterrand wanted. In particular, today’s European Union is neither the source of a distinctly European vision of world politics, nor the political tool necessary to project French power in the age of globalization. If the international system is shifting from unipolarity to a proto-multipolar structure, it is because of China’s rise as a great power, and not because of the European Union. The E.U.’s dramatic division in front of the Iraqi crisis of 2002-2003 was the crucial proof of its weakness as a real global player.

The European paradox is exactly this: the E.U.’s official goals have been reached, but the outcome is quite different from what its main supporters expected 15 years ago.

Moreover, French citizens perceived that an enlarged Europe was not a multiplier of power and prosperity, but a huge market that exacerbated competition, wiping out the welfare state, i.e., the core of the so-called “European social model”.

Since then, the E.U. and the most pro-European parties in France have been unable to reverse the process. Enthusiasm for European integration has remained weak. However, no real alternative to the current path of integrationist policies has been effectively proposed. If the supranational model is in a crisis, so is the “Europe of nation states” advocated by the sovereignists. As a consequence, European elections are perceived as a not-so-crucial event by French (and European) citizens.

E’ uscito il mio saggio su La Russia e l’Estero Vicino: da Eltsin a Putin, per la rivista “Ricerche Storiche”, edita da Polistampa.
Uno stralcio dal paragrafo introduttivo:

L’idea dell’esistenza di un “estero vicino russo” nasce in concomitanza con la fine dell’Unione Sovietica. È direttamente connessa al problema di quali rapporti politico-diplomatici, strategico-militari ed economici instaurare fra la Federazione Russa e gli altri stati ex sovietici.
L’espressione ближнее зарубежье (Blizhneye Zarubezh’e) è composta dall’aggettivo blizhneye (vicino) e dal sostantivo zarubezh’e che significa letteralmente “oltre confine”. In altri termini, designa “i paesi oltre confine ma prossimi”, in contrapposizione all’estero “lontano”. In un articolo del 15 gennaio del 1992 sul quotidiano Izvestiya si menzionava non a caso un “estero a portata di mano” .
L’allora ministro degli esteri russo, Andrei Kozyrev, nell’agosto del 1992 si espresse in modo critico verso ogni tentazione di Mosca di “minacciare” i paesi ex sovietici nel “cosiddetto estero vicino” , in particolare in Ucraina, al fine di mantenerli strettamente legati alla Federazione Russa.
Da parte sua, un osservatore statunitense della nascita del concetto di “Estero Vicino”, Paul Goble del Carnegie Endowment, affermò nel gennaio del 1992 che l’espressione rivestiva “un significato politico ben più che geografico o demografico” e indicava soprattutto “la difficoltà” dei politici russi a considerare i paesi ex sovietici come nazioni “realmente indipendenti”. Ancor più importante, secondo Goble e altri analisti americani, era il fatto che le repubbliche ex sovietiche appena nate fossero l’oggetto della “pretesa russa” di alcuni speciali diritti in campo politico ed economico. In altri termini, il concetto di Estero Vicino designava la volontà di Mosca di delimitare una vera e propria “sfera d’influenza” russa post-sovietica.
Al contempo, cominciava però ad affacciarsi anche un secondo significato di Estero Vicino, più geografico e demografico, ma anch’esso strettamente legato a quello politico: l’espressione avrebbe indicato le repubbliche ex sovietiche dove vivevano ancora circa 25 milioni di russi , che Mosca avrebbe dovuto “difendere” dalla pressione dei nuovi nazionalismi.
Emergevano quindi, già nel 1992, tutti gli elementi che avrebbero reso il concetto di Estero Vicino un perno della nuova politica estera russa: quelli politici, connessi sia alla questione dello status di grande potenza russa, sia al problema della sicurezza strategica del nuovo stato; quelli economici, con la definizione di nuovi rapporti commerciali ed energetici; e quelli legati all’identità russa e al rapporto fra Mosca e le comunità russe oltre confine.

Article written for ExploringGeopolitics.

Spykman’s in-depth analysis of geography’s political-strategic significance constitutes an excellent introduction to the methodology of geopolitics.
. . . Probably, the most interesting part of Spykman’s theoretical geopolitics is the one devoted to the significance of location for a state’s power potential. “The location of a state may be described from the point of view of world-location, that is, with reference to the land masses and oceans of the world as a whole, or from the point of view of regional location, that is, with reference to the territory of other states and immediate surroundings. The former description will be in terms of latitude, longitude, altitude, and distance from the sea; the latter will be in terms of relations to surroundings areas, distances, lines of communication, and the nature of border territory . . . “A complete description of the geographic location of a state will include […] an analysis of the meaning” of the facts of location, since while the latter “do not change, the significance of such facts changes with every shift in the means of communication, in routes of communication, in the technique of war, and in the centers of world power, and the full meaning of a given location can be obtained only by considering the specific area in relation to two systems of reference: a geographic system of reference from which we derive the facts of location, and a historical system of reference by which we evaluate those facts”.

Analysis by Bruce Pannier for RFERLwith bits of an interview of mine.

I wrote in 2005 that Pakistan’s geopolitical importance was on the rise. I considered mainly Pakistan’s position (a strategic link between the Middle East’s Arabian Sea region, South Asia, and Central Asia) and its value for China and the US from a security point of view, especially in terms of maritime power and strategic route. Especially the US cannot afford to see Pakistan disintegrate, because such a development would likely trigger a shift in the region geopolitical orientation (from a pro-Western to an unknown but probably anti-Western alignment).
I also considered the Pakistan-India problem to be a key issue: Pakistan’s destabilization may add to Indo-Pakistani tensions and could potentially trigger a new conflict, which, because of the two states’s nuclear capabilities, is among the most dangerous ones in today’s international relations.

Now, four years later, it is clear that the possibility of a progressive disintegration of Pakistan is to be taken seriously.
In the early 2000s, US geopolitical analyst and geographer Saul B. Cohen launched the hypothesis of a “Pashtunistan” taking shape as a result of US destruction of the Taliban regime and serious instability in Pakistan’s remote regions. This would have triggered a major geopolitical change in Central-South Asia, with Afghanistan and Pakistan de facto disintegrating.
The hypothesis might have seemed too bold, but some of the world’s most important newspapers now utilize the concept.

The situation is confused and it’s not at all clear if it is possible to speak about a “talibanization” of the country. What is sure is that Balochistan, Waziristan, and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas are caught in a struggle, in which both ethno-religious and territorial aspects are concerned.

Pepe Escobar wrote on May 9 for Asia Times that

Balochistan is totally under the radar of Western corporate media. But not the Pentagon’s. An immense desert comprising almost 48% of Pakistan’s area, rich in uranium and copper, potentially very rich in oil, and producing more than one-third of Pakistan’s natural gas, it accounts for less than 4% of Pakistan’s 173 million citizens. Balochs are the majority, followed by Pashtuns. Quetta, the provincial capital, is considered Taliban Central by the Pentagon […].

For the US, the Afghan operation has become the “AfPak” issue. Max Hastings, in today’s Financial Times, explains the problem clearly:

It is frustrating for the US government to be making strategy for a battlefield while knowing that the strategic outcome will be decided on another one. The current redeployments in Afghanistan are taking place in the knowledge that Pakistan matters much more. The most important change in the thinking of Washington and its allies over the past year derives from recognition they are fighting the wrong war, or at least running a sideshow.

The purpose of the 2001 US invasion was to deny sanctuary to terrorists based in Afghanistan. Yet al-Qaeda today plays only a marginal role in that country, while being deeply rooted in Pakistan. Western forces find themselves engaged in an ill-defined campaign to stabilise Afghan tribal society, while being unable to use troops across the border, where most Pakistanis are bitterly hostile to the US. […]

The most obvious feature of the Afghan war in the months ahead is that it will become, in the phrase of indiscreet US soldiers, “re-Americanised”. The Americans perceive Nato as lacking both means and will to grip the situation. The most important priority for Washington is to determine exactly what its soldiers hope to accomplish, rather than making it up as they go along.

The result is that Pakistan is even more a geopolitical crux today than it was four years ago. It has incresingly attracted US military energies from the Afghan theatre. It has also forced India to re-focus its attention on the Pakistani militants issue after the Mumbay attacks. And it will take a long time before the situation becomes clearer. Expect the AfPak problem to dominate the US foreign policy agenda for the rest of this year and to impact the debate on NATO’s future.

Interview for RFERL.

The European Union repeatedly emphasized unity in the wake of vows at a major meeting late last year to pursue a new energy policy.

Pledges of solidarity to develop a unified energy grid and an end to dependence on Russian gas were renewed again in January, when member states found themselves frantically meeting again when a Russia-Ukraine dispute disrupted natural-gas supplies to a freezing Central and Southeastern Europe.

There has been broad agreement on the need for a diversification of suppliers and new import routes. But divisions quickly emerge when the topic turns to specific projects, and critics suggest national and private interests threaten to eclipse the exigencies of the EU as a whole.

The fate of the Nabucco gas-pipeline project is arguably a case in point.

Interview for RFERL.

Two energy conferences are taking place this week — one in Bulgaria, the other in Turkmenistan — that could result in major decisions being made on pressing issues surrounding European imports.

State officials and business representatives in both Sofia and Ashgabat will be discussing how to reliably transit energy resources — mainly natural gas — from locations in Asia to markets in Europe.

There are subtle differences in the agendas of the two conferences, but both will be focused on divining which pipelines will transport gas to Europe, and from which countries the gas will come.

The meetings come as Europe is attempts to break free from its heavy dependency on Russian-controlled energy supplies and troublesome transit routes that pass through Belarus and Ukraine.