Europe’s shield protecting it from the restless Middle East.

The case regarding Russia is more problematical in the short run, but in the longer term the pursuit of a similarly positive and far-reaching strategic engagement is becoming historically timely. Admittedly, Russia, twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, still remains undecided about its identity, nostalgic about its past, and simultaneously overreaching in some of its aspirations. Its efforts to create “a common economic space” (under the aegis of the Kremlin) in the area of the former Soviet Union naturally worry the newly independent post-Soviet states. The dominant elements in its power elite still maneuver to dilute transatlantic links, and they still resent Central Europe’s desire for deep integration within the European Union and its defensive membership in NATO, even while also worrying about China’s growing power on the very edge of Russia’s mineral-rich and sparsely populated Far East.

At the same time, however, the increasingly politically important Russian middle class is evidently adopting the life-styles of the West while a growing number of Russia’s intellectual community speak more openly of their desire for Russia to be a part of the modern West. The fundamental question “what is the right relationship between modernization and democratization?” has started to permeate informal debates within the country’s upper strata, including even some segments of the top political elite entrenched in the Kremlin. A growing number of Russians are beginning to realize that a fundamental change in Russia’s relationship with the West may be in the country’s vital long-range interest.

Simultaneously, uncertainty regarding Asia’s geopolitical stability is rising in the eastern half of Eurasia. Unless deliberately constrained, the competitive geopolitics of the newly energized Asia could become ominously reminiscent of conflicts in the West over the last two hundred years. China’s ambitions are beginning to surface more openly, with nationalistic assertiveness increasingly undermining the carefully cultivated veil of official modesty, national moderation, and historic patience. Its competition for regional preeminence with Japan and with India is still primarily in the diplomatic and economic realms, but the availability of effective military power—and perhaps the willingness to use it—is becoming a relevant consideration in respective geopolitical calculations. Any use of force could become especially ominous in the rivalry between the nuclear-armed China and India, especially over the also nuclear-armed Pakistan. The rising new East could then, indeed, become quite turbulent, just as the old West once was.

As noted earlier, the southwest region of the awakened eastern part of Eurasia is already in a potentially contagious crisis. The new “Global Balkans”[18] embracing the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—where the United States is the only major external power to have become militarily involved—risks expanding to Central Asia, with violence already intensifying in parts of Russia’s Muslim- inhabited North Caucasus. Every one of the new Central Asian states is potentially vulnerable to internal violence, each of them is insecure, and all of them desire more direct access to the outside world while seeking to avoid either Russian or Chinese domination. The now politically awakened Eurasia as a whole thus lacks a shared framework and its geopolitical stability is questionable.

Over one hundred years ago the path-breaking geopolitical thinker, Harold Mackinder, identified Eurasia as the key “world-island” and concluded that “who rules the world-island, commands the world.” In all of world history, only three ruthless heads of powerful military machines came even close to achieving such “rule.” Genghis Khan almost did so by relying on his remarkable military skills, but his conquest of the “world-island” ended on the edge of Central Europe. He could not overcome the consequences of distance and of numbers, and consequently the numerically thin Mongol veneer of his “empire” was assimilated before long into the initially conquered populations.

Hitler, having conquered Europe, also came close to achieving from the opposite direction a similar outcome, and might have won if the Nazi invasion of Russia had been accompanied by a Japanese attack on Russia from the East. Then, after Hitler’s defeat, with Soviet forces entrenched west of Berlin in the center of Europe, Stalin actually came the closest when his trans-Eurasian Sino-Soviet bloc, which emerged as a result of Communist victory in China, attempted to drive America out of Korea. However, the possibility of Communist control over the “world- island” faded rapidly as NATO was organized in the West and as the Sino-Soviet bloc in the East split after Stalin’s death in a bitter and divisive feud.

Given the rise of the newly dynamic but also internationally complex and politically awakened Asia, the new reality is that no one power can any longer seek—in Mackinder’s words—to “rule” Eurasia and thus to “command” the world. America’s role, especially after having wasted twenty years, now has to be both subtler and more responsive to Eurasia’s new realities of power. Domination by a single state, no matter how powerful, is no longer possible, especially given the emergence of new regional players. Accordingly, the timely and needed objective of a deliberate longer-term effort by America should be broad geopolitical trans-Eurasian stability based on increasing accommodation among the old powers of the West and the new powers of the East.

In essence, the pursuit of the foregoing objective will require US engagement in shaping a more vital and larger West while helping to balance the emerging rivalry in the rising and restless East. This complex undertaking will call for a sustained effort over the next several decades to connect, in transformative ways, through institutions like the EU and NATO, both Russia and Turkey with a West that already embraces both the EU and the United States. Steady but genuine progress along that axis could infuse a sense of strategic purpose into a Europe increasingly threatened by a slide into destabilizing and divisive geopolitical irrelevance. At the same time, America’s strategic engagement in Asia should entail a carefully calibrated effort to nurture a cooperative partnership with China while deliberately promoting reconciliation between China and US-allied Japan, in addition to expanding friendly relations with such key states as India and Indonesia. Otherwise, Asian rivalries in general or fear of a dominant China in particular could undermine both Asia’s new potential world role and its regional stability. The task ahead is to translate a long-term geopolitical vision into a historically sound and politically attractive strategy that promotes realistically the revival of the West and facilitates the stabilization of the East within a wider cooperative framework.

2: A LARGER AND VITAL WEST

The earlier discussions of “The Receding West ” and of “The Waning of the American Dream” were not exercises in historical inevitability. A renewal of American domestic dynamism is possible, while America, by working purposefully with Europe, can shape a larger and more vital West. The point of departure for such a long- term effort is recognition of the historical reality that the Europe of today is still unfinished business. And it will remain so until the West in a strategically sober and prudent fashion embraces Turkey on more equal terms and engages Russia politically as well as economically. Such an expanded West can help anchor the stability of an evolving Eurasia, as well as revitalize its own historic legacy.

The dividing line between Europe on the one hand and Russia and Turkey on the other is a geographical abstraction. Neither the rivers Bug (separating Poland from Belarus) nor Prut (separating Romania from Ukraine) nor Narva (separating Estonia from Russia) define the natural geographic and cultural outer limits of Europe’s East. Nor, for that matter, do the Ural Mountains located deep within Russia, customarily cited in geography books as delineating Europe from Asia. Even less meaningful in that regard is the Strait of Bosporus, which links the Mediterranean and Black Seas, with the Turkish metropolis Istanbul said to be located in “Europe” but with the city’s extension across the narrow passage of seawater (as well as the main part of Turkey’s territory) said to be in “Asia.”{6}

More misleading still are the conventional notions of the cultural boundaries of Europe. In terms of lifestyle, architecture, and social habits, Vladivostok in Russia’s far east is more European than Kazan (the capital of Tatarstan) located thousands of miles west of Vladivostok in the “European” part of the Russian Federation. Ankara, the capital of Turkey located on the Anatolian Plain and thus geographically in Asia, is as thoroughly a European city as Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, located more than half a thousand miles further east but said to be in Europe.

Ultimately, contemporary Russia and, to a lesser degree, Turkey are separated from Europe neither by geography nor by lifestyle but rather by an ambivalence—difficult to define precisely—regarding what is politically and culturally distinctive to the current postimperial West: its shared combination of residual spiritual beliefs and

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