Putin

In the event of turmoil and terrorism—homegrown or stimulated from without—following on the death of Kazakhstan’s leader, Putin, his modernized military now well tested in Ukraine and Syria, will have at least two good geopolitical reasons for incursion.

The first is connected with the ideas of the British geographer Halford Mackinder, who is revered and reviled as the creator of modern geopolitical theory: revered because of the pioneering quality of his ideas and reviled for making them too categorical and because the Nazis used them to justify their doctrine of lebensraum. Mackinder is known to Russian historians and the history-minded Putin for his theories, but also because he was British high commissioner for Russia in late 1919 and early 1920, traveling through the south of the country during the thick of the civil war, urging London to support the Whites against the Reds, for which, on his return to London in 1920, he was knighted.

Mackinder’s fame rests not on a grand opus but on “The Geographical Pivot of History,” an article published in the April 1904 issue of The Geographical Journal in London. He did, however, publish books in which he developed his theory of Europe, Asia, and Africa as one big “world island” surrounded by a “world ocean.” History was made in the world island, hence Mackinder’s famous formulation:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:

Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island:

Who rules the World-Island commands the World.

In his book The Revenge of Geography Robert Kaplan identifies the Heartland’s exact location:

“Kazakhstan is Mackinder’s Heartland.”

If Russia were in danger of becoming no more than China’s gas station and lumberyard, Putin would be sorely tempted to seize control of northern and eastern Kazakhstan. That would mean controlling the thousand-mile-long border with China, specifically with Xinjiang. The following political situation, whether genuine or concocted by Russia, could turn temptation into action:

The president of Kazakhstan suddenly dies. There is still no known successor chosen nor any mechanism in place to select one. Homegrown Islamists seize the moment to unleash terror in the cities and seize the considerable amount of weapons-grade uranium that Kazakhstan is known to possess. Feeling threatened as Christians, the ethnically Russian population of northern and eastern Kazakhstan calls on Moscow for help, and Moscow is only too glad to oblige. The world is presented with a stark choice: which flag will fly over the region—the white-blue-and-red of Russia or the black banner of ISIS?

The Islamists will also have used the moment to stir up China’s Uighurs, who after years of China’s “Strike hard” policy are ready to strike back. China will now depend on Russia to maintain border security to keep its energy imports and manufactured exports moving; it will also depend on Russia to cease the flow of arms to the Uighurs. The balance of power will have shifted significantly in Russia’s favor.

Chance, cunning, and the willingness to use force will have made Russia what it has so longed to be since the fall of the USSR—the equal of China and thus of the United States, one of a new Big Three, the Triumvirate that rules the World Island and the World Ocean, that is to say, the World.

PART SIX THE TWILIGHT OF PARANOIA

Everything that is connected with Russia and Orthodoxy is under attack. Everything connected with the empire is under attack. Russian history, Stalin and the family are under attack.

—ALEXANDER PROKHANOV

10 HOW VLADIMIR PUTIN LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE INTERNET

Russia is a military state and its destiny is to be the terror of the world.

—TSAR NICHOLAS I

A great paradox of Putin’s later reign is that as he moved away from the West after the events in Ukraine, he also began slowly, imperceptibly, to embrace the West’s defining modern invention, the Internet.