Defender Europe 2020: Washington's strategic motivations

(To Tiziano Ciocchetti)
11/03/20

The NATO Defender Europe exercise, which will be held in Europe from April to May 2020, will involve 37.000 soldiers from 18 nations belonging to the Alliance. approximately 33.000 vehicles and containers, and 450 armored vehicles will be used. About 100 rail transport will be used (thus reducing environmental pollution to a minimum) that will cross seven countries.

The goal of the great tutorial is to test the ability of Europe - with the significant US contribution of course - to react to a hostile act.

Many Europeans are wondering, these days, why, given the spread of the influenza virus across the continent, DEFENDER EUROPE is not canceled. At the same time, the most disparate theories about an imminent invasion of the territory of the Russian Federation by the forces of the Alliance are spreading on the web.

To clarify, about the reasons that push the Pentagon to show muscles especially in Eastern Europe, we believe it is necessary to expose, in summary terms, the geopolitical strategies that, from the post-war period to the present day, have characterized every Administration that has settled in the White House.

Washington's European strategic interest is centered on the geopolitical theories of the first half of the XNUMXth century, such as the theories of the British geographer Mackinder on the Heartland.

Mackinder (photo), in 1904, starts from the concept that the ideal condition is to be able to benefit from a central position; in this regard he postulates the existence of a pivot of the World (in fact Heartland) which, taking into account the land mass, should be placed in the continental part of Eurasia. The power that owns it actually controls World Island, that is, the European, Asian and African continents.

In the concept of geographical pivot of the story, exposed by Mackinder in the article "The whole world and how to win peace", published in July 1943 in the magazine Foreign Affairs, the heart of the world corresponds to Eurasia. In this vast region, according to the British geographer, the conditions exist for the development of a dynamic economic and military power endowed with a significant force.

Russia benefits from a key position in that it occupies, in the world, the same central strategic position as Germany in Europe: it can strike in all directions and be hit from all sides, except from the north.

Subdued by His British Majesty, whose navy then dominated the oceans (as the American one now dominates them), Mackinder's great fear was the political unification of the Eurasian continent. The reversal of the balance of powers in favor of the pivotal state, or its expansion on the Eurasian external lands, would guarantee this to the use of the great continental resources for a shipbuilding program: world domination would then be possible. This would happen if Germany formed an alliance with Russia.

His concern emerged evidently already in 1919 in Democratic Ideals and Reality: "What will become of the Maritime Powers if one day the great continent united politically to become the basis of an Invincible Armada?".

In this work he enlarges the area-pin, making it correspond to the borders that Russia would have occupied a few decades later. Mackinder indicated in Eastern Europe the object of all desires, first of all the Russian and German ones: "The origin of the Great War is a revolt of the Slavs against the Germans (...) because whoever dominates the largest island in the world controls the world".

The European isthmus was therefore to constitute the bridgehead of the Maritime Powers, which had to aim at the creation of new state formations to be placed between Germans and Slavs. In practice what the signatories of the Treaty of Versailles would have done, creating new states in Central and Balkan Europe.

Mackinder has managed to create a true school of thought, whose influence on the strategic thinking of politicians from large states is not to be underestimated, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries.

Such theories were criticized, albeit in a nuanced way, by Spykman, an American professor of international relations at Yale. Leader of the American geopolitical school, he asserted that: “The typical field of action of geopolitics will be the foreign policy of the state. Thanks to its own methods of analysis, it knows how to use geographic data (understood in their broadest meaning) to establish political behavior that allows to reach some legitimate objectives ".

Spykman rejects the land / sea opposition as the foundation of geopolitical reasoning. During the Great War England and Russia were allies; in the Second World War an alliance was seen again between a Maritime Power, the United States, and an earthly one, the USSR.

According to Spykman (Photo): “The Tsarist empire has always tried to grab possession of harbors in hot climates and has found the way blocked by the British Maritime Power that had spread along the Eurasian coast.
London's Imperial Policy was based on the maritime encirclement of the Eurasian mass, which depended on the predominance of its naval force on the maritime periphery. This position could be threatened by the appearance of a competitive naval power on the continental coast or by the penetration of Russian land forces to the sea ".

He points out that there has never really been a simple opposition between land power and sea power.

Spykman promotes the existence of a rimland, “Intermediate region between the Heartland and the surrounding seas ": therefore a coastal region, which constitutes the true pivotal area, and is the target of all conflicts between maritime and terrestrial powers. Mackinder's approach is reversed. Who dominates the rimland Eurasia dominates, those who dominate Eurasia have the fate of the world in their hands.

Spykman's theory of the maritime ring containing continental power has had and has a great influence on the development of American foreign policy. It was at the origin of the Containment strategy adopted by the United States during the Cold War: the political cohesion of the rimland (USA, Europe and island Asia) was to curb the expansionist aims of the Heartland (the Soviet bloc).

Even after the end of the Cold War, and with the entry of Eastern European countries into NATO, Spykman's geopolitical theories found a lot of space in the American administrations. This is why the DEFENDER EUROPE exercise represents one of the tools with which Washington stems the "expansionist ambitions" of the Kremlin and at the same time feeds the fear of encirclement inherent in the Russian soul.

Photo: US Army / web