After the attack on the Caliphate forces with the Caspian Sea fleet (see "Russia and Iran. The "new" axis takes off"), other Russian naval forces participate in the Syrian campaign. This time it's up to the cruise missiles of the Rostov on Don, new generation submarine positioned in the eastern Mediterranean.
The sense of action goes far beyond the strictly military meanings.
Let's go by degrees.
It is indisputable that the bombardment of the Isis positions from the sea summarizes three things.
First of all, that a land-based power such as Russia returns to exploit naval weapons systems in an operational sense. To a more general expansion program of the Navy, alongside a development of systems not only of strategic utility, as happened for decades in the former Soviet Navy, but also tactics. Accustomed to seeing (imagine more than anything else ...) mammoth submarines armed with ballistic missiles more than anything else suitable as an atomic deterrent in a logic of Cold War, we must take note of the evolution in the Russian military logic, in a few weeks able to show versatility in a sector like the naval sector, never been the spearhead of the Moscow armed forces.
The use of the submarine fleet is then the demonstration of an operating potential with new generation tools. Like any conflict, the Syrian campaign is also a showcase to show the ability and criticality of methods, technologies and potentials. On the Rostov on Don and the improved Kilo Class we refer to the sections and following the best practices Online Defense. We limit ourselves to saying that Russian enterprise and novelties have astonished observers.
Finally, the ease with which the Russian Navy has moved in theaters historically unfamiliar like the Mediterranean Sea must be considered. In the light of the Russian-Turkish crisis and the Bosphorus navigation constraints imposed by the Montreux Convention, the strong Russian political determination to use the military instrument is evident.
All these aspects alone are not enough to understand what is happening and what can be imagined in a not too distant future.
The campaign in Syria for the first time places the Russian armed forces in the face of a global goal or in any case external to the former Soviet space. The 2008 war in Georgia and the second Chechen campaign had affected areas of natural influence (in the case of Chechnya even inside the Federation). The military effort alongside Damascus is the prologue of a new system of balances that sets the foundation stone for the liquidation of the unipolar world inherited from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This does not imply a return to the world divided into blocks according to the Cold War patterns, essentially for two reasons:
-
the clash between ideologies is over
-
the Russian military revival does not equate to a return of Moscow to the role of planetary power
On this second point it is good to reflect. Managing a role of global hegemony proved impossible for the Soviet Union and was in fact the cause of the implosion. Strengthened by this experience, it is much more likely to imagine for the future a leaner Russia capable of political and military power "limited" to the Eurasian bloc. The attention of Moscow, no longer interested in peripheral scenarios in the name of ideological causes (all the wars and African guerrillas and Romance in the times of the Cold War), would be aimed at the space that the European Union reaches the Pacific, including the Black Sea and the Gulf South perch and arctic seas to the north, areas of significant strategic impact for Russia. The reintegration of the Crimea into the Federation in the 2014 and the recent deployment of S-300 and S-400 systems in the Arctic areas (Novaya Zemlya) must be read in this sense.
If this scenario is not very different from that of the tsarist Eurasia, we can imagine a world divided by areas of macro-regional influence, where the predominant geopolitical weight lies with the continental power or reference powers.
In this system of balances the involvement of nations like China, India, Brazil, Iran and South Africa is inevitable. In addition to the economic, geographical, cultural and demographic aspects, it is inevitable that the "promotion" also passes through the military instrument.
The role of the United States, a unilateral superpower from the 1991, is to be re-read on this principle and for the moment is not willing to fall back to new Monroe Doctrines with a 19th century flavor. On this basis it is even more urgent to understand the political future of the European Union, net of the rebirth of global powers which are now downgraded as the United Kingdom and France. The end of the Cold War and the monoblock of the last 25 years will impose courageous choices also on Germany and Japan, economic giants hidden so far behind the finger of the Second World War. Whatever the developments, one thing seems certain: the world to come is already begun.
(photo: TASS)
