Trump is creating the perfect storm to bring the United States back to the center of the world. A cyclone that aims to stop the advance, which seemed unstoppable, of new global players, first and foremost China. And it doesn't matter if the ones who pay the price are the balances or imbalances in the so-called world order, the alliances that seemed consolidated, the rule of law, the rules of civil coexistence, in short everything that arose from the dissolution of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. Now there is a new competitor that must be stopped and it is the People's Republic of China in cahoots, until now, with the Russian Federation.
It is more than evident that in recent years we have been witnessing an attack on the West carried out essentially with economic and diplomatic means, but also with brutal force, by a group of powers joined by more and more countries belonging to the so-called Global South and led, directly or indirectly, by the Chinese Dragon and Moscow. The analysis of those conflicts leads us to identify a well-defined area of the world, the theatre of that attempt still in progress. This is the rimland classical (the one theorized by Spykman), which includes Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, the South and East China Sea up to the Bering Strait. According to that theory, whoever secures control of the rimland has world domination.
In fact, it is precisely along this disputed area that the powers constituting theHeartland (the heart-Earth, the classic Mackinder one), that is China and its junior partner Russia, also making use of States proxy like Iran and North Korea, have been launching an assault on the old manor of the West for years, which is increasingly less solid and compact. Hence the war in Ukraine aimed at regaining control by Moscow of at least part of Eastern Europe, the attack of the so-called Axis of Iranian Resistance on Israel and on trade in the Middle East, the new colonization of Africa by China and Russia, the attempt to realize the Silk Road Chinese Eurasianism with Beijing's increasingly less veiled threats to Taiwan, the aggressive policies of the People's Republic of North Korea which has gone as far as sending soldiers and missiles into the heart of Europe and having ballistic missiles fly over Japan.
How to stop all this?
Updating the classical theories of geopolitics, starting from the last century there has already been a new Heartland which is represented by the USA. It is the second heart of the world, with its own rimland that surrounds it. Here too, having control of it and at the same time competing with China for its classic one would allow for world domination.
This assumption would seem to be confirmed by Trump's moves, many of which are apparently disjointed and disorganized but which, upon closer inspection, have a very clear purpose.
Let's try to examine them...
In the Southern Rimland of Central America, Trump, aside from the deeply symbolic move of renaming the Gulf of Mexico, is trying to stop China's acquisition of the Panama Canal and to weaken Mexico with tariffs.
To the north, it is applying the same protectionist policy with Canada and is making claims on Danish Greenland in order to prevent the implementation of the Arctic Silk Road Sino-Russian.
The most important US Rimland for Trump is the Indo-Pacific because it overlaps critically with the Chinese one. Here the decisive games will be played, which essentially include the issue of Taiwan considered by Beijing (wrongly) a secessionist region, the dispute over the islands of the South China Sea and the presence of the nuclear-capable “rogue” state of North Korea. The need to achieve economy of forces will force the US to concentrate on that Rimland, sacrificing the transatlantic one that until recently constituted the pillar of its global projection.
Here there are at least two objectives: if on the one hand it is necessary to reduce its commitment to concentrate the military instrument in the Indo-Pacific, on the other it is trying to remove Russia from the dangerous embrace with China. It does so by flattering Putin and calling into question the relationship hitherto privileged with the Europeans, including Great Britain, with a possible sacrificial victim: Ukraine. A pragmatism that has put the old continent with its back to the wall, forcing it to identify new policies aimed at avoiding irrelevance and decline.
* Luigi Chiapperini, retired general of the Lagunari army corps, former commander of the national and multinational contingents in Kosovo in 2001 (NATO), in Lebanon in 2006 (UN) and in Afghanistan in 2012 (NATO), is currently a member of the Army Study Center and president emeritus of the Lagunari Amphibious Troops Association.
Images: US Navy / author
