The Coming World War

Russia and China are natural adversaries. However, as Zbigniew Brzezinski warned when analyzing threats to American security, “the most dangerous scenario,” would be “a grand coalition of China and Russia…united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.”

This is why it will be important for the US to make preemptive concessions: because in doing so, it removes these grievances, which should allow the natural competing interests of Russia and China to come to the fore once more.

You seem to assume that the decision to launch or not launch nuclear weapons would be logically made and deliberated. But this is almost certainly not going to be the case. The problem is one of unintentional escalation; the probability of a miscalculated launch by either party in an otherwise conventional kinetic war, either by a commander in the field, bad intelligence, human error, or the ambiguity of so many launch systems today which can launch either conventional or nuclear warheads. Someone in Poland launches a conventional missile from a launch system that is also capable of launching a nuke; what is the response from Russia going to be? What will the people at the other end assume is coming their way? The miniaturization of nuclear weapons is another problem -- as is the old problem of launch on warning. The fate of the world rests in the hands of deeply flawed people under immense pressure in crushing time constraints.

I think people don't think about nuclear war because they are frightened to, and understandably console themselves by saying it's not going to happen. Or they think this type of worry is consigned to history. It's hard to imagine a nuclear war in the days of Tic Tok, Netflix and iPhones. Yet those who look closely at these topics believe we have rarely been closer to disaster.

It is also disturbing when baby rabbits are eaten by foxes. The practice of geopolitics is deeply unfair.*

The Baltic nations hope that they will gain protection from Russia through the EU and NATO. They have put themselves in one camp of great powers, and the other camp is eyeing them greedily. It is because of their geographic situation: they are very strategically located, as are Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. Russia does not necessarily want to conquer these countries - it just wants them locked into its sphere, because it sees them as essential to its national security, much as the US would not have tolerated a soviet Mexico or Canada in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

This is mainly because the Russian heartland, from the current western borders of Belarus and Ukraine to the Urals, is militarily indefensible. Russia is actually a very hemmed-in country. A crown of ice covers its northern frontier, limiting access and navigation in the arctic winter. In Europe, the flat European plain is essentially an invasion highway to Moscow, and also (via Ukraine, especially eastern Ukraine) a direct route to cutting Russia off from the Caucuses and Black and Caspian seas. In addition, the Baltics and Denmark deprive coastal European Russia of Atlantic access year-round. In the Far East, Russia's only substantial port is Vladivostok, which needs to be kept free of ice in the winter months by means of ice-breaker ships; and Vladivostok is anyway largely ringfenced by American ally Japan a little further out. More broadly there are Russian fears of Chinese designs on Vladivostok and growing Chinese influence in the central Asian republics via the B&R Initiative, but these concerns have been deprioritized temporarily due to the mutual antagonism of Russia and China towards the US.

Neutral (but NATO friendly) Sweden and NATO member Denmark are also strategically located; together they block Russia's North Sea access to the Atlantic. This is why Russia looks enviously on Gotland and war-gamed a nuclear attack on Sweden in 2016, and why the Swedish government soon thereafter circulated a document called If Crisis or War Comes; it speaks of compulsive resistance, the duty to resist, conscription, and no surrender. Conscription was reintroduced there in 2017.

In the south-west, Russia is confined to the Black Sea and can access the Mediterranean only on the goodwill of Turkey, which literally holds the keys to the Mediterranean for Russia in the form of the Dardanelles and Bosporus. This is why NATO values Turkey so very much and why the Turko-Russian relationship is so important and historically antagonistic.

Anyway, I think it's a big mistake to assume that the current borders of Europe represent in any way a final settled status, or that there will ever be a final settled status. I personally wish that they did and they were. I would much rather that Russia had been handled differently and had been brought into the NATO and the EU fold somehow in the 90s. But perhaps that was never possible. Due to its geography, it's probable that Russia must be authoritarian and suspicious - that the authoritarian mindset is a consequence of having such an enormous, multi-ethnic imperial territory; and that the need to have an enormous territory stems from the geographically vulnerable position of the original Russian territory - Muscovy, which essentially remains the Russian heartland today. Hence Russia will always be a problem for its neighbors and its neighbors will always be a problem for it. It is a horrible geopolitical feedback loop that our lizard brains may not be able to overcome.

*As a small country, I fully expect that Ireland would fall back into the UK's orbit if the EU collapsed, or if America withdrew from the wider world. It would suck, it wouldn't be fair, but as mentioned, geopolitics isn't fair. Thankfully for Ireland, only the UK sees us as geopolitically important, and even then not as important as Norway and Iceland when the bombs start falling. In early 1940 notably the allies tried (and failed) to invade and occupy neutral Norway, and succeeded in invading and occupying neutral Iceland, rather than southern Ireland to secure the Atlantic (possibly because the UK was already in possession of Derry; incidentally this is one reason why Ireland frequently makes the list of most survivable countries -- we are not very important. And that is a good thing - though alas, this pertains only in a non-nuclear war. Ireland is very much a nuclear target in certain chilling scenarios.

You seem very angry and indignant at me. I am not pro-Russia or defending the bullying actions of great powers. I am trying to explain the Russian mentality, not justify it. Ireland was not invaded by the UK in WW2. Norway would have been invaded by the UK - for geographical reasons - only the Germans beat the allies to it. This isn't a misrepresentation of history - it is a fact. It was called Plan R 4.

What is laughable though is that you find the Russian mindset and posture laughable. It's obviously not laughable. If it were laughable, Crimea would still be with Ukraine, the Baltics wouldn't be scared out of their wits every time Russia war games close to their borders, and Ukraine wouldn't be worried about an invasion from the east. If it were laughable NATO wouldn't exist. I presume what you mean is that you don't like their attitude and think it's ridiculous. But what you think doesn't matter. What matters is what the Kremlin thinks.

I have not forgotten Kaliningrad. I mentioned the Suwalki Gap in my very first post on this thread. Kaliningrad is a poisoned chalice that's been handed around from one power to the next, always ultimately to the detriment of everyone. It is one of the most militarized places in Europe.