Black Sea Region, testing polygon for a new global order
Author: Dr. Dorin POPESCU
Abstract
All the specific geopolitical turbulences of the last few years represent expressions of the attempts of the great actors to create favorable negotiating positions for the new formats of revision of the current global order. Currently, the implicit conventions underlying the current geopolitical model seem to be exhausted. We are witnesses of the paradigm of dismantling the current global political order and creating a new global geopolitical paradigm. In our opinion, the creation of operating theaters for the formal antagonism particularizes the new geopolitical paradigm of all previous models.
Previous geopolitical models relied on the consensual recognition of a direct confrontation space/territory as a paradigmatic expression of the geopolitical model, while the new paradigms require masking/camouflage of ideological conflict territories through artificially created theaters of operations (military priority). In the epic of the new geopolitical paradigm, the tendency to artificially formalize a confrontational theater that masks the authentic intentions of the great political actors has the essential role.
The most advanced unconventional technologies for testing the new props of geopolitical negotiation seem to belong to the Kremlin. Russia moves in Syria only military but geopolitically into the wider Black Sea area. The Black Sea region has a special significance in the recent geopolitical calibration of the Kremlin. The wider Black Sea region represents for the Russian Federation the real tactical field that tests its geopolitical resistance to the Euro-Atlantic political advancement and also the strategic vector of Russia's course in the new geopolitical context, the geographical and geopolitical perimeter that decides on its future positions in the negotiations on the new world order. The replies of the other global Black Sea actors seem not to have reached the refined level of the Kremlin.
Our suggestion is that we must read the geopolitical processes taking place in the wider Black Sea area as an expression of geopolitical competition, in an unofficial perimeter, between the great political actors, with the goal of creating geopolitical dividends in ongoing negotiations for a new global order. All this geopolitical texture makes the Black Sea region the perfect polygon for new tests on the negotiations on the new global order. In the penumbra of battles for the public, this region will provide the alchemical combination for the new world order.
Keywords
Wider Black Sea area, new global political order, testing polygon, new geopolitical architecture, geopolitical negotiation, atypical/asymmetrical confrontation spaces
Recent developments in geopolitical dynamics, from the conflict in Syria to the hybrid war in the eastern districts of Ukraine, highlight a prospective that deserves analytical deepening.
It is very possible that all the specific geopolitical turbulences of the last few years represent expressions of the attempts of the great actors to create favorable negotiating positions for the new formats of revision of the current global order.
Currently, the implicit conventions underlying the current geopolitical model seem to be exhausted. The principles of international law that rule the world order are faulty. Under the combined pressure of several global actors, the current geopolitical model has reached its limits. The right of force became the main instrument of political positioning and actions. Efforts by some of the global actors to obtain prior UN Security Council Agreements for large-scale military operations (Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) today seem like old pictures, while the UN itself seems to have reached its maximum conservation capacity of the formal prestige that allowed it to exist in the geopolitical calculations of the great global actors.
We are witnesses of the paradigm of dismantling the current global political order and creating a new global geopolitical paradigm. Russian military intervention in Georgia, Crimean occupation and Donbas hybrid war, US unpredictability in the Trump era and its global/planetary disengagement, Brexit, political crisis inside the European Union, advancement of illiberal policies in Europe, reevaluation/review of strategic agreements in the nuclear field, enlargement implosive mix of European construction, conflict in Syria, lone wolves’ attacks in Europe, new migration maps and policies, militarist enthusiasm and the decay of the current international law order through political actions of force without joint effective sanctions by the international community seem to be the symptoms of the new geopolitical paradigm.
It is obvious that the great actors are preparing/getting ready for the negotiations that will shape the future world order. To the scenarios for the preparation of a favorable negotiation position belong the large military actions, demonstration military exhibitions, testing the limits of diplomatic discourse, refining/fine tuning of the hybrid war techniques, reconfiguring ideological tools (fake news, carousel voting, poisons etc.), creating operational theaters of the formal antagonism etc.
In our opinion, this last dimension/specificity of the new geopolitical paradigm, the creation of operating theaters for the formal antagonism, is unconventional and particularizes the new geopolitical paradigm of all previous models. Previous geopolitical models relied on the consensual recognition of a direct confrontation space/territory as a paradigmatic expression of the geopolitical model, while the new paradigms require masking / camouflage of ideological conflict territories through artificially created theaters of operations (military priority).
In the epic of the new geopolitical paradigm, the tendency to artificially formalize a confrontational theater that masks the authentic intentions of the great political actors has the essential role. Currently, the conflict in Syria seems to be meeting the parties' consensus in order to be (officially) presented as a space for exploring the new geopolitical architecture: the magnitude of the conflict, the US and the Russian Federation intervention on the ground, the new conjunctural/short term political alliances around Syria, the singular stance of Turkey, the mix of local insurgency groups, etc. seem to configure a perfect geopolitical design for a classic theater of operations.
But the new geopolitics are no longer built around classical policies and practices. The authentic testing polygons of the new global order are no longer the classic confrontation spaces but rely on them to create confusion and deviations. While conflicts are taking place in Syria, the new geopolitical narratives essential to the design of the new global order meet and confront in atypical spaces with non-conventional instruments. The Syrian conflict, with all its real dramatic effects for the fate of many millions of people, can be seen, from a geopolitical perspective, in terms of a cynical political realism, as a smoke curtain covering unconventional narratives that prepare elsewhere the new world order.
The most advanced unconventional technologies for testing the new props of geopolitical negotiation seem to belong to the Kremlin. Its new props no longer focus on the classical preparation of a performance response in a possible direct military confrontation, but on the creation and prior exploitation of vulnerabilities in the other's ideological bone structure (architecture). The Kremlin already counts (or can count) on the election of an American president, on the ideological motivation of America's voting tendencies, on the functioning of the illiberal (and anti-European) democracies in Europe, on the boycott of functionality of the current Europe, on the increased nationalistic and anti-European rhetoric in the countries with a solid European background, on the creation of major political crises, etc. Russia Today, wreck troops, green men, fake news etc. have replaced tanks, strategic bombers, or nuclear submarines, kept for classical military confrontations and for the strategic reserve.
Creation of more favorable corridors in the formats that will establish the new world order currently depends less on the conventional military arsenal of the great actors than on the mobility and inventiveness of their resources to undermine the ideological bone (architecture) of the other. When Americans discover that the democratic virtues they are proud of at the global level are no longer decisive nor sufficient for choosing their leader freely, the Pentagon's military arsenal (designed to create external deterrents) risks to become irrelevant.
In this paradigmatic perspective, in today's geopolitical chess game, the players skills to anticipate the moves of the other are more important than ever. To anticipate the other's moves, in a game in which they respond perfectly to them remains a mere minor bet, it substantially increases the chance of victory in the game.
Where does Moscow move geopolitically at this point and where do all other world chess players move geopolitically?
In our modest opinion, Russia moves in Syria only military but geopolitically into a symbolic territory represented by the US, Europe and the Black Sea (the Black Sea area).
Russian Federation's military actions in Syria respond to the Kremlin's tactical needs, while for the geopolitical moves huge laboratory resources are mobilized in many geographical areas of which symbolic and catalyst nucleus is the Black Sea space.
The major geopolitical interest of the Russian Federation is to achieve an advancement in ideological containment/discouragement, an advancement that would make inconclusive the eventual improvement/advancement of military deterrence of Others. From this perspective, the effects of the Kremlin's geopolitical game seem to be devastating.
In the United States, Washington's political class and American public opinion face for the first time the hypothesis that the direct vote for the presidential election is a direct consequence/effect of the Kremlin's vote control. For the American public imagination, the idea that Moscow can decide the direct election champion in the United States has the devastating effects of a tsunami that can reduce the significant myth of American military heroism in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. to insignificant dimensions. Such an idea may create long-term demobilization and disengagement of an average American from the own American political system, and the long-term effects of these ideological mutations may be as critical to American society as the September 11 attack.
In Europe, the geopolitical attack by Russia Today and the troop army has already produced visible, quantifiable effects in the long run. With a little Russian ideological help, Europe is becoming self-disappointed, self-indulging, is reconfiguring itself (Brexit), and dissociating itself. It becoming a fragile territory, a safe target for lone wolves or even a terrorist nursery. Images of Brussels terrorized by its own citizens and with fully militarized streets, or a terrorized Paris (the emblematic image of a tolerant Europe, demonized/diabolized and punished for the Puritanism redundancy), have the shock wave effect, capable of anesthetizing confidence in the European construction. Using such breaches, it was possible and easy to construct signs of illiberal democracies in Eastern Europe, nationalist inflation in Central Europe, the skeptics and anti-Europeans, almost the majority in Brussels and Strasbourg, the Brexit (the death of the Anglo-Saxon European lung etc.).
Black Sea region has a special significance in the recent geopolitical calibration of the Kremlin. A geopolitical failure of Europe at home, in Europe, as an indirect effect of the unconventional movements of the Kremlin, coupled with a correlated failure of America's ambition to become great once again, leaves Russia free in a territory that for hundreds of years has had the absolute priority of the external positioning - immediate proximity, ex-Soviet space, Caucasus, Central Asia, the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. This territory, permanently prioritized by all Russian regimes at least since Catherine the Great, which has become the theater of confrontation between Russia's logic of maintaining its own influence and the Euro-Atlantic expansion logic in the past 25-30 years, can now be regained by Russia as a space of influence.
The most vulnerable link of this space, from the perspective of Russian strategic interests, is the geographic line of possible NATO / EU enlargement: Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia. The regaining of this outpost requires geopolitical impact action and concentration of efforts in this direction. The Russian Federation moves geopolitically to the Black Sea region because it sees the Euro-Atlantic strategic corridor in this region as its traditional land of influence and its borders, the future threat of Russia's perfect geopolitical isolation. Unlike Central Asia or the Caspian Sea, where the geopolitical turbulence and / or the magnitude of long-term effects are much lower, the Black Sea area is the sanctuary that must be protected from the perspective of the Kremlin's strategic interests.
Main/first geopolitical action of Moscow in the Black Sea region is the ideological de-legitimization and declassification of NATO and the EU. The strategic interest of the Kremlin in the US and EU institutional debilitation seems to be directly linked to its tactical interest in producing, by this debilitation, the suspension of the Euro-Atlantic enlargement plans in the Black Sea area. Russia is geopolitically moving to Europe and the US (not only) for abstract reasons (weakening the potential of the main competitors), but additional for pragmatic reasons – the dejection of their geo-political scenarios in the Black Sea area.
For these reasons, the Black Sea region represents for the Russian Federation the real tactical field that tests its geopolitical resistance to the Euro-Atlantic political advancement and also the strategic vector of Russia's course in the new geopolitical context, the geographical and geopolitical perimeter that decides on its future positions in the negotiations on the new world order. Russia's military or image failure in Syria is much less geopolitical for Moscow's interests than capitulation in a space that can bring its rivals ante portas, to the gates of Moscow.
Synthetic recapitulation of Russia's main moves in the Pontic geopolitical polygon reveals the amplitude of geopolitical play in this area. In the wider Black Sea region, Moscow has tested the most sophisticated forms of hybrid warfare throughout modern history (green little people in Crimea, local paramilitary detachments of the Donbas separatists, troll’s ideology of military intervention, etc.). Moscow has turned the region into an El Dorado of separatism and a paradisiacal space of frozen conflicts. The Kremlin has canceled the obsession with regional strategic rivalry relations with Ankara, proposing atypical reformulations of the nature of the Russian-Turkish bilateral relationship. In this sense, by using the favorable corridor generated by Ankara's frustrations over Turkey's European integration projects for Turkey's accession to the EU, sometimes creating breaches and additional obstacles in the Ankara-Brussels dialogue, Moscow seems to have convinced Turkey that it can function as a credible partner in the Black Sea area. One can also highlight the unreliable capacity of Russian diplomacy to be credible and performant in dynamizing strong institutional formulas (some analysts suggest, on this background, that the rebuilding of the Russian-Turkish regional alliance could have effects on Turkey's demotivation of its own commitments as a member of the North Atlantic Alliance, other analysts and even regional political leaders are already talking about a possible Russia-Turkey-Iran axis that complicates the Black Sea security picture). Russia's geopolitical moves in the Black Sea seem to redesign the strategic architecture of the region, deepening the traditional lines of demarcation, creating new designs, etc. Finally, the convincing results of the Russian ideology on the line of promoting the concept of Novorusia, a concept from which new hybrid wars in the region are still expected, especially at high potential eruption points, should not be underestimated. The scenarios regarding the continuation of Russian project Novorusia, especially in the Odessa region, would be catastrophic for NATO countries riparian to the Black Sea (Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey), remaining a high probability.
Replies of the other global Black Sea actors seem not to have reached the refined level of the Kremlin. The US and NATO have responded to the concerns of some member states through the creation of an advanced presence of NATO on the eastern flank in the Black Sea region. There are prospects for talking about consolidation of the southern flank, increasing the cohesion of the Alliance in the region, increasing the naval presence in the region, etc. However, apart from purely military measures, the geopolitical response of the US / NATO / EU in the region seems weak. For the US, the geopolitical game in the Black Sea region, geographically far from America and its borders, with minimal risk of producing critical explosions for Washington, seems comfortable. For the European Union, any unconventional confrontation theater that can remove Moscow from direct interference with the sacred area of the Balkans is welcome. In this political design, the EU/NATO countries in the Black Sea region still have substantially unused resources (diplomatic, economic, political) to convince the EU/NATO of the need to promote coherent geopolitical programs linking the Black Sea region to the Balkans. An assumption of Romania on the priority of the six-month presidency of the Council of the European Union (January-June 2019), the strengthening of the European Cohesion in the Balkans and the Black Sea (2B / Western Balkans - Black Sea), would generate multiple benefits of stability and cohesion in the region. Finally, the last major global actor to count on the geopolitical equation of the Black Sea, China, is showing ever more persistent concerns about using the region as a possible silk route that would allow fast freight transport between China and Western Europe.
x x x
Traditional analytical perspective has so far seen in the Black Sea region a possible military/conventional conflict theater. From this perspective, the analysis of the region's steady militarization in recent years has been essential.
Our suggestion is that we must read the geopolitical processes taking place in the wider Black Sea area as an expression of geopolitical competition, in an unofficial perimeter, between the great political actors (USA, Russian Federation, NATO/EU, at the limit and China), with the goal of creating geopolitical dividends in ongoing negotiations for a new global order.
At the moment, Moscow seems to be in a poll position, which has initiated unconventional and far-reaching geopolitical scenarios in a space where it has the advantage of maximum game expertise.
Geopolitical play of the great actors in the Black Sea area overlaps with and combines the interests and political affiliations of the countries of the region. The paradigmatic effect of the local mix of interests is the absence of a consensus of the region/countries for a common/regional priorities agenda. For EU and NATO member countries, the region's list of priorities is generated by strengthening the security environment across the region to preserve economic and democratic gains. For countries aspiring to EU/NATO integration, the economic, legal and social reforms are a priority which can facilitate their access to the Euro-Atlantic prestigious political club, in conjunction with the Soviet/Russian de-ideologization (although de-ideologization is one of the basic principles of new thinking, advanced by the new post-Soviet leadership). For some countries in the wider space, the balance between the Euro-Atlantic pole and Moscow seems to be the ideal solution. Finally, for Moscow, the only global actor in the region, maintaining/resuming geopolitical control over the region is essential and priority. The competition for regional leadership, in which the main players are (or have aspirations thereof) Turkey, Ukraine, and even Romania, does not seem to generate cohesion benefits. The new regional formats (The Wider Black Sea Region, Bucharest B9 Initiative, Intermarium, The Three Seas Initiative) still lack clarity and consistency in the absence of a consensus on the region's priorities. Finally, the ethno-cultural mosaic of the region, the historical experience of the crises, the intersections of the North-South and East-West strategic routes, provide this space with a high level of resilience to tests, a compulsory aptitude for the geopolitical spaces which are not formally marked as confrontational territories.
All this geopolitical texture makes the Black Sea region the perfect polygon for new tests on the negotiations on the new global order. In the penumbra of battles for the public (Syria, the Middle East, etc.), this region will provide the alchemical combination for the new world order.
