Rockefeller’s New World Order
In 1992, a Pentagon document titled “Defense Planning Guidance “was leaked to the New York Times. It was not to be for public viewing, and was hastily buried. It was drafted by then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and his assistant Paul Wolfowitz, both of whom would be key figures in the 8-year administration of Bush’s son, George “Dubya” Bush, beginning in 2001.
The document described a strategy for America in the “new world order”. This document stated that “America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union.” The paper stated that Russia would remain “the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the United States”. The paper also stated that the US must prevent the emergence of a European army which would displace NATO. The Pentagon document presented a vision of a US-run “Sole Superpower “ world, what the Pentagon later called “Full Spectrum Dominance” – US control of the world’s seas, land, and even its air – including outer space and even cyberspace.
For America to maintain its global dominance, one must think about the Rockefeller family motto “Competition is a sin!” Its chief economic competitors are Western Europe (mainly Germany) and East Asia (mainly Japan, and soon, China). Both of these regions need to import large volumes of oil to power their economies. Since America had gutted its industrial base, and was in no position to compete economically with these regions, Washington was determined to control the oil on which these two regions depended on for its survival. In addition, it had to break up Russia, since Russia had the potential to supply the energy needs of these two regions. Plus Russia had the capacity to use its military and especially its nuclear arsenal to destroy America. The only way to weaken Russia was oil – US control of Russian oil; this would be the geopolitical strategy to achieve this Rockefeller aim. As American historian James Petras noted:
“After 1991, the CIA gave the highest priority to fomenting the breakup of the Soviet Union. By financing and arming local separatist movements. America was not concerned whether the new leaders were Islamic fundamentalists, ex-Soviet autocrats, or Mafia gangsters – the important issue was to destroy the Soviet Union, and now Russia, and to undermine Russian influence in its former areas of the Soviet Union.”
The Cheney-Wolfowitz document would be activated immediately following 9-11.
Now, one may ask, what has oil and Russia got to do with the subject matter of Eurasian geopolitics, and the battle for control of Eurasia. To get the answer, one has to study the role of America and Britain in the world. Its controlling families – the Rockefellers in America and the Rothschilds in Britain – have viewed the world as a whole, as one piece, since their business interests encompass most of the countries in the world. So, we study the world just as they do, in order to have a better grasp and understanding of international geopolitics.
To that end, it is worth studying what a Rockefeller geostrategist, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, in 1997:
“Eurasia is home to most of the world’s politically assertive and dynamic states. All the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia. The world’s most populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the potential or economic challengers to American primacy. After the United States, the next six largest economies and military spenders are there, as are all but one of the world’s overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75% of the world’s population, 60% of its GNP and 75% of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia’s potential power overshadows even America’s. “
Eurasia is the world’s axial super-continent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world’s three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy —“.
Brzezinski was revealing that US foreign policy was based on the axioms of British geopolitics founder Halford Mackinder, who had long ago figured out the central geopolitical importance of Eurasia for empire builders. Clearly, US foreign policy left no room for rival power blocs, above all not in Eurasia where a strategic partnership between China and Russia could deal a major blow to Washington’s agenda of total geopolitical control.
The US-initiated Saudi oil production glut in 1986 had dealt a devastating blow to the Soviet economy as world oil prices plunged by some 70% within months. A secondary target was Iran. Within 3 years, both the Soviet Union and Iran threw in the towel. With Iran, it asked for a cease-fire in its 8-year long war with Iraq.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, Washington’s strategy towards the areas of the world with the greatest known oil reserves was to expand into the vacuum left by a distracted Russia – namely into the newly-independent countries of the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union.
The covert fomenting of the so-called “Islamic unrest” in Chechnya, the grab by Chevron and Exxon of the oil fields of Kazakhstan and by another Rockefeller company, ARCO, in Azerbaijan, were the focus of US policy in the first months after the fall of the Berlin Wall The role of the IMF in the former Soviet Union was to demand privatization of state assets. Above all, the state oil and gas companies were auctioned to private investors, all 7 of whom were fronts for the Rothschild family. Companies like Yukos of Mikhael Khodokovsky was indicative of this process. Khodokovsky’s principal shareholder (owning some 75%) was Lord Jacob Rothschild, heir to the London banking dynasty and one of the most powerful figures in Anglo-American finance. Another front-man for Jacob Rothschild in Russia was Boris Berezovsky and his lieutenant Roman Abramovic, who later sold his stake in Sibneft Oil to the Kremlin. Part of the proceeds of this was used to buy the English soccer club Manchester United.
As Soviet oil output began to fall after 1988, they planned to boost drilling at Tengiz, a large oil and gas field in Kazakhstan, discovered in 1979, until American and Rockefeller pressure led to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. This American/Rockefeller pressure was two-pronged: – The first was the collapse in the oil price in 1986-88; the second was the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which drained the Soviet economy of badly-needed economic and financial resources. Both these factors played an instrumental role in the collapse of the Soviet economy.
The wars in Chechnya (1994 and 1999), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Georgia (2008), the Arab Spring (2010), Libya (2011), Syria (2011), and Ukraine (2014) – were, but the opening shots of a series of geopolitical oil and energy “pipeline” wars – undeclared wars, but wars in every sense of the word. They were wars, covert and overt, spanning territory that stretched from the Caspian Sea in Central Asia to the South China Sea, from the Indian Ocean on down to the Persian Gulf and deep into Africa.
The energy wars were fought with bombs, with terror tactics and with devastating remote-controlled pilotless drones. They were often also fought with sophisticated new methods of political destabilization of uncooperative regimes through what were called Color Revolutions.
The goal was simple: Pentagon control of all oil deposits in order to be able to control the emerging Eurasian economic colossus, especially Russia, India and China. The goal would be achieved by any means necessary.
As Rockefeller’s chief international geopolitical thug, Henry Kissinger stated, in the early 1970s: “If you control money then you control governments; if you control food, then you can control the people; and if you control oil, then not only can you control countries, but you can control the destinies of nations”.
The wars currently taking place in Ukraine and Syria are but two fronts in the same war. The issue of Syria will be discussed in a separate article, to be published in late 2017.
Now, why Ukraine? The answer is simple. In the energy wars that began in the early 1990s, each war followed a pattern, a sequential order, which slowly but surely eroded leverage of America’s rivals, mainly Russia. One would not understand the Ukraine if we did not follow the sequence of these wars, or rather these energy wars.
The first of these energy wars was in 1986 when the US and Saudi Arabia dropped the price of oil, targeting the Soviet Union and Iran. The second was the first Gulf war of 1990/91, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. The third was Chechnya in 1994 and 1999. Then followed by Kosovo in 1999, then Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), the Yukos affair in Russia (2003/4), Georgia in 2008, the Arab Spring (2010), Libya (2011), Syria (2011), and then the gas wars encompassing Africa, and Europe (2009-2015), and, finally Ukraine in 2014. To understand some of these sequential wars, let us briefly do a summary of each, in order.
The First Gulf War 1990
At the end of the 8-year long war between Iraq and Iran, Iraq was heavily in debt, needed agricultural help, and needed to revitalize its industrial base. In November 1989, a high-powered business delegation led by Alan Stoga of Kissinger & Associates went to Iraq. They were surprised at the advanced levels of Iraq’s industrial base and know-how. They offered Saddam Hussein help with his financial problems, and as well as food aid, and industrial and advanced technology help. In return Iraq must allow them access to its oil. Saddam Hussein agreed on everything else but turning over Iraq’s oil industry to the Rockefeller group. Predictably, the Americans turned against Saddam Hussein.
Through various means, Washington lured Iraq into the Kuwaiti trap, which brought the American military in force into the region, and defeated Iraq. Sanctions placed on Iraq helped neutralize Iraq’s capacity to rebuild, and kept Iraqi oil out of the international markets for nearly 2 decades.
Kazakhstan 1991
Around the same time, Washington’s immediate agenda was to break up the former Soviet Union into balkanized and disconnected pieces in order to secure control over its vast oil wealth. With this goal in mind, Kazakhstan and Central Asia were priority targets for “restructuring”.
Washington used the IMF, which it controlled, and which it had previously used to plunder the nations of Latin America and Africa during the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s. The IMF’s restructuring, or “shock therapy” policies, required privatization of state enterprises.
In 1991, just weeks before the final disintegration of the Soviet Union, Moscow officials, desperate for western capital and technology to develop their vast oil reserves, began talks with Standard Oil of California (Socal). Socal had just swallowed one of the Seven Sisters (meaning one of the 7 largest oil companies in the world), Gulf Oil-owned by the Mellon family- , and had renamed the new giant company Chevron. Soviet officials awarded Chevron rights to the oil-rich Tengiz field in Kazakhstan on the shores of the Caspian Sea in 1991. These Moscow officials were scrambling for whatever crumbs or political payoffs they could get before the entire edifice collapsed. Dollars, in return for giving away prized assets for these officials, were worth more than gold at that time. Tengiz oil reserves were around 25 billion barrels – a super-giant field by any measure, when one considers that it was more than America’s oil reserves, of 21 billion barrels! Cash-strapped Soviet engineers spent more than $1 billion drilling dozens of wells before concluding that foreign technology was needed.
The Soviet-Tengiz deal collapsed when the Soviet Union collapsed. The rights to Tengiz were transferred to the newly-declared republic of Kazakhstan. By 1993, Chevron had become the first and only foreign investor in Kazakhstan. It was joined by another Rockefeller company, Exxon. Chevron had a 50% share and Exxon had a 25% share in Tengiz. Thus, two Rockefeller companies were holding the lion’s share- a 75% stake.
Chevron managed to negotiate a shrewd deal with the newly independent Kazakh government of Nursultan Nazarbayev. Chevron convinced a cash-starved Kazakhstan to sign what the US oil majors normally imposed on Third World countries – a Production Sharing Agreement, or PSA. In this case, Chevron pledged to invest $20 billion over 40 years, and to Chevron’s advantage, the company would not even pay a first installment of $420 million until oil production reached 250,000 barrels a day. That allowed Chevron to keep a substantial portion of its obligated payment until a pipeline had been built to transport Tengiz oil to western markets. The pipeline took about 6 years to build. Chevron’s goal was to keep Tengiz oil out of the hands of Russia and other potential rivals, and not use it until needed. In the late 1990s, one of the world’s largest oil fields was discovered in Kazakhstan, not far south from Tengiz, called Kashagan. At an estimated reserve of 40 billion barrels, it is only beaten by the world’s largest oil field – Ghawar in Saudi Arabia. The cost of developing this field has reached some $125 billion as of the end of this year, and oil still hasn’t been produced a yet. Due to the exorbitantly high cost, the Rockefellers have brought in other companies into the deal.
Chechnya Oil Wars – 1994 and 1999
The next target of Washington and the big Anglo-American oil multinationals, after locking up Kazakhstan, was to capture one of the world’s oldest oil-producing regions near Baku, Azerbaijan, situated on the western shore of the Caspian, bordering Iran. Baku oil reserves were very large. Its oil would flow to potential markets through an existing Soviet-era pipeline that went through the Russian province of Chechnya, a landlocked region inhabited by half a million Muslims. Baku was also the “cork holding the keys to the energy riches of the Caspian”, as most of the oil flows were directed first to Baku, and from there into pipelines going through to the west. The powers that controlled the oil could clearly shape the future map of Eurasia, for better or worse.
America did not want to use this existing pipeline, as it did not want Russia involved in any way regarding Baku’s oil. Neither did the US want to route this oil south through Iran, for the same reason. Rather, the US wanted to route the oil through a new pipeline, gong west through Georgia into Turkey, and ending up at the Turkish port city of Ceyhan, located on the Mediterranean Sea. This pipeline would bypass Russia, Iran and the maritime choke point of Istanbul’s Bosphorus Straights. But, how to achieve this?
Amid the chaos of the collapsing Soviet Empire in Central Asia and the Caucasus, the CIA began recruiting more Mujaheddin forces and Islamic fundamentalists, often financed with Saudi money, and re-routing them into Chechnya and neighboring Dagestan – precisely along the route of the existing Russian pipeline. Chechnya declared itself independent from Russia in 1991; a political act that Moscow feared would snowball far beyond Grozny, if not opposed harshly.
The Chechen leadership declared a “jihad” or holy war against Russia, with fighters referring to themselves as “mujaheddin”, the same name used by the CIA-trained forces in Afghanistan that had fought the Soviet troops just a few years earlier. Foreign funds, arms, and Islamic volunteers desperate for dollars streamed into Chechnya, many from Middle East countries.
The Saudi royal House had been intimately dependent on American financial and military support since the 1940s when, with the help of US President Franklin Roosevelt, the Rockefeller Standard Oil companies formed the Arab-American Oil Company, ARAMCO, to control the world’s largest known oil reserves. Saudi money and Washington geopolitics have been joined at the hip ever since.
When the Soviet Union fell, the Saudis saw the potential advantage of spreading Islam into the former Soviet Union, and in the process weakening their oil-producing competitor by spreading an anti-Moscow ideology of separatism. During the US-sponsored Islamic uprising against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan from 1980-1989, Washington teamed up with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and other Muslim states to recruit, finance and arm thousands of Muslim fundamentalists from all over the Middle East, North Africa, southern Caucasus, and southern Asia.
Numerous volunteers from Chechnya fought in Afghanistan against the Soviet forces and its Afghan supporters. The US achieved victory in Afghanistan; it severely weakened the Soviet state, but recruited thousands of well-armed and trained fundamentalist networks. While one sector of the Islamic forces went into opposition to America in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, another group lent itself to American geopolitical strategy in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and Russia.
Saudi forms of Islam replaced the traditional Sufi forms in Chechnya and across the region. It was ideally suited to fomenting new wars of religious fanaticism against the secular Russian stare. Moscow was more than alarmed.
The Russian pipeline ran through Dagestan and Chechnya – the regions which the CIA and its proxies – chose as targets. Foreign mujaheddin mercenaries under local Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev were used by Washington in a proxy war that would be replayed numerous times across Central Asia and Eurasia over the coming years.
As major US and British oil companies swarmed over the states of the former Soviet Union, grabbing oil assets on sweetheart terms, the CIA-trained mujaheddin fighters were brought into Chechnya. Conveniently, Chechnya was located along the only existing oil pipeline from Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan (Baku) on the Caspian Sea into Russia ending at the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk – and from there to world markets. In addition to the pipeline transiting Grozny from Baku to the Ukraine, In addition to the pipeline transiting Grozny from Baku to the Ukraine, Grozny was also the site of a major Soviet-era refinery. Moscow regarded sovereign control over Chechnya as vital to Russia’s role in the future oil flows from the Caspian Sea and Baku.
Washington agreed, and for that reason backed the Islamic insurgency against Moscow, using Saudi money.
Russia invaded Grozny in December 1994, and its military forces were badly defeated by the Chechen irregular forces. With this defeat, Washington used Chechnya’s problems as a valid reason to build a new pipeline that does not transit Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, and main city. A second Russian invasion happened in 1999, this time under newly-appointed Prime Minister Putin. In the process, Grozny was totally destroyed. Putin went on to rebuild Grozny, which today, resembles any ultra-modern city in the world. Putin and the current Chechen leadership, under Ramadan Kadyrov, are very close, to the extent that western intelligence agents have no chance of destabilizing the region again.
As soon as the chaos in Chechnya necessitated the construction of an alternative pipeline through a pro-US Georgia and Turkey, the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline (the BTC), the money and volunteers for the Chechen cause abruptly dried up. The goal had been accomplished – weakening Moscow’s control over Caucasus oil flows. In August 2001, oil began flowing in this new BTC pipeline, at the rate of 1 million bpd. It took 9 months for this oil to fill up the pipeline, and reach Ceyhan.
Using the CIA-trained fighters, Basayev led savage guerrilla campaigns against Russia troops, launching mass-hostage kidnappings of civilians, and demanding the withdrawal of Russian soldiers from Chechnya. Oil was the real agenda behind US proxy wars in Chechnya and across Central Asia during the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The aim of the western oil majors, as well as the banks behind them, was not to secure future oil for America’s great consumption demands. That was never a consideration. Their aim was nothing less than to control all the major known oil areas of the planet.
Kosovo
Yugoslavia occupied a crucial geographical space in southern Europe. It was aligned to Russia, and it had a state-directed economy. Both of these were anathema to the US, due to a new program pushing for privatization of state assets, and reducing the role of the state in the economy. A brilliant way to reduce a nation’s sovereign power. It was a policy called “controlled disintegration”, beginning in 1981, working on a blueprint by John D Rockefeller 3rd, David’s eldest brother. Beginning in early 1990, Yugoslavia was put through an economic and financial squeeze, resulting in the dissolution of the state. Yugoslavia broke up into several parts, and war ensued. The war in Bosnia and Croatia lasted for several years, from 1992-1995.
In 1998, Washington put in motion a series of events that would result in the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo breaking away from Yugoslavia. This was accomplished by the NATO bombing of Belgrade and the Serbian army, as well as massive infrastructural damage to Serbia. In the end, Washington succeeded in creating an independent Kosovo, one which was wholly dependent on NATO and the good graces of Washington. America’s man in Kosovo was Hashim Thaci, a drug-lord, and a key mover of narcotics for Washington, on the drug pipeline from Afghanistan into Europe.
What was the motivation of Washington in securing Kosovo for itself? The answer is simple – oil pipelines. If one were to look at the map of the region, one finds that the increasing flow of oil from Tengiz, in Kazakhstan, was creating a problem for shipping the oil out. Oil from Tengiz was first railed to Novorossiysk on the Black Sea. Later, when the pipeline was built from Tengiz to this port, the volume of oil increased, and more oil tankers were required to ship this to markets. As the Black Sea shipments had to go through the Bosporus, and it was right through the center of Istanbul, the Turkish government was worried about any environmental disasters happening there. So, they limited the number of oil tankers sailing through this route. The alternative was to build a pipeline from Burgas, a Bulgarian port on the Black sea, through to Vlores, on the Adriatic Sea. And from there, oil tankers would load up and take the oil to markets.
This pipeline became known as the AMBO pipeline. Once again, the pipeline would traverse Macedonia and Kosovo, before going through Albania, and into Vlores, on the Albanian coast. For this to happen, Kosovo had to be taken from the control of Serbia, which was aligned with Russia. Thus, the war in Kosovo.
The $1.3 billion trans-Balkan AMBO pipeline is one of the most important of these multiple pipelines. It will pump oil from the tankers that bring it across the Black Sea to the Bulgarian oil terminus at Burgas, through Macedonia to the Albanian Adriatic port of Vlore. From there it will be pumped on to huge 300,000 ton tankers and sent on to Europe and the US, bypassing the Bosporus Straits—the congested and only route out of the Black Sea where tankers are restricted to 150,000 tons.
Exxon-Mobil and Chevron, two of the world’s largest oil corporations, financed the AMBO project.
The US is also antagonizing its European allies and Russia with Camp Bondsteel and other smaller military bases run alongside the proposed AMBO pipeline route. It has been built near the mouth of the Presevo valley and energy Corridor 8, which the European Union has sponsored since 1994 and regards as a strategic route east-west for global trade.
In April 1999, British General Michael Jackson, the commander in Macedonia during the NATO bombing of Serbia, explained to the Italian paper Sole 24 Ore “Today “ the circumstances which we have created here have changed. Today, it is absolutely necessary to guarantee the stability of Macedonia and its entry into NATO. But we will certainly remain here a long time so that we can also guarantee the security of the energy corridors which traverse this country.”
The newspaper added, “It is clear that Jackson is referring to the 8th corridor, the East-West axis which ought to be combined to the pipeline bringing energy resources from Central Asia to terminals in the Black Sea and in the Adriatic, connecting Europe with Central Asia. That explains why the great and medium sized powers, and first of all Russia, don’t want to be excluded from the settling of scores that will take place over the next few months in the Balkans.”
Not only that, the Pentagon built a military base within Kosovo, called Camp Bondsteel, one of the largest US military bases in the world. This was meant to protect the AMBO pipeline, and also to control the energy flows from the Caspian region, as well as the Middle East.
Afghanistan
When the Taliban assumed power in Afghanistan in 1996, negotiations began with Conoco, another Rockefeller oil company, about building a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan (holding the world’s 4th largest gas reserves) through Afghanistan, into a port in Pakistan, and from there to markets in India and Asia.
For various reasons, negotiations got bogged down. Around this time, China began to take a keen interest in Afghanistan, and negotiations were opened between the Chinese and the Taliban.
Also, the Eurasian giants, Russia and China formed a security organization to protect them from America’s geopolitical oil-driven strategy to destabilize Central and East Asia. This was called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or the SCO.
The SCO, founded in 2001 in Shanghai by the heads of state of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, has evolved into what might be called Halford Mackinder’s worst nightmare—a vehicle for welding close economic and political cooperation of the key Eurasian land powers independently of the United States. In his widely-publicized 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski bluntly stated, “It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book.”
He added the warning, “Henceforth, the United States may have to determine how to cope with regional coalitions that seek to push America out of Eurasia, thereby threatening America’s status as a global power.” In the wake of the events of September 2001, events which many Russian intelligence experts doubted to be the work of a rag-tag band of Muslim Al Qaeda fanatics, the SCO has begun to take the character of the very threat that Brzezinski, a student of Mackinder, warned of. In a recent interview on The Real News, Brzezinski also bemoaned the lack of any coherent Eurasian strategy, notably in Afghanistan and Pakistan, on the part of the Obama Administration. America could not wait for China to bring Afghanistan into its orbit. Furthermore, by securing Afghanistan for itself, Washington could block any pipeline routes from China into the Middle East and Central Asia. This would also effectively position American military forces in Russia’s backyard, the so-called “soft underbelly “of southern Russia. Afghanistan was a “platform” from which the US intended to control the regions energy flows.
To forestall all of this, the Rockefeller family initiated what became known as the 9-11 terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Months before it happened, this incident was known within the Rockefeller family as “the event” For further information, in detail on this, please read the 2 part article called “The SCO and 9-11”, dated 9th and 25th May, 2015. You will find it in Volume 1, issues numbers 9 and 10.
Mackinder’s Heartland and Brzezinski’s Chess Game:
It’s essential to understand the historic background to the term geopolitics. In 1904, an academic British geographer named Halford Mackinder made an address before the Royal Geographic Society in London which was to change history. In his speech, titled, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History,’ Mackinder sought to define the relation between a nation’s or region’s geography—its topography, relation to the sea or land, its climate—with its politics and position in the world. He posited two classes of powers: sea powers including Britain and the United States as well as Japan; and he posited the large land powers of Eurasia, which, with development of the railroad, were able to unite large land masses free from dependency on the seas.
For Mackinder, an ardent Empire advocate, the implicit lesson for continued hegemony of the British Empire following the 1914-1917 World War, was to prevent at all costs a convergence of interests between the nations of East Europe—Poland, Czechoslovakia , Austria-Hungary–and the Russia-centered Eurasian heartland, as he termed it. After the Versailles peace talks, Mackinder summed up
Ideas in the following famous dictum:
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland?
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island?
Who rules the World-Island commands the world?
Mackinder’s Heartland was the core area of Eurasia, and the World-Island was all of Eurasia, including Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Great Britain, never a part of Continental Europe, he saw as a separate naval or sea-power. The Mackinder geopolitical perspective shaped Britain’s entry into the 1914 Great War; it shaped her entry into World War Two. It shaped Churchill’s calculated provocations of an increasingly paranoid Stalin, beginning 1943, to entice Russia into what became the Cold War.
From a US perspective, the 1946-1991 Cold War era was all about who shall control Mackinder’s World-Island, and, concretely, how to prevent the Eurasian Heartland, centered on Russia, from doing just that. A look at a polar projection map of US military alliances during the Cold War makes the point: The Soviet Union had been geopolitically contained and prevented from any significant linkup with Western Europe or the Middle East or Asia. The Cold War was about Russian efforts to circumvent that NATO-centered Iron Curtain.
Former US National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, writing in the post-Soviet era in 1997, drew on Mackinder’s geopolitics by name, in describing the principal strategic aim of the United States to keep Eurasia from unifying as a coherent economic and military bloc or counterweight to the sole superpower status of the United States.
To understand US foreign policy since the onset of the Bush-Cheney Presidency in 2001, therefore, it’s useful to cite a revealing New York Council on Foreign Relations Foreign Affairs article by Brzezinski from September/October 1997:
“Eurasia is home to most of the world’s politically assertive and dynamic states. All the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia. The world’s most populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the potential political or economic challengers to American primacy. After the United States, the next six largest economies and military spenders are there, as are all but one of the world’s overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75 percent of the world’s population, 60 percent of its GNP, and 75 percent of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia’s potential power overshadows even America’s.
Eurasia is the world’s axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world’s three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy…’
If we take the words of Washington strategist Brzezinski and understand the axioms of Halford Mackinder as the driving motive for Anglo, and later, American foreign policy for more than an entire century, it begins to become clear why a reorganized Russian state under the Presidency of Vladimir Putin has gone into motion to resist the overtures and overt attempts at deconstruction being promoted by Washington in the name of democracy. How has Putin acted to shore up Russian defenses? In a word: energy.
Russian Energy Geopolitics
In terms of the overall standard of living, mortality and economic prosperity, Russia today is not a world class power. In terms of energy, it is a colossus. In terms of landmass it is still the single largest nation in land area in the world, spanning from the Pacific to the door of Europe. It has vast territory, vast natural resources, and it has the world’s largest reserves of natural gas, the energy source currently the focus of major global power plays. In addition, it is the only power on the face of the earth with the military capabilities able to match that of the United States despite the collapse of the USSR and deterioration in the military since.
Russia has more than 130,000 oil wells and some 2000 oil and gas deposits explored of which at least 900 are not in use. Oil reserves have been estimated at 150 billion barrels, similar perhaps to Iraq. They could be far larger but have not yet been exploited owing to difficulty of drilling in some remote arctic regions. Oil prices above $60 a barrel begin to make it economical to explore in those remote regions.
Russia’s state-owned natural gas pipeline network, its so-called ‘unified gas transportation system’ includes a vast network of pipelines and compressor stations extending more than 150,000 kilometers across Russia. By law only the state-owned Gazprom is allowed to use the pipeline. The network is perhaps the most valued Russian state asset outside the oil and gas itself. Here is the heart of Putin’s new natural gas geopolitics and the focus of conflict with western oil and gas companies as well as the European Union.
Now that we have understood a bit about the real cause and effect of all the wars in Eurasia over the past two decades, the next few articles will help in crystallizing events that seem random, at first, but are part of a coldly calculated plan to bring all of Eurasia’s oil and gas fields under Rockefeller control.
