The Revenge of Geography (28 page)

Yet despite all these advantages, history will likely not repeat itself in the sense of another Russian empire emerging in the early twenty-first century. This is because of particular historical and geographical circumstances that adhere in Central Asia.

Russia began to solidify control in Central Asia in the early nineteenth century, when Russian trade in the area increased, even as on the Kazakh steppe, for example, anarchy reigned with no point of political domination above that of local clan authorities.
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The Soviets in the early twentieth century created individual states out of the vast Central Asian steppe and tableland that did not cohere with ethnic borders, so that if any tried to secede from the Soviet Union it would have been impossible—leading to interethnic war. The Soviets were afraid of pan-Turkism, pan-Persianism, and pan-Islamism, for which the splitting up of ethnic groups was a partial panacea. This created a plethora of anomalies. The Syr Darya valley begins in an Uzbek-populated part of Kyrgyzstan and passes through Uzbekistan, then through Tajikistan before returning to Uzbekistan and ending up in Kazakhstan. The road linking the Uzbek capital of Tashkent to the Uzbek province of Ferghana must pass through Tajikistan. To get from Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, to the ethnic-Tajik areas of Khojent and Khorog one must pass through Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The town of Chimkent, close to Uzbekistan, is predominantly Uzbek, but is “attached” to Kazakhstan. The predominantly Tajik-populated city of Samarkand is in Uzbekistan, and so forth. What emerged in Central Asia, therefore, was less ethnic nationalism than “Sovietism” as a technique of control and power. But while Sovietism survives, even after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the ethnic Russians in the region have been marginalized, and in some places there exists strong hostility against them. Nevertheless, pan-Turkism and pan-Persianism remain relatively weak. Iran has been Shiite since the sixteenth century, whereas Tajiks and the other Persianized Muslims of Central Asia are mainly Sunni. As for the Turks, only recently has modern Turkey sought to become a focal point of the Muslim world.
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Sovietism and the lack of complete identification of each state with a single ethnic group has ironically led to a modest stability in Central
Asia, occasional unrest in the Ferghana valley and elsewhere notwithstanding. (Though, I must say, the region remains a potential tinderbox.) This dynamic, buttressed by extreme wealth in natural resources, has given some of these states significant bargaining power with the principal Eurasian states—Moscow and Beijing—who can be played off one against the other. (Russia needs Central Asian gas to transport to European markets, which gives Russia leverage over Europe; but Russia’s position is being threatened by China’s own purchase of Central Asian gas.)
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Central Asia’s bounty is immense. Kazakhstan’s Tengiz oil fields alone are thought to contain twice as much oil as the Alaskan North Slope.
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Turkmenistan’s annual natural gas output is the third highest in the world. Kyrgyzstan was the largest producer of mercury and antimony in the Soviet Union, and has large deposits of gold, platinum, palladium, and silver.
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This wealth in natural resources, as well as lingering resentment over Soviet occupation, has led, for instance, to Uzbekistan opening its railway bridge to Afghanistan to NATO traffic without at least initially consulting Russia; to Turkmenistan diversifying its energy routes rather than relying completely on Russia; and to Kazakhstan turning to European rather than Russian engineers to exploit its geologically “tricky” petroleum reserves in the Caspian Sea shelf.
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Thus, a Russian sphere of influence will be challenging to preserve, and will be held hostage in some degree to the fickleness of global energy prices, given how Russia’s own economy essentially runs on natural resources, just like the Central Asian ones. Russia’s new empire, if it does emerge, will likely be a weak reincarnation of previous ones, limited not just by flinty states in Central Asia but by the rising influence in Central Asia of China, and to a lesser extent of India and Iran. China has invested over $25 billion in Central Asia. It is paying for a two-thousand-mile highway across Kazakhstan. There are daily flights between the Kazakh city of Almaty and the western Chinese city of Urumqui, and Chinese goods fill Central Asian markets.
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Kazakhstan may be the ultimate register of Russian fortunes in Eurasia. Kazakhstan is a prosperous middle-income state by Central
Asian standards that is geographically the size of Western Europe, with a GDP larger than all the other Central Asian states combined. Kazakhstan’s new capital, Astana, is located in the ethnic Russian north of the country, which hothead Russian nationalists wanted to annex after the fall of the Soviet Union: at that time, of nine oblasts along Kazakhstan’s three-thousand-mile northern border with Russia, in eight of them, in their northern parts, the population was almost 90 percent non-Kazakh.
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The ceremonial buildings of Astana, designed by Sir Norman Foster, constitute a Kazakh rebuke to Russian ambitions regarding their country. The reinvention of Astana cost $10 billion. It is linked to the south of the country by high-speed trains.
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Kazakhstan is truly becoming an independent power in its own right. It is developing three super-giant “elephant” oil, gas, and condensate fields, two on the Caspian Sea, with major investment from Western multinationals. A new oil pipeline from the Caspian to western China will soon be completed. Kazakhstan is about to become the world’s largest producer of uranium. It has the world’s second largest chromium, lead, and zinc reserves, the third largest manganese reserves, the fifth largest copper reserves, and ranks in the top ten for coal, iron, and gold.

Kazakhstan
is
Mackinder’s Heartland! It is rich in all the world’s strategic natural resources and smack in the middle of Eurasia—overlapping, as it does, western Siberia and Central Asia—and stretches 1,800 miles from the Caspian Sea in the west to Outer Mongolia in the east. The Urals peter out in Kazakhstan’s northwest; the foothills of the Tien Shan begin in Kazakhstan’s southeast. Kazakhstan’s climate is so continental in its extremes that before dawn in winter Astana’s temperature can be minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Mackinder believed that some great power or superpower would control the Heartland. But in our age the Heartland lies in the hands of its indigenous inhabitants, even as great powers like Russia and China fight over its energy resources. Russia may influence Kazakhstan, and in ways severely pressure it. In the final analysis, the Russian and Kazakh economies are interwoven and Kazakhstan cannot defend itself against the Russian military. But Kazakhstan will always
have the option of turning toward China if the likes of Putin or his successor become too heavy-handed; in any event, the chances that Russia would be willing to suffer the international disapproval and diplomatic isolation that an invasion of Kazakhstan would precipitate are slim. In 2008, Georgia, a country forty times smaller than Kazakhstan, with a third the population and with few natural resources, may have exposed the limits of Russian military adventurism on the super-continent. Indeed, when Kyrgyzstan made a subtle plea for Russian troops to intervene against ethnic riots in 2010, Russia did not opt for a major intervention, afraid of getting bogged down in a mountainous Central Asian country on the far side of Kazakhstan.

Another restraining factor against Russian military action in Central Asia is China, whose influence in the region has grown at the expense of Russia, and with whom Russia shares a long border in the Far East. Reasonably good Russian-Chinese relations will provide momentum to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization: a group of which Kazakhstan is a member, which seeks to unite Eurasian powers, mainly autocratic, in an effort to counter the influence of the United States. The wages of Russian-Chinese enmity are greater influence for the United States and Europe in Eurasia. Thus, Russia will discipline its behavior in Central Asia and likely forswear any attempt to reclaim parts of Mackinder’s Heartland by force.

One word of caution regarding this analysis: Russia’s hand may be weakened in Central Asia because of the rise of China and the desire of Central Asians to do more business with nonthreatening, high-technology countries like South Korea and Japan. But while Russia’s military options are somewhat constrained, Russia can still move troops around Central Asia in a way that no other power can, and Central Asians do harbor a certain nostalgia in these politically volatile times for the peace and security that was the old Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center could well be right: Russia’s best real hope in the long run is to liberalize its economy and politics, in order to make Russia attractive to the Kazakhs and other former subject peoples. For the Heartland, with the
collapse of communism and the onset of globalization, has become a power in its own right. Kazakhstan, which is more than double the land area of the other Central Asian states combined, demonstrates it. Mackinder, who feared the horizontal separation of the world into classes and ideologies, believed that along with the balance of power, it was provincialism—the vertical separation of the world into small groups and states—that helps guarantee freedom.
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At the end of his famous article “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Mackinder has a disturbing reference to China. After elucidating why the interior of Eurasia forms the fulcrum of geostrategic world power, he posits that the Chinese “might constitute the yellow peril to the world’s freedom, just because they would add an oceanic frontage to the resources of the great continent, an advantage as yet denied to the Russian tenant of the pivot region.”
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Leave aside the inherent racist sentiment of the era, as well as the hysterics with which the rise of any non-Western power is greeted, and concentrate instead on Mackinder’s analysis: that whereas Russia is a land power whose only oceanic frontage is mainly blocked by Arctic ice, China is, too, a continental-sized power, but one whose virtual reach extends not only into the strategic Central Asian core of the former Soviet Union, with all of its mineral and hydrocarbon wealth, but also to the main shipping lanes of the Pacific three thousand miles away, where China enjoys a nine-thousand-mile
coastline with many good natural harbors, most of which are ice-free. (Mackinder actually feared that China would one day conquer Russia.) Furthermore, as Mackinder wrote in 1919 in
Democratic Ideals and Reality
, if Eurasia conjoined with Africa forms the “World-Island”—the heart of the dry-land earth, four times the size of North America, with eight times the population—then China, as Eurasia’s largest continental nation with a coastline in both the tropics and the temperate zone, occupies the globe’s most advantageous position. Mackinder predicts at the conclusion of
Democratic Ideals and Reality
that, along with the United States and the United Kingdom, China would eventually guide the world by “building for a quarter of humanity a new civilization, neither quite Eastern nor quite Western.”
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A patriotic imperialist to the last, Mackinder naturally included Great Britain in this exalted category. Nevertheless, using only the criteria of geography and demography, his prediction about China has at least so far proved accurate.

The fact that China is blessed by geography is something so basic and obvious that it tends to be overlooked in all the discussions about its economic dynamism and national assertiveness over recent decades. Thus, a look at the map through the prism of Chinese history is in order.

While Russia lies to the north of 50 degrees north latitude, China lies to the south of it, in roughly the same range of temperate latitude as the United States, with all the variations in climate and the benefits which that entails.
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Harbin, the main city of Manchuria, lies at 45 degrees north latitude, the same as Maine. Beijing is near 40 degrees north latitude, the same as New York. Shanghai, at the mouth of the Yangzi River, lies at 30 degrees north latitude, the same as New Orleans. The Tropic of Cancer runs through the southern extremity of China and also cuts just below the Florida Keys.