Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall PDF

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Email: [email protected] BUY CSS / PMS / NTS & GENERAL KNOWLEDGE BOOKS ONLINE CASH ON DELIVERY ALL OVER PAKISTAN Visit Now: WWW.CSSBOOKS.NET For Oder & Inquiry Call/SMS/WhatsApp 0333 6042057 – 0726 540316 FPSC and PPSC Model Papers Latest and Updated Editions FPSC 48th Edition | PPSC 72nd Edition Call | SMS Now 0726540141 - 03336042057 Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power & Peace By Hans Morgenthau css solved compulsory mcqs From 2000 to 2020 Latest & Updated Order Now Call/SMS 03336042057 - 0726540141 ‘Marshall is not afraid to ask tough questions and provide sharp answers … His approach is simple but e ective. Ten chapters, each accompanied by a map, cover the world’s regions and global powers. Each shows how geography shapes not just history but destiny. In an ever more complex, chaotic and interlinked world, Prisoners of Geography is a concise and useful primer on geopolitics.’ – Adam LeBor, Newsweek ‘Sharp insights into the way geography shapes the choices of world leaders.’ – Gideon Rachman, The World blog, ft.com ‘An exceptional work, well-researched, argued and documented … a treasure of information to satisfy the specialist researcher into contemporary geopolitics and o ers a riveting insight to the general reader or student.… It is all covered in this magni cent book, which I highly recommend.’ – Nehad Ismail, writer and broadcaster ‘There are few foreign correspondents in the current British media who can present an overview of a political situation quite like Tim Marshall … in Prisoners of Geography he presents this knowledge and experience quite brilliantly. It’s a cleverly written book and underlines what makes Tim Marshall such an e ective voice on world a airs.’ – retroculturati.com ‘Marshall’s latest book explains how politics is nothing without geography, in his crisp and compelling style … What he really excels at is capturing the psychology of nations and giving maps a power that politicians must tame.’ – Top Ten Holiday Reads, Dan Lewis, Stanfords, WorldTravelGuide.net ‘Quite simply, one of the best books about geopolitics you could imagine: reading it is like having a light shone on your understanding… Marshall is clear-headed, lucid and possessed of an almost uncanny ability to make the broad picture accessible and coherent … the book is, in a way which astonished me, given the complexities of the subject, unputdownable… I can’t think of another book that explains the world situation so well.’ – Nicholas Lezard, Evening Standard ‘Crisply written and brilliantly argued.’ – Dame Ann Leslie ‘An essential and detailed re ection of the geopolitical dynamics that exist globally.’ – Dr Sajjan M. Gohel  PRISONERS OF GEOGRAPHY  CONTENTS Foreword by Sir John Scarlett KCMG OBE Introduction 1 Russia 2 China 3 USA 4 Western Europe 5 Africa 6 The Middle East 7 India and Pakistan 8 Korea and Japan 9 Latin America 10 The Arctic Conclusion Bibliography Acknowledgements Index  FOREWORD I T HAS BECOME A TRUISM TO THINK, AND TO SAY, THAT WE LIVE IN exceptionally unstable times. The world, we are told, has never been more unpredictable. Such statements invite a cautious, even sceptical, response. It is right to be cautious. The world has always been unstable and the future, by de nition, unpredictable. Our current worries could certainly be much worse. If nothing else, the centenary of 1914 should have reminded us of that. All that said, fundamental changes are certainly under way, and these have real meaning for our own future and that of our children, wherever we live. Economic, social and demographic change, all linked to rapid technological change, have global implications which may mark out the times we live in now from those that went before. This may be why we talk so much about ‘exceptional uncertainty’ and why ‘geopolitical’ commentary has become a growth industry. Tim Marshall is unusually well quali ed, personally and professionally, to contribute to this debate. He has participated directly in many of the most dramatic developments of the past twenty- ve years. As his Introduction reminds us, he has been on the front line in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Syria. He has seen how decisions and events, international con icts and civil wars, can only be understood by taking full account of the hopes, fears and preconceptions formed by history and how these in turn are driven by the physical surroundings – the geography – in which individuals, societies and countries have developed. As a result, this book is full of well-judged insights of immediate relevance to our security and well-being. What has in uenced Russian action in Ukraine? Did we (the West) fail to anticipate this? If so, why? How far will Moscow push now? Does China at last feel secure within what it sees as natural land borders, and how will this a ect Beijing’s approach to maritime power and the USA? What does this mean for other countries in the region, including India and Japan? For over 200 years the USA has bene ted from highly favourable geographical circumstances and natural resource endowment. Now it has unconventional oil and gas. Will this a ect its global policy? The USA has extraordinary power and resilience, so why is there so much talk of US decline? Are the deeply embedded divisions and emotions across North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia intractable, or can we detect some hope for the future? Finally, and maybe most importantly for our country, the United Kingdom, which is one of the largest and most global economies: how is Europe reacting to the uncertainties and con icts nearby, and not so nearby? As Tim points out, over the past seventy years (and especially since 1991) Europe has become accustomed to peace and prosperity. Are we at risk now of taking this for granted? Do we still understand what is going on around us? If you want to think about these questions, read this book. Sir John Scarlett KCMG OBE, Chief Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), 2004–2009  INTRODUCTION V LADIMIR PUTIN SAYS HE IS A RELIGIOUS MAN, A GREAT supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church. If so, he may well go to bed each night, say his prayers and ask God: ‘Why didn’t you put some mountains in Ukraine?’ If God had built mountains in Ukraine, then the great expanse of atland that is the North European Plain would not be such encouraging territory from which to attack Russia repeatedly. As it is, Putin has no choice: he must at least attempt to control the atlands to the west. So it is with all nations, big or small. The landscape imprisons their leaders, giving them fewer choices and less room to manoeuvre than you might think. This was true of the Athenian Empire, the Persians, the Babylonians and before; it was true of every leader seeking high ground from which to protect their tribe. attempts to control The land on which we live has always shaped us. It has shaped the wars, the power, politics and social development of the peoples that now inhabit nearly every part of the earth. Technology may seem to overcome the distances between us in both mental and physical space, but it is easy to forget that the land where we live, work and raise our children is hugely important, and that the choices of those who lead the seven billion inhabitants of this planet will to some degree always be shaped by the rivers, mountains, deserts, lakes and seas that constrain us all – as they always have. Overall there is no one geographical factor that is more important than any other. Mountains are no more important than deserts, nor rivers than jungles. In di erent parts of the planet, di erent geographical features are among the dominant factors in determining what people can and cannot do. Broadly speaking, geopolitics looks at the ways in which international a airs can be understood through geographical factors; not just the physical landscape – the natural barriers of mountains or connections of river networks, for example – but also climate, demographics, cultural regions and access to natural resources. Factors such as these can have an important impact on many di erent aspects of our civilisation, from political and military strategy to human social development, including language, trade and religion. The physical realities that underpin national and international politics are too often disregarded both in writing about history and in contemporary reporting of world a airs. Geography is clearly a fundamental part of the ‘why’ as well as the ‘what’. It might not be the determining factor, but it is certainly the most overlooked. Take, for example, China and India: two massive countries with huge populations that share a very long border but are not politically or culturally aligned. It wouldn’t be surprising if these two giants had fought each other in several wars, but in fact, apart from one month-long battle in 1962, they never have. Why? Because between them is the highest mountain range in the world, and it is practically impossible to advance large military columns through or  over the Himalayas. As technology becomes more sophisticated, of course, ways are emerging of overcoming this obstacle, but the physical barrier remains a deterrent, and so both countries focus their foreign policy on other regions while keeping a wary eye on each other. Individual leaders, ideas, technology and other factors all play a role in shaping events, but they are temporary. Each new generation will still face the physical obstructions created by the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas; the challenges created by the rainy season; and the disadvantages of limited access to natural minerals or food sources. I rst became interested in this subject when covering the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s. I watched close at hand as the leaders of various peoples, be they Serbian, Croat or Bosniak, deliberately reminded their ‘tribes’ of the ancient divisions and, yes, ancient suspicions in a region crowded with diversity. Once they had pulled the peoples apart, it didn’t take much to then push them against each other. The River Ibar in Kosovo is a prime example. Ottoman rule over Serbia was cemented by the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389, fought near where the Ibar ows through the city of Mitrovica. Over the following centuries the Serb population began to withdraw behind the Ibar as Muslim Albanians gradually descended from the mountainous Malesija region into Kosovo, where they became a majority by the mid eighteenth century. River Fast-forward to the twentieth century and there was still a clear ethnic/religious division roughly marked by the river. Then in 1999, battered by NATO from the air and the Kosovo Liberation Army on the ground, the Yugoslav (Serbian) military retreated across the Ibar, quickly followed by most of the remaining Serb population. The river became the de facto border of what some countries now recognise as the independent state of Kosovo. Mitrovica was also where the advancing NATO ground forces came to a halt. During the three-month war there had been veiled threats that NATO intended to invade all of Serbia. In truth, the restraints of both geography and politics meant the NATO leaders never really had that option. Hungary had made it clear that it would not allow an invasion from its territory, as it feared reprisals against the 350,000 ethnic Hungarians in northern Serbia. The alternative was an invasion from the south, which would have got them to the Ibar in double-quick time; but NATO would then have faced the mountains above them. I was working with a team of Serbs in Belgrade at the time and asked what would happen if NATO came: ‘We will put our cameras down, Tim, and pick up guns,’ was the response. They were liberal Serbs, good friends of mine and opposed to their government, but they still pulled out the maps and showed me where the Serbs would defend their territory in the mountains, and where NATO would grind to a halt. It was some relief to be given a geography lesson in why NATO’s choices were more limited than the Brussels PR machine made public. An understanding of how crucial the physical landscape was in reporting news in the Balkans stood me in good stead in the years which followed. For example, in 2001, a few weeks after 9/11, I saw a demonstration of how, even with today’s modern technology, climate still dictates the military possibilities of even the world’s most powerful armies. I was in northern Afghanistan, having crossed the border river from Tajikistan on a raft, in order to link up with the Northern Alliance (NA) troops who were ghting the Taliban. The American ghter jets and bombers were already overhead, pounding Taliban and Al Qaeda positions on the cold, dusty plains and hills east of Mazar-e-Sharif in order to pave the way for the advance on Kabul. After a few weeks it was obvious that the NA were gearing up to move south. And then the world changed colour. The most intense sandstorm I have ever experienced blew in, turning everything a mustard-yellow colour. Even the air around us seemed to be this hue, thick as it was with sand particles. For thirty- six hours nothing moved except the sand. At the height of the storm you couldn’t see more than a few yards ahead of you, and the only thing clear was that the advance would have to wait for the weather. The Americans’ satellite technology, at the cutting edge of science, was helpless, blind in the face of the climate of this wild land. Everyone, from President Bush and the Joint Chiefs of Sta to the NA troops on the ground, just had to wait. Then it rained, and the sand that had settled on everything and everyone turned into mud. The rain came down so hard that the baked-mud huts we were living in looked as if they were melting. Again it was clear that the move south was on hold until geography nished having its say. The rules of geography, which Hannibal, Sun Tzu and Alexander the Great all knew, still apply to today’s leaders. More recently, in 2012, I was given another lesson in geostrategy: as Syria descended into full-blown civil war, I was standing on a Syrian hilltop, overlooking a valley south of the city of Hama, and saw a hamlet burning in the distance. Syrian friends pointed out a much larger village about a mile away, from where they said the attack had come. They then explained that if one side could push enough people from the other faction out of the valley, then the valley could be joined onto other land that led to the country’s only motorway, and as such would be useful in carving out a piece of contiguous viable territory which one day could be used to create a mini-statelet if Syria could not be put back together again. Where before I saw only a burning hamlet, I could now see its strategic importance and understand how political realities are shaped by the most basic physical realities. Geopolitics a ects every country, whether at war, as in the examples above, or at peace. There will be instances in every region you can name. In these pages I cannot explore each one: Canada, Australia and Indonesia, among others, get no more than a brief mention, although a whole book could be devoted to Australia alone and the ways in which its geography has shaped its connections with other parts of the world, both physically and culturally. Instead I have focused on the powers and regions that best illustrate the key points of the book, covering the legacy of geopolitics from the past (nation-forming); the most pressing situations we face today (the troubles in Ukraine, the expanding in uence of China); and looking to the future (growing competition in the Arctic). In Russia we see the in uence of the Arctic, and how its freezing climate limits Russia’s ability to be a truly global power. In China we see the limitations of power without a global navy. The chapter on the USA illustrates how shrewd decisions to expand its territory in key regions allowed it to achieve its modern destiny as a two- ocean superpower. Europe shows us the value of at land and navigable rivers in connecting regions with each other and producing a culture able to kick-start the modern world, while Africa is a prime example of the e ects of isolation. The chapter on the Middle East demonstrates why drawing lines on maps while disregarding the topography and, equally importantly, the geographical cultures in a given area is a recipe for trouble. We will continue to witness that trouble this century. The same theme surfaces in the chapters on Africa and India/Pakistan. The colonial powers drew arti cial borders on paper, completely ignoring the physical realities of the region. Violent attempts are now being made to redraw them; these will continue for several years, after which the map of nation states will no longer look as it does now. Very di erent from the examples of Kosovo or Syria are Japan and Korea, in that they are mostly ethnically homogeneous. But they have other problems: Japan is an island nation devoid of natural resources while the division of the Koreas is a problem still waiting to be solved. Meanwhile, Latin America is an anomaly. In its far south it is so cut o from the outside world that global trading is di cult, and its internal geography is a barrier to creating a trading bloc as successful as the EU. Finally, we come to one of the most uninhabitable places on earth – the Arctic. For most of history humans have ignored it, but in the twentieth century we found energy there, and twenty- rst- century diplomacy will determine who owns – and sells – that resource.  Seeing geography as a decisive factor in the course of human history can be construed as a bleak view of the world, which is why it is disliked in some intellectual circles. It suggests that nature is more powerful than man, and that we can only go so far in determining our own fate. However, other factors clearly have an in uence on events too. Any sensible person can see that modern technology is now bending the iron rules of geography. It has found ways over, under, or through some of the barriers. The Americans can now y a plane all the way from Missouri to Mosul on a bombing mission without needing concrete along the way on which to refuel. That, along with their partially self-sustaining great Aircraft Carrier Battle Groups, means they no longer absolutely have to have an ally or a colony in order to extend their global reach around the world. Of course, if they do have an airbase on the island of Diego Garcia, or permanent access to the port in Bahrain, then they have more options; but it is less essential. So air power has changed the rules, as in a di erent way has the internet. But geography, and the history of how nations have established themselves within that geography, remains crucial to our understanding of the world today and our future. The con ict in Iraq and Syria is rooted in colonial powers ignoring the rules of geography, whereas the Chinese occupation of Tibet is rooted in obeying them; America’s global foreign policy is dictated by them, and even the technological genius and power projection of the last superpower standing can only mitigate the rules that nature, or God, handed down. What are those rules? The place to begin is in the land where power is hard to defend, and so for centuries its leaders have compensated by pushing outwards. It is the land without mountains to its west: Russia.  CHAPTER 1 RUSSIA Vast (adjective; vaster, vastest): of very great area or extent; immense. R USSIA IS VAST. IT IS VASTEST. IMMENSE. IT IS SIX MILLION SQUARE vast, eleven time zones vast; it is the largest country in the miles world. Its forests, lakes, rivers, frozen tundra, steppe, taiga and mountains are all vast. This size has long seeped into our collective consciousness. Wherever we are, there is Russia, perhaps to our east, or west, to our north or south – but there is the Russian Bear. It is no coincidence that the bear is the symbol of this immense size. There it sits, sometimes hibernating, sometimes growling, majestic, but ferocious. Bear is a Russian word, but the Russians are also wary of calling this animal by its name, fearful of conjuring up its darker side. They call it medved, ‘the one who likes honey’. At least 120,000 of these medveds live in a country which bestrides Europe and Asia. To the west of the Ural Mountains is European Russia. To their east is Siberia, stretching all the way to the Bering Sea and the Paci c Ocean. Even in the twenty- rst century, to cross it by train takes six days. Russia’s leaders must look across these distances, and di erences, and formulate policy accordingly; for several centuries now they have looked in all directions, but concentrated mostly westward. When writers seek to get to the heart of the bear they often use Winston Churchill’s famous observation of Russia, made in 1939: ‘It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, but few go on to complete the sentence, which ends, ‘but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.’ Seven years later he used that key to unlock his version of the answer to the riddle, asserting, ‘I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.’ He could have been talking about the current Russian leadership, which despite being now wrapped in the cloak of democracy, remains authoritarian in its nature with national interest still at its core. When Vladimir Putin isn’t thinking about God, and mountains, he’s thinking about pizza. In particular, the shape of a slice of pizza – a wedge. The thin end of this wedge is Poland. Here, the vast North European Plain stretching from France to the Urals (which extend 1,000 miles south to north, forming a natural boundary between Europe and Asia) is only 300 miles wide. It runs from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Carpathian Mountains in the south. The North European Plain encompasses all of western and northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, northern Germany and nearly all of Poland. From a Russian perspective this is a double-edged sword. Poland represents a relatively narrow corridor into which Russia could drive its armed forces if necessary and thus prevent an enemy from advancing towards Moscow. But from this point the wedge begins to broaden; by the time you get to Russia’s borders it is over 2,000 miles wide, and is at all the way to Moscow and beyond. Even with a large army you would be hard-pressed to defend in strength along this line. However, Russia has never been conquered from this direction partially due to its strategic depth. By the time an army approaches Moscow it already has unsustainably long supply lines, a mistake that Napoleon made in 1812, and that Hitler repeated in 1941. Likewise, in the Russian Far East it is geography that protects Russia. It is di cult to move an army from Asia up into Asian Russia; there’s not much to attack except for snow, and you could only get as far as the Urals. You would then end up holding a massive piece of territory, in di cult conditions, with long supply lines and the ever-present risk of a counter-attack. You might think that no one is intent on invading Russia, but that is not how the Russians see it, and with good reason. In the past 500 years they have been invaded several times from the west. The Poles came across the North European Plain in 1605, followed by the Swedes under Charles XII in 1708, the French under Napoleon in 1812, and the Germans twice, in both world wars, in 1914 and 1941. Looking at it another way, if you count from Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, but this time include the Crimean War of 1853–6 and the two world wars up to 1945, then the Russians were ghting on average in or around the North European Plain once every thirty- three years. At the end of the Second World War in 1945, the Russians occupied the territory conquered from Germany in Central and Eastern Europe, some of which then became part of the USSR, as it increasingly began to resemble the old Russian Empire. In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed by an association of European and North American states, for the defence of Europe and the North Atlantic against the danger of Soviet aggression. In response, most of the Communist states of Europe – under Russian leadership – formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955, a treaty for military defence and mutual aid. The Pact was supposed to be made of iron, but with hindsight by the early 1980s was rusting, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 it crumbled to dust. President Putin is no fan of the last Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev. He blames him for undermining Russian security and has referred to the break-up of the former Soviet Union during the 1990s as ‘a major geopolitical disaster of the century’. Since then the Russians have watched anxiously as NATO has crept steadily closer, incorporating countries which Russia claims it was promised would not be joining: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia in 2004 and Albania in 2009. NATO says no such assurances were given. I Joined NATO Russia, like all great powers, is thinking in terms of the next 100 years and understands that in that time anything could happen. A century ago, who could have guessed that American armed forces would be stationed a few hundred miles from Moscow in Poland and the Baltic States? By 2004, just fteen years from 1989, every single former Warsaw Pact state bar Russia was in NATO or the European Union. The Moscow administration’s mind has been concentrated by that, and by Russia’s history. Russia as a concept dates back to the ninth century and a loose federation of East Slavic tribes known as Kievan Rus’, which was based in Kiev and other towns along the Dnieper River, in what is now Ukraine. The Mongols, expanding their empire, continually attacked the region from the south and east, eventually overrunning it in the thirteenth century. The edgling Russia then relocated north-east in and around the city of Moscow. This early Russia, known as the Grand Principality of Muscovy, was indefensible. There were no mountains, no deserts and few rivers. In all directions lay atland, and across the steppe to the south and east were the Mongols. The invader could advance at a place of his choosing, and there were few natural defensive positions to occupy. Enter Ivan the Terrible, the rst Tsar. He put into practice the concept of attack as defence – i.e., beginning your expansion by consolidating at home and then moving outwards. This led to greatness. Here was a man to give support to the theory that individuals can change history. Without his character of both utter ruthlessness and vision, Russian history would be di erent. The edgling Russia had begun a moderate expansion under Ivan’s grandfather, Ivan the Great, but that expansion accelerated after the younger Ivan came to power in 1533. It encroached east on the Urals, south to the Caspian Sea and north towards the Arctic Circle. It gained access to the Caspian, and later the Black Sea, thus taking advantage of the Caucasus Mountains as a partial barrier between it and the Mongols. A military base was built in Chechnya to deter any would-be attackers, be they the Mongol Golden Hordes, the Ottoman Empire or the Persians. There were setbacks, but over the next century Russia would push past the Urals and edge into Siberia, eventually incorporating all the land to the Paci c coast far to the east. be they took Siberia Now the Russians had a partial bu er zone and a hinterland – strategic depth – somewhere to fall back to in the case of invasion. No one was going to attack them in force from the Arctic Sea, nor  ght their way over the Urals to get to them. Their land was becoming what we know now as Russia, and to get to it from the south or south-east you had to have a huge army, a very long supply line, and ght your way past defensive positions. In the eighteenth century, Russia – under Peter the Great, who founded the Russian Empire in 1721, and then Empress Catherine the Great – looked westward, expanding the Empire to become one of the great powers of Europe, driven chie y by trade and nationalism. A more secure and powerful Russia was now able to occupy Ukraine and reach the Carpathian Mountains. It took over most of what we now know as the Baltic States – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Thus it was protected from any incursion via land that way, or from the Baltic Sea. Now there was a huge ring around Moscow which was the heart of the country. Starting at the Arctic, it came down through the Baltic region, across Ukraine, then the Carpathians, the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Caspian, swinging back round to the Urals, which stretched up to the Arctic Circle. In the twentieth century Communist Russia created the Soviet Union. Behind the rhetoric of ‘Workers of the World Unite’, the USSR was simply the Russian Empire writ large. After the Second World War it stretched from the Paci c to Berlin, from the Arctic to the borders of Afghanistan – a superpower economically, politically and militarily, rivalled only by the USA. Russia is the biggest country in the world, twice the size of the USA or China, ve times the size of India, twenty- ve times the size of the UK. However, it has a relatively small population of about 144 million, fewer people than Nigeria or Pakistan. Its agricultural growing season is short and it struggles to adequately distribute what is grown around the eleven time zones which Moscow governs. Russia, up to the Urals, is a European power in so far as it borders the European land mass, but it is not an Asian power despite bordering Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China and North Korea, and having maritime borders with several countries including Japan and the USA. Former US Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin was mocked when she was reported as saying, ‘You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska’, a line which morphed in media coverage to ‘I can see Russia from my house.’ What she really said was, ‘You can see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.’ She was right. A Russian island in the Bering Strait is two and a half miles from an American island in the Strait, Little Diomede Island, and can be seen with the naked eye. You can indeed see Russia from America. High up in the Urals there is a cross marking the place where Europe stops and Asia starts. When the skies are clear it is a beautiful spot and you can see through the r trees for miles towards the east. In winter it is snow-covered, as is the Siberian Plain you see below you stretching towards the city of Yekaterinburg. Tourists like to visit to put one foot in Europe and one in Asia. It is a reminder of just how big Russia is when you realise that the cross is placed merely a quarter of the way into the country. You may have travelled 1,500 miles from St Petersburg, through western Russia, to get to the Urals, but you still have another 4,500 miles to go before reaching the Bering Strait, and a possible sighting of Mrs Palin, across from Alaska in the USA. Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union I was in the Urals, at the point where Europe becomes Asia, accompanied by a Russian camera crew. The cameraman was a taciturn, stoic, grizzled veteran of lming, and was the son of the Red Army cameraman who had lmed a great deal of footage during the German siege of Stalingrad. I asked him, ‘So, are you European or are you Asian?’ He re ected on this for a few seconds, then replied, ‘Neither – I am Russian.’ Whatever its European credentials, Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 per cent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 per cent of its population lives there. Siberia may be Russia’s ‘treasure chest’, containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming and large stretches of swampland. Only two railway networks run west to east – the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal–Amur Mainline. There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so. China may well eventually control parts of Siberia in the long- term future, but this would be through Russia’s declining birth rate and Chinese immigration moving north. Already, as far west as the swampy West Siberian Plain, between the Urals in the west and the Yenisei River 1,000 miles to the east, you can see Chinese restaurants in most of the towns and cities. Many more di erent businesses are coming. The empty depopulating spaces of Russia’s Far East are even more likely to come under Chinese cultural, and eventually political, control. When you move outside of the Russian heartland, much of the population in the Russian Federation is not ethnically Russian and pays little allegiance to Moscow, which results in an aggressive security system similar to the one in Soviet days. During that era Russia was e ectively a colonial power ruling over nations and people who felt they had nothing in common with their masters; parts of the Russian Federation – for example, Chechnya and Dagestan in the Caucasus – still feel the same way. Late in the last century, overstretch, spending more money than was available, the economics of the madhouse in a land not designed for people, and defeat in the mountains of Afghanistan all led to the fall of the USSR. The Russian Empire shrank back to the shape of more or less the pre-Communist era with its European borders ending at Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, in support of the Communist Afghan government against anti-Communist Muslim guerrillas, had never been about bringing the joys of Marxist-Leninism to the Afghan people. It was always about ensuring that Moscow controlled the space to prevent anyone else from doing so. taking over Afghan territory Crucially, the invasion of Afghanistan also gave hope to the great Russian dream of its army being able to ‘wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian ocean’, in the words of the ultra- nationalistic Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and thus achieve what it never had: a warm-water port where the water does not freeze in winter, with free access to the world’s major trading routes. The ports on the Arctic, such as Murmansk, freeze for several months each year: Vladivostok, the largest Russian port on the Paci c Ocean, is ice-locked for about four months and is enclosed by the Sea of Japan, which is dominated by the Japanese. This does not just halt the ow of trade; it prevents the Russian eet from operating as a global power. In addition, water-borne transport is much cheaper than land or airborne routes. This lack of a warm-water port with direct access to the oceans has always been Russia’s Achilles heel, as strategically important to it as the North European Plain. Russia is at a geographical disadvantage, saved from being a much weaker power only because of its oil and gas. No wonder, in his will of 1725, that Peter the Great advised his descendants to ‘approach as near as possible to Constantinople and India. Whoever governs there will be the true sovereign of the world. Consequently, excite continual wars, not only in Turkey, but in Persia … Penetrate as far as the Persian Gulf, advance as far as India.’ When the Soviet Union broke apart, it split into fteen countries. Geography had its revenge on the ideology of the Soviets and a more logical picture reappeared on the map, one in which mountains, rivers, lakes and seas delineate where people live, are separated from each other and thus how they develop di erent languages and customs. The exceptions to this rule are the ‘Stans’, such as Tajikistan, whose borders were deliberately drawn by Stalin so as to weaken each state by ensuring it had large minorities of people from other states. If you take the long view of history – and most diplomats and military planners do – then there is still everything to play for in each of the states which formerly made up the USSR, plus some of those previously in the Warsaw Pact military alliance. They can be divided three ways: those that are neutral, the pro-Western group and the pro-Russian camp. The neutral countries – Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan – are those with fewer reasons to ally themselves with Russia or the West. This is because all three produce their own energy and are not beholden to either side for their security or trade. In the pro-Russian camp are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Belarus and Armenia. Their economies are tied to Russia in the way that much of eastern Ukraine’s economy is (another reason for the rebellion there). The largest of these, Kazakhstan, leans towards Russia diplomatically and its large Russian-minority population is well integrated. Of the ve, Kazakhstan and Belarus have joined Russia in the new Eurasian Union (a sort of poor man’s EU) and all are in a military alliance with Russia called the Collective Security Treaty Organization. The CSTO su ers from not having a name you can boil down to one word, and from being a watered-down Warsaw Bloc. Russia maintains a military presence in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Armenia. Then there are the pro-Western countries formerly in the Warsaw Pact but now all in NATO and/or the EU: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Albania and Romania. By no coincidence, many are among the states which su ered most under Soviet tyranny. Add to these Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, which would all like to join both organisations but are being held at arm’s length because of their geographic proximity to Russia and because all three have Russian troops or pro-Russian militia on their soil. NATO membership of any of these three could spark a war. Moldova Georgia Ukraine All of the above explains why, in 2013, as the political battle for the direction of Ukraine heated up, Moscow concentrated hard. As long as a pro-Russian government held sway in Kiev, the Russians could be con dent that its bu er zone would remain intact and guard the North European Plain. Even a studiedly neutral Ukraine, which would promise not to join the EU or NATO and to uphold the lease Russia had on the warm-water port at Sevastopol in Crimea, would be acceptable. That Ukraine was reliant on Russia for energy also made its increasingly neutral stance acceptable, albeit irritating. But a pro-Western Ukraine with ambitions to join the two great Western alliances, and which threw into doubt Russia’s access to its Black Sea port? A Ukraine that one day might even host a NATO naval base? That could not stand. President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine tried to play both sides. He irted with the West, but paid homage to Moscow – thus Putin tolerated him. When he came close to signing a massive trade agreement with the EU, one which could lead to membership, Putin began turning the screw. For the Russian foreign policy elite, membership of the EU is simply a stalking horse for membership of NATO, and for Russia, Ukrainian membership of NATO is a red line. Putin piled the pressure on Yanukovych, made him an o er he chose not to refuse, and the Ukrainian president scrambled out of the EU deal and made a pact with Moscow, thus sparking the protests which were eventually to overthrow him.  The Germans and Americans had backed the opposition parties, with Berlin in particular seeing former world boxing champion turned politician Vitaly Klitschko as their man. The West was pulling Ukraine intellectually and economically towards it whilst helping pro-Western Ukrainians to push it westward by training and funding some of the democratic opposition groups. Street ghting erupted in Kiev and demonstrations across the country grew. In the east, crowds came out in support of the President, while in the west of the country, in cities such as L’viv (which used to be in Poland), they were busy trying to rid themselves of any pro-Russian in uence. By mid-February 2014 L’viv and other urban areas were no longer controlled by the government. Then on 22 February, after dozens of deaths in Kiev, the President, fearing for his life, ed. Anti-Russian factions, some of which were pro-Western and some pro-fascist, took over the government. From that moment the die was cast. President Putin did not have much of a choice – he had to annex Crimea, which contained not only many Russian-speaking Ukrainians but, most importantly, the port of Sevastopol. Sevastopol is Russia’s only true major warm-water port. However, access out of the Black Sea into the Mediterranean is restricted by the Montreux Convention of 1936, which gave Turkey – now a NATO member – control of the Bosporus. Russian naval ships do transit the strait, but in limited numbers, and this would not be permitted in the event of con ict. Even after crossing the Bosporus the Russians need to navigate the Aegean Sea before accessing the Mediterranean, and would still have either to cross the Gibraltar Straits to gain access to the Atlantic Ocean, or be allowed down the Suez Canal to reach the Indian Ocean. The Russians do have a small naval presence in Tartus on Syria’s Mediterranean coast (this partially explains their support for the Syrian government when ghting broke out in 2011), but it is a limited supply and replenishment base, not a major force. Another strategic problem is that in the event of war the Russian navy cannot get out of the Baltic Sea either, due to the Skagerrak Strait, which connects to the North Sea. The narrow strait is controlled by NATO members Denmark and Norway; and even if the ships made it, the route to the Atlantic goes through what is known as the GIUK gap (Greenland/Iceland/UK) in the North Sea – which we will see more of when we look at Western Europe. Having annexed Crimea, the Russians are wasting no time. They are building up the Black Sea eet at Sevastopol and constructing a new naval port in the Russian city of Novorossiysk which, although it does not have a natural deep harbour, will give the Russians extra capacity. Eighty new ships are being commissioned, as well as several submarines. The eet will still not be strong enough to break out of the Black Sea during wartime, but its capacity is increasing. To counter this, in the next decade we can expect to see the USA encouraging its NATO partner Romania to boost its eet in the Black Sea whilst relying on Turkey to hold the line across the Bosporus. Crimea was part of Russia for two centuries before being transferred to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine in 1954 by President Khrushchev at a time when it was envisaged that Soviet man would live forever and so be controlled by Moscow for ever. Now that Ukraine was no longer Soviet, or even pro-Russian, Putin knew the situation had to change. Did the Western diplomats know? If they didn’t, then they were unaware of Rule A, Lesson One, in ‘Diplomacy for Beginners’: when faced with what is considered an existential threat, a great power will use force. If they were aware, then they must have considered Putin’s annexation of Crimea a price worth paying for pulling Ukraine into modern Europe and the Western sphere of in uence. A generous view is that the USA and the Europeans were looking forward to welcoming Ukraine into the democratic world as a full member of its liberal institutions and the rule of law, and that there wasn’t much Moscow could do about it. That is a view which does not take into account the fact that geopolitics still exists in the twenty- rst century, or that Russia does not play by the rule of law. Flushed with victory, the new interim Ukrainian government had immediately made some foolish statements, not least of which was the intention to abolish Russian as the o cial second language in various regions. Given that these regions were the ones with the most Russian speakers and pro-Russian sentiment, and indeed included Crimea, this was bound to spark a backlash. It also gave President Putin the propaganda he needed to make the case that ethnic Russians inside Ukraine needed to be protected. The Kremlin has a law which compels the government to protect ‘ethnic Russians’. A de nition of that term is, by design, hard to come by because it will be de ned as Russia chooses in each of the potential crises which may erupt in the former Soviet Union. When it suits the Kremlin, ethnic Russians will be de ned simply as people who speak Russian as their rst language. At other times the new citizenship law will be used, which states that if your grandparents lived in Russia, and Russian is your native language, you can take Russian citizenship. Given that, as the crises arise, people will be inclined to accept Russian passports to hedge their bets, this will be a lever for Russian entry into a con ict. Approximately 60 per cent of Crimea’s population is ‘ethnically Russian’, so the Kremlin was pushing against an open door. Putin helped the anti-Kiev demonstrations, and stirred up so much trouble that eventually he ‘had’ to send his troops out of the con nes of the naval base and onto the streets to protect people. The Ukrainian military in the area was in no shape to take on both the people and the Russian army, and swiftly withdrew. Crimea was once again de facto a part of Russia. You could make the argument that President Putin did have a choice: he could have respected the territorial integrity of Ukraine. But, given that he was dealing with the geographic hand God has dealt Russia, this was never really an option. He would not be the man who ‘lost Crimea’, and with it the only proper warm-water port his country had access to. No one rode to the rescue of Ukraine as it lost territory equivalent to the size of Belgium, or the US state of Maryland. Ukraine and its neighbours knew a geographic truth: that unless you are in NATO, Moscow is near, Washington DC is far away. For Russia this was an existential matter: they could not cope with losing Crimea, the West could. The EU imposed limited sanctions – limited because several European countries, Germany among them, are reliant on Russian energy to heat their homes in winter. The pipelines run east to west and the Kremlin can turn the taps on and o. Energy as political power will be deployed time and again in the coming years, and the concept of ‘ethnic Russians’ will be used to justify whatever moves Russia makes. In a speech in 2014 President Putin brie y referred to ‘Novorossiya’ or ‘New Russia’. The Kremlin-watchers took a deep breath. He had revived the geographic title given to what is now southern and eastern Ukraine, which Russia had won from the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century. Catherine went on to settle Russians in these regions and demanded that Russian be the rst language. ‘Novorossiya’ was only ceded to the newly formed Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1922. ‘Why?’ asked Putin rhetorically, ‘Let God judge them.’ In his speech he listed the Ukrainian regions of Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odessa before saying, ‘Russia lost these territories for various reasons, but the people remained.’ Several million ethnic Russians still remain inside what was the USSR, but outside Russia. It is no surprise that, after seizing Crimea, Russia went on to encourage the uprisings by pro-Russians in the Ukrainian eastern industrial heartlands in Luhansk and Donetsk. Russia could easily drive militarily all the way to the eastern bank of the Dnieper River in Kiev. But it does not need the headache that would bring. It is far less painful, and cheaper, to encourage unrest in the eastern borders of Ukraine and remind Kiev who controls energy supplies, to ensure that Kiev’s infatuation with the irtatious West does not turn into a marriage consummated in the chambers of the EU or NATO. Covert support for the uprisings in eastern Ukraine was also logistically simple and had the added bene t of deniability on the international stage. Barefaced lying in the great chamber of the UN Security Council is simple if your opponent does not have concrete proof of your actions and, more importantly, doesn’t want concrete proof in case he or she has to do something about it. Many politicians in the West breathed a sigh of relief and muttered quietly, ‘Thank goodness Ukraine isn’t in NATO or we would have had to act.’ The annexation of Crimea showed how Russia is prepared for military action to defend what it sees as its interests in what it calls its ‘near abroad’. It took a rational gamble that outside powers would not intervene, and Crimea was ‘doable’. It is close to Russia, could be supplied across the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and could rely on internal support from large sections of the population of the peninsula. Russia has not nished with Ukraine yet, nor elsewhere. Unless it feels threatened Russia will probably not send its troops all the way into the Baltic States, or any further forward than it already is in Georgia; but it will push its power in Georgia, and in this volatile period further military action cannot be ruled out. However, just as Russia’s actions in its war with Georgia in 2008 were a warning to NATO to come no closer, so NATO’s message to Russia in the summer of 2014 was, ‘This far west and no further.’ A handful of NATO war planes were own to the Baltic States, military exercises were announced in Poland and the Americans began planning to ‘preposition’ extra hardware as close to Russia as possible. At the same time there was a urry of diplomatic visits by Defence and Foreign Ministers to the Baltic States, Georgia and Moldova to reassure them of support. Some commentators poured scorn on the reaction, arguing that six RAF Euro ghter Typhoon jets ying over Baltic airspace were hardly going to deter the Russian hordes. But the reaction was about diplomatic signalling, and the signal was clear – NATO is prepared to ght. Indeed it would have to, because if it failed to react to an attack on a member state, it would instantly be obsolete. The Americans – who are already edging towards a new foreign policy in which they feel less constrained by existing structures and are prepared to forge new ones as they perceive the need arises – are deeply unimpressed with the European countries’ commitment to defence spending. In the case of the three Baltic States, NATO’s position is clear. As they are all members of the alliance, armed aggression against any of them by Russia would trigger Article 5 of NATO’s founding charter, which states: ‘An armed attack against one or more [NATO member states] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all’, and goes on to say NATO will come to the rescue if necessary. Article 5 was invoked after the terrorist attacks in the USA on 11 September 2001, paving the way for NATO involvement in Afghanistan. President Putin is a student of history. He appears to have learnt the lessons of the Soviet years, in which Russia overstretched itself and was forced to contract. An overt assault on the Baltic States would likewise be overstretching and is unlikely, especially if NATO and its political masters ensure that Putin understands their signals. Russia does not have to send an armoured division into Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia to in uence events there, but if it ever does it would justify the action by claiming that the large Russian communities there are being discriminated against. In both Estonia and Latvia approximately one in four people are ethnically Russian and in Lithuania it is 5.8 per cent. In Estonia the Russian speakers say they are under-represented in government and thousands do not have any form of citizenship. This does not mean they want to be part of Russia, but they are one of the levers Russia can pull to in uence events. The Russian-speaking populations in the Baltics can be stirred up to making life di cult. There are existing, fully formed political parties already representing many of them. Russia also controls the central heating in the homes of the Baltic people. It can set the price people pay for their heating bills each month, and, if it chooses, simply turn the heating o. Russia will continue to push its interests in the Baltic States. They are one of the weak links in its defence since the collapse of the USSR, another breach in the wall they would prefer to see forming an arc from the Baltic Sea, south, then south-east connecting to the Urals. This brings us to another gap in the wall and another region Moscow views as a potential bu er state. Firmly in the Kremlin’s sights is Moldova. Moldova presents a di erent problem for all sides. An attack on the country by Russia would necessitate crossing through Ukraine, over the Dnieper River and then over another sovereign border into Moldova. It could be done – at the cost of signi cant loss of life and by using Odessa as a staging post – but there would no deniability. Although it might not trigger war with NATO (Moldova is not a member), it would provoke sanctions against Moscow at a level hitherto unseen, and con rm what this writer believes to already be the case – that the cooling relationship between Russia and the West is already the New Cold War. Why would the Russians want Moldova? Because as the Carpathian Mountains curve round south-west to become the Transylvanian Alps, to the south-east is a plain leading down to the Black Sea. That plain can also be thought of as a at corridor into Russia; and, just as the Russians would prefer to control the North European Plain at its narrow point in Poland, so they would like to control the plain by the Black Sea – also known as Moldova – in the region formerly known as Bessarabia. A number of countries that were once members of the Soviet Union aspire to closer ties with Europe, but with certain regions, such as Transnistria in Moldova, remaining heavily pro-Russian, there is potential for future con ict. After the Crimean War (fought between Russia and Western European allies to protect Ottoman Turkey from Russia), the 1856 Treaty of Paris returned parts of Bessarabia to Moldova, thus cutting Russia o from the River Danube. It took Russia almost a century to regain access to it, but with the collapse of the USSR, once more Russia had to retreat eastward. However, in e ect the Russians do already control part of Moldova – a region called Transnistria, part of Moldova east of the Dniester River which borders Ukraine. Stalin, in his wisdom, settled large numbers of Russians there, just as he had in Crimea after deporting much of the Tatar population. Modern Transnistria is now at least 50 per cent Russian- or Ukrainian-speaking, and that part of the population is pro-Russian. When Moldova became independent in 1991 the Russian-speaking population rebelled and, after a brief period of ghting, declared a breakaway Republic of Transnistria. It helped that Russia had soldiers stationed there, and it retains a force of 2,000 troops to this day. A Russian military advance in Moldova is unlikely, but the Kremlin can and does use its economic muscle and the volatile situation in Transnistria to try and in uence the Moldovan government not to join the EU or NATO. Moldova is reliant on Russia for its energy needs, its crops go eastward and Russian imports of the excellent Moldovan wine tend to rise or fall according to the state of the relationship between the two countries. Across the Black Sea from Moldova lies another wine-producing nation: Georgia. It is not high on Russia’s list of places to control for two reasons. Firstly the Georgia–Russian war of 2008 left large parts of the country occupied by Russian troops, who now fully control the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Secondly, it lies south of the Caucasus Mountains and Russia also has troops stationed in neighbouring Armenia. Moscow would prefer an extra layer to their bu er zone, but can live without taking the rest of Georgia. That situation could potentially change if Georgia looked close to becoming a NATO member. This is precisely why it has so far been rebu ed by the NATO governments, which are keen to avoid the inevitable con ict with Russia. A majority of the population in Georgia would like closer ties with the EU countries, but the shock of the 2008 war, when then President Mikheil Saakashvili naively thought the Americans might ride to his rescue after he provoked the Russians, has caused many to consider that hedging their bets may be safer. In 2013 they elected a government and president, Giorgi Margvelashvili, far more conciliatory to Moscow. As in Ukraine, people instinctively know the truism everyone in the neighbourhood recognises: that Washington is far away, and Moscow is near. Russia’s most powerful weapons now, leaving to one side nuclear missiles, are not the Russian army and air force, but gas and oil. Russia is second only to the USA as the world’s biggest supplier of natural gas, and of course it uses this power to its advantage. The better your relations with Russia, the less you pay for energy; for example, Finland gets a better deal than the Baltic States. This policy has been used so aggressively, and Russia has such a hold over Europe’s energy needs, that moves are afoot to blunt its impact. Many countries in Europe are attempting to wean themselves o their dependency on Russian energy, not via alternative pipelines from less aggressive countries but by building ports. On average, more than 25 per cent of Europe’s gas and oil comes from Russia; but often the closer a country is to Moscow, the greater its dependency. This in turn reduces that country’s foreign policy options. Latvia, Slovakia, Finland and Estonia are 100 per cent reliant on Russian gas, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Lithuania are 80 per cent dependent, and Greece, Austria and Hungary 60 per cent. About half of Germany’s gas consumption comes from Russia which, along with extensive trade deals, is partly why German politicians tend to be slower to criticise the Kremlin for aggressive behaviour than a country such as Britain, which not only has 13 per cent dependency, but also has its own gas-producing industry, including reserves of up to nine months’ supply. There are several major pipeline routes running east to west out of Russia, some for oil and some for gas. It is the gas lines which are the most important. In the north, via the Baltic Sea, is the Nord Stream route, which connects directly to Germany. Below that, cutting through Belarus, is the Yamal pipeline, which feeds Poland and Germany. In the south is the Blue Stream, taking gas to Turkey via the Black Sea. Until early 2015 there was a planned project called South Stream, which was due to use the same route but branch o to Hungary, Austria, Serbia, Bulgaria and Italy. South Stream was Russia’s attempt to ensure that even during disputes with Ukraine it would still have a major route to large markets in Western Europe and the Balkans. Several EU countries put pressure on their neighbours to reject the plan, and Bulgaria e ectively pulled the plug on the project by saying the pipelines would not come across its territory. President Putin reacted by reaching out to Turkey with a new proposal, sometimes known as Turk Stream. Russia’s South Stream and Turk Stream projects to circumvent Ukraine followed the price disputes between the two states of 2005– 10, which at various times cut the gas supply to eighteen countries. European nations which stood to bene t from South Stream were markedly more restrained in their criticism of Russia during the Crimea crisis of 2014. Enter the Americans, with a win-win strategy for the USA and Europe. Noting that Europe wants gas, and not wanting to be seen to be weak in the face of Russian foreign policy, the Americans believe they have the answer. The massive boom in shale gas production in the USA is not only enabling it to be self-su cient in energy, but also to sell its surplus to one of the great energy consumers – Europe. To do this, the gas needs to be lique ed and shipped across the Atlantic. This in turn requires lique ed natural gas (LNG) terminals and ports to be built along the European coastlines to receive the cargo and turn it back into gas. Washington is already approving licences for export facilities, and Europe is beginning a long-term project to build more LNG terminals. Poland and Lithuania are constructing LNG terminals; other countries such as the Czech Republic want to build pipelines connecting to those terminals, knowing they could then bene t not just from American lique ed gas, but also supplies from North Africa and the Middle East. The Kremlin would no longer be able to turn the taps o. The Russians, seeing the long-term danger, point out that piped gas is cheaper than LNG, and President Putin, with a ‘what did I ever do wrong’ expression on his face, says that Europe already has a reliable and cheaper source of gas coming from his country. LNG is unlikely to completely replace Russian gas, but it will strengthen what is a weak European hand in both price negotiation and foreign policy. To prepare for a potential reduction in revenue Russia is planning pipelines heading south-east and hopes to increase sales to China. This is an economic battle based on geography and one of the modern examples where technology is being utilised in an attempt to beat the geographic restraints of earlier eras. Away from the heartland Russia does have a global political reach and uses its in uence, notably in Latin America, where it buddies up to whichever South American country has the least friendly relationship with the United States, for example Venezuela. It tries to check American moves in the Middle East, or at least ensure it has a say in matters, it is spending massively on its Arctic military forces, and it consistently takes an interest in Greenland to maintain its territorial claims. Since the fall of Communism it has focused less on Africa, but maintains what in uence it can there albeit in a losing battle with China. At home it is facing many challenges, not least of which is demographic. The sharp decline in population growth may have been arrested, but it remains a problem. The average lifespan for a Russian man is below sixty- ve, ranking Russia in the bottom half of the world’s 193 UN member states, and there are now only 144 million Russians (excluding Crimea). From the Grand Principality of Muscovy, through Peter the Great, Stalin and now Putin, each Russian leader has been confronted by the same problems. It doesn’t matter if the ideology of those in control is tsarist, Communist or crony capitalist – the ports still freeze, and the North European Plain is still at. Strip out the lines of nation states, and the map Ivan the Terrible confronted is the same one Vladimir Putin is faced with to this day.  CHAPTER 2 CHINA ‘China is a civilisation pretending to be a nation.’ Lucian Pye, political scientist I N OCTOBER 2006, A US NAVAL SUPERCARRIER GROUP LED BY THE USS Kitty Hawk was con dently sailing through the East China 1,000-foot Sea between southern Japan and Taiwan, minding everyone’s business, when, without warning, a Chinese navy submarine surfaced in the middle of the group. An American aircraft carrier of that size is surrounded by about twelve other warships, with air cover above and submarine cover below. The Chinese vessel, a Song-class attack submarine, may well be very quiet when running on electric power but, still, this was the equivalent to Pepsi-Cola’s management popping up in a Coca-Cola board meeting after listening under the table for half an hour. The Americans were amazed and angry in equal measure. Amazed because they had no idea a Chinese sub could do that without being noticed, angry because they hadn’t noticed and because they regarded the move as provocative, especially as the sub was within torpedo range of the Kitty Hawk itself. They protested, perhaps too much, and the Chinese said: ‘Oh! What a coincidence, us surfacing in the middle of your battle group which is o our coast, we had no idea.’ This was twenty- rst-century reverse gunboat diplomacy; whereas the British used to heave a man-of-war o the coast of some minor power to signal intent, the Chinese hove into view o their own coast with a clear message: ‘We are now a maritime power, this is our time, and this is our sea.’ It has taken 4,000 years, but the Chinese are coming to a port – and a shipping lane – near you.  Until now China has never been a naval power – with its large land mass, multiple borders and short sea routes to trading partners, it had no need to be, and it was rarely ideologically expansive. Its merchants have long sailed the oceans to trade goods, but its navy did not seek territory beyond its region, and the di culty of patrolling the great sea lanes of the Paci c, Atlantic and Indian Oceans was not worth the e ort. It was always a land power, with a lot of land and a lot of people – now nearly 1.4 billion. The concept of China as an inhabited entity began almost 4,000 years ago. The birthplace of Chinese civilisation is the region known as the North China Plain, which the Chinese refer to as the Central Plain. A large, low-lying tract of nearly 160,000 square miles, it is situated below Inner Mongolia, south of Manchuria, in and around the Yellow River Basin and down past the Yangtze River, which both run east to west. It is now one of the most densely populated areas in the world. The Yellow River basin is subject to frequent and devastating oods, earning the river the unenviable sobriquet of ‘Scourge of the Sons of Han’. The industrialisation of the region began in earnest in the 1950s and has been rapidly accelerating in the last three decades. The terribly polluted river is now so clogged with toxic waste that it sometimes struggles even to reach the sea. Nevertheless the Yellow River is to China what the Nile is to Egypt – the cradle of its civilisation, where its people learnt to farm, to make paper and gunpowder. To the north of this proto-China were the harsh lands of the Gobi Desert in what is now Mongolia. To the west the land gradually rises until it becomes the Tibetan Plateau, reaching to the Himalayas. To the south-east and south lies the sea. The heartland, as the North China Plain is known, was and is a large, fertile plain with two main rivers and a climate that allows rice and soy beans to be harvested twice a season (double-cropping), which encouraged rapid population growth. By 1500 BCE in this heartland, out of hundreds of mini city-states, many warring with each other, emerged the earliest version of a Chinese state – the Shang dynasty. This is where what became known as the Han people emerged, protecting the heartland and creating a bu er zone around them. The Han now make up over 90 per cent of China’s population and they dominate Chinese politics and business. They are di erentiated by Mandarin, Cantonese and many other regional languages, but united by ethnicity and at a political level by the geopolitical impulsion to protect the heartland. Mandarin, which originated in the northern part of the region, is by far the dominant language and is the medium of government, national state television and education. Mandarin is similar to Cantonese and many other languages when written, but very di erent when spoken. The heartland is the political, cultural, demographic and – crucially – the agricultural centre of gravity. About a billion people live in this part of China, despite it being just half the size of the United States, which has a population of 322 million. Because the terrain of the heartland lent itself to settlement and an agrarian lifestyle, the early dynasties felt threatened by the non-Han regions which surrounded them, especially Mongolia with its nomadic bands of violent warriors.  China chose the same strategy as Russia: attack as defence, leading to power. As we shall see, there were natural barriers which – if the Han could reach them and establish control – would protect them. It was a struggle over millennia, only fully realised with the annexation of Tibet in 1951. By the time of the famous Chinese philosopher Confucius (551– 479 BCE) there was a strong feeling of Chinese identity and of a divide between civilised China and the ‘barbarous’ regions which surrounded it. This was a sense of identity shared by sixty million or so people. By 200 BCE China had expanded towards, but not reached, Tibet in the south-west, north to the grasslands of Central Asia and south all the way down to the South China Sea. The Great Wall (known as the Long Wall in China) had been rst built by the Qin dynasty (221–207 BCE), and on the map China was beginning to take on what we now recognise as its modern form. It would be more than 2,000 years before today’s borders were xed, however. Between 605 and 609 CE the Grand Canal, centuries in the making and today the world’s longest man-made waterway, was extended and nally linked the Yellow River to the Yangtze. The Sui dynasty (581–618 CE) had harnessed the vast numbers of workers under its control and used them to connect existing natural tributaries into a navigable waterway between the two great rivers. This tied the northern and southern Han to each other more closely than ever before. It took several million slaves ve years to do the work, but the ancient problem of how to move supplies south to north had been solved – but not the problem which exists to this day, that of ooding.  The Han still warred with each other, but increasingly less so, and by the early eleventh century CE they were forced to concentrate their attention on the waves of Mongols pouring down from the north. The Mongols defeated whichever dynasty, north or south, they came up against and by 1279 their leader Kublai Khan became the rst foreigner to rule all of the country as Emperor of the Mongol (Yuan) dynasty. It would be almost ninety years before the Han took charge of their own a airs with the establishment of the Ming dynasty. By now there was increasing contact with traders and emissaries from the emerging nation states of Europe, such as Spain and Portugal. The Chinese leaders were against any sort of permanent European presence, but increasingly opened up the coastal regions to trade. It remains a feature of China to this day that when China opens up, the coastland regions prosper but the inland areas are neglected. The prosperity engendered by trade has made coastal cities such as Shanghai wealthy, but that wealth has not been reaching the countryside. This has added to the massive in ux of people into urban areas and accentuated regional di erences. In the eighteenth century China reached into parts of Burma and Indochina to the south, and Xinjiang in the north-west was conquered, becoming the country’s biggest province. An area of rugged mountains and vast desert basins, Xinjiang is 642,820 square miles, twice the size of Texas – or, to put it another way, you could t the UK, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Belgium into it and still have room for Luxembourg. And Liechtenstein.  But, in adding to its size, China also added to its problems. Xinjiang, a region populated by Muslims, was a perennial source of instability, indeed insurrection, as were other regions; but for the Han the bu er was worth the trouble, even more so after the fate which befell the country in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the coming of the Europeans. The imperial powers arrived, the British among them, and carved the country up into spheres of in uence. It was, and is, the greatest humiliation the Chinese su ered since the Mongol invasions. This is a narrative the Communist Party uses frequently; it is in part true, but it is also useful to cover up the Party’s own failures and repressive policies. Later the Japanese – expanding their territory as an emerging world power – invaded, attacking rst in 1932 and then again in 1937, after which they occupied most of the heartland as well as Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Americans at the end of the Second World War in 1945 led to the withdrawal of Japanese troops, although in Manchuria they were replaced by the advancing Soviet army, which then withdrew in 1946. A few outside observers thought the post-war years might bring liberal democracy to China. It was wishful thinking akin to the naive nonsense Westerners wrote during the early days of the recent ‘Arab Spring’, which, as with China, was based on a lack of understanding of the internal dynamics of the people, politics and geography of the region. Instead, nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek and Communist armies under Chairman Mao battled for supremacy until 1949, when the Communists emerged victorious and the Nationalists withdrew to Taiwan. That same year Radio Beijing announced: ‘The People’s Liberation Army must liberate all Chinese territories, including Tibet, Xinjiang, Hainan and Taiwan.’ Mao centralised power to an extent never seen in previous dynasties. He blocked Russian in uence in Inner Mongolia and extended Beijing’s in uence into Mongolia. In 1951 China completed its annexation of Tibet (another vast non-Han territory), and by then Chinese school textbook maps were beginning to depict China as stretching even into the Central Asian republics. The country had been put back together; Mao would spend the rest of his life ensuring it stayed that way and consolidating Communist Party control in every facet of life, but turning away from much of the outside world. The country remained desperately poor, especially away from the coastal areas, but uni ed. Mao’s successors tried to turn his Long March to victory into an economic march towards prosperity. In the early 1980s the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping coined the term ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’, which appears to translate as ‘Total control for the Communist Party in a Capitalist Economy’. China was becoming a major trading power and a rising military giant. By the end of the 1990s it had recovered from the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, regained Hong Kong and Macau from the British and Portuguese respectively, and could look around its borders, assess its security and plan ahead for its great move out into the world. If we look at China’s modern borders we see a great power now con dent that it is secured by its geographical features, which lend themselves to e ective defence and trade. In China the points of the compass are always listed in the order east–south–west–north, but let’s start in the north and move clockwise. In the north we see the 2,906-mile-long border with Mongolia. Straddling this border is the Gobi Desert. Nomadic warriors from ancient times might have been able to attack south across it, but a modern army would be spotted massing there weeks before it was ready to advance, and it would have incredibly long supply lines running across inhospitable terrain before it got into Inner Mongolia (part of China) and towards the heartland. There are few roads t to move heavy armour, and few habitable areas. The Gobi Desert is a massive early warning system-cumdefensive line. Any Chinese expansion northward will come not via the military, but from trade deals as China attempts to hoover up Mongolia’s natural resources, primarily minerals. This will bring with it increased migration of the Han into Mongolia. Next door, to the east, is China’s border with Russia, which runs all the way to the Paci c Ocean – or at least the Sea of Japan subdivision of it. Above this is the mountainous Russian Far East, a huge, inhospitable territory with a tiny population. Below it is Manchuria, which the Russians would have to push through if they wanted to reach the Chinese heartland. The population of Manchuria is 100 million and growing; in contrast, the Russian Far East has fewer than seven million people and no indications of population growth. Large-scale migration south to north can be expected, which will in turn give China more leverage in its relations with Russia. From a military perspective the best place to cross would be near the Russian Paci c port of Vladivostok, but there are few reasons, and no current intentions, to so do. Indeed, the recent Western sanctions against Russia due to the crisis in Ukraine have driven Russia into massive economic deals with China on terms which help keep Russia a oat, but are favourable to the Chinese. Russia is the junior partner in this relationship. Below the Russian Far East, along the coast, are China’s Yellow, East China and South China seas which lead to the Paci c and Indian Oceans, have many good harbours and have always been used for trade. But across the waves lie several island-sized problems – one shaped like Japan, which we shall come to shortly. Continuing clockwise, we come to the next land borders: Vietnam, Laos and Burma. Vietnam is an irritation for China. For centuries the two have squabbled over territory, and unfortunately for both this is the one area to the south which has a border an army can get across without too much trouble – which partially explains the 1,000-year domination and occupation of Vietnam by China from 111 BCE to 938 CE and their brief cross-border war of 1979. However, as China’s military prowess grows, Vietnam will be less inclined to get drawn into a shooting match and will either cosy up even closer to the Americans for protection or quietly begin shifting diplomatically to become friends with Beijing. That both countries are nominally ideologically Communist has little to do with the state of their relationship: it is their shared geography that has de ned relations. Viewed from Beijing, Vietnam is only a minor threat and a problem that can be managed. The border with Laos is hilly jungle terrain, di cult for traders to cross – and even more complicated for the military. As they move clockwise to Burma, the jungle hills become mountains until at the western extreme they are approaching 20,000 feet and beginning to merge into the Himalayas. This brings us to Tibet and its importance to China. The Himalayas run the length of the Chinese–Indian border before descending to become the Karakorum Range bordering Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. This is nature’s version of a Great Wall of China, or – looking at it from New Delhi’s side – the Great Wall of India. It cuts the two most populous countries on the planet o from each other both militarily and economically. They have their disputes: China claims the Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh, India says China is occupying Aksai Chin; but despite pointing their artillery at each other high up on this natural wall, both sides have better things to do than reignite the shooting match which broke out in 1962, when a series of violent border disputes culminated in vicious large-scale mountain ghting. Nevertheless, the tension is ever-present and each side needs to handle the situation with care. Very little trade has moved between China and India over the centuries, and that is unlikely to change soon. Of course the border is really the Tibetan–Indian border – and that is precisely why China has always wanted to control it. This is the geopolitics of fear. If China did not control Tibet, it would always be possible that India might attempt to do so. This would give India the commanding heights of the Tibetan Plateau and a base from which to push into the Chinese heartland, as well as control of the Tibetan sources of three of China’s great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong, which is why Tibet is known as ‘China’s Water Tower’. China, a country with approximately the same volume of water usage as the USA, but with a population ve times as large, will clearly not allow that. It matters not whether India wants to cut o China’s river supply, only that it would have the power to do so. For centuries China has tried to ensure that it could never happen. The actor Richard Gere and the Free Tibet movement will continue to speak out against the injustices of the occupation, and now settlement, of Tibet by Han Chinese; but in a battle between the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan independence movement, Hollywood stars and the Chinese Communist Party – which rules the world’s second-largest economy – there is only going to be one winner. When Westerners, be they Mr Gere or Mr Obama, talk about Tibet, the Chinese nd it deeply irritating. Not dangerous, not subversive – just irritating. They see it not through the prism of human rights, but that of geopolitical security, and can only believe that the Westerners are trying to undermine their security. However, Chinese security has not been undermined and it will not be, even if there are further uprisings against the Han. Demographics and geopolitics oppose Tibetan independence. The Chinese are building ‘facts on the ground’ on the ‘roof of the world’. In the 1950s the Chinese Communist People’s Army began building roads into Tibet, and since then they have helped to bring the modern world to the ancient kingdom; but the roads, and now railways, also bring the Han. It was long said to be impossible to build a railway through the permafrost, the mountains and the valleys of Tibet. Europe’s best engineers, who had cut through the Alps, said it could not be done. As late as 1988 the travel writer Paul Theroux wrote in his book Riding the Iron Rooster: ‘The Kunlun Range is a guarantee that the railway will never get to Lhasa.’ The Kunlun separated Xinjiang province from Tibet, for which Theroux gave thanks: ‘That is probably a good thing. I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet, and then I realised that I liked wilderness much more.’ But the Chinese built it. Perhaps only they could have done. The line into the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, was opened in 2006 by the then Chinese President Hu Jintao. Now passenger and goods trains arrive from as far away as Shanghai and Beijing, four times a day, every day. They bring with them many things, such as consumer goods from across China, computers, colour televisions and mobile phones. They bring tourists who support the local economy, they bring modernity to an ancient and impoverished land, a huge improvement in living standards and healthcare, and they bring the potential to carry Tibetan goods out to the wider world. But they have also brought several million Han Chinese settlers. The true gures are hard to come by: the Free Tibet movement claims that in the wider cultural Tibetan region Tibetans are now a minority, but the Chinese government says that in the o cial Tibetan Autonomous Region more than 90 per cent of people are Tibetan. Both sides are exaggerating, but the evidence suggests the government is the one with the greater degree of exaggeration. Its gures do not include Han migrants who are not registered as residents, but the casual observer can see that Han neighbourhoods now dominate the Tibetan urban areas. Once, the majority of the population of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang were ethnically Manchurian, Mongolian and Uighur; now all three are majority Han Chinese, or approaching the majority. So it will be with Tibet. This means that resentment of the Han will continue to manifest itself in rioting such as that of 2008, when anti-Chinese Tibetan protestors in Lhasa burnt and looted Han properties, twenty-one people died and hundreds were injured. The authorities’ crackdown will continue, the Free Tibet movement will continue, monks will continue to set themselves on re to bring the plight of the Tibetans to the world’s attention – and the Han will keep coming. China’s massive population, mostly crammed into the heartland, is looking for ways to expand. Just as the Americans looked west, so do the Chinese, and just as the Iron Horse brought the European settlers to the lands of the Comanche and the Navajo, so the modern Iron Roosters are bringing the Han to the Tibetans. Finally the clock hand moves round past the borders with Pakistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan (all mountainous) before reaching the border with Kazakhstan, which leads back round north to Mongolia. This is the ancient Silk Route, the trade land bridge from the Middle Kingdom to the world. Theoretically it’s a weak spot in China’s defence, a gap between the mountains and desert; but it is far from the heartland, the Kazakhs are in no position to threaten China, and Russia is several hundred miles distant. South-east of this Kazakh border is the restive ‘semi-autonomous’ Chinese province of Xinjiang and its native Muslim population of the Uighur people, who speak a language related to Turkish. Xinjiang borders eight countries: Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.  There was, is and always will be trouble in Xinjiang. The Uighurs have twice declared an independent state of ‘East Turkestan’, in the 1930s and 1940s. They watched the collapse of the Russian Empire result in their former Soviet neighbours in the ‘Stans’ becoming sovereign states, were inspired by the Tibetan independence movement, and many are now again calling to break away from China. Inter-ethnic rioting erupted in 2009, leading to over 200 deaths. Beijing responded in three ways: it ruthlessly suppressed dissent, it poured money into the region, and it continued to pour in Han Chinese workers. For China, Xinjiang is too strategically important to allow an independence movement to get o the ground: it not only borders eight countries, thus bu ering the heartland, but it also has oil, and is home to China’s nuclear weapons testing sites. Most of the new towns and cities springing up across Xinjiang are overwhelmingly populated by Han Chinese attracted by work in the new factories in which the central government invests. A classic example is the city of Shihezi, 85 miles north-west of the capital, Ürümqi. Of its population of 650,000, it is thought that at least 620,000 are Han. Overall, Xinjiang is reckoned to be 40 per cent Han, at a conservative estimate – and even Ürümqi itself may now be majority Han, although o cial gures are di cult to obtain and not always reliable due to their political sensitivity. There is a ‘World Uighur Congress’ based in Germany, and the ‘East Turkestan Liberation Movement’ set up in Turkey; but Uighur separatists lack a Dalai Lama-type gure upon whom foreign media can x, and their cause is almost unknown around the world. China tries to keep it that way, ensuring it stays on good terms with as many border countries as possible in order to prevent any organised independence movement from having supply lines or somewhere to which it could fall back. Beijing also paints separatists as Islamist terrorists. Al Qaeda and other groups, which have a foothold in places like Tajikistan, are indeed attempting to forge links with the Uighur separatists, but the movement is nationalist rst, Islamic second. However, gun, bomb and knife attacks in the region against state and/or Han targets over the past few years do look as if they will continue, and could escalate into a full-blown uprising. China will not cede this territory and, as in Tibet, the window for independence is closing. Both are bu er zones, one is a major land trade route, and – crucially – both o er markets (albeit with a limited income) for an economy which must keep producing and selling goods if it is to continue to grow and to prevent mass unemployment. Failure to so do would likely lead to widespread civil disorder, threatening the control of the Communist Party and the unity of China. There are similar reasons for the Party’s resistance to democracy and individual rights. If the population were to be given a free vote, the unity of the Han might begin to crack or, more likely, the countryside and urban areas would come into con ict. That in turn would embolden the people of the bu er zones, further weakening China. It is only a century since the most recent humiliation of the rape of China by foreign powers; for Beijing, unity and economic progress are priorities well ahead of democratic principles. The Chinese look at society very di erently from the West. Western thought is infused with the rights of the individual; Chinese thought prizes the collective above the individual. What the West thinks of as the rights of man, the Chinese leadership thinks of as dangerous theories endangering the majority, and much of the population accepts that, at the least, the extended family comes before the individual. I once took a Chinese Ambassador in London to a high-end French restaurant in the hope they would repeat Prime Minister Zhou Enlai’s much-quoted answer to Richard Nixon’s question ‘What is the impact of the French Revolution?’, to which the prime minister replied ‘It’s too soon to tell.’ Sadly this was not forthcoming, but I was treated to a stern lecture about how the full imposition of ‘what you call human rights’ in China would lead to widespread violence and death and was then asked, ‘Why do you think your values would work in a culture you don’t understand?’ The deal between the Party leaders and the people has been, for a generation now, ‘We’ll make you better o – you will follow our orders.’ So long as the economy keeps growing, that grand bargain may last. If it stops, or goes into reverse, the deal is o. The current level of demonstrations and anger against corruption and ine ciency are testament to what would happen if the deal breaks. Another growing problem for the Party is its ability to feed the population. More than 40 per cent of arable land is now either polluted or has thinning topsoil, according to their Ministry of Agriculture. China is caught in a catch-22. It needs to keep industrialising as it modernises and raises standards of living, but that very process threatens food production. If it cannot solve this problem there will be unrest.  There are now around 500 mostly peaceful protests a day across China over a variety of issues. If you introduce mass unemployment, or mass hunger, that tally will explode in both number and the degree of force used by both sides. So, on the economic side China now also has a grand bargain with the world – ‘We’ll make the stu for cheap – you buy it for cheap.’ Leave to one side the fact that already labour costs are rising in China and it is being rivalled by Thailand and Indonesia, for price if not volume. What would happen if the resources required to make the stu dried up, if someone else got them rst, or if there was a naval blockade of your goods – in and out? Well, for that, you’d need a navy. The Chinese were great sea voyagers, especially in the fteenth century, when they roamed the Indian Ocean; Admiral Zheng He’s expedition ventured as far as Kenya. But these were money-making exercises, not power projections, and they were not designed to create forward bases that could be used to support military operations. Having spent 4,000 turbulent years consolidating its land mass, China is now building a Blue Water navy. A Green Water navy patrols its maritime borders, a Blue Water navy patrols the oceans. It will take another thirty years (assuming economic progression) for China to build naval capacity to seriously challenge the most powerful seaborne force the world has ever seen – the US navy. But in the medium to short term, as it builds, and trains, and learns, the Chinese navy will bump up against its rivals in the seas; and how those bumps are managed – especially the Sino–American ones – will de ne great power politics in this century. The young seamen now training on the second-hand aircraft carrier China salvaged from a Ukrainian rust yard will be the ones who, if they make it to the rank of admiral, may have learnt enough to know how to take a twelve-ship carrier group across the world and back – and if necessary ght a war along the way. As some of the richer Arab nations came to realise, you cannot buy an e cient military o the shelf. Gradually the Chinese will put more and more vessels into the seas o their coast, and into the Paci c. Each time one is launched there will be less space for the Americans in the China Seas. The Americans know this, and know the Chinese are working towards a land-based anti-ship missile system to double the reasons why the US navy, or any of its allies, might want one day to think hard about sailing through the South China Sea. Or indeed, any other ‘China’ sea. And all the while, the developing Chinese space project will be watching every move the Americans make, and those of its allies. So, having gone clockwise around the land borders, we now look east, south and south-west towards the sea. Between China and the Paci c is the archipelago that Beijing calls the ‘First Island Chain’. There is also the ‘Nine Dash Line’, more recently turned into ten dashes in 2013 to include Taiwan, which China says marks its territory. This dispute over ownership of more than 200 tiny islands and reefs is poisoning China’s relations with its neighbours. National pride means China wants to control the passageways through the Chain; geopolitics dictates it has to. It provides access to the world’s most important shipping lanes in the South China Sea. In peacetime the route is open in various places, but in wartime they could very easily be blocked, thus blockading China. All great nations spend peacetime preparing for the day war breaks out. The South China Sea is a hotly contested area between China and its neighbours leading to disputes over ownership of islands, natural resources and control of the seas and shipping lanes. Free access to the Paci c is rstly hindered by Japan. Chinese vessels emerging from the Yellow Sea and rounding the Korean Peninsula would have to go through the Sea of Japan and up through La Perouse Strait above Hokkaido and into the Paci c. Much of this is Japanese or Russian territorial waters and at a time of great tension, or even hostilities, would be inaccessible to China. Even if they made it they would still have to navigate through the Kuril Islands north-east of Hokkaido, which are controlled by Russia but claimed by Japan. Japan is also in dispute with China over the uninhabited island chain it calls Senkaku and the Chinese know as Diaoyu, north-east of Taiwan. This is the most contentious of all territorial claims between the two countries. If instead Chinese ships pass through, or indeed set o from, the East China Sea o Shanghai and go in a straight line towards the Paci c they must pass the Ryukyu Islands, which include Okinawa – upon which there is not only a huge American military base, but as many shore-to-ship missiles as the Japanese can pile at the tip of the island. The message from Tokyo is: ‘We know you’re going out there, but don’t mess with us on the way out.’ Another potential are-up with Japan centres on the East China Sea’s gas deposits. Beijing has declared an ‘Air Defence Identi cation Zone’ over most of the sea requiring prior notice before anyone else ies through it. The Americans and Japanese are trying to ignore it, but it will become a hot issue at a time of their choosing or due to an accident which is mismanaged. Below Okinawa is Taiwan, which sits o the Chinese coast and separates the East China Sea from the South China Sea. China claims Taiwan as its twenty-third province, but it is currently an American ally with a navy and air force armed to the teeth by Washington. It came under Chinese control in the seventeenth century but has only been ruled by China for ve years in the last century (from 1945 to 1949).  Taiwan’s o cial name is the Republic of China (ROC) to di erentiate it from the People’s Republic of China, although both sides believe they should have jurisdiction over both territories. This is a name Beijing can live with as it does not state that Taiwan is a separate state. The Americans are committed to defending Taiwan