(by Giovanni Ramunno) The two-phase move by the President of the Russian Federation, to annex Crimea first and then invade Ukraine, is a clear signal from the Kremlin that it wants to re-establish, at least in Europe, the spheres of influence, because they are still considered an incontrovertible fact of geopolitics.
To achieve its goals, Russia is convinced that it can use force to achieve what Western experts call "escalation dominance" in Europe and Asia, while also counting on the fact that NATO is a defensive alliance and therefore its Article 5 does not affect the Russian maneuver.
To inspire this imperialist vision to President Putin, his adviser Karaganov, according to whom the priority of every great power is to guarantee security and prosperity within a sphere of influence over neighboring states, thus ignoring the primacy of the sovereignty of the states themselves . In this particular meaning, the political elites of the peoples of the countries of the former Soviet Union lack the historical value elements that should characterize them, thus requiring an authoritative Russian leadership capable of directing and coordinating the common good of these peoples.
The geopolitical dynamics that Western diplomacies face in recent years by observing the violence perpetrated in Chechnya, Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine from their uncomfortable and bulky neighbor, are, as Kennan said in his famous Long Telegram, “… So intricate, so delicate, so alien to our way of thinking and so important for the analysis of our international environment”.
Kenna in particular he advised Charles Bohlen, interpreter and chief advisor to the Soviet Union to President Franklin Roosevelt on February 4, 1945 in Yalta, a division of Europe into spheres of influence. Bohlen was against it because he was convinced that "A foreign policy of this type cannot be conducted in a democracy", but in two years he had to resign.
We know the results: a dignified and definitive compromise which guaranteed Stalin to divide Europe into spheres of influence and which, for the four decades that followed, saw the United States and the Soviet Union face each other in the great power challenge that we know. like Cold War.
In the Soviet sphere, captive Eastern European nations remained under the rule of an "evil empire" and American presidents repeatedly faced crises in which they had to choose between sending troops to Soviet-dominated nations to support freedom. and the exercise of rights that the West declares to be universal.
For this reason, without exception, Dwight Eisenhower, when the Hungarians rose up in 1956, and Lyndon Johnson, during the Prague Spring of 1968, chose not to intervene in defense of the oppressed peoples whose rights were being trampled on by a ruthless communist regime, because aware that a nuclear war cannot be won: an unacceptable but undeniable truth, although, to paraphrase Bohlen, the peoples who had fought a long, hard war deserved at least to try to work out a better world.
Almost five years passed from Kennan's first notice before the policy paper NSC-68 finally outlined a global strategy. Now as then, the only actionable course of action (developed on page 54 of the US Security Council document) was a vigorous political offensive by the free world against the Soviet Union and the strengthening of an adequate economic and defensive system by of the United States and its allies able to deter the opponent.
Undoubtedly the strategy, which surprises for its ingenious clarity and simplicity, has not changed.
The free world needs to close ranks and lead a new and robust political offensive, while strengthening its economic and military resilience also in consideration of more decisive action taken by a much more assertive autocracy represented by China. It is time for Europe to reach a new political and identity awareness that allows it to abandon logics that belong to a world that is now past, establishing itself as a credible geopolitical actor.
More generally, if American policymakers could find a way to allow strategic interests to steer policy, falling within the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and if the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, between the United States and the European Union, nearly 70 percent of world GDP could support the ideals of the free world, against that of autocracies, which would stand at 20 percent.
The world has seen a renewed impulse of quarrelsome and only apparently uncoordinated dynamics, creating a cognitive disorientation in public opinions, which sometimes forget the values that support them, and a weakening in the political incisiveness aimed at countering a more virulent nationalist authoritarianism.
In reality, the game is still open and the free world is still in a position to dictate the rules of the game, if not even lead a new one. Reagan doctrine taking up a strategy, the American one of 1968, which history has certainly declared successful.