Inklings Of Geostrategic Planning

If you do a web search on any phrase like "map of Russia in 2050" or something similar, you can find dozens of fanciful maps of how former Russian territory might be divided following the collapse of the Putin state. I've posted a few here now and then, and here's another one today. But so far, I've seen very little serious discussion of what any such outcome might actually be, even though every indication is that Russian military capability was wildly overestimated before the current war, while Russia's stockpile of obsolescent weapons and its available military manpower have now been seriously depleted.

In other words, the actual balance of world power is shifting big time as we watch. I've run into are a few early glimmers of analysis. In Foreign Policy yesterday:

For the first time, Iran is involved in a major war on the European continent. Iranian military advisors, most likely members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, are on the ground in occupied Ukraine—and possibly Belarus—to help Russia rain down deadly Iranian kamikaze drones on Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure.

. . . Tehran’s military support is already making its deadly mark on the war, but the geopolitical consequences extend much further. By escalating its support for Russia’s imperial attempt to subjugate Ukraine, Iran hopes to advance its own imperial project in the Middle East. Tehran will likely seek to leverage the deepening Russo-Iranian partnership into arms deals from Moscow while using lessons learned from the Ukrainian battlefield to perfect Iranian drone and missile capabilities. At the same time, the regime in Iran likely hopes that fueling the crisis in Ukraine will further distract the West from confronting Iran’s pursuit of hegemony in the Middle East. With any luck, however, Tehran’s foray into European power politics could help nudge Washington and its Western allies toward a more robust policy to counter Iran.

Unfortunately, that's about it as far as what the authors have to say on what this might mean, and I would think a bright sophomore majoring in international relations could come up with the same sort of thing. But wait a minute -- this is Foreign Policy, a chin-stroking, furrowed-brow publication that's firmly within the range of politically acceptable discourse. Hasn't the Obama-Biden policy been to tilt toward Iran and away from Israel? Yet at the moment, Iran is allied with Russia against Ukraine, a country we're treating as a NATO ally in all but name. Isn't this a contradiction? The authors don't say, and they don't go anywhere near the implications.

In Forbes on Monday, With Moscow Distracted, Xi Jinping Could Turn China’s Gaze To Russia:

As China’s Communist Party Congress wound to a close, China’s “Paramount Leader,” Xi Jinping, emerged stronger than ever. Granting himself a third five-year term, what remained of any internal opposition was ceremonially ushered out of the room. With Xi’s powerbase solid, the West is taking to the fainting couch, anticipating that Xi’s hardline approach towards China’s territorial ambitions will rapidly crystalize into a military confrontation over Taiwan, a key link in the strategic “first island chain” in the Pacific.

The threat is overstated. Even though Party delegates baked new anti-Taiwanese language into the Communist Party’s constitution, the real territorial temptation for China might be to the North, in the Russian Far East, where hundreds of thousands of ethnically Chinese Russian citizens, trapped in a substantially weakened and hollow dictatorship, could potentially be enticed to reconsider their options.

While there’s no way to know what Xi is thinking, China’s long-established pattern of behavior suggests that, as Russia redirects border security units to a grinding conflict in Ukraine, it is worth considering if China might be mulling expansionist contingencies to the north, along the sprawling and sparsely held 2,615 mile Russian frontier.

Again, that's about as far as the analysis in this piece goes, and like the piece in Foreign Policy and the fanciful map at the top of this post, they're worth what you're paying to read them. But they're raising a basic question that hardly anyone is asking: the Putin state is on the verge of collapse, its military resources are effectively depleted, and as of now, any second-rate power on its borders that chooses to exert territorial claims can do so successfully.

But in addition, some international authority will inevitably be needed to enforce order in any of several possible zones once the Ukraine war is settled and Russia becomes unstable. Some of the fanciful maps put the US in charge in far eastern Siberia; this one has Canada there. Some put China in Kamchatka; this one has Japan. One individual who had remarkable foresight was Edward Harriman (1848-1909), whose rail empire was dismantled under the Teddy Roosevelt administration, only to be completely restored by 1996. In 1899, he sponsored an elaborate expedition to Alaska, the purpose of which nobody has ever been able to discern fully:

Edward Harriman was one of the most powerful men in America and controlled several railroads. By early 1899, he was exhausted. His doctor told him that he needed a long vacation. Harriman went to Alaska to hunt Kodiak bears. Rather than go alone, he took a scientific community to explore and document the coast of Alaska.

He contacted Clinton Hart Merriam, the head of the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy at the United States Department of Agriculture, and one of the founders of the National Geographic Society. Harriman told Merriam that he would cover the expenses of scientists, artists, and other experts who would join the voyage. He asked Merriam to choose the scientific party.

Historians question why Harriman wanted to go to Alaska. Some think he was considering developing Alaskan resources. Some think he was considering building a railroad to the Alaskan territory. Some people at the time openly wondered if he was going to buy Alaska, or build a railroad bridge from Alaska to Siberia — a railroad around the world. Nothing seemed impossible for Edward H. Harriman.

I've read several Harriman biographies, and none comes close to an answer to the question. Harriman worked himself to death before he could achieve many of his plans, but I've always thought it's significant that he had a Russia expert, the elder George F Kennan, as a close associate. My money is on the future maps that list far eastern Siberia as "ceded to US". . . .