The Next Decade

G. Friedman

Germany

History had placed Germany on the north of the North European Plain, an area with a few rivers to serve as defenses, but some of the most productive parts of this new nation-state were on the opposite bank of the Rhine, completely unprotected. To the west was France. To the east was Russia. Both had enjoyed the centuries when Germany was fragmented and weak, but now there was a frightening new Germany, economically the most dynamic country in Europe, with a powerful military and with a deep sense of insecurity.

Germany in turn was frightened by its neighbors’ fears. Germany’s leaders knew their nation could not survive if it was attacked simultaneously by France and Russia. They also believed that at some point such an attack would come, because they understood how intimidating they appeared to their neighbors. Germany could not permit France and Russia to start a war at the time or place of their choosing, and thus Germany, driven by its own fear, devised a strategy of preemption coupled with alliances.

Europe in the twentieth century was defined by these fears, which, being imposed by geography, were both rational and unavoidable [..]

Both world wars were launched according to a single scenario: Germany, insecure because of its geographical position, swept across France in a lightning attack. The goal in both cases was to defeat France quickly, then deal with Russia. In 1914, the Germans failed to defeat France quickly, the troops dug in, and the conflict became a protracted war. The Germans found themselves fighting France, Britain, and Russia simultaneously in both the east and the west. ...

Poland

The Poles have suffered in direct relation to the strategic importance of their location, bordering both Germany and Russia and occupying the North European Plain, which extends like a thoroughfare from the French Atlantic coast to St. Petersburg. The other eastern European countries share the Polish view, but they are geographically safer, behind the Carpathian Mountains.

Exposed on either side, Poland will have little choice but to go along with whatever the Germans and Russians decide, which would be disastrous for the United States. It is therefore in the American interest to guarantee Poland’s independence from Russia and Germany, not only formally but by creating a viable and vibrant Polish economy and military that can serve as the model and driver for the rest of eastern Europe. Poland is the historical bone in the throat of both Germany and Russia, and it is in the American interest to make sure that it is firmly lodged there. A Poland aligned with Germany is a threat to Russia, and the reverse is true as well. Poland must remain a threat to both, because the United States cannot let either feel too secure.

Over the next ten years, an American relationship with Poland would serve two functions: it might prevent or limit the Russo-German entente, but failing that, it could create a counterbalance. The United States urgently needs Poland, because there is no alternative strategy for balancing an alliance between Russia and Germany.

Australia

Australia is actually quite dependent on international trade .. These goods are shipped by sea, and Australia has no control whatever over the security of its sea-lanes. In a sense, then, Australia is like a creature whose arteries and veins are located outside its body, unprotected and constantly at risk. Australia’s strategy for dealing with this vulnerability has been to ally itself with the dominant naval power in the western Pacific—once Britain, now the United States. All alliances bear costs, and the British and Americans wanted the same quid pro quo: Australia’s participation in their wars. Australians sacrificed heavily in the Boer War, both world wars, and in Korea and Vietnam. Between 1970 and 1990 the Australians pulled back from this role as military partner, but during this period there were few calls for their participation. In 1990, in Desert Storm, they returned to their strategy of assisting in military operations, and they then went on to fight in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Along with the security of sea-lanes, Australia’s well-being depends on an international trading regime that allows terms it can manage. Australia’s strategy of being of service to its Anglo-American cousins has bought it a seat at the table alongside the great powers. This has provided influence and security to its trade, something that Australia never could have achieved on its own.

During World War II, Australia served Britain by sending troops to North Africa. It served the United States by acting as a depot for building up U.S. forces for the Pacific theater. Certainly Australian forces fought as well, but if no forces had been available, Australia’s tremendous value was its location, behind the geographic shield of Indonesia and New Guinea. Should any great power emerge in the western Pacific to challenge the United States, Australia will once again be the strategic foundation for America’s Pacific strategy. The caveat is that building the infrastructure for a rear depot took several years in World War II, and any future conflict might not allow that kind of lead time.

The Middle East

[T]he Ottomans, who had allied with Germany, were defeated in World War I. To the victors went the spoils, which included the extensive Ottoman province known as Syria. A secret wartime deal between the British and the French, the Sykes-Picot agreement, had divided this territory between the two allies on a line running roughly from Mount Hermon due west to the sea. The area to the north was to be placed under French control; the area to the south was to be placed under the control of the British. Further divisions gave rise not only to the modern country of Syria but to Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel as well.

The French had sought to be an influence in this region since the days of Napoleon. [..] As a state, then, Lebanon had no prior reality. Its main unifying feature was that its people felt an affinity with France. The British area to the south was divided along similarly arbitrary lines. During World War I, the Muslim clan that ruled the western Hejaz region of the Arabian Peninsula, the Hashemites [today's Jordanians], had supported the British. In return, the British promised to install this group as rulers of Arabia after the war. But London made commitments to other tribes as well. Based in Kuwait, a rival clan, the Saud, had launched a war against [Otto] in 1900, trying to take control of the eastern and central parts of the Arabian Peninsula. In a struggle that broke out shortly after World War I, the Sauds defeated the Hashemites, so the British gave Arabia to them—hence today’s Saudi Arabia.

The Hashemites received the consolation prize of Iraq, where they ruled until 1958, when they were overthrown in a military coup supported the British. [.. They]  were moved to an area to the north along the eastern bank of the Jordan River. Centered on the town of Amman and lacking any other obvious identity, this new protectorate became known as Trans-Jordan, as in “the other side of the Jordan River.” After the British withdrew in 1948, Trans-Jordan became contemporary Jordan, a country that, like Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, had never existed before. [..]

The British took the term Filistin, ran it through some ancient Greek, and came up with Palestine as the name for this new region. Its capital was Jerusalem, and its residents were thereafter called Palestinians.

None of these remnants was a nation in the sense of having a common history or identity except for Syria itself, which could claim a lineage going back to biblical times. Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine were French and British inventions, created for their political convenience. Their national history went back only as far as Mr. Sykes and Monsieur Picot and some British double-dealing in Arabia.

Which is not to say that the inhabitants did not have a historical connection to the land they lived on. If not their homeland, the territory was certainly a home, but even here there was complexity. Under Ottoman rule, the ownership of the land, particularly in Palestine, had been semifeudal, with absentee landlords collecting rent from the felaheen, or peasants, who actually tilled the soil.

Enter the Jews. Members of the European Diaspora had been moving into this region since the 1880s, joining relatively small Jewish communities that had existed there (and in most other Arab regions) for centuries. This immigration was part of the Zionist movement, which—motivated by the European idea of the nation-state—sought to create a Jewish homeland in the region the Jews had last controlled in biblical times.

The Jews came in small numbers, settling on land purchased with funds raised by Jews in Europe. Frequently this land was bought from the absentee landlords, who sold it out from under their Arab tenants. From the Jewish point of view, this was a legitimate acquisition of land. From the tenants’ point of view, it was a direct assault on their livelihood, as well as an eviction from land their families had farmed for generations. As more Jews arrived, the acquisition of land, the title to which was frequently dubious anyway, became less scrupulous and even more intrusive.

While the Arabs generally (but not universally) saw the Jews as alien invaders, they did not agree on something perhaps more important: to whom did the residents of Palestine owe national allegiance?

The Syrians regarded Palestine the way they regarded Lebanon and Jordan—as an integral part of Syria. They opposed an independent Palestine, just as they opposed the existence of an independent Jewish state, for the same reason they opposed Lebanese and Jordanian independence: for them, the Sykes-Picot agreement was a violation of Syria’s long-standing territorial integrity.

The Hashemites, formerly from the Arabian Peninsula, had even greater problems with the Palestinians. The Hashemites were, after all, an Arabian tribe transplanted on the east bank of the Jordan. After the British left in 1948, they became rulers by default of what is today the West Bank. While sharing Arab ethnicity and the Muslim faith with the Palestinians who were native to the area, these transplants were profoundly different in culture and history. In fact, the two groups were quite hostile to each other. The Hashemite (now Jordanian) view was that Palestine was legally theirs, at least the part left after Israel gained independence. Indeed, from the time that the Jews became more numerous and powerful in Palestine, the Hashemite rulers of Jordan saw these new emigrants from eastern Europe and elsewhere as allies against the native Palestinians [..]

In 1956 [Egypt] experienced a military coup that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power. Nasser opposed the existence of Israel, but he had a very different vision of the Palestinians. Nasser’s dream was the creation of a single Arab nation, a United Arab Republic, which he succeeded in establishing very briefly with the Syrians. For him, all of the countries of the Arab world were illegitimate products of imperialism and all should join together as one, under the leadership of the largest and most powerful Arab country, Egypt. Viewed in that context, there was no such thing as Palestine, and the Palestinians were simply Arabs occupying a certain ill-defined piece of land.

All the Arab states within the region, then, save the Jordanians, wanted the destruction of Israel, but none supported, or even discussed, an independent Palestine. The Gaza strip, occupied by Egypt during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, was administered as part of Egypt for the next twenty years. The West Bank remained a part of Jordan. The Syrians wanted all of Jordan and Palestine returned to them, along with Lebanon.

This was complicated enough, but then the Six Day War of 1967 shuffled the deck once more.

In 1967, Egypt expelled UN peacekeeping forces from the Sinai Peninsula and remilitarized it. They also blockaded the Straits of Tiran and the Bab el Mandeb, cutting off the port of Eilat from the Red Sea. In response, the Israelis attacked not only the Egyptians but also the Jordanian West Bank, which had shelled Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights in Syria, which had shelled Israeli settlements.

Israel’s success, including the occupation of Jordan west of the river, transformed the entire region. Suddenly a large population of unwilling Palestinian Arabs was under the rule of an Israeli state. Israel’s initial intent seems to have been to trade the conquered areas for a permanent peace agreement with its neighbors. However, at a meeting held in Khartoum after the 1967 war, the Arab states replied with the famous “three no’s”: no negotiation, no recognition, no peace. At this point the Israeli occupation of these formerly Palestinian areas became permanent.

It was also at this point that the Palestinians first came to be viewed as a separate nation. The Egyptians had sponsored a group known as the Palestine Liberation Organization and installed a young man named Yasir Arafat to lead it. Nasser still clung to the idea of an Arab federation, but no other nations chose to accept his leadership. Nasser wasn’t prepared to submit to anyone else, which left the PLO and its constituent organizations, such as al-Fatah, by default the sole advocates for a Palestinian state.

The Jordanians were happy to have the Palestinians living in Israeli territory, as an Israeli problem. They were also happy to recognize the PLO as representing the Palestinian people, and just as happy that the Israelis didn’t allow the Palestinians to be independent. The Syrians supported their own organizations, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which advocated that Israel should be destroyed and that the Palestinians should be incorporated into Syria. So the recognition of Palestinian nationalism by the Arabs was neither universal nor friendly. Indeed, Arab support for the Palestinians seemed to increase in proportion to the distance the Arabs were from Palestine.

It should be obvious from this summary that the moral argument that rages about the rights of Israel, which any American president must deal with, is enormously complex. Beyond the substantial displacement of populations that occurred with the creation of modern Israel, the immigration of European Jews did not constitute the destruction of a Palestinian nation, because no such nation had ever existed. The Palestinian national identity in fact emerged only out of resistance to Israeli occupation after 1967. And the hostility toward Palestinian national claims was as intense from Arabs as it was from Jews. Israeli foreign policy was shaped by these realities and took advantage of them in order to impose the current political order on the region. But whatever was the case in the past, there is certainly today a self-aware Palestinian nation, and that is part of what must inform U.S. policy going forward.

Apart from dealing with this incredibly convoluted history, which weighs on any moral judgment, U.S. policy in this region must accommodate two other basic facts. First, whatever the Israelis’ historical claim, from a twentieth-century perspective, the Jews were settlers from another continent who displaced the natives.

Eurasia

For generations, keeping the technological sophistication of Europe separated from the natural resources and manpower of Russia has been one of the key aims of American foreign policy...

The American interest in Eurasia—understood as Russia and the European peninsula—is the same as U.S. interest everywhere: for no single power or coalition to dominate. The unification of Russia and Europe would create a force whose population, technological and industrial capability, and natural resources would at the very least equal America’s, and in all likelihood outstrip them. ...

During the twentieth century, the United States acted three times to prevent the kind of Russian-German entente that could unify Eurasia and threaten fundamental American interests. In 1917, Russia’s separate peace with the Germans turned the tide against the Anglo-French in World War I. The U.S. intervened in World War II, supplying the British and especially the Soviets, who bled the Wehrmacht and prevented a German takeover of the vast Russian territories. In 1944, the United States then invaded Western Europe, blocking not only the Germans but the Soviets as well...

The response of the United States to a Russian-German entente must be the same during the next ten years as it was in the twentieth century. The United States must continue to do everything it can to block a German-Russian entente and to limit the effect that Russia’s sphere of influence might have on Europe..

In the next ten years, an ideal solution from the American point of view would be to split the Franco-German bloc, and in fact the president should work to open as wide a breach as possible between the two countries.. The United States must focus on limiting the power of the center while simultaneously doing all it can to thwart a Russo-German entente. In other words, it must apply the principle of balance of power to Europe, much as Britain did. Ironically, the first phase of this U.S. strategy must be to retain its current relationship with Britain.

Russia

Putin’s strategy of focusing on energy production and export is a superb short-term tool, but it works only if it forms the basis for major economic expansion. To achieve this larger objective, Russia has to deal with its underlying structural weaknesses, yet these weaknesses are rooted in geographical problems that are not readily overcome.

Unlike much of the industrial world, Russia has both a relatively small population for its size and a population that is highly dispersed, tied together by little more than a security apparatus and a common culture.

Even the major cities, such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, are not the centers of a giant megalopolis. They are stand-alone entities, separated from each other by vast distances of farmland and forest. Leaving apart the fact that the Russian population is in decline, the current distribution of population makes a modern economy, or even efficient distribution of food, difficult, if not impossible. The infrastructure connecting farming areas to the city is poor, as is the infrastructure connecting industrial and commercial centers.

The problem in connectivity stems from the fact that Russia’s rivers go the wrong way. Unlike American rivers, which connect farming country to ports where food can be distributed, Russian rivers merely create barriers. Neither the czars and their railway bonds nor Stalin with his enforced starvation ever came close to overcoming the problem, and the cost of building a connective tissue for the Russian economy—extensive rail systems and roads—remains staggering. Russia has always wielded a military force that outstripped its economy

Ukraine covers the entire southwestern frontier of Russia, and from the Russian point of view, it is the key to Russian national security.. The Russian territory lying between Ukraine and Kazakhstan is only three hundred miles wide, and all of Russia’s influence in the Caucasus—along with a good deal of the oil in the pipelines to the south—flows through this gap. At the center of the gap is Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad. During World War II, the Soviets sacrificed one million lives in the battle to keep that gap from being closed by the Germans.

Nuke Tech

Only one country ever produced a nuclear weapon from scratch, and that was the United States. The British got their nukes in compensation for their contribution to the American research effort. The French also acquired the technology from the Americans, which they then regifted to Israel. The Russians stole the knowledge from the Americans, then transferred it to both the Chinese and the Indians. The Chinese gave the technology to the Pakistanis. The point is, the development of these weapons through an independent research program is enormously difficult..

Mexico, Drugs

For a manufactured product, such as the electronic components that Mexico exports to the United States legally, a profit margin of 10 percent would be quite high.. The profit margin on drug sales is enormously higher than 10 percent, because the inherent cost of the commodity is extremely low. Marijuana needs no processing, and processing costs on heroin and cocaine are insignificant. A reasonable and even conservative estimate for the profit margin on narcotics is 90 percent.