When empires fall

The 20th century saw the collapse of three major empires, the Habsburg, the Ottoman, and the Soviet empire.

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire ushered into the Middle East an era of instability and conflict that endures to this day. The collapse of the Habsburg Empire created the conditions that led to the Second World War. And as for the collapse of the Soviet empire, it ushered in a degree of global instability of massive proportions that we are barely at the inception of. The new Russian empire

The creation of the Soviet Union in 1922 saw the return to the Russian fold of the various republics that had broken away when the czarist regime fell in 1917. Thus the Soviet Union was a Union only in name. In reality it was the Russian empire, with Russia at its core, Moscow as its capital and the Communist Party as its supreme leader.

The collapse of Nazi Germany enabled this Russian empire to extend its dominance to the countries of Eastern Europe, which became part of its colonial realm. However, what distinguished this Russian empire from its imperial predecessors was its dual makeup. While it was an extension of the Russian state it was also the harbinger of an ideology that laid claim to a universal appeal.

Within this perspective, the Russian empire under its "Soviet" label achieved a global reach through its foreign subsidiaries, namely the numerous national communist parties throughout the world that professed loyalty to their mother party, the Communist Party of the USSR.

The end result was that the collapse of the Soviet Union was two implosions in one: the collapse of the Russian empire on the one hand and the disintegration of the ideology that stood at its core, namely the Marxist model, on the other.

The Russian state that emerged from the ashes of the Soviet Union was a shattered entity. Never particularly efficient except for its security apparatus, the former Soviet state machinery practically collapsed, leaving the country in a condition of semi-anarchy.

The only redeeming feature to emerge from this state of turmoil was the successful repatriation to Russia of the numerous nuclear warheads that the Soviet Union had positioned in its former republics, providing employment to the thousands of scientists who had been part of the Soviet nuclear establishment.

Significantly,

the

denuclearization process was strongly supported by the United States. Europe redefined

The collapse of the Soviet Union left the US both economically and militarily as the only superpower on the planet. In parallel to the urgency represented by the denuclearization program, which successfully ensured that no nuclear warheads fell into the wrong hands, Washington was now confronted with two options regarding its future relations with Russia.

The first would be based on the assumption that within the coming half-century or more Russia would emerge from its despondency as a regional power with a strong national identity and a global nuclear reach. Such a power would have traditional security concerns resulting in an aversion to having hostile entities on its borders.

In practical terms this would have entailed creating a buffer belt of neutral states on the Swiss or Finnish model between the European Union and Russia that would have included the Baltic States, Belarus and Ukraine. In parallel, Crimea, with its Russian population, would have been returned to Russia and some agreement would have been found regarding the predominantly Russian Donets Basin.

Assuming a best-case scenario, the end of the Cold War would have morphed into a 2+2 global balance of power: two superpowers, China and the United States, and two European regional powers, namely Russia and Western Europe, with a buffer zone of neutral states in-between.

There is no evidence that such a scenario was ever contemplated in Washington. Indeed, the inability to think long-term compounded by what was seen as a unique opportunity to degrade what was left of its former antagonist proved difficult to resist. This was not necessarily the result of a long-term, well-thoughtout policy but rather of a drift on the path of least resistance compounded by the irresistible urge to act.

The end result was that Washington embarked, as regards Russia, on what can be termed a "forward" policy, a policy that was enabled by a lack of vision and unity of the core European countries that did not come to terms with the fact that their security, unlike what happened during the Cold War, no longer depended on the United States.