The US is weakening

IT seems like there are those that are geopolitically caught in—or maybe wish for—the good old days when the world was simpler. That is, when the US and USSR are in a bipolar geopolitical world.

The mixtape for the Cold War has many highlights, but the first track must be the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The showdown between John F. Kennedy of the US and Nikita Khrushchev of the USSR had everything—high drama, high stakes, and television.

There were the proxy wars. Vietnam was the battleground in the 1960s and 1970s. The US lost. Then the superpowers moved to Afghanistan in the 1970s and 1980s. The USSR lost.

In 1961, the Non-aligned Movement (NAM) of developing world states was formed interestingly in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, considered “non-aligned” because of its leader Josip Broz Tito.

Marshall Tito had defied—and maybe scared—every USSR leader, including Joseph Stalin. While a staunch communist, Tito had been in a Russian prisoner of war camp during World War One. Cuba was also “non-aligned.” The Philippines became a member in 1993 after the US bases were expelled.

Speaking of Afghanistan, that was part of the 500-year quest of Russia to secure a warm-water port—through Pakistan—with free access to the blue water oceans. Saint Petersburg is on the Baltic Sea, a body that has always been practically a Swedish lake. Russia does “own” Crimea and the port of Sevastopol. But that requires cooperation with Black Sea partner and owner of the Bosporus Strait, Turkey. Petropavlovsk-kamchatskiy on the Pacific Ocean is 6,767 kilometers from Moscow.

Republican candidate Mitt Romney referred to Russia as America’s “biggest geopolitical foe” during the 2012 presidential campaign. Barack Obama, who was wrong on almost every foreign policy decision he made, ridiculed Romney saying, “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

In 2021 the world is still “bipolar.” Geopolitically, though, it depends on where you look. If the president in Washington, D.C. looks East, he sees the situation as US versus Russia. If he looks West, it is US versus China.

But what the rest of the world sees is a bipolar set up of the US versus a China/russia partnership.

Sir Halford John Mackinder, who died in 1947, was an English geographer, academic and politician, who was regarded as one of the founding fathers of both geopolitics and geostrategy. In his 1904 paper The Geographical Pivot of History, he envisioned a Eurasian superstate, based between the Volga River and the Yangtse. This superstate was not military-based but rooted in simple economics.

The Chinese-russian partnership already dominates or controls Mackinder’s “World Island,” defined as Eurasia and all Africa. “The overland and sea silk roads similarly bind the EU and the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans’ states respectively,” writes Alasdair Macleod, a Member of the London Stock Exchange for over four decades. “It amounts to over half the world’s population no longer sharing the economic and currency interests of 328 million Americans. It is game-on for the cold war to continue.”

While Biden and the US has Nato, there is a more far-reaching counterforce: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Its members—china, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India, Pakistan, and Russia—stretch across Asia through the Indian Ocean to Europe.

While the US can pop up an Aircraft Carrier Strike Group anywhere it wants, it is slowly being pushed back economically. This is the new Cold War.