Putin

8 RUSSIA’S MECCA: THE ARCTIC

In late 2015 Dmitri Rogozin, deputy prime minister in charge of space and defense, tweeted the following: “The Arctic is Russia’s Mecca.”[293] A flamboyant type, Rogozin has been known to say what others cannot or dare not. He first gained notoriety when he headed up the faux opposition party Rodina (Motherland), which produced a racist film spot, “Let’s Throw the Garbage out of Moscow,” showing dark-skinned men from the Caucasus leering at pure Russian women and littering the streets with watermelon rinds until a couple of real Russian men walk over to put things right. Rogozin was one of the first seven people to whom Obama’s sanctions were applied. His response: “Tanks don’t need visas.”[294] He speaks four languages and has a Ph.D. in philosophy.

When it comes to the importance of the Arctic for Russia’s future Rogozin is hardly alone in voicing such maximalist sentiments. Addressing the next generation of Russians at a youth camp outside Moscow, Putin said of the country’s future: “Our interests are concentrated in the Arctic. And of course we should pay more attention to … strengthening our position [there].”[295] When serving as president, Dmitri Medvedev frequently said that the Arctic must become a “main resource base”[296] by 2020. The problem now is that after the break with the West over Crimea and Ukraine, the Arctic becomes both more essential to Russia’s future and, without Western investment, equipment, and expertise, much more difficult to exploit.

Calling the Arctic “Mecca” implies that the Arctic will save Russia not only economically, but spiritually as well. The identity that failed to crystallize in the decades after the fall of the USSR will finally coalesce around a great new national enterprise where heroic boldness, economic feats, and patriotism will merge. For grandeur and complexity the Arctic project is often compared to the mastery of outer space, and from the societal point of view, it has the advantage of allowing many more people to participate.

Russia made its Arctic intentions fully explicit on August 2, 2007, when Artur Chilingarov, scientist, polar explorer, and politician, startled the world by descending to a depth of some fourteen thousand feet in a submersible and planting a titanium Russian flag on the seafloor beneath the North Pole. His courage was admirable. Chilingarov was sixty-seven at the time. There was no guarantee that he would find his way safely back to the hole on the surface, and the submersible could not break through the ice on its own. In quite un-Soviet fashion, the entire proceedings were broadcast live.

Staking a claim by planting his nation’s flag like explorers of old elicited derision closely followed by alarm. “This isn’t the fifteenth century…. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say ‘We are claiming this territory,’” mocked Peter MacKay, Canadian foreign minister at the time.[297]

But the Canadians changed their tune quickly, dispatching their prime minister to the Arctic. As a senior official put it: “The Russians sent a submarine to drop a small flag at the bottom of the ocean. We’re sending our prime minister to reassert Canadian sovereignty.”[298] (From the wording, it wasn’t clear if they were also sending him to the bottom or whether a photo-op stroll on an ice floe would suffice.) Upon his arrival he announced the establishment of two new military bases in the region to defend that sovereignty.

Beyond the politics and the posturing a lot is at stake. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet and is now ice-free long enough that its vast deposits of oil, gas, and precious minerals could conceivably be extracted. Passages for shipping have been opened up over Russia and Canada, which reduces distance, time, and costs by significant amounts. Potentially, the melting will make enormous fish stocks available for commercial harvesting. All this makes the Arctic a place worth exploiting and worth fighting for.

Most of us have maps rather than globes, which are already acquiring a sort of retro chic like typewriters. Maps are slightly absurd, of course, as are any two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional phenomena, especially when it comes to depicting Earth as a whole. A globe, when viewed from above, is a much better guide to the relative presence and proportion of the five Arctic countries—the United States, Canada, Russia, Denmark (as the foreign-affairs representative of Greenland), and Norway. It is there where all the lines of longitude converge in zero that the fate of Putin’s Russia will play out sometime in midcentury.

The Arctic is an ocean surrounded by continents, unlike Antarctica, which is a continent surrounded by ocean. The Arctic was discovered by Phoenician sailors, who named the region after the northern star they had followed, called “Arktos” by the Greeks, meaning near the Great Bear (constellation Ursa Major). The larger Arctic Circle, which includes the northernmost parts of the five Arctic states, has bear—most famously, polar bear—musk oxen, reindeer, caribou, foxes, wolves, hare. The teeming plant and animal life under the ice sheet of the Arctic Ocean includes plants, plankton, and fish.

The ice that forms the polar ice cap in the Arctic Ocean is frozen sea water and is usually ten to thirteen feet thick, though some ridges reach heights of sixty-five feet. The ice cap is about the size of the continental United States and has typically lost about half its size with the summer, but quickly reacquired it with the coming of winter.

But recently something has happened. Over the last fifty years about 50 percent of the Arctic ice cap has melted away. As Scott G. Borgerson, international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, put it in “Arctic Meltdown: The Economic and Security Implications of Global Warming”:

This loop is defined as “the process whereby retreating sea ice exposes darker and less reflective seawater which absorbs more heat and in turn causes more ice to melt.”[300]

The breakup of Arctic ice has sent polar bears southward and onto land. There they have encountered grizzlies fleeing north from Canadian mining and construction sites. Mating, they have produced a new hybrid now known informally as the “pizzly” or nanulak, which combines the Inuit word for polar bear, nanuk, with the word for grizzly, aklak.

In a paradox both obvious and painful, it was the burning of fossil fuels that caused the climate change that is melting the Arctic ice cap, thereby making its vast deposits of oil and gas accessible now for the first time. The U.S. Geological Survey and Norway’s Statoil jointly estimate that the Arctic contains one-fourth of the world’s remaining oil and gas deposits. The territory claimed by Russia alone holds up to 586 billion barrels according to the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources. The world consumes something like 90 million barrels of oil per day and so the estimate for the Russian deposits could keep the entire planet chugging along for almost eighteen years. At $50 a barrel that’s almost $30 trillion worth of oil.

Geological surveys also indicate that the Arctic seafloor, shallow at many points, also contains abundant high-grade copper, zinc, diamonds, gold, silver, platinum, manganese, and nickel.

The fishing stocks represent another bonanza with 25 percent of the world’s whitefish, from the cod in the Barents Sea to the pollack in the Russian Far East. The Atlantic has been so fished out of cod that the great fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, is practically moribund. In addition, “polar invertebrates represent a valuable resource for the chemical and pharmaceutical sectors as they are used in the production of analgesics and other types of medication, as well as for food and drink preservation.”[301]

Estimates of the wealth the Arctic holds clearly vary widely, even wildly. Partly this is simply due to a lack of information. It’s been said that we know more about the surface of Mars than about the Arctic Ocean’s floor. Still, two things seem fairly certain. One is that even the most conservative estimates of the gas and oil deposits make them attractive except in the worst of markets. The other is that the melting of the Arctic ice cap has opened the fabled, long-sought Northwest Passage across the top of Canada to commercial shipping, making it a “trans-Arctic Panama Canal,” as Icelandic president Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson has called it.[302] Russia’s equivalent, the Northern Sea Route (NSR), has itself already been compared to the Suez Canal, with which it intends to compete. Not all the money is to be made underwater.

There are several advantages to these two major new shipping routes. Shorter is cheaper. The Northern Sea Route reduces a voyage from Hamburg to Yokohama from 18,350 kilometers to 11,100. The story is much the same with Canada’s Northwest Passage. Previously a ship traveling from Seattle to Rotterdam would have to pass through the Panama Canal. The direct Northwest Passage route cuts 25 percent off the distance, with commensurate savings in fuel and labor costs, though insurance costs can run higher.

The shorter routes also mean carbon dioxide emissions are reduced. The pirate-infested Strait of Malacca and Horn of Africa can be avoided. Supertankers that are too large for either the Suez or the Panama Canal and thus must sail about the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn will enjoy even greater reductions in time and distance.

But there are already problems. Canada claims full jurisdiction over the Northwest Passage as part of its territorial waters, which allows them to charge other nations for passing through them. The United States and the EU dispute that claim and are also against Russia’s charging for passage through the Northern Sea Route. There are also maritime border disputes between the United States and Russia.

Those disputes may all be settled peacefully as was one between Russia and Norway over a 175,000-square-kilometer area in the Barents Sea. Originally over fishing rights, the dispute expanded to include the gas and oil deposits, which could run to thirty-nine billion barrels. That dispute lasted several years but was settled amicably in September 2010. Russia needs Norwegian assistance in drilling in the Arctic, and Norway has the most experience in such climatic conditions.

“The Arctic … is just an ocean … governed by the law of the sea,” said Norwegian foreign minister Espen Barth Eide.[303] In the simplest terms that means that the treasures of the Arctic Ocean and any disputes arising over them are the exclusive business of the five nations with an Arctic coastline. Germany, however, contends that the rapid and dramatic climate changes occurring in the Arctic will affect everyone and therefore are everyone’s business.

Though the five Arctic countries can resolve their disputes multilaterally or even bilaterally, as Russia and Norway did, there are nevertheless two bodies for airing and resolving differences. The Arctic Council is an intergovernmental body with eight permanent members (the five Arctic Ocean states plus the Arctic Circle states Sweden, Finland, and Iceland). Germany has permanent observer status, to which China also now aspires. Six native peoples also have permanent observer status. The council does not have the power to enact or enforce laws, but has produced the council’s first binding pact delineating the Arctic Ocean for research-and-rescue operations.

The most serious problems relating to boundaries and sovereignty are currently dealt with by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). UNCLOS has already defined and delineated the power of any nation bordering a sea: within 12 nautical miles of its coastline a nation exercises sovereign rights and may arrest foreign ships entering those waters without permission. A nation’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) extends 200 nautical miles. Within the EEZ, the coastal state has exclusive rights over the economic resources of the sea, seabed, and subsoil to the exclusion of other states. The real troubles begin with the continental shelf, which is the seabed and subsoil areas that can be shown to be an extension of the land of a given country. The continental shelf can extend 200 nautical miles and in some cases up to 350 if it can be demonstrated to be part of the “natural prolongation of the soil.”[304]

Two enormous problems arise here. Russia aggressively claims the continental shelf, which includes the underwater mountain ranges known as the Lomonosov Ridge and the Mendeleev Ridge, as the natural prolongation of Russia’s land. This vast territory (465,000 square miles or about three Californias) includes the North Pole, one reason that the titanium flag was planted there in 2007. If Moscow’s claims for the continental shelf are approved, Russia will not only be the largest country on earth but the largest underwater as well.

Russia’s first claim on this territory was rejected by the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf as being insufficiently demonstrated. In August 2015 it submitted a new claim. Denmark and Canada also claim part of it as belonging to their continental shelf.

Another major complication is that the United States is not yet an official signatory to the Law of the Sea Treaty. The motion died in the Senate in 2012 with Republicans declaring that “the treaty’s litigation exposure and impositions on U.S. sovereignty outweigh its potential benefits.”[305] Former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have been strong supporters of the treaty. Then defense secretary Leon Panetta has said: “Not since we acquired the lands of the American West and Alaska have we had such a great opportunity to expand U.S. sovereignty.”[306] By not being a signatory to the Law of the Sea, the United States does not have official claim to its territorial sea, Exclusive Economic Zone, or continental shelf.

Republican senator Richard Lugar, addressing the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said that the Law of the Sea had been “designated by the Bush Administration as one of five ‘urgent’ treaties deserving of ratification.”[307] He added:

Lugar also noted that Russia was already making “excessive claims in the Arctic.”[309]

The Russians, of course, don’t see their claims on the Arctic as excessive but as just and justified. And indeed there is considerable historical basis for the Russians to feel a special relationship with the Arctic. There is no question that they were the forerunners of scientific exploration in the region, establishing a tradition of intrepid researchers who set up their research stations on ice floes that could suddenly break apart, as described in this Soviet report from November 1954:

As Britain’s leading expert on the Russian Arctic, Terence Armstrong, says in The Russians in the Arctic: “This sort of thing was not a rare occurrence.”[311] He points out that through their “boldly conceived expeditions, the Russians have made themselves the undisputed experts on the whole central Arctic region…,”[312] adding that almost “everything that is known about the circulation of water in the Arctic Ocean … was discovered by Russian work.”[313]

Not only did the Russians explore the High North, they exploited it, which also means investing in it. Twenty percent of Russia’s landmass, the Arctic Circle, accounts for something like 20 percent of the country’s GDP and exports. None of the other five Arctic Ocean powers have any cities of notable size in the Arctic Circle. Nome, Alaska, the United States’ largest Arctic city, usually has a population of just under 4,000. Russia, on the other hand, has eight of the ten largest cities in the Arctic Circle, Norway having the other two. Murmansk, the largest, had a population of 500,000 in Soviet times, though it has fallen almost by half in the years since.

The last city founded by the tsars, in 1916, Murmansk was a principal target of the 1918 U.S. invasion to keep Russia war materiel from falling into German hands. American soldiers are buried there. During World War II the “Murmansk run” became legendary as British, Canadian, and American ships kept an embattled Soviet Union supplied with food. German U-boats torpedoed eighty-five merchant ships and sixteen Royal Navy warships. Churchill called this “the worst journey in the world.”[314]

For Russians the Arctic is associated with the heroic and the hellish—sometimes the two have even been combined. Daring rescues of explorers and scientists trapped by ice provided patriotic fodder for Soviet newspapers and newsreels. In 1937, due to exceptionally severe conditions, twenty-six Soviet ships were forced to winter at sea, frozen in place. This might have been good luck in disguise because 1937 was the very apex of Stalin’s Terror, and it was safer to be trapped in Arctic ice than home in your bed.

The Arctic was not only an arena of heroic exploits but a scene of ecological crimes. There were 138 nuclear tests—land-based, underground, underwater—in the Arctic between 1955 and 1990. Fourteen nuclear reactors were simply dumped into Arctic waters along with nineteen vessels containing radioactive waste. The K-27 nuclear submarine was scuttled in 1981 in thirty meters of water whereas international convention requires three thousand. In some places, like Andreeva Bay, nuclear waste leakages from a site containing thirty-two tons have rendered the waters “completely devoid of life.”[315]

But that may not be the gravest danger: “A Russian Academy of Sciences study indicates decades’ worth of nuclear reactor and radioactive waste dumping in the Kara Sea by the Russian Navy—as well as fallout from Soviet-era nuclear tests—could cause heightened levels of radioactive contamination when major Arctic oil drilling projects ramp up…. Studies show that when the drill bit hits the ocean floor, there is a danger of disinterring a vast portion of the Soviet Union’s irresponsible nuclear legacy … which threatens to contaminate at least a quarter of the world’s Arctic coastlines.”[316]

But drilling presents other dangers—as well as some intriguing possibilities—apart from the release of radioactive wastes. Russian scientists, attempting to foresee and forestall some of the effects of climate change and drilling, have been working on the melting permafrost and have recently discovered more than twenty previously unknown and possibly dangerous viruses. One of them, termed a “giant” virus because, at a length of 0.6 microns, it can be seen under a normal optical microscope, is known as Mollivirus sibericum and has been frozen in ice for thirty thousand years.

Not all the viruses are potentially harmful. In fact, one of them, officially known as Bacillus F and more informally as “the elixir of life,” shows mind-boggling promise. First, scientists noticed that Bacillus F “didn’t show signs of aging,” said Dr. Anatoly Brushkov, head of the Geocryology Department at Moscow State University. “My colleagues and I cultivated the bacteria and started studying them more closely…. We started injecting mice with a solution containing Bacillus F and their lifespan increased by up to 30 percent.” As the lab head, Vladimir Repin, put it: “Imagine an old mouse living the last of its average 600 days. We injected it with the solution, and suddenly it started behaving like it was much younger. All the vital signs returned to normal.” Another of the lab’s scientists said, “Experiments have already resulted in mice restoring their fertility and beginning to reproduce again.”[317]

The true treasures of the North may not be the obvious ones of gas, oil, and gold.

In private, members of an ethnic group will often say things about themselves that they would not tolerate being said publicly, especially by someone not a member of their group. By themselves Russians will often remark on their carelessness, their bent for the slapdash. This, however, is usually viewed with more affection then disdain, seen as a result of the maximalist Russian spirit, which cannot be bothered with mere fussy detail.

In an article entitled “Carelessness as a Russian National Trait,” Michael Bohm, a former editor of The Moscow Times, lists eight horrific examples, including the crash of a Proton rocket in July 2012 because the velocity sensor was installed with the plus and minus poles reversed. The rocket carried three satellites worth $75 million, and they were not insured. Within Russia planes crash much more frequently than they do in other advanced nations, though Aeroflot’s international flights are world-class and its safety rating is higher than American Airlines’. The sinking of the Kursk nuclear attack submarine in August 2000, Putin’s first crisis, was caused by leaving on board cruise missiles that should have been removed to shore during training exercises and by proceeding with the testing of torpedoes that were leaking acid. One of those torpedoes exploded on board, causing a cruise missile to explode. This, and a long list of similar incidents, caused Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev to declare sloppiness “a national threat.”[318]

Nothing is more portable than culture, and the Russians have brought theirs with them to the Arctic. In Soviet times that meant the dumping of radioactive wastes directly into the sea regardless of the depth. In post-Soviet times that mind-set has taken different forms. The sinking of the Kolskaya oil rig in December 2011 is a perfect example.

Everything was done wrong and everything went wrong. The captain had called his wife to say that their “mission is suicidal…. It was prohibited to transport oil rigs in those waters between December 1 and February 29.”[319] In mid-December, tugged by an icebreaker, the rig was traveling from the waters off the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East and was carrying sixty-seven people, which was fourteen more than its crew; both Russian and international regulations stipulate that only skeleton crews be on board when rigs are being towed—sixty of the sixty-seven should have been on the icebreaker. Instead, the rig was packed like an “inter-island ferry in Indonesia.” The captain, who had attempted to resign but not been permitted to, was among the fifty-three casualties when the rig capsized and sank in heavy seas on December 18, 2011, in the Sea of Okhotsk, where the water temperature was 33 degrees, meaning any survivors had only thirty minutes before freezing to death.

In a Voice of America article, “Russia Moves into Arctic Oil Frontier with a Lax Safety Culture?” longtime Russia watcher James Brooke says the sinking of the Kolskaya rig “involved the kind of stunning incompetence that most nations would rule criminal.”

Brooke adds: “Some men, in what can only be described as superhuman feats of strength, donned wetsuits and managed to swim far enough in the freezing water to avoid getting pulled down in the deadly whirlpool created by the massive, multi-ton structure as it sank 1,000 meters to the ocean floor.”

Russia’s culture of carelessness produces the very conditions that elicit its cult of heroism; the two are linked in a self-perpetuating pattern.

There was no pollution from the sinking of the Kolskaya oil rig, but a catastrophic oil spill remains the main danger to the Arctic. Many experts would agree with Simon Boxall, a specialist in oil spills from the University of Southampton in England who helped analyze BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico and is quite straightforward on the subject of Arctic drilling: “It is inevitable you will get a spill—a dead cert.”[320]

There are two particular problems with an oil spill in the Arctic. Hundreds of boats were available in the Gulf of Mexico to aid in the cleanup, which would hardly be the case in the Arctic. To complicate matters, says Boxall, the Arctic presents “a completely different type of environment. In temperate climes, oil disperses quickly. Bacteria help. In the Arctic the oil does not break down this way—it can take decades before it breaks down. Nature will not help us.” The rule of thumb is that what took five years in the Gulf of Mexico will take more than twenty in the Arctic.

Visiting the Arctic in 2010 and helping attach a tracking device to a sedated polar bear, Vladimir Putin announced: “We are planning a serious spring cleaning of our Arctic territories.”[321] That has remained largely an empty promise. In fact, rapid exploitation has been the order of the day, a project that includes what has to rank as one of the Worst Ideas in the World—the Russians are planning to supply their exploitation projects with floating nuclear power plants!

The prospect of these floating nuclear power plants (FNPPs) has elicited reactions that range from “floating Chernobyls”[322] to “fairly proven hardware, derived from those used on the icebreakers.”[323] Other observers, like former Soviet submarine captain and atomic safety inspector turned antinuclear campaigner Alexander Nikitin, worry about earthquakes and their aftereffects. “If a working floating nuclear reactor were dashed against the shore in a tsunami, it would mean an unavoidable nuclear accident.”[324] For his troubles Nikitin has been arrested several times for treason and espionage, the first time coming in 1996, when Yeltsin was still president. Though never convicted—a good sign—he has spent considerable time in pretrial detention.

Luckily, the lightly enriched uranium the FNPPs will use will not make them an attractive target for criminals or terrorists.

The first FNPP, soon to be operational, is called the Academician Lomonosov; not coincidentally, the extended continental shelf that Russia claims as an extension of its mainland is also named after Mikhail Lomonosov, an eighteenth-century polymath of peasant origin. The floating reactors will be able to supply electricity, heat, and desalinated water to a city of 200,000. They will be refueled every three years and serviced every twelve, and have a lifespan of forty.

Fifteen countries from China to Argentina have already expressed interest in leasing FNPPs.

The vast blank whiteness of the Arctic can, it seems, take any projection—from wealth rising from the sea like some god of ancient myth to tsunamis lashing floating nuclear power plants toward cities through waters black with spilled oil. Yet it’s also possible that both of these dramatic extremes will be avoided by the most common result of human endeavor—failure.

The gas and oil deposits may prove smaller than anticipated or more difficult and expensive to extract. The price of oil may stay low for a long time. And in the meanwhile breakthroughs in energy—fusion, superpowerful batteries—may make oil less necessary as fuel. The sea lanes over Russia connecting Asia and Europe may also not prove as lucrative as hoped. The dangerous unpredictability of the weather will impose strict limits on the shipping season, and many believe the main traffic will consist of raw materials being shipped out of the Russian Arctic rather than commercial traffic between Tokyo and Rotterdam. It wouldn’t take more than a few serious accidents for shippers, and insurers, to have second thoughts about the route. There have already been close calls. Two tankers, each loaded with thirteen thousand tons of diesel fuel, collided in July 2010, though the Russians dismissed the incident as a mere “fender bender.”[325]

There are even pessimists when it comes to the possibility of a bounty of fish revealed by the shrinking ice cap. An Economist article, “Tequila Sunset,” warns that a “warming Arctic will not … be full of fish. It will simply be an ice-free version of the desert it already is.”[326] The reason for this is that “global warming … may increase ocean stratification. This is the tendency of seawater to separate into layers, because fresh water is lighter than salt and cold water heavier than warm. The more stratified water is, the less nutrients in it move around.”

The greatest failure that could occur in the Arctic is, however, war. Henry “Hap” Arnold, commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces and the only U.S. officer ever to hold five-star rank in two military services (Army and Air Force), predicted the following: “If there is a Third World War the strategic center of it will be the North Pole.”[327] Arnold was no doubt basing his thinking on the fact that the shortest distance between the United States and the USSR for strategic bombers was over the North Pole, and whoever controlled the Arctic would have a vital advantage. It wasn’t long before ICBMs made the North Pole less important, but that in turn made it all the more important for nuclear subs. Just as the United States was shocked by Sputnik in 1957, the Soviets were shocked by advanced U.S. nuclear subs like the Nautilus, which transited the Arctic Ocean in 1958, and the Skate, which surfaced at the North Pole in 1959.

A resurgent Arctic is part of a resurgent Russia. Putin has declared, “We have no intention of militarizing the Arctic,”[328] but that statement is contradicted by other official statements that define the Arctic as a vital interest and main strategic base in the twenty-first century, by military doctrine dedicated to maintaining Russia’s national interests in the Arctic, and by a whole series of practices—the reopening of bases, the building of airstrips able to accommodate fighters and bombers, and the production of military equipment specifically designed for fighting in Arctic conditions.

Stalin emphasized the importance of the Arctic, seeing it as a source of “colossal wealth,”[329] and used forced labor to extract its resources, a luxury Putin does not have. But the wealth of the Arctic is even more important to Putin that it was to Stalin. It will be his last chance to transform Russia’s riches into greatness and strength. Since he has not sufficiently diversified the economy, the Arctic could well be Putin’s last stand.

Some of Putin’s moves have already made Russia’s Arctic neighbors nervous. Russia is moving forward with a gas turbine–powered armored vehicle called Rytsar (the Knight). A sort of light Arctic tank, its motor is designed to start and operate in the extreme cold and also to travel the long distances between bases and settlements. Drones are already patrolling, especially in the eastern part of the country. Motorized rifle brigades are being formed in the Murmansk region in the western part. The FSB created an Arctic Directorate in 2004, the control of borders always part of that organization’s purview. The list could go on but would thereby create an overly dramatic impression, as do some of the statements of Russian politicians and documents, like the following: “In a competition for resources it cannot be ruled out that military force could be used to resolve emerging problems.”[330]

Russia’s actions in the Arctic, combined with incursions into Ukraine and Syria, have given Russia’s Arctic neighbors some genuine cause for alarm, especially the Norwegians, who also share a land border with Russia. New third-generation Abrams-type battle tanks are now being stored in the huge spaces carved out of Norway’s quartz and slate mountains. In 2010 Norway, the only NATO member with a permanent military base above the Arctic Circle, reopened its mountain stronghold in Bodø, which has fifty-four thousand square feet of tunnels and a five-story-high command center. At this stage, intelligence is still far more significant than the positioning of forces. “If Vienna was the crossroads of human espionage during the Cold War…,” says James Bamford, a columnist for Foreign Policy, “it’s fair to say that the Arctic has become the crossroads of technical espionage today.”[331]

The Russians profess to feel threatened by the extension of NATO to their country’s very borders, a result of former Eastern Bloc countries joining the organization. At the North Pole, however, Russia faces four NATO countries, all of which were members from its very inception. These were not the long-suffering countries of Eastern Europe seeking refuge inside NATO’s castle, but core defenders of Western values and strategies. The Russians know how to rattle the Poles and the Baltic states, but find facing the United States, Canada, Norway, and Denmark a bit more worrisome. Still, with all its military bases and icebreakers—twenty-seven to the United States’ two—Russia is the powerhouse of the north. “We’re not even in the same league as Russia right now,” concedes Coast Guard commandant Paul Zukunft.[332]

That is the basic geopolitical lay of the land, but what matters even more here is the dynamic driving events. For the United States, Canada, Norway, and Denmark the Arctic is important whereas for Russia it has an edge of existential desperation. Since its land-based oil fields are browning, the promised resources of the Arctic could well mean the difference between power and collapse. If Russia loses “the battle for resources,” as Deputy Prime Minister Rogozin puts it, it will also lose “sovereignty and independence.”[333] Those resources lie principally in that immense undersea extension of its territory known as the Lomonosov Ridge. The submersible that planted the titanium flag on the seafloor under the North Pole was not all about propaganda and bravado—it was also collecting soil samples as part of the scientific evidence, including the acoustic and seismic, to support Russia’s claim, which was presented to the United Nations in August 2015, no quick answer anticipated.

And what if the UN rejects Russia’s claim? Then, given the right desperate economic conditions, it will quickly become apparent that for Russia the Arctic is not so much a Mecca as an undersea Crimea that must be seized and annexed in defiance of all law, even at the risk of war.

9 MANIFESTING DESTINY: ASIA

Russia is pivoting east just as China “marches west.” They could well collide in Central Asia.

Russia, of course, had burgeoning trade with China before the violent events in Crimea and Ukraine caused the rupture between Moscow and the West. Like other resource-rich countries, Russia saw the chance to profit by feeding the furnace of the Chinese economy, which, to take one measure of its scale, in the years 2011–13 poured more concrete than the United States did in the entire twentieth century. China had already surpassed Germany as Russia’s leading trading partner in 2011. In a pronouncement both ringing and clunky, Putin declared in 2012: “In the 21st century, the vector of Russia’s development is to the east.”[335]

For Russia the east has always been a vector of its manifest destiny. America’s great westward sweep was matched by Russia’s to the east, which even spilled over into the Western Hemisphere to include Alaska and parts of northern California. The Russians did not confront any great warlike nations like the Comanches, making their takeover of Siberia and the Far East a relatively easy conquest, not the source of both sagas and shame as the conquest of Indian territory was for America. The drive was so successful that three-quarters of Russia is in Asia.

It was Russia’s eastward expansion that gave it the territorial basis for its own sense of greatness, but the east also carries associations of tragic humiliation and defeat. The only successful invasion of Russia came from the east, Genghis Khan having succeeded where Napoleon and Hitler would fail. The destruction of the Russian fleet by the Japanese navy in the Tsushima Strait during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 still resonates in Russia. Billed as a “short, victorious war,”[336] a tonic for a society ailing from worker discontent and revolutionary assassination, the war had definite racist overtones. The Russian press called the Japanese “little yellow devils,” while the British and some other European powers equipped Tokyo and cheered “brave little”[337] Japan on. But the cheering stopped when the war ended with an ominous first—the first victory of an Asian nation over a white European one.

It was inevitable that Russia’s eastward expansion would cause it to come up against China. Russia is the only European country that borders China. In fact, it has two separate borders with China. One is quite long, a touch over 2,500 miles in length, whereas the second, only 24 miles long and located between Kazakhstan and Mongolia, will not be visible on any map of normal size, but may well play an outsized role in the coming years because of pipelines passing through the ecologically precious lands of the Golden Mountains of Altai. In any case, unlike the United States, Russia and China are both countries with many borders, fourteen each in fact.

The first treaty China ever concluded with the West (the Treaty of Nerchinsk, 1689) was to begin establishing borders with Russia, a process that was only finally completed by Putin and Hu in 2004. But fear and grievances remain. Many Chinese believe that by force or the threat of force Russia imposed “unequal treaties”[338] on China and unjustly seized 1.5 million square kilometers. Mao espoused that view in 1964, and five years later Soviet and Chinese troops engaged in armed border clashes. “The Politburo was terrified that the Chinese might make a large-scale intrusion into the Soviet territory that China claimed. A nightmare vision of invasion by millions of Chinese made the Soviet leaders almost frantic,” wrote Arkady Shevchenko, the highest-ranking Soviet diplomat ever to defect, in his book Breaking with Moscow.[339]

The fear behind the old Soviet quip—all quiet on the Finnish-Chinese border—continues to fuel Russian anxiety. Speaking off the record, a highly placed Russian government figure told me that he expects the next war to be a “resource war” and China to be the enemy. It’s a pity that Russian-American relations have sunk so low, he said, when we should be forging an alliance to counter the mounting Chinese threat.

Putin has said of Russian-Chinese relations: “We do not have a single irritating element in our ties.”[340] In fact, the relationship is fraught with tension. First and foremost is what could be called Russia’s demographobia. In the country’s vast Far East, there are only 7 million people, while China’s three northern provinces that border the Russian Far East contain more than 100 million. Many are already working in Russia, crossing the bordering as Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Rogozin puts it, “small groups of 5 million.”[341] Putin himself has said: “I don’t want to dramatize the situation, but if we do not make every real effort, even the indigenous population will soon speak mostly Japanese, Chinese and Korean.”[342]

The Russian towns and cities near the border with China are forlorn and dilapidated, whereas their Chinese counterparts gleam with steel, glass, and commercial energy. China’s cheap goods, especially clothing and electronics, draw Russian customers from far and near. The few shopping centers and high-rises in the Russian towns tend to be built by Chinese companies.

But it is not only Chinese laborers who cross the border into underpopulated Russia to exploit its natural resources, and not only Russian shoppers who cross in the other direction to buy goods for themselves or for resale; there is also a flow of educated professionals moving from Russia to China, where their skills are more in demand and better paid. And, to further complicate the picture, there are cross-border romances as well, usually between Russian women, known for their beauty and warmth, and Chinese men, who, compared to Russians, have the reputation of earning more and drinking less.

Different as they are, the Russians and Chinese both share a sense of being humiliated nations. The Chinese even speak of their “century of humiliation” from the middle of the nineteenth century, when foreigners, especially the British, forced unequal treaties on them, until 1949, when Mao’s victory began China’s comeback. (The Map Department of the People’s Press in Beijing has even published Maps of the Humiliation of China over One Hundred Years.)

Siberia’s richness and emptiness cannot help but stimulate China’s appetite for resources and lebensraum. Though all border differences were successfully negotiated in 2004, there remains a lingering sense on the Chinese side that much of the territory along the border was taken unfairly by Russia when China was weak. In some Chinese textbooks the areas on the Russian side of the border are shown in the same color as China itself. Though the borders have been fixed, that alone cannot provide Russia with much reassurance, having itself just recently violated the 1994 Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Siberians, moreover, have never been too happy about their domination and exploitation by distant Moscow. Theirs is a mentality of self-sufficiency, rugged individualism, and distrust of the central government. In the chaos of the Russian Revolution and civil war, Siberia even briefly seceded, establishing its own republic, its flag’s green and white symbolizing forest and snow. A similar logo is used by the currently existing National Alternative of Siberia—known as the Siberian Liberation Army until the group’s leader was visited by the security police curious as to his choice of words, since private armies are frowned upon, to say the least. This fringe group has a near-zero chance of having any impact at the moment, though the Russian authorities are always mindful that, given the right set of conditions, small groups like the Bolsheviks and Nazis can dart from the margins to the center.

Russia and China are both content with the current arrangement and will remain so until some new dynamic brings the borders back into question. It would be a delicious historical irony if at some point China began aiding the Siberian equivalent of the breakaway groups that set up the phantasmagorical People’s Republic of Donetsk.

A mixture of half-real paranoia and quite real ambition caused Putin to create an enemy out of NATO, which had obliged him by expanding its borders to outflank Russia from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Putin needed that enemy for political purposes, his rule secured by the security services, the armed forces, and the wealthy elite he has created. Funds flowed to them, which meant that they would not flow to education, nonmilitary R&D, and high-tech centers imitating Silicon Valley, where those funds could have a substantial impact on the country’s economic future. Russia produces little that the world wants; its top ten exports, with the exception of some industrial machinery, include oil, gas, iron, steel, precious stones and metals, fertilizer, aluminum, wood, and cereal. Russia does of course sell weapons, planes, warships, and other military equipment, but not enough to make the top-ten list.

In the meantime, there are buyers, especially for gas and oil. Russia may be pivoting east and Europe may be desperately weaning itself off Russian energy, but their economies are still very much bound up. Though China has surpassed Germany as Russia’s number one trade partner, the EU as a whole accounts for 41 percent of Russian trade, more than four times what China imports. The countries of Eastern Europe—especially Poland and the Baltic states, which feel the most threatened by Russia because of past experience, proximity, and, in the case of Estonia and Latvia, large number of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers—are also countries that depend heavily on Russia for their energy supplies. Poland gets at least half of its gas from Russia and has a supply contract with Gazprom that runs until 2022. Some of them are scrambling for inventive solutions to their problem of dependency on Russia. Lithuania is building a floating terminal to receive liquefied natural gas from the United States. Other gambits included developing domestic shale reserves, as Estonia is doing. And it’s always possible to simply pay more for gas and oil from other sources.

Like Europe’s liberation of itself from Russian gas and oil, Russia’s search for new or enlarged markets in Asia will not be accomplished anytime soon. Alexander Ivanov, deputy head of the state-run bank VEB, put it: “Over the long term, these markets may supplant the European and American markets for us, but it won’t be quick.”[343]

Indeed, the signs have been highly mixed. Russia’s trade with China actually fell in 2015 by some 26 percent. The two countries had hoped to hit the $100 billion mark but came in $32 billion short. On the other hand, China’s import of Russian oil for May 2016 hit a record thirty-eight million barrels.

China, of course, will never allow itself to become dependent on Russia for energy any more than Russia will settle for being a “natural resources appendage”[344] for China. Putin is not about to turn rejection in the West to humiliation in the East. Russia is already attempting to protect itself in Asia by employing the same principle it failed to apply to its domestic economy—diversification. The Kremlin deals with both India and Pakistan, with which it lifted an embargo on arms sales in 2014. Russia sells submarines to Vietnam, also supplying it and India with nuclear power stations. Russia plays India off against China, selling it the first in a series of nuclear attack subs for $1 billion in 2012 under a ten-year contract. India declined to join in the sanctions against Russia in response to the annexation of Crimea and the incursions into eastern Ukraine. It is even possible that Russia will now be motivated to come to terms with Japan over the four southernmost Kurile Islands. The waters off those islands are rich in stocks of fish, gas, and oil, while the islands themselves contain large quantities of gold and rhenium, an exceedingly rare and costly metal used in jet engines. Seized by the USSR at the end of World War II, the islands have prevented Russia and Japan from formally concluding a peace. Wars never quite end and feelings still run high. When then president Medvedev visited one of the Kurile Islands in 2010 the Japanese prime minister, Naoto Kan, called it an “unforgiveable outrage.”[345]

Still, for all its overtures and deals, Russia may not find itself much more welcome or effective in the East than it was in the West. The United States competes there with Russia as a supplier of weapons and a guarantor of security, and there is no question that countries like Japan and South Korea will remain squarely in the American camp. “Russia’s geo-strategic eyes are bigger than its stomach,” says Brad Williams, a specialist in East Asia relations at the University of Hong Kong. “Simply put, Russia doesn’t have the economy to support a sustained presence in Asia.”[346]

And for that very reason, implacable geopolitical logic may compel Russia to employ blunter instruments to achieve its ends in Asia.

The strategic doctrine known as “March West” was publicly articulated in an article published in Global Times in October 2012 by Wang Jisi, identified by the Brookings Institution as “China’s most prominent and influential foreign relations scholar and a professor at Peking University.”[347] The stated purpose of March West is to move away from possible confrontation with the United States in the maritime region off China’s coast and to accelerate the “Grand Western Development,” a national strategy promulgated in 2000 whose aim is to speed the development of China’s western provinces, which have lagged far behind those on the eastern coast.

When it came to defining the importance of the western provinces and their relationship to China’s dominant population group, the Han, no one put it better than Mao did back in 1956: “We say China is a country vast in territory, rich in resources and large in population; as a matter of fact, it is the Han nationality whose population is large and the minority nationalities whose territory is vast and whose resources are rich.”[348]

Not only do these non-Han western provinces possess land and natural wealth; they are one of the principal places through which China imports energy and exports manufactured goods. A part of the ancient Silk Road that supplied Rome with silk for togas, they are integral to President Xi’s dream of building a new Silk Road as part of China’s March West strategy. On a state visit to Kazakhstan in September 2013, President Xi waxed poetic on the subject: “I can almost hear the ring of the camel bells and [see] the wisps of smoke in the desert.”[349] Like Mao, Xi is physically large and imposing, given to poetic speech and a grandiose sense of self and mission that is already resulting in something of a personality cult around “Papa Xi,” as he is sometimes known.

There are also affinities between Xi and Putin, the first leader he visited after assuming control of China. Men of the same generation, they face a similar task—to finally deliver their nations from a sense of humiliation and make them great powers while at the same time balancing economic dynamism with state control of information and opinion. Putin’s popularity in China jumped to 92 percent after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Biographies of “Putin the Great” make the bestseller list. Major General Wang Haiyun, a former military attaché to Moscow, expressed quite clearly the Chinese image of Putin as a “bold and decisive leader of a great power, who’s good at achieving victory in a dangerous situation.”[350]

Xi not only says that he and Putin are alike but has sought to further emulate the Russian leader. The modernization of China’s army, the People’s Liberation Army, is being closely modeled on Putin’s revamp of the Russian army—leaner, meaner, more professional, gearing up to use high-tech and hybrid warfare rather than to fight great massed battles. China’s island-building in the South China Sea was inspired by and modeled after Russia’s actions in Crimea and east Ukraine. The two countries’ militaries are now working together more closely than ever, not only in joint exercises, but in sharing “information in such a sensitive area as missile launch warning systems and ballistic missile defense, [which] indicates something beyond simple co-operation,” says Vasily Kashin, an expert on China’s military at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.[351]

Though some fear a Russia-China axis based on their shared opposition to American hegemony, the two countries are, as we shall see, ultimately more likely to collide than to coordinate.

Xi’s interest in a new Silk Road is of course more prosaic than poetic. China imports huge quantities of gas and oil from Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, which have shown themselves to be more pliant and reliable partners than Russia. But to reach China that gas and oil must flow through the western province of Xinjiang, which is restive to put it mildly.

Usually the Dalai Lama’s words have a calming effect on people. But not always. One phrase that he occasionally uses can infuriate the Chinese leadership. This is not a mantra learned in the occult monasteries of Tibet but a dullish geographical term: “East Turkestan.”[352]

What does it mean? And why does it infuriate the Chinese?

East Turkestan is a huge area in northwest China amounting to about one-sixth of the country. The Chinese government absolutely insists that it be called Xinjiang or, even more officially, the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The local people are Uighurs, Muslims who speak a Turkic language. Like the Tibetans they would prefer independence from China but would probably settle for genuine autonomy. Like the Tibetans they feel no affinity with China on any level.

When the Dalai Lama uses the phrase “East Turkestan” he is in effect saying that Xinjiang is a natural part of Turkic-speaking Islamic Central Asia, not of China, which holds it by force alone. To the Chinese this is a seditious term, a call to revolt. In 2010 China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman declared that the Dalia Lama’s use of such language proved “his intent of splitting the country and sabotaging ethnic unity.”[353]

Until now, Beijing has dealt with Xinjiang much as it has dealt with Tibet. It has flooded the region with Han Chinese to tip the population balance against the indigenous locals. (The current population in Xinjiang is about 45 percent Uighur and 40 percent Han.) Mandarin is the language of social advancement; the local language, culture, and religion are viewed by Han officialdom as impediments to progress. Job listings frequently stipulate native Mandarin speakers only. But perks have been offered to those who are willing to cooperate with authorities: some Uighurs were exempted from China’s one-child-per-family policy, and the government has offered soft loans to small farmers.

Beijing wants a docile Xinjiang—but this seems increasingly unlikely. China’s nightmare would be collusion between the two great Western provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang. Tibetans are, however, more likely to express their discontent by means of self-immolation, whereas the Uighurs tend to opt for overt violence against Chinese officials and citizens. Though Beijing declares that these rebels are instigated and financed from abroad, their benefactors must not be very generous: an attack on a police station in Xinjiang in June 2013 that left twenty-seven dead, including nine police officers, was carried out with knives. That pattern changed briefly in 2015 with a car bomb attack in Tiananmen Square. But the Uighurs, who have an old tradition of making knives and daggers, will probably continue to favor them—knives are portable, concealable, impossible to ban. Even at close range a gun is impersonal, but there is something hideously intimate about a knife attack.

Xinjiang is important to China not only because of what is beneath the ground—the country’s largest gas deposits and considerable oil—but also because of what moves across the ground. Much of China’s imports and some of its exports must pass through Xinjiang. A new rail line, already called the New Silk Road, is faster than shipping through the Suez Canal. Just as important, China increasingly gets its gas and oil through pipelines that cross Xinjiang west to east. If a reasonable, just, and humane solution to the “East Turkestan” problem is not found, China can expect the Uighur rebels to graduate from knives to explosives that can cut those rail and pipe lines.

Unlike the United States, which has no offshore neighbors able to interfere with its merchant shipping or the movements of its navy, China is not blessed with a safe and open coastline. A glance at a map shows that China’s coastline, though long and variegated, would not be particularly advantageous during periods of tension or conflict. China is still very dependent on oil from the Middle East that must pass through the Strait of Hormuz, which could easily be closed by the United States in the event of conflict with China. Any goods China imports (e.g., 82 percent of its crude oil) or exports by sea also have to run the gauntlet of the Strait of Malacca, also easy to choke off, not to mention passing several countries with which China has territorial conflicts: Vietnam, the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan. And then of course there is always Taiwan—that “unsinkable aircraft carrier”[354] off China’s coast, to use General Douglas MacArthur’s still relevant phrase.

In the event of serious conflict at sea, the western provinces, especially Xinjiang, will attain exceptional significance as the primary conduits of energy and raw materials for China. Then China’s survival will depend in large part on how well it has solved its Uighur problem. One example of how China is failing to solve that problem is Kashgar, the main city of the Uighur region. In the days of the Silk Road merchants traveling west from China would encounter a huge, forbidding desert called Taklimakan, meaning “Go In No Come Out.” At that point the Silk Road split into two routes, one skirting the desert from the north, the other from the south, with both reuniting in Kashgar. Fearing the role the city could play in a Uighur resurgence, the Chinese, under the pretext of earthquake safety, are currently dismantling Kashgar’s ancient labyrinth of streets and exiling their inhabitants to cheap, sterile high-rises where their culture dies.

The Uighurs are unlike the Tibetans, whose cause is better known because of the genial Dalai Lama and the support of Buddhism-embracing celebrities. The Uighurs have no such leader, no such followers. On the other hand, Tibet is for all its publicity still a world apart, whereas the Uighurs belong to the one-billion-plus Muslim world community and are subject to all that has convulsed that world in recent years. And China’s policy of “Strike hard” against the “three evils” of terrorism, separatism, and extremism has been applied too indiscriminately on the Uighurs. Beards have been forbidden, government employees forced to work and eat on holy days. And it is almost a given that where the green flag is trampled the black flag will soon be raised.

Dangerous enough in itself, the “East Turkestan” problem now has its force multiplied by events developing in Central Asia.

“The Kazakhs never had any statehood,”[355] said President Putin in August 2014 in what seemed a backhanded compliment to Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev, whom Putin was trying to credit for creating “a state in a territory that never had a state before.”[356] These remarks caused outrage and alarm in Kazakhstan, especially in the wake of the Ukrainian incursion, which had been based in part on a similar sentiment. There are certain obvious and ominous similarities between the two countries. After the fall of the USSR both countries had voluntarily surrendered their nuclear weapons. At the time Kazakhstan had some fourteen hundred, making it the number four nuclear power in the world. However, as in the case of Ukraine, those weapons were not really operational, their codes being controlled by Moscow; but they could be repurposed for other weapon types or, falling into terrorist hands, be used for dirty bombs. Putin’s declaring neither country a real state, dubious in the case of Ukraine, is less so vis-à-vis Kazakhstan, since its people were mostly pastoral nomads until the Soviet era. Both Kazakhstan and Ukraine had significant clusters of populations that were Russian-speaking and/or identified as Russians. As a progressive twenty-first-century authoritarian, Putin would never use old-fashioned Stalinist methods of swallowing nations whole, preferring only to slice off the tranche that could be justified and would prove the most useful to his strategic aims. In his attitude toward Kazakhstan Putin derives a certain moral authority from the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, on whom he bestowed the country’s highest award, the State Prize of the Russian Federation, in 2007. In Rebuilding Russia, written in 1990, Solzhenitsyn advocated a new post-Soviet state shorn of the burdens of empire and consisting of Russia, Belarus, parts of Ukraine, including Crimea, and the north and east of Kazakhstan, which he contends were “actually part of southern Siberia.”[357]

Often described as more than four times the size of Texas (though it’s hard enough to imagine the size of one Texas), Kazakhstan has copious quantities of gas, oil, and gold, and its uranium reserves rank second only to Australia’s. It sells fifty-five thousand tons of uranium to China a year, supplying nearly half its needs. China’s New Silk Road passes right through Kazakhstan, bringing goods to the market in the Netherlands two weeks faster than by sea. Energy flows to China through Kazakhstan. China has been assiduous in courting Kazakhstan and equally assiduous in avoiding the kind of contretemps caused by the insults, inadvertent or not, that Putin seems especially prone to.

By Central Asian standards, Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev is a fairly reasonable autocrat. Early on he made a favorable impression on Margaret Thatcher, who saw him as a sort of Central Asian Gorbachev, a man you could do business with, telling Nazarbayev: “Mr. President, you seem to be moving from Communism to Thatcherism.”[358] (This incident alone gives some feel for how long Nazarbayev has been ruling Kazakhstan.) And Gorbachev himself liked Nazarbayev “very much. He had an energetic and attractive personality. He was open to new ideas.”[359] Though corrupt and authoritarian, like China and Russia, Kazakhstan is not an impossible place like its neighbor Uzbekistan, which has been called “Central Asia’s heart of darkness.”[360] There, critics of the regime are routinely tortured, including being boiled alive, according to Great Britain’s former ambassador to that country, Craig Murray, who documented a whole series of such appalling injustices in his book Murder in Samarkand.

Such misrule in Uzbekistan has led to greater resentment and resistance than in relatively unrepressive Kazakhstan. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) has been a problem since the 1990s and has now pledged its allegiance to the Islamic State. Many Uzbeks are fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq; an Uzbek was one of the three suicide bombers in the June 2016 attack on Istanbul’s airport. Terrorist groups exist within Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and are ready to capitalize on a shift in circumstances, especially a sudden, dramatic one like the death of a leader, especially one with no named successor. Though the Uzbek president’s death in September 2016 passed without immediate incident, the death of Kazakhstan’s might not, and besides, as the FSB well knows, crises can be manufactured—a grievance, a slogan, some demonstrations, a few bombs, a video that goes viral.

The state-controlled media make it difficult to gauge the extent of the Islamist threat in Kazakhstan. The government prefers that terrorist incidents be presented and portrayed as the violence of criminal gangs. That leads to certain absurdities, like saying that a suicide bomber who blew himself up in the local security police headquarters was actually a crime boss who did so “with the aim of avoiding responsibility for his crimes.”[361] Uzbekistan plays it just the opposite—it treats nearly all violent acts as those of Islamist extremists, thereby allowing it to crack down on all its enemies, including oppositionists and critics, and as well to attract foreign aid, especially from the United States, in the war against terrorism.

Islamism enters all the Central Asian countries through the Internet, discs, books, and the living word of preachers. Prison, as always, is a great university. Fighters returning from Syria and Iraq enthrall the young with their tales of apocalyptic battles, video games come to life. If educated, well-to-do British and French youth can be radicalized to the point where they would go fight in Syria or commit terrorist acts at home, something of the same sort can easily occur in dictatorial Uzbekistan or authoritarian Kazakhstan.

Paradoxically, the sanctions against Russia seem to be helping ISIS. Part of it is simple math and is exemplified by the former Soviet Central Asian republic of Tajikistan. A bit smaller than Wisconsin, Tajikistan has eight million people, more than a third of whom live beneath the poverty line. For that reason, more than a million young Tajik men have traveled to Russia in search of jobs. They do the work—repairing streets, construction, shoveling snow, driving cabs—that Russians are increasingly reluctant to do. The remittances they send home account for close to 40 percent of GDP, a frighteningly high percentage.

The sanctions that have inflicted pain on the Russian economy mean there is less work for the Tajik guest workers to do. Something like 200,000 returned home in 2015: 40 percent less money was sent back than in previous years. That alone meant a 16 percent drop in GDP. Nearly a quarter million young men returned to Tajikistan to a situation that was only made worse by their arrival. Those young men will find no opportunities at home and will thus be vulnerable to the appeal of the Taliban and ISIS, which is spreading quickly throughout the former Soviet Union. And it is not only rootless, lost youth who are attracted.

In mid-May 2015 the head of Tajikistan’s Special Assignment Police Force, Colonel Gulmurod Khalimov, trained in counterterrorism in the United States, simply disappeared: When he reappeared on May 27 it was in an ISIS video in which he promised to wage violent jihad against Tajikistan. He taunted his fellow countrymen as “the slaves of non-believers” and hurled them a challenge: “I am ready to die for the Caliphate—are you?”[362]

When Kazakh president Nazarbayev decided to create Astana, his new, gleaming capital, he supposedly chose the inhospitable northern steppe for its location in order to establish a Kazakh presence in territory that was otherwise largely Russian. Russians represent something like a quarter of Kazakhstan’s population, a figure that increases to half in the northern and eastern regions that border Russia, what Solzhenitsyn called actually part of Southern Siberia. The Kazakh government has instituted a program to get 95 percent of the country speaking Kazakh by 2020 while retaining Russian as both an official and an unofficial lingua franca. Kazakhstan is like Ukraine, where a great many people who consider themselves Ukrainian cannot speak the language or speak only kitchen Ukrainian at best. But one can speak only the language of the conqueror and still be fierce about independence, as the Irish, for one, have amply demonstrated.

For Putin the north and east of Kazakhstan are important because of their Russian population but even more so because that region borders Xinjiang.

In the event of turmoil and terrorism—homegrown or stimulated from without—following on the death of Kazakhstan’s leader, Putin, his modernized military now well tested in Ukraine and Syria, will have at least two good geopolitical reasons for incursion.

The first is connected with the ideas of the British geographer Halford Mackinder, who is revered and reviled as the creator of modern geopolitical theory: revered because of the pioneering quality of his ideas and reviled for making them too categorical and because the Nazis used them to justify their doctrine of lebensraum. Mackinder is known to Russian historians and the history-minded Putin for his theories, but also because he was British high commissioner for Russia in late 1919 and early 1920, traveling through the south of the country during the thick of the civil war, urging London to support the Whites against the Reds, for which, on his return to London in 1920, he was knighted.

Mackinder’s fame rests not on a grand opus but on “The Geographical Pivot of History,” an article published in the April 1904 issue of The Geographical Journal in London. He did, however, publish books in which he developed his theory of Europe, Asia, and Africa as one big “world island” surrounded by a “world ocean.” History was made in the world island, hence Mackinder’s famous formulation:

In his book The Revenge of Geography Robert Kaplan identifies the Heartland’s exact location:

If Russia were in danger of becoming no more than China’s gas station and lumberyard, Putin would be sorely tempted to seize control of northern and eastern Kazakhstan. That would mean controlling the thousand-mile-long border with China, specifically with Xinjiang. The following political situation, whether genuine or concocted by Russia, could turn temptation into action:

The president of Kazakhstan suddenly dies. There is still no known successor chosen nor any mechanism in place to select one. Homegrown Islamists seize the moment to unleash terror in the cities and seize the considerable amount of weapons-grade uranium that Kazakhstan is known to possess. Feeling threatened as Christians, the ethnically Russian population of northern and eastern Kazakhstan calls on Moscow for help, and Moscow is only too glad to oblige. The world is presented with a stark choice: which flag will fly over the region—the white-blue-and-red of Russia or the black banner of ISIS?

The Islamists will also have used the moment to stir up China’s Uighurs, who after years of China’s “Strike hard” policy are ready to strike back. China will now depend on Russia to maintain border security to keep its energy imports and manufactured exports moving; it will also depend on Russia to cease the flow of arms to the Uighurs. The balance of power will have shifted significantly in Russia’s favor.

Chance, cunning, and the willingness to use force will have made Russia what it has so longed to be since the fall of the USSR—the equal of China and thus of the United States, one of a new Big Three, the Triumvirate that rules the World Island and the World Ocean, that is to say, the World.