David J. Williams

Iceland has gone bust. But all is not lost. Swimming toward them is. . .a bear! It’s Russia! Vladimir Putin no less, looking as sexy as ever in those bathing trunks of his. Russia is loaning Iceland about the equivalent of a third of Iceland’s GDP, and God only knows what the terms are going to be. I’m sure it’s not going to come cheap, though; although it seems unlikely Russia will get a base out of it (not yet anyway), they’re clearly going to have a lot more maneuvering room in the North Atlantic now.  In fact, it seems that this could become the greatest Russian foreign policy coup since . . .since . . .shit, since Cuba?  Anyone want to help me put this in perspective?

I should also point out that this has occurred despite the fact that the Russian stock market has shut down several times in the last month.  What people often miss, though, is that that stuff doesn’t matter as much over there:  their stock market handles a fraction of their economy, whereas it turned out OUR stock market handled many times our economy’s weight in bullshit assets.  Score one for more primitive markets.  Russia is now able to use its immense foreign currency reserves to stir up additional trouble for a weakening West, and Iceland is the first such move.

It won’t be the last, though.  And Iceland is particularly interesting:  in the Cold War, it was the key to the sea-lanes between the U.S. and Europe; had the shooting started, it would have been essential for the Red Navy to neutralize Iceland in order to cut the supply-lines to NATO forces in Western Europe seeking to resist a Warsaw Pact invasion.  Now Iceland’s geopolitical angle may be a little different.  As global warming keeps on opening up the Arctic Ocean, Russia is getting ever more interested in claiming ever vaster areas of energy-rich seabed.  She planted a flag on the North Pole last year, much to Canada’s chagrin.  (Harper’s comprehensive 07 article on this issue is well worth reading.)  And now there’s even been talk that Canada should invite Iceland to join it, just like it did to Newfoundland back in the 1940s:  after all, Reykjavik is no further from Ottowa than Vancouver.  Someone may yet save Bjork from the bear.

One of the things that was particularly striking about Prez Debate #2 is the continued role-reversal on Pakistan. Obama wants to get in there and take out Bin Laden; McCain says he’s an idiot for saying that. To be fair, the positions are a little more nuanced than that: Obama is saying he’ll pull the trigger if the Pakistani govt won’t, whereas McCain clearly reserves for himself the right to do whatever he wants without telling Pakistan anything in advance (parse his objections, and it’s pretty clear that what he’s really reacting to is Obama being indiscreet enough to talk about secret wars on national TV).

Nonetheless, it’s the mirror-image of what we’re used to seeing.  But Obama knows what happens to Democrats who fail to act tough on foreign policy, particularly in the Age of Terror, and he’s determined to match/raise McCain’s rhetoric wherever possible—a stance that could become problematic as the growing financial crisis opens up a gap between where the American public want to intervene (i.e., everywhere) and where we’re actually capable of intervening (a lot fewer places).  Right now we’re in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the possibility of expanding operations into Iran and Pakistan, either of which would vault us into a whole new level of commitment.

And then there’s Russia.  McCain’s condemnation of her actions in Georgia makes it impossible for Obama to say anything else, but as I’ve noted before, it would be sheer insanity to go to the mat with Russia over anything in the Caucasus.  And yet amidst all the rhetoric, one gets a pretty precise sense of what the candidates clearly believe the American electorate wants to hear.  Tuesday night neither man had the balls to tell the American people that the economy’s on its way to the shitter; there’s no reason to be surprised that they’re not about to mention that the country’s days of policing the world are over.  Everybody’s just going to find that one out the hard way.

The failure of the bailout bill has set off all the usual recriminations, though as of this writing the market is regaining some of the ground it lost yesterday. The bill that went down to defeat yesterday was certainly rife with problems: as economist Nouriel Roubini (one of the few who saw the financial tsunami coming) points out, it lacked numerous safeguards and put far more of the public’s money at risk than is prudent. Nonetheless it seems virtually certain that some kind of bill will pass shortly.

But the underlying damage has already been done. Future historians are likely to mark 2000 as the apogee of the American Empire; the decline since then has been as swift as it was unnecessary.  Wed to their belief in American exceptionalism, the country’s leaders ran up huge debts to support wars that (as enemies like Bin Laden anticipated) undermined the state’s finances.  And the people showed even greater myopia, spending like there was no tomorrow even as they lapsed into endless blue state/red state culture strife.  The world economy has depended for way too long on the ability of the U.S. consumer to place him/herself in ever greater debt.  We’ve now reached the limits of that ability, and we’ve got a long way to fall.  We may or may not be heading for a second great depression, but we are certainly heading for a multipolar world (at first financially, but ultimately politically).  And the transition to it will be anything but pretty.

Pakistan has now ordered its troops to kill any U.S. soldiers crossing the Afghan border. The media barely gave that a yawn, and the campaigns haven’t even registered it, because they’ve been too busy talking about mooses and pigs. Nonetheless, the situation over there is going critical. Ostensibly our ally in the war on terror, Pakistan has been playing every end against the middle for a while now; their Northwest tribal areas are the central bastion of the Taliban, not to mention (in all likelihood) Bin Laden himself. But those areas are about as remote and ungoverned as any place on Earth is, and the current Pakistani government enjoys no popular support whatsoever for encroaching on them.

Enter the Americans.  Who raided the Northwest areas in force last week (which was what triggered the shoot to kill orders), and who now face a classic Catch-22.  They can either (a) not go into Pakistan, and thus never win in Afghanistan (or catch Bin Laden), or (b) go into Pakistan and get shot at and potentially start yet another war.  Finesse will be called for, all the more so given that Pakistani politics in the wake of the fall of Musharraf is rapidly becoming anyone’s game to win.  And American encroachments hold the potential to radicalize those politics very quickly.  An outright jihadist takeover is an entirely plausible scenario.

In short, it’s hard to overestimate just how big of a disaster this could become.  Pakistan is the sixth most populous country in the world.  And it has nuclear weapons.  Bin Laden must be doing handstands in his cave right now.

As the New Russia continues to take shape, the Old Russia’s getting a makeover. Case in point: the latest Russian school textbooks go a long way toward exonerating Stalin for all that pesky mass-murder stuff, emphasizing the work he did to save the Soviet state, and instructing teachers to emphasize that all Stalin’s actions were “entirely rational.” What makes this all the more fascinating is that Prosveshenije, the textbook company that’s released this magnum opus, is the same one that for years had a monopoly on Soviet textbooks: i.e., they’ve got a lot of practice in making the past whatever it is that the present needs it to be.

So President Medvedev gave a speech a couple of days back in which he articulated in some detail the governing axioms of Russian foreign policy. We can assume, of course, that this is the word direct from Putin himself; otherwise Medvedev wouldn’t have said it. The five principles are:

#1: Russia recognizes the primacy of international law

#2: The world should be multipolar. No one nation should dominate the international system.

#3: Russia doesn’t seek confrontation with any other country.

#4: Russia will protect the interests of its citizens abroad.

#5: “As is the case of other countries, there are regions in which Russia has privileged interests. These regions are home to countries with which we share special historical relations and are bound together as friends and good neighbours.”

No prizes for guessing that #2 and #5 are the really important ones here.  The Kremlin is signalling to Washington that what’s happened in Georgia is the first part of a more general settlement within (and possibly beyond) the former Soviet Union.  The Russian gamble here is that the U.S. is too bogged down in its MidEast quagmire to do much about that, at least in the initial phases.  At the same time, I would doubt that we’d see any more overt moves by Russia (beyond that already underway in Georgia) until after the U.S. presidential election.

In other news, Russian media continues to hail Putin as the incarnation of manhood in the New Russia.  And what better way to prove it than by having him shoot a tiger on national TV?

I guess that settles that.

A second cold war? Russia regains its great power status? There’s a lot of SF fans who said my geopolitical ideas were crazy. But turn on the TV, and Russian tanks are steamrolling over Georgia. And now I’m getting emails from *other* SF fans who are asking me whether I’m going to use this to claim vindication.

Well, no, I’m not.

For one thing, gloating ain’t attractive. But more importantly, despite the media’s hysterical claims of a new cold war, this isn’t the one I had in mind. What’s presented in THE MIRRORED HEAVENS is a Russia capable of projecting force on a global basis. But the Russian Federation of today is a long way still from anything that approaches the all-encompassing global reach of the Soviet Union.

And that’s something the U.S. ought to bear in mind as it weighs its options in the aftermath of the Georgia fait accompli.  A lot of people who should know better are calling for Bush II to get tough on the Evil Russian Bear.  But what they’re forgetting (or ignoring) is that we already HAVE been getting tough.  We promised that NATO would never expand into the former Soviet Union, but then NATO did.  Not only that, but we withdrew unilaterally from the ABM pact and started building missile defense infrastructure in the Czech Republic and Poland.  And while we were at it we intervened in Ukrainian politics.

But although the Russia we’re dealing with now may not be anywhere near as powerful as the Soviets, it’s still a damn sight stronger than the broken reed we trampled over in the 1990s.  And although American domestic politics has reached such a lamentable state of affairs that both candidates feel they have to immediately jump on the anti-Russia bandwagon (any rhetoric besides the mindless assertion of American power being deemed unpatriotic these days), hopefully something at either the State Department or the Pentagon is weighing the facts:

Item #1:  the bulk of our military forces will be engulfed in the Mideast quagmire for some time to come
Item #2:  the question of whether America intervenes in the former Soviet Union means a lot more to the Russians than it does to the Americans
Item #3:  we need Russia’s help with Iran whether we like it or not.
Item #4:  Putin ain’t Hitler. (This doesn’t mean that Putin’s a saint.  It just means that he isn’t the leader of a state hell-bent on conquering all of Eurasia and killing entire ethnic groups while he does so.)
Item #5:  While Putin may not be Hitler, he really has the potential to fuck with the price of oil.

Bottom line, regardless of what Russia does next, we’re idiots if we go to the mat with them right now over territory inside what was once the Soviet Union. And we’d be unwise to forget that for-too-long discredited concept in international relations called spheres of influence.  And I’m more than a little concerned that over the next few years (regardless of who wins the election) we’re going to start to see just how flimsy some of the assumptions that guide American foreign policy have become.

So the plan seemed simple enough: retire the Shuttle in 2010 and bring the new spaceship online in 2015 (at the absolute earliest). And in the meantime, pay the Russians to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station via the Soyuz. After all, they’re dirt poor and need hard currency, right? And since the Berlin Wall collapsed they’ve been more than happy to help out whenever we need it, right?

But now there’s Georgia. And the realization that if our diplomatic relations with Russia turn to shit, it’s going to difficult to persuade Moscow to continue to provide the world’s most expensive taxi service. All the more so as allowing NASA to contract with Russia will require Congress to pass a special waiver, as the Washington Post reports this morning. Which is highly unlikely to happen in an election year.  And even less likely to happen in a year in which Russian tanks are busy plowing Georgia.

Of course, the real question is What the Hell Did We Expect?  Defense Secretary Gates was quoted this morning as saying that Russia’s Georgian incursion has “called into question the entire premise” of U.S.-Russian relations.  That premise being, I suppose, that we can do whatever we want on Russia’s borders and if they say anything about it, then they hate freedom almost as much as, well, everybody else.  And when it turns out we can’t hitch a ride on the Soyuz, you can be sure the prez (whoever that might be) will decry Russia’s attempt to dominate the entire solar system.  Georgia today, tomorrow Mars:  it’s certainly a better gameplan than anything NASA has managed to come up with.

With the invasion of Georgia, Russia has signaled that reports of her demise are greatly exaggerated, and more than a little premature. Thanks in part to the U.S. being mired in an endless Middle Eastern war, Russia is in a position to define a sphere of influence, and operate within it with impunity. Many are focusing on the legalisms involved: in particularly, how the secession of Kosovo from Serbia opened up the door for Russia to play the same game in South Ossetia/Georgia. But the truth of the matter is that U.S. moves in eastern Europe (in particular the prospect of U.S. missile defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic) meant that Russia has been backed into a corner. Now we see her response.

And we’re also getting a glimpse of the new face of warfare. Even as the tanks started to roll, it became evident that Georgia was under massive cyberattack; now the New York Times has reported that this online incursion (or rehearsals for it) commenced last month. The NYT calls this the “first time that a known cyberattack has coincided with a shooting war”, which I find strange, as there’s more than a little evidence that the U.S. did the same thing in its assault on Iraq in 2003 (and if they didn’t, then they were fools not to).  At any rate, it won’t be the last.

But the exact contours of this new type of war will take some while to play out.  As with space warfare, the topography of cyberwarfare remains relatively undefined.  A fascinating article in Wired pointed out how some countries are cyberlocked:  just as a landlocked country has no access to the sea, cyberlocked countries rely to too great an extent on nearby countries for their access to the net.  (In this case, Georgia is dependent to an alarming degree on Russia infrastructure.)  The road from here to THE MIRRORED HEAVENS (in which the World Wide Net actually sunders along geopolitical lines) remains a long one, but I think we’re starting to see the first signs of it.

And meanwhile Georgia had better pray the cease-fire holds.  Vladimir Putin may not use computers, but he’s pretty good at employing people who do.

(For Part One of this essay, click HERE.)

All of the attention upon space left the leaders of the non-space services scrambling to assert the significance of their own theaters (though they hedged their bets by building up their own space-based presences). They experienced mixed success in this regard. Perhaps the fiercest such debate centered on the role that the sea would play. Unsurprisingly, the navies of both sides argued that Neptune’s arena would be a crucial one, and they mounted a wide range of arguments to support their claim.

The experience of the U.S. Navy in developing and making its case is particularly instructive. Its officers contended that since all the nations across the three Eastern continents were either neutral or Eurasian vassals, attacks launched from the oceans were the most immediate route, save from space itself, to deploy U.S. munitions without warning into the East’s defenses.  Indeed, at the core of the Navy’s calculations was an attempt to replicate a key component of its strategy during the First Cold War:  namely, encircling Russia and China with a series of bases capable of projecting force into their homelands.

The question, though, was the nature of that force.  The dominant naval platform of the 20th century, the aircraft carrier, had become obsolete long before the full resurgence of the Eurasian powers.  Carriers were simply too vulnerable to waves of torpedoes and ever-faster cruise missiles.  An increasing proportion of the force in any one carrier group had to be dedicated solely to protecting the carrier—yet such precautions failed (in spectacular fashion) against more than one “rogue state” in the first two decades of the 21st century.

The solution to all this was as radical as it was expensive:  since a maneuvering boat was essentially motionless relative to onrushing hypersonic missiles, why bother trying to build any evasive capability into a capital ship at all?  Why not make it motionless?  Thus was conceived the Raft (also called the Floating Fortress, in homage to Orwell): several kilometers along each side, racked with weaponry, and boasting full-length runways, as well as space launch facilities.  In the eyes of their designers, two factors made the Rafts a survivable proposition:  first, most of their weapons could be utilized for defensive purposes against oncoming missiles (e.g., the craft possessed a myriad smaller lasers that could be trained directly upon such incoming targets) and, second, a Raft was so large that even a direct hit was unlikely to be fatal.  When possible, Rafts were placed on or near the equator to maximize their space-launch potential.

It can safely be asserted that the construction of such behemoths laid to rest any notions that the U.S. navy was run by hidebound reactionaries wedded to the capital ships of a previous generation—but how they would perform were they to be put to the test remained to be seen.

NEXT:  UNDERWATER WARFARE