F-14D – US Navy Air Superiority Fighter of the late 20th century (photo: Pixabay)
This position depends on maintaining the proper balance of power in Europe and generally across the whole of Eurasia as a single supercontinent and the heart of the world. Proper means being in line with the American interests. This balance lies in the existence of a balancing system of many countries where the United States remains the strongest arbiter holding primacy over any particular constellation of equilibrium on the supercontinent. To this end, an important role for the United States was usually fulfilled by the United Kingdom, which – by its geographical location – somehow “helped” the United States to balance the European continental system. The proper balance brought peace by mitigating the aspirations of rising powers capable of dominating the continent. This made the United States secure and made Europe a place of stability.
For the United States, the current primary goal is to maintain the global domination it achieved after the Second World War and reaffirmed after a victorious end to the Cold War. This was done in execution of the “grand strategy” which has been followed by all American administrations. Beginnings of its creation can be seen as early as the First World War. Simply put, it boils down to two guidelines.
Its wealth and strength are based on sea borne trade in the world ocean, where the majority of world strategic flows occur, and whose principles and security are guarded by the US Navy, dominating the oceans and seas of the world with its flagship fleet of aircraft carriers enabling it to project power far from its own shores. This allows the American architect of the world order to control the course of globalisation, promote favourable global trade rules, maintain a dominant position in international financial structures in terms of the role of the dollar, capital investments and capital returns of investments, as well as maintain convenient military alliances and collective alliance systems in which the US has always been the largest shareholder.
From a geopolitical point of view, the rest of the globe is rather an insignificant island. The primary task of US leaders is not to allow one power to dominate Eurasian resources or to subjugate one of the Rimlands (Asian or Western European), which would allow them to unleash forces to engage in matters outside their own region and to economically or militarily defeat the United States, ultimately also in the western hemisphere. This fear dictated the USA’s involvement in the First and Second World Wars in order to prevent the prospect of German hegemony and in the Cold War in order to prevent the hegemony of the Soviet Union.
It was an extremely important place, the control of which determined the connectivity of American and British policy and the possibility of its joint implementation by the two sea powers of the world ocean in close cooperation. During both World Wars and the Cold War, undisturbed communication from the US east coast to western Europe formed the basis of the alliance’s strength – nomen est omen – the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and the foundation of the advanced US presence on the continent, which made the guarantees of Europe’s external hegemon credible.
In this way, both the Atlantic and Pacific have actually turned into the inner lakes of the new global maritime American empire. In the Atlantic, this was complete after the takeover of the Azores and naval and air bases in Iceland (that is, in fact – the Atlantic transit stations on the way to Europe) – along with the visible presence of the US Navy in the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Mediterranean, the stationing of American troops in the British Isles and in the west of the Old Continent, as well as installing naval bases in the western Mediterranean, which consolidated the strategic position of the US in Europe on the way to Asia.
After the creation of NATO in 1949 and in the face of further decline of Great Britain as a colonial power, the Americans became the external hegemon of Western Europe with the border of its influence up to the Elbe line, the Danish Straits, the Bosphorus and the mountains of the northern part of the Scandinavian peninsula. This and the supremacy in the Mediterranean Sea and the gradual takeover of British influence in the Levant and the Middle East cemented the advanced US presence in Europe.
How intriguing that in just 35 years, as a result of two world wars that crushed the old European powers, all European countries had to accept the fact that they had become de-facto protectorates of two external powers: sea (US) and land (USSR) – competing with each other on their territories and using them as client or proxy countries in the struggle for dominance throughout entire Eurasia and its littoral waters.
During the Cold War, decisions about war and peace in Europe were made in two external capitals, namely Washington and Moscow. It is hard to measure more clearly the collapse of the old system of European powers. France’s attempt to build strategic independence since the 1950s by winning a special status in NATO and developing its own nuclear arsenal did not change the strategic picture.
Rather, they are a confirmation that Paris understood the situation it was in and wanted to gain the room for maneuver by “pulling” the US and the American nuclear arsenal on their side in the event of an invasion of the Soviets).
In addition to the military presence itself, the geo-economic American response to the Soviet threat was also the so-called Marshall plan, under which 16 Western European countries devastated earlier by the world war received over USD 13 billion (USD 150 billion calculated according to the value of the USD in 2017). This allowed the industrial production to increase by as much as 64% before the end of 1951, while their GDP increased by an impressive 25% on average. The part of Europe located east of the Elbe, utterly destroyed in the horrific struggles on the land eastern fronts of World War II did not receive this help.
George Marshall (1880-1959), US Secretary of State (photo: Wikipedia)
During and immediately after World War II, the United States created an international institutional architecture to secure the country’s dominant position in the international system. The United Nations was to ensure the primacy of the US in international politics, and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (the Bretton Woods system) were to secure the leading role of the dollar and US leadership in international finance and economics. The GATT trading system was to consolidate the structural advantages of the US as interested in the free circulation of maritime power in international trade. The United States helped Western Europe with the Marshall plan and inspired the creation of the North Atlantic Alliance, which is the backbone of the geopolitical community of the Atlantic world, which we know from the Cold War.
In the Pacific, it was only the defeat of the Kuomintang and Mao Zedong’s conquest of power in China that pushed US influence from the core of the Asian continent, although the Pacific remained an internal body of water of the United States due to the network of influence and the system of alliances in the so-called the first chain of islands ranging from Japan through Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore and Australia.
In addition, the Americans had the forward presence of their powerful Pacific Fleet at various bases in the Western Pacific from Japan to Guam, which effectively eliminated all Soviet (and to a lesser extent Chinese) attempts to break into the open Pacific throughout the entire Cold War.
Even earlier – at the beginning of the twentieth century – the United States in its policy in the Western Pacific had tried to maintain a balance between Russia and Japan to ensure that the European powers and Japan did not obtain alternative sole and exclusive spheres of influence and interests in colonially-exploited China (the “Open Door” policy in Asia), which was to secure the relevant US influence in the region. Tokyo’s superpower policy in the 1930s – essentially seeking to oust American interests from Asia – led to the war of the rising Japan versus the United States, culminating in the devastating defeat of the Asian sea power.
As in Europe, the elimination of Japan strengthened the Soviet Union and the Americans had to bear Asia’s security on their shoulders. The result was the Korean War. As in the case of Germany on the other side of Eurasia, American leaders decided to rebuild the Japanese economy in order to restore regional balance. The temporary weakening of the United States in the 1970s and the peak of the USSR’s power during Brezhnev’s time prompted Nixon to gain additional Chinese cooperation to offset the Kremlin’s influence. This accelerated the end of the Soviet empire, while allowing the China’s Middle Kingdom unbelievable economic development for the next several decades.
The Soviet Union became far stronger than all the other European countries combined. Germany had been completely destroyed and additionally divided into two parts. Great Britain and France ended the war severely weakened, and their overseas colonies began to slip out of their hands. Also for this reason, the attentions of London and Paris were concentrated outside continental Europe.
Initially, Washington was convinced that US economic power and nuclear monopoly would prevent Soviet domination in Europe. However, Moscow’s actions in the countries behind the “Iron Curtain” and nuclear tests since August 1949 convinced American decision-makers to take active steps to ensure the right balance in Europe. For the first time since the 18th century and the then-brief episode of the alliance with France, the United States entered into a permanent alliance with European countries, thus creating a framework of security architecture that survived for the next several decades.
Hence the need to ensure a forward presence on the continent and the capability to project massive power across the Atlantic to Europe, and to strengthen the defence capabilities of European allies.
To this end, the United States – which had been earlier quick to demobilise shortly after the Second World War – hastily returned to engagement in the Old Continent, so as not to lose it this time to the Soviets. They used both earlier allies and enemies: Britain and France, as well as Italy and West Germany. The system of American alliances in Europe and Asia has since multiplied Washington’s combined power and influence that it could bring to bear – for the benefit of itself and its primacy strategy – international problems by providing institutionalised forums for cooperation with like-minded countries.
In this arrangement, European allies gave the Americans access to key geostrategic points such as the Bosphorus and the Danish Straits as well as to military bases in Europe’s land-based core (primarily in Germany), with a high degree of military interoperability over time. In this way, they also made it possible to legitimise American leadership in international affairs and create the impression of an extraordinary unity of the West’s geopolitical construct.
In terms of strategic practice, the United States decided to pursue a policy of containment of the Soviet Union, at which time two available options within such policy were analysed: Kennan’s proposed strategy of complete containment, which consisted in containing the progress of Soviet influence everywhere and always ordering to respond to the threat of any Soviet offensive by force or by a show of strength. This option was artfully given the label “perimeter defence” by John Lewis Gaddis. The second option was the strategy of “strongpoint defense” proposed by Walter Lippman, which in turn ordered to focus on defending only specific, vital interests and only in predetermined places, instead of defending all interests and everywhere – as postulated by Kennan.
There, the Soviets tried to leave their defensive bastion on the Barents Sea with submarines of the Northern Fleet. This was intended to interfere with the free communication of Western allies in the GIUK area. It was here, in the 1980s, that the Soviets also tried to develop operational battle concepts with the help of attack bombers firing stand-off missiles (launched at distance from outside the horizon line) at the American group of aircraft carriers which ensured American control over the whole GIUK gap. The US Navy’s response was to develop the operational concept of the Outer Air Battle, which would have mitigated or completely eliminated the threats to aircraft carriers outlined above, restoring free communication between America and Europe.
Branches of US marines would prevent the Soviets from capturing any significant part of Norway, its ports or the transhipment or airport infrastructure needed to service Soviet ships and planes operating in the North Atlantic. The Danish Straits were of similar significance for both sides, the eventual capture of which (together with the Danish islands and the Jutland Peninsula) would give the Soviets the opportunity to cut allied maritime communications from the British Isles to the mouth of the Rhine (Benelux and West Germany), followed by attempts to cut communication at GIUK itself. At this point, it is worth noting that the task of conquering islands in the Danish Strait and Jutland Peninsula was entrusted as part of the division of tasks in the Warsaw Pact, among others to the Polish People’s Army.
Finally, in the south on the Mediterranean, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles were the last key sea points for the clash of opponents in the Cold War. Because of the importance of the Straits and the desire to prevent their control by the Soviet Union, the Americans protected Turkey from attempts to subordinate Ankara’s policy to Moscow, which began at the end of World War II. This decided that, for the sake of Europe’s southern flank, the Americans ensured that Turkey became an ally of the Sea, strengthening and supporting it in various ways throughout the long period of the Cold War.
In the middle of Germany, in the Northern European Plain, there was the most important land confrontation place in Europe: the “Central Front”, where the main components of land and air forces of both sides were massed, including powerful armoured forces. This front covered the internal border of divided Germany and the western border of Czechoslovakia. For the needs of the Central Front in the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet concepts for the use of independent operational maneuvering groups (by the visionary Marshal of the USSR Nikolai Ogarkov) and the American concept of AirLand Battle were developed, which worked well after the end of the cold war in the deserts of Mesopotamia.
The most strategically sensitive place on the entire Central Front was the so-called Fulda Gap, i.e. the Fulda Isthmus, named after the German city of Fulda, located between the borders of Hesse and Thuringia Länder and Frankfurt am Main. The Fulda Gap included two corridors, both flat, lowland, very convenient for the massive movement of tank formations operating by surprise (additionally rewarding the maneuver from the east), which could enable the capture of abutments on the Rhine by the Soviets (which would collapse the entire NATO front in Western Europe) and the rapid capture of Frankfurt am Main – Germany’s transport hub and an important airport through which American additions and reinforcements were to arrive in the event of war. It is worth adding that this is actually the same place where Napoleon withdrew to after the defeat at Leipzig in 1813. And it is the also place where, at the end of World War II, the 12th US Corps moved quickly deep into Nazi Germany at the turn of March and April 1945, heading for the Elbe to confirm the Tehran-Yalta arrangements with “boots on the ground”.
Two other solutions were proposed: “friendly cooperation” (engagement) and an “offensive push” of Soviet influences from places where these influences had already appeared (rollback).
Engagement was to accept the assumption that the Soviet Union is not an enemy of the US, and that the US administration should cooperate peacefully with Moscow and avoid the costs and risks associated with any attempt to stop the expansion of Moscow’s influence. This approach was attractive, especially in the aftermath of a war in which the Soviet Union had been an ally of the Western Allies. On the other hand, rollback was looking for opportunities for offensive action against the USSR and its allies. This option never had solid support in Washington, although it was closest to its implementation in October 1950, when US troops crossed the 38th parallel in Korea during a counteroffensive against communist units. The rollback attempt, however, ended in defeat when Chinese troops hit the previously victorious US troops in the northern part of the peninsula. This extended the war to July 1953, depriving the United States of the fruits of victory, which in the autumn of 1950 seemed to be at hand.
By the way, a similar debate to that of the Cold War on the stages of reaction to the rise of an adversary in Eurasia: containment, engagement, or rollback against the rise of China’s power and Chinese policy in the Western Pacific and the New Silk Road areas appeared in the United States with the new administration of President Donald Trump’s White House.
The defeat of the Soviet Union and its dissolution in 1991 began for Poland a period of strategic adoption by the power of the world ocean, called in the wider journalistic and political practice deftly, figuratively and quite aptly – the “Atlantic world”.
At that time, there was a conviction, particularly strong in Poland, of “the end of history.” After a long course through a difficult history, full-of-victims, Poland was about to reach a well-deserved, fair, and – most importantly – a positive finish. In other words, it had achieved its goal of becoming a safe harbour, firmly anchored in the institutions of the broadly understood West. At a more or less conscious level, there was a belief that someone else – not us, would look after our future and its planning. With this came the certainty that they would take care of our security, development of our space, regional and continental balancing is the foundation of the security architecture.
What was worse – the thinking about the Polish War Theatre war ceased – about this specific physical piece of terrain between Warsaw and the Vistula valley at the heart of the country and the Dnieper and the Daugava rivers’ strategic defensive perimeter or about Poland’s Eastern buffer zones, now named Belarus and Ukraine that we used to call Bordelands which ensured we had the cushion against the actions of the Russian Empire.
The potential for the development of communication in this part of the continent on the north-south axis favouring spontaneous development and the development of the Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium has not been sufficiently considered. East-west development has been pushed since the 1990s by a united Germany and other Western countries wishing to communicate Europe along the most obvious latitudinal communication line for them. Thus, after the shedding of the Soviet hegemon, the process of conceptualising one’s own space – that which had been given to Poland by history and geography – was not restored.
Autor
Jacek Bartosiak
CEO and Founder of Strategy&Future, author of bestselling books.
Strategy&Future
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