Turkish Forum English

Category: Ukraine

  • “We Will Not Let Our People Go Cold,” Says Turkish Energy Minister

    “We Will Not Let Our People Go Cold,” Says Turkish Energy Minister

    “We Will Not Let Our People Go Cold,” Says Turkish Energy Minister

    Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 6 Issue: 4
    January 8, 2009 04:20 PM
    By: Saban Kardas

    The dispute between Russia and Ukraine over natural gas prices continues to threaten the energy supply to Europe in the midst of plunging temperatures (EDM, January 5). The disruptions caused by the row between the Russian gas company Gazprom and Ukraine’s Naftohaz has already led to the halting of deliveries to many European countries that are dependent on Russian gas. Amid mutual accusations and contradictory claims by both parties, several European leaders and European Union officials have asked those involved to relax tensions (BBC News, January 7).

    As a country that depends heavily on natural gas for electricity production and household heating, Turkey is also discussing the implications of the crisis. Turkey’s gas imports from Russia amount to 65 percent of its total needs of 135 million cubic meters (MCM) per day. Turkey imports 40 MCM of gas from Russia a day via the West pipeline passing through Ukraine and Bulgaria and another 35 MCM through the Blue Stream pipeline underneath the Black Sea. Turkey also imports around 15 MCM of gas from Iran and 17 MCM from Azerbaijan per day. The state-owned Petroleum Pipeline Corporation (BOTAS) has signed various contracts to secure the import of the following amounts annually: 16 billion cubic meters (BCM) via Blue Stream, 14 BCM through the West pipeline, 10 BCM from Iran, and 6.6 BCM from Azerbaijan. Moreover, BOTAS has also signed agreements with Nigeria and Algeria for 1.2 BCM and 4 BCM, respectively, of liquefied natural gas (LNG) (Cumhuriyet, January 7).

    The International Energy Agency (IEA) maintains that if the gas supply and winter conditions remain unchanged, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece may face problems (www.ntvmsnbc.com.tr, January7). Since Turkey already confronted a similar crisis in 2006, it has had greater experience in learning how to deal with these types of shortages.

    At the beginning of the crisis, representatives from BOTAS and the Energy Ministry announced that the Ukrainian crisis was not affecting Turkey and the gas flow from both West line and Blue Stream, as well as from Iran, was continuing. They also noted that Turkey did not expect a cutoff in the West line but that there were contingency plans in case this did happen. BOTAS officials noted that the underground tanks were full and Turkey could increase the capacity of Blue Stream up to 50 MCM by activating a compressor station in Corum (www.ntvmsnbc.com.tr, January 2).

    When the news about Russia’s decision to cut off gas to Ukraine arrived, Energy Minister Hilmi Guler told reporters that gas supplies from the West pipeline had been completely halted. Guler also noted that the gas supplies from Blue Stream would soon be increased to 48 MCM per day. He assured the Turkish public, “We will not let our people go cold” (Anadolu Ajansi, January 6).

    Guler announced that Turkey had already started to implement some precautions. First, the ministry asked the power stations producing electricity from natural gas to switch to secondary fuels. Although Reuters reported that in three stations electricity production had been halted (Hurriyet Daily News, January 8), energy officials have denied these claims, saying that production was continuing normally (Cihan Haber Ajansi, January 8).

    Moreover, if the supply shortages continue, the ministry plans to cut gas delivery to industrial facilities producing their own electricity from natural gas that is sold at subsidized prices. Since falling industrial production due to the global economic crisis has already reduced Turkey’s energy consumption, such reductions would probably not create major power supply problems. Nonetheless, experts note that using alternative sources such as fuel oil to produce electricity is likely to increase production costs by up to 20 percent (www.ntvmsnbc.com.tr, January 7).

    Furthermore, like other countries, Turkey has started tapping strategic reserves and using LNG. Guler noted that six ships were scheduled to bring additional LNG in January; and, if need arose, Turkey would seek additional deliveries. According to official sources, if deliveries arrive as scheduled, Turkey will be unlikely to experience major shortages. At the same time, Turkey is working to expand the daily supply capacity of its underground reserve depots.

    A source from the Iranian Embassy in Ankara said that Iran was ready to increase its gas exports to Turkey to offset the shortfall, as long as Iran’s domestic consumption did not prevent it (Today’s Zaman, January 7). Minister Guler said, however, that additional supplies from Blue Stream would be enough to maintain the supply balance and that Turkey would not take up the Iranian offer. Last winter, when Iran cut exports to Turkey due to its own domestic needs, Gazprom helped avoid shortages by increasing its supplies to Turkey. Given this experience, Turkey’s reluctance to rely on the Iranian option is understandable.

    Overall, the goal of these measures is to reduce the impact of the crisis on households. Since major metropolitan areas rely on natural gas for heating, the public has become increasingly worried about these developments. In response to this concern, the IGDAS gas distribution company in Istanbul issued a statement maintaining that the gas and LNG depots supplying the city had sufficient reserves and that there were no grounds for anxiety about shortages in Istanbul (www.nethaber.com, January 6). The precautions in place have already reduced Turkey’s daily consumption from 130 MCM to 107 MCM (www.cnnturk.com, January 7).

    Despite the optimistic statements from official sources, energy expert Necdet Pamir maintains that Turkey’s reserve capacity is too limited, which makes it vulnerable to such supply shocks. Moreover, Pamir notes that switching to secondary sources for electricity production by buying LNG on spot markets incurs additional costs (www.cnnturk.com, January 7). Some experts claim, however, that under the contract between Turkey and Russia, Gazprom will have to compensate Turkey for its losses (Cihan Haber Ajansi, January 6).

    Other experts refer to the positive implications of the crisis for Turkey. Bahadir Kaleagasi, the Turkish Industry and Business Association Representative to the EU, notes that the row once again demonstrates the vulnerability of Europe’s energy supplies. The EU will come under pressure to diversify transportation routes, which will strengthen Turkey’s position in negotiations over the Nabucco project for supplying Europe with gas by means of pipelines going through Turkey (ANKA, January 7).

    https://jamestown.org/program/we-will-not-let-our-people-go-cold-says-turkish-energy-minister/

  • Laying Claim to Asia

    Laying Claim to Asia

    by Dmitry Shlapentokh
    22 December 2008

    On the Dnieper and in Crimea, the notion is taking root that Eurasia’s true heart was never in Russia after all.

    For centuries, nationalistic Ukrainian intellectuals have seen Ukraine as a part of Europe and hostile to Asians. And it was Russians who were dubbed Asiatics, descendants of the Mongols, who had nothing to do with civilized European Ukraine. The popularity among some Russian intellectuals of “Eurasianism,” with its emphasis and praise of Russia’s Asiatic-Mongol roots, handed post-Soviet Ukrainian intellectuals an additional reason for locating Russia in Asia, with Asiatics as the Russians’ major allies.

    Nationalist-minded Ukrainian historians and politicians also began to witness a countermovement as, by the end of the Putin presidency, rising Russian nationalism increasingly disowned the notion, put forth by scores of Eurasianists from Lev Gumilev to Aleksandr Dugin, of the Mongols as engaged in a healthy “symbiosis” with Russians. In recent years Ukrainians also noted that in Crimea, which most Russians still regard as part of Russia, it was ethnic Tatars who were most loyal to Ukraine. This led to a dramatic reinterpretation of history. In the new version of Ukrainian idiosyncratic “Eurasianism,” Tatars, and indeed other Muslim peoples as well, became Ukraine’s “historical” friends who had fought alongside freedom-loving Ukrainians against their common primordial enemy, the Russian empire. The image of Tatars was recast in the Ukrainian mind from other perspectives as well. Tatar Asianness, essentially tainted by despotism and brutality, was displaced as a cultural and political phenomenon and became instead an integral part of civilized Europe.

    Detail of a painting depicting the Battle of Konotop. Source:
    Mузейний простір України.

    EURO-EURASIANISM

    The changing fortunes of the Crimean Tatars became a major driver of the growth of Ukrainian “Eurasianism.” Deported by Stalin during World War II and replaced by ethnic Russians and Russified Ukrainians, the Crimean Tatars were “rehabilitated” by Khrushchev and started to return to their ancestral lands by the late Soviet and, of course, post-Soviet era. Similar to the Chechens, the Crimean Tatars have never forgotten their misfortune and blame Russians – not just the regime but ethnic Russians – for this. This resentment is reinforced by the feeling that it was the Russians who took their property and land.

    For their part, the Russian-speakers who make up the large majority of the Crimean population regarded Crimea, with Sevastopol – still the home port for Russia’s Black Sea fleet – as an essentially Russian place. They demanded either broad autonomy or outright unification with Russia. Kyiv, alarmed that the Russian-speaking Crimeans might come to play a role not unlike that of the Sudeten Germans in interwar Czechoslovakia, began to appreciate the Crimean Tatars, who although much smaller in numbers had emerged as a natural counterbalance to the Russian speakers of the peninsula and, by the logic of events, even to Russified eastern Ukrainians, who are seen by westerners as less committed to independence. These elements – their gravitating, at least by political logic, toward western Ukrainian nationalists and their coming to appear more pro-European than eastern Ukrainians – lend the Eurasianism of the Ukrainian Tatars a specific flavor quite different from the Russian variety. Russian Eurasianism, while emphasizing peaceful coexistence and nurturing a “symbiosis” between Russians and Asians, sees in this the foundation of a grand empire. Asiatic elements in Russian culture are also seen as a way to juxtapose Russia-Eurasia against, if not the entire West, at least America, and what are regarded as her East European stooges. Nothing of this sort can be found in Ukrainian Eurasianism. It is true that both Ukrainians and Crimean Tatar nationalists boast of their respective peoples’ military prowess in dealing with enemies, Russia first of all. Yet this history of military valor serves to underscore the defense of liberty and has no imperialist implications.

    There are other differences. If for Russian Eurasianists the attachment to “Tatars” (not merely in the Crimea but the historical Muslim groups going back to the Mongol conquest) served to bind Russia closer to Asia, for the Ukrainians the same bond came to represent a European multiculturalism, the very fact that Europe, European civilization, includes not just white Christians but people of a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

    Representatives of both branches of Eurasianism have actively appealed to historical analogies to substantiate their essentially dissimilar claims.

    OUR FRIENDS, THE TATARS

    This new vision of Ukrainians’ relationship with the Tatars, as well as with other Asian peoples, took form soon after the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of Ukraine as an independent state – visibly, in the changing displays at the Kyiv State Historical Museum, the goal of which was to propagandize the new official version of the Ukrainian past. Drastic rearrangement of the Soviet-era expositions led to the disappearance of the Mongol invasion of the Kyivan state, the pivotal event in that state’s history and that of many peoples of Eurasia. The future Russian state’s struggle with the Mongols, and, later, what most historians regarded as the liberation from the Mongol yoke, had been marginalized. The centuries-long conflicts of Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians with the Crimean Tatar vassals of the Ottoman Empire had also vanished. And at the end of the exposition hall dedicated to the “Orange Revolution” of 2004, regarded by Ukraine’s present-day rulers as the true watershed in recent Ukrainian history, you could read that Ukraine was a place of various minorities. Russians were not mentioned. At the same time, there was now a place for Jews and Tatars.

    The Tatars’ old negative image in Ukraine is showing signs of reversing among historians and in the public mind as well, as opinions catch on that in some ways resemble those of such Russian Eurasianists as the scholar Lev Gumilev (1912-1992), who saw the dramatic events of the 13th century not so much as an overwhelming onslaught – the traditional view of pre-revolutionary and Soviet historiography – but rather as a “raid” that inflicted rather limited damage. This is also the view of some Ukrainian historians who downplay the devastation and argue that soon after the Mongol conquest of Kyiv, the capital of Kyivan Rus, foreign travelers found a vibrant trading community in the city, a sign of the limited extent of the destruction. Moreover, recent archeological work is cited as support for a hypothesis that the conquering impulses of the new rulers were subsiding and their energies increasingly channeled into city-building, trade, crafts, and similar exploits. These views of the Golden Horde fit well into the design of some leading intellectuals in Russia’s Tatarstan Republic. While regarding modern Tatars as the descendants of the Golden Horde, or at least not denying the Golden Horde as contributing to the formation of Tatar nationhood, one of these intellectuals, R.S. Khakimov, focuses not on the Golden Horde’s military prowess and associated brutality but on what he sees as the positive implications of Mongol statehood. In his view, its rulers were preoccupied not with bloodshed or conquest but with the development of crafts, trade, and culture.

    This stress on the cultural achievements and broad religious tolerance of Tatars and Muslims in general not only enrolls them within European civilization but can be taken so far as seeing in them forerunners of true European values in an era when most other Europeans were behaving in a most “unEuropean” and “Asiatic” way. And while Tatar military prowess may now be downplayed when Ukrainian pundits comment on the Muslim conquests, it can also be re-emphasized when the Tatars are seen as the Ukrainians’ ally in fighting what is now regarded as Ukrainians’ historical enemies: the Russians.

    PAST AND PRESENT

    As friction between Ukraine and Russia has risen, history has become increasingly involved in providing justification for the present. This year, Ukrainian press accounts, bolstered by an article in the nationalist Russian newspaper Zavtra, laid claim to celebrate the Battle of Konotop as a great feat of Ukrainian military power.

    In that encounter in 1659, a force of Ukrainians and their Crimean Tatar and Polish allies defeated with much slaughter a Russian army at Konotop in the north of today’s Ukraine. The triumph of Ukrainian leader Ivan Vyhovsky, successor to Bogdan Khmelnitsky, was not to last long; Vyhovsky soon faced rebellion in his own ranks and fled to Poland.

    The Battle of Konotop is one of the manifestations of the complexity of Russia’s 17th-century war with Ukraine, one event in the bloody years of strife among Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians that ended in major territorial gains for Moscow. The clash has been transformed by present-day Ukrainian historians into an epic battle in which the foe numbered almost 100,000.

    In these scholars’ thinking the victory at Konotop identifies Russia as the major enemy of the Ukrainians. More, it shows clearly that not only was the Ukrainian state already in existence in the 17th century but that it was a strong power, a worthy rival of Russia. According to one tale, upon receiving news of the defeat, the Russian czar trembled. The implication is that Russia was trembling not in fear of a potential Polish march on Moscow – the memory of the Time of Troubles when Polish troops occupied Moscow still fresh – but in fear of victorious Ukraine.

    This interpretation, of course, leaves unexplained how this mighty rival of weak Russia was in the end incorporated into the Russian state. At any rate, what most concerns us is the role of the Tatars in these events. Here, the Tatars have emerged as a valiant ally who helped the Ukrainians defeat the common enemy. In an article published in June on a site for Russian Muslims, Islam.ru, pagan Russians are juxtaposed against monotheist Muslim Tatars or Ottoman Turks; it was no accident, according to this interpretation of events, that the victors presented some of the most important Russian prisoners taken at Konotop to the Ottoman sultan. It is a view of history in which Ukraine has not been the historical enemy of Asians, at least those who live in Europe, but actually their good friend. The same could be said for Ukraine’s historical relations with the Poles. The story is quite different for Russia. From a brotherly Orthodox country, it has been transformed into the primordial enemy of Ukrainians.

    There is also a direct link between past and present. In the past, Ukrainians, Poles, and Muslims of various origin – civilized and freedom-loving people all – defended their liberties against the Russian imperial monster, the same as they do now, for Russia’s nature has not changed through time. In the eyes of some Ukrainian politicians, Russia continues to occupy part of historic Ukrainian land and subjugates the Chechens. Russia was and continues to be an imperial predator.

    The unfolding of dramatic geopolitical changes – Russia’s increasing alienation not just from the West but from Eastern Europe, as well as from a good segment of her own Muslims, and the corresponding rapprochement between Ukrainians and the historic Muslim community in the Crimea – has driven this startling reversal. By dint of this growing Ukrainian “Eurasianism” Russia is cast into an “Asia” that is not so much a place as a cultural and political sign for despotism and brutality. At the same time the Tatars are pulled into Europe, a Europe not in the geographic sense but a symbol of the “civilized” West.

     

    Dmitry Shlapentokh is an associate professor of history at Indiana University in South Bend.

  • Crimean Tatars Rally For Return Of Ancestral Land

    Crimean Tatars Rally For Return Of Ancestral Land

    SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine — Some 2,000 repatriated Crimean Tatars gathered in front of the Crimean Supreme Council in the Ukrainian city of Simferopol to demand the return of land they were forced to leave several decades ago.

    Daniyal Ametov, a leader of the protest, told RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service that the demonstration is against Crimean authorities for “their responsibility in creating the land problems for the Crimean Tatars.”

    The protesters ended the rally after negotiations with local legislators, but promised to gather again on December 15 if their demands are not met.

    Crimean Tatars are considered an indigenous nation of the Crimean Peninsula. Tens of thousands were deported by Soviet authorities to Central Asia in the 1940s.

    Deportees and their families began returning to Crimea in the 1990s, demanding that their lands and properties be returned to them. 

  • Uzbek History Textbook Denounces Soviet Totalitarianism But Downplays Popular Movements in Uzbekistan

    Uzbek History Textbook Denounces Soviet Totalitarianism But Downplays Popular Movements in Uzbekistan

    Paul Goble

    Kuressaare, November 21 – A history textbook prepared for tenth graders in Uzbekistan on the Soviet period denounces communist totalitarianism in sweeping terms, but it downplays popular movements that have struggled for democracy in that Central Asian country in recent years and ignores many events that the current Tashkent regime finds inconvenient.
    Because most people “conceive the history of their country as [they] are told about it in school,” Mariya Yanovskaya says in an article posted on the Ferghana.ru portal, history as presented in school texts is one of the most sensitive political issues in many countries, including all the post-Soviet states (www.ferghana.ru/article.php?id=5959).
    Recently, there have been intense discussions over new texts in the Russian Federation which portray Stalin’s terror as an appropriate modernization technique and school books in Ukraine that argue the 1932-33 famine was a genocide that Moscow launched against the Ukrainian people.
    Because the media inside Uzbekistan is more tightly controlled than in either of those countries, this history textbook is unlikely to provoke similar debates. But that makes Yanovskaya’s review especially important because it provides important insights into what the next generation of Uzbeks is likely to think about their past and hence their future.
    The book opens with the following declaration: “Dear Students! The textbook which you are holding in your hands covers the most complex and contradictory period of the history of the Fatherland, a period of heavy losses, tragic events and also of heroic struggle for freedom and independence, a period of victories and defeats and of self-sacrificing labor of our people.”
    Then, Yanovskaya says, the book stresses that the Uzbeks not only resisted but hated Soviet power from the beginning. It denounces the Bolshevik destruction of the Kokand autonomy, pointing out that the Bolsheviks and their Red Army allies killed more than 100,000 people in that city alone.
    “The basic part of the indigenous population did not recognize the Bolsheviks or the Soviet system,” the text says, in large measure because that system pursued “a colonialist policy,” sought to destroy religion, and acted in other ways to denigrate the dignity of the people of Uzbekistan.
    The Uzbeks and the other peoples of Central Asia struggled for many years in a movement that the Soviets dismissively call “the basmachi movement” but which the people there referred as “the freeman’s movement,” the textbook continues in increasingly emotional terms.
    And the book points out that “the totalitarian regime destroyed not only thousands of fighters who sacrificed themselves for the interests of the people but also tens of thousands of innocent victims. Soviet power throughout the ensuing years continued to conduct a repressive policy which brought the population much grief and suffering.”
    In other passages, the new textbook talked about Stalinist crimes “against whole peoples” during and after World War II, a reference to the deportation of nationalities which it calls “unforgivable criminal acts.” The book talks about the brutal transformation of Uzbek society and the Uzbek economy by Moscow and its agents.
    Yanovskaya says that she “would like to read such lines” in a textbook prepared by Moscow historians for schools in the Russian Federation, but her comments throughout the review make it clear that she doesn’t have that chance now and does not expect to have it anytime soon.
    But as the Uzbek textbook deals with more recent events, she says, it falls far short of what she would like to see in three respects. First, it utterly fails to explain how the Soviet Union in fact brought some real benefits to the people there, benefits that led them to vote overwhelmingly for the preservation of the USSR.
    “About that referendum,” she writes, “there is not a word in the textbook,” although “like a red thread” throughout this period it specifies that “the dream of independence never left the minds and hearts of advanced people. … In the heart of the people never were extinguished a striving for independence and dreams about the freedom of the Fatherland.”
    And it suggests in her words “that when Islam Abduganiyevich Karimov came to power, the dreams were realized. The country is now happy, independent and proceeding in giant steps toward a bright future, which is being build under the leadership … [and Yanovskaya says she almost wrote “ ‘the communist party.’”
    Second, the textbook specifically criticizes those national movements which sought democracy rather than the solidification of the Karimov regime. “One of the main errors of the ‘Birlik’ movement,” the textbook insists, “consisted in its lack of understanding of the true interests of our people.”
    Its activists “involved themselves with the organization of meetings and demonstrations thus putting psychological pressure on local leaders and searching for errors and shortcomings in the activity of the government and local organs of power. Therefore, the movement could not capture the support of the broad strata of the population.”
    And as for the Erk Party, the textbook simply says that it “did not have a precise program for the construction of a new society,” the kind of language and attitude about opponents that was such a prominent feature of Soviet textbooks and that continues to inform, albeit with new targets, the textbooks of Uzbekistan and other post-Soviet states.
    And third, and again like Soviet textbooks, the Uzbek history text simply ignores many inconvenient events or describes them in such generalized terms that only those who already know something about the history of the republic could possibly understand as references to these events.
    Thus, there is not a single word about the destructive earthquake in Tashkent in April 1966, nor is there any real information about the conflicts with the Meskhetian Turks or with the Kyrgyz in the late 1980s or about “the modernizing, developing and innovative role” of Moscow and the Soviet system in the development of Uzbekistan.
    In short, she suggests, the children of Uzbekistan are getting a Soviet-style version of reality, albeit one in which the things Moscow took pride in are denounced and the things Moscow denounced are praised, a pattern that does no more to promote independent thought than did the one in the Soviet textbooks. But that of course is almost certainly the point.

    http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2008/11/window-on-eurasia-uzbek-history.html

  • Mustafa Jemilev Observes His 65th Birthday

    Mustafa Jemilev Observes His 65th Birthday

    The recognized leader of Crimean Tatars, Mustafa Jemilev observed his 65th
    birthday     yesterday.

    Born in Crimea on 13 November 1943, he was only six months old when his
    family and the rest of the Crimean Tatar population were deported by Soviet
    authorities in May 1944. His family lived in a special settlement camp in
    Uzbekistan until 1956, when tight restrictions were relaxed. At the age of
    18, he and several of his activist friends established the Union of Young
    Crimean Tatars. His first arrest came in 1966, when he was sentenced for
    refusing to serve in the Soviet Army.

    A well-known Soviet dissident, He spent almost one fourth of his life in
    Soviet prisons and labor camps. He is also remembered for staging the
    longest hunger strike in the history of human rights movement. The hunger
    strike    , which lasted for 303 days (but he survived due to forced feeding),
    drew world’s attention to the predicament of Crimean Tatars.

    In 1986, as Jemilev was completing his sixth prison term in a hard-labor
    camp, he was charged and tried for anti-Soviet activities once again. During
    the summit held by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, however, the
    American President asked for the release of five political prisoners as part
    of the negotiations. Jemilev was one of those prisoners and he was released
    with the condition that he refrain from any political activity.

    In May 1989, he was elected to head the Crimean Tatar National Movement.
    That year he returned to Crimea with his family, a move that would be
    followed by the eventual return of 250,000 Tatars to their homeland. He is
    currently serving as a member of the Ukrainian Parliament (Kyiv) and as
    Chairman of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis (Simferopol) .

    Jemilev received the Nansen Medal, awarded by the United Nations High
    Commissioner for Refugees     for his persistent efforts and commitment to
    defend the rights of Crimean Tatars to repatriate. The Crimean Tatar
    leadership has always sought to solve conflicts by non-violent means. In an
    interview Jemilev gave shortly after receiving the Nansen Medal in October
    1998, he stated that “when violent means are used innocent people die, and
    no just cause can justify the taking of innocent lives.”

    We extend our birthday greetings to Mustafa Jemilev and our best wishes for
    a long, healthy and successful life.

    Inci Bowman, Ph.D.
    International Committee for Crimea
    Washington, DC

  • The International Economic Crisis and Stratfor’s Methodology

    The International Economic Crisis and Stratfor’s Methodology

    The International Economic Crisis and
    Stratfor’s Methodology
    By George Friedman
    Stratfor’s focus is on geopolitics. That means that it focuses on the behavior of human societies organized into complex, geographically defined systems. In our time, that means that we study nation-states. In order to understand the behavior of nation-states, it is necessary to focus on three major dimensions: economics, war and politics. The nation has to be studied in terms of producing wealth, defending (and stealing) wealth, and the internal and external relations by which humans shape their lives.

    Economics, war and politics are not separate spheres. They are a single entity together constituting the reality of the nation-state. There are those who argue that economic life should be left alone, not interfered with by political or military power. We won’t engage in that argument. What we know, empirically, is that political and military power constantly impinge on economic life, and vice versa. It is impossible to imagine war without taking into account politics and economics. It is impossible to think of domestic or foreign policy without considering economic and military issues. By the same token, it is also impossible to think about economics without thinking about military and political matters. If it can be made otherwise, then someone will do so and then we will change our opinion. Until then, we cannot think of the free market as a meaningful independent reality. It is always shaped by other factors. Perhaps it should be otherwise. It isn’t.

    An integrated approach to social reality requires that these distinctions, so important in the organization of a university or a newspaper, be overcome. They were created in order to organize human activities into manageable pieces. Our argument is that in so doing, reality is only apparently made more manageable, and in fact is falsified. The standard approach to these issues creates distinctions that don’t exist and complexities that conceal rather than reveal the nature of the problem at hand. A general who tries to wage war without consideration of political ends and economic means is going to fail. An economist who tries to understand and predict the behavior of the economy without a comprehensive understanding of the political and military realities which shape the economy will not do particularly well.

    Geopolitics is in one sense also an abstraction, but it has the virtue of not creating artificial distinctions. The price that the geopolitician pays for a comprehensive view of reality is a forced simplification: there is just too much happening to state it comprehensively. Geopolitics is the search for the center of gravity of reality, those overwhelming forces that drive the system in the direction it is going to take. These forces are never solely political, military or economic in nature. Usually, they are in plain sight and are overlooked because, being simple, they appear insufficient. Indeed, they may be insufficient, but others can add the details. Our goal is to lay bare the essentials and identify the general direction in which things are moving.

    Take, for example, our recent analysis of the Russo-Georgian war. It derived from this central reality: Russia by the 19th century had achieved the borders essentially held by the Soviet Union. In 1992 it had collapsed to a position in which it had not been since perhaps the 17th century. That condition was untenable. Either Russia would implode or it would reassert itself fairly quickly. By early 2000s, it was our view that it would choose to assert itself. When the United States tried to make an ally of Ukraine, which Russia sees as crucial for its economic, military and political well-being, we became certain that Russia would push back. As the Americans got bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, a window of opportunity opened up and the Russians began the process of reassertion.

    There are, obviously, endless things left out of this analysis. People of every discipline could rip it apart as being insufficiently sophisticated. In one sense they would be right. By avoiding the complexity of sophistication, we could see the fundamental shape of things — which was that the Russian collapse, if halted, would have to reverse itself for economic, military and political reasons. There were obviously many details we could not predict and some we didn’t know. But we captured the essential geopolitical condition of Russia in order to understand what it had to do. We left it to others to do the important work of mapping the complexity. Our task was to capture the simplicity.

    In our analysis of the current financial crisis in the United States — and the world as a whole — we have sought the center of gravity of the problem. We approached that simply by asking one question: is what is going on simply another inflection point in the business cycles that have occurred since World War II, or does it represent a systemic failure such as that which happened during the Great Depression? This struck us as the urgent issue.

    We noted that in the Great Depression, the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by nearly 50 percent over three years. It was an unprecedented calamity. Bearing this in mind, we compared the current situation to other events since World War II to see if there was a framework for measuring it. We found that framework in the Savings and Loan crisis of 1989, when an entire sector of the U.S. financial system collapsed and the federal government intervened — essentially guaranteeing or purchasing commercial real estate, whose price decline had triggered the crisis. We noted that the total amount allocated by the federal government in that crisis was about 6.5 percent of the GDP (and the amount actually spent, before recouping of costs via sales, was less than 3 percent). We noted also that in the current crisis another sector of the financial system — the investment banks — were devastated, and that the federal government intervened, this time at about 5 percent of GDP. Meanwhile, the equity markets had not declined as much as they did in 2000-2001, and as of the second quarter of this year the economy was still growing by more than 2 percent. From this we concluded that the U.S. economy was moving into a recession but that the recession would not break the framework of the postwar economy, although clearly the degree of government intervention will reshape the financial markets.

    From the point of view of many Russian experts in 2001, our analysis of the future of Russia was seen as simplistic and naïve. From the standpoint of professional economists and traders in the markets, the same is being said of our current analysis. But just as our critics among Russian experts failed to see the main thrust of Russian history, many economists fail to see the main thrust of what is now happening. The United States is a $14 trillion economy with a potential problem amounting to $1-2 trillion (and probably far less than that). If the government intervenes, it will create inequities and imbalances in the system. But between the size of the economy and the government printing press, the problem will be managed — particularly because there are underlying assets — houses — that can be monetized in the long run. The gridlock in the financial system will undoubtedly create a recession, but there hasn’t been one for seven years and it’s high time.

    One can like or dislike the outcome, and we certainly agree that this will cause long-term dislocations and imbalances. But we also know that America as a nation-state has the resources to manage its way through this crisis if the government intervenes. And that intervention is as hard-wired into the American political-economic-military system as the law of supply and demand.

    We do not speak the language of economics. There are numerous economists who can do that. And we certainly don’t speak the language of the financial markets. We speak our own language, designed to reveal the elegant essence of the problem rather than its enormous complexity. Certainly, if our analysis is wrong because we failed to identify a crucial problem, then we haven’t identified the center of gravity properly. And we will be wrong, which is far worse. But as in February 2000, when we published a piece called “Recession Time?” which forecast the market collapse that happened a few weeks later and the recession that followed it, we will be criticized for not understanding some essential point — in 2000 it was that we had no understanding of the impact of increased productivity on the business cycle. They were right. We didn’t understand it and we were right not to. The complexities of productivity did not trump the obvious, which was that the NASDAQ had reached unsupportable levels and there had been no recession in nine years and that was way too long.

    So, too, we are criticized for our failure to understand the spread between T-Bills and LIBOR or myriad other things. But we do understand this: The political reality is that the size of the American economy, deployed by the state, trumps the financial problems created by the fall of the housing markets. It will be ugly and painful for some and there will be a recession, but things are always ugly and painful when there is a recession.

    This series is about the economic problem, therefore, but is not written about the economy and certainly not by economists. Their work is valuable but it differs from ours. Rather this is about geopolitics and therefore about the different regions and nation-states of the world. It is a geopolitical analysis subsuming economics, politics and military affairs in a single system. And it is designed to extract the obvious rather than drill into the complexity.

    We hope this series has some value to our readers in clarifying the current moment. That is its intention: to highlight the main tendency, not to detail the complexity. Understanding the trees has value, but seeing the forest clearly has value as well.

    John F. Mauldin
    johnmauldin@investorsinsight.com