Europe And The North Atlantic Rift In Geopolitics

Western Atlantic Oceanic vs Russian Eurasian land-based

The standoff over the Russian invasion of Ukraine since February 2022 brought to the fore contesting visions of a Western Atlantic and oceanic expansionism against the land-based Eurasianism of Russia. Charles Clover, in his book Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia라이브 바카라 New Nationalism, argues that the Cold War “was rather a permanent conflict between two geographic realities—the world라이브 바카라 greatest land power of ‘Eurasia’ and its natural opponent of ‘Atlantic’ sea power, represented first by Britain and then by the United States”. Atlantic oceanic expansionism assumed the form of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) whose eastwards advance understandably irked Russia. Lord Hastings Ismay, the first Secretary General of NATO, captured the purpose of the alliance when he famously said it was about keeping the Americans in Europe, the Russians out, and the Germans down. Under Donald Trump, the Americans have exited to be with the Russians, leaving the incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to request the extension of the meagre nuclear umbrella of the British (under 250 warheads) and the French (under 300 warheads), which are very small in terms of the larger number of 1,419 American deployed warheads they are meant to complement, against the 1,549 Russian ones, meant to be deterred.

The Eurasian land-based expansionism of Russia is inspired by the controversial ideas of Russian political theorist Alexander Dugin and historian Lev Gumilev. Gumilev, who died in 1992, was interned for 14 years of his life in Siberian prison camps, which gave him an insight into the vigour of the tribes that inhabited the steppes of inner Eurasia such as the Scythians, the Xiongnu, the Huns, Turks, Khitai, Tanguts and Mongols. Gumilev captured the energy of such groups in a Russian term, passionarnost, which undergirds the Russian nationalism of Vladimir Putin that expands westwards to absorb Ukraine. The Russians have been on the ascendant—initially in 2014 when they had a walkover in Crimea—and now three years after the invasion of Ukraine as they reclaim larger parts of regions such as Kursk. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy received a rude dressing-down at the hands of President Trump and Vice President Vance as they chided him for not being thankful enough for US support. Zelenskyy received a warmer response from European leaders when he flew to London for the ‘Securing Our Future Summit’ in early March, where a dramatic call to rearm the EU was made by Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission.

Back to 2016

The signs of the rupture of the North Atlantic alliance between the US and Western Europe were in evidence since 2016 with news of Russian social media meddling in the Brexit referendum and the Trump presidential victory. Britain was always the English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon conduit of American influence on Europe and the Russians would have been delighted to see Britain exiting the EU. Brexit Britain undermined its own strategic role in the larger architecture of the alliance that stretched across the Atlantic to connect the US and Europe. Brexit Britain라이브 바카라 anti-immigrant sentiment chimed well with the advent of President Trump in the White House in his first administration. With Trump being voted out of power in November 2020, and the coming in of the Joe Biden administration, Brexit did not seem such a great idea. Trump라이브 바카라 return to the White House seemed to briefly cheer Brexiteers up again, with noticeably dull British politicians such as Liz Truss and Suella Braverman going ecstatic.

In both Britain and the US, the traditionally staid conservative and republican parties have broken the crash-barriers on the Right that have separated the fast-lane highway to political power from the Far-right political terrain that has always verged on, but until this point, remained outside that highway to power. This differs from France and Germany, where in the elections over the past few months, the centre has somehow still held the ground against a continuously resurgent Far-right. This is, in the words of scholar and journalist Tariq Ali, an ‘extreme centre’ where the ground keeps being pulled underfoot, further towards the Right, even as centrist parties such as the German Christian Democrats and Emmanuel Macron라이브 바카라 En Marche party, keep hugging that very shifting centre ground.

Navigating the Uncharted Waters of the 21st Century

These are unprecedented times that we are living through as we chart the un-navigated waters of the 21st century. The only historical landmarks available are the crises of the 1930s between the two world wars. The resemblances between now and the 1930s become uncannily more frightening as Far-right figures such as Elon Musk and Steve Bannon engage in gestures that look so much like the Sieg Heil or the ‘Hail Victory’ Nazi salute. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, we have been witnessing the demise of the Western-backed international rules-based order that was enforced more in the hypocritical excusing of Western excesses and its zealous enforcement over non-Western rivals. The Ukraine crisis provided the perfect opportunity for the West to double down on its insistence on the upholding of this democratic and rules-based order. In the face of Israel라이브 바카라 atrocities in Gaza in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, there has been a Western shredding of that very rules-based order for the sake of Israel.

The discerning and the reasoning amongst us must collectively think hard to wrap our heads around the intractability of our times. In a new world order—whoever the next hegemon is—with China being touted the most likely candidate as it abuts the trade routes of the Asia-Pacific, a more genuine democracy would need to be ushered in that is far more substantial than the thinly attenuated thing that Western liberal-democracy always was. Foolhardy proponents of Western liberal-democracy kept arguing that Islam and its immigrants were the clear and present civilisational danger to its continued existence. It is the illiberalism of the West라이브 바카라 Far-right, for instance Hungary라이브 바카라 Viktor Orbán and his opposition to Muslim immigrants, that is the actual wrecking ball of the house of Western liberal-democracy.

Western blockheadedness on immigration results in attempts to make nation-states somehow impervious to waves of migration. Trump and other Far-right leaders behave in the futile manner of King Canute who, as legend has it, sat on the shore of his realm to command the waves to go back. Migration is a force that has creatively shaped history and with the onset of an irreversible climate crisis—which Far-right thinking cannot even begin to fathom—waves of climate migrants directed towards the temperate regions will be irrepressible and on a scale likely to be Biblical.

The global transition that we may witness over the next decade will require some of the boldest and most imaginative thinking that humankind has ever been able to conjure up from the relatively shallow depths of its experience and existence of a mere 200,000 years of the 4.6 billion years that planet Earth has been around. This may well be a time to think on a planetary scale and not the narrow territorial scale of nationalism that every single major and emerging power from the US and Russia to China and India unthinkingly does. That is precisely the futility of nationalism which seeks to continuously replenish the nation-state that has been the ordering principle of global politics for the past two centuries. Can the nation-state, the political receptacle that constantly brims over with the heady concoction of nationalism, ever solve the crisis of climate change, artificial intelligence, nuclear apocalypse, global trade imbalances, or financial flows that create chasmic inequalities within nation-states and across the world?

The nation-state is Europe라이브 바카라 most widely exported modular form of political organisation around the world. Europe itself has been plunged into the crisis of confronting the Russian behemoth to its east whose winters have always been its historical scourge, whether in the form of Napoleon라이브 바카라 defeat in 1812 or today, as it seeks to wean itself away from cheap Russian energy supplies that have heated its homes. The 21st century is turning on two hinges, where different forms of the European nation-state and its sovereign integrity are involved. One is on Europe라이브 바카라 doorstep and exists precariously in the form of Ukraine and the other is a European settler outpost a little farther out in the form of Israel. Europe라이브 바카라 response notably contrasts in the case of its support for Ukraine against Russia and the lack of such support for Gaza/Palestine, which could never become a nation-state. Europe has fallen between these two stools and into a mid-Atlantic rift.

(Views expressed are personal)

Amir Ali teaches at the Centre For Political Studies, JNU, New Delhi

This article is a part of 바카라's April 1, 2025 issue 'World At Reset', which explores the ongoing changes in the global geopolitical order. It appeared in print as 'E for Eclipse'.