Author: Tiberio Graziani – 15/01/2024
Theory of the Arc of Crisis: Geopolitics and Geostrategy
Tiberio Graziani – Vision & Global Trends (“Società Italiana di Geopolitica” Project)
Abstract – The article proposes an attempt to apply the crisis arc model to the two ongoing conflicts (Russia – Ukraine and Israel – Gaza) within the broader context of the geopolitical transition from the so-called unipolar system to what is defined as multipolar or polycentric. The model seems to fit very well in the case of the clash between Moscow and Kiev. The situation appears more complex in the case of Israel – Gaza. However, the expansion of the conflict in the Red Sea seems to support the hypothesis of the model’s applicability. Some brief considerations on the fragility of the European Union are succinctly expressed. Keywords: Crisis arcs, Clash of Civilizations, Ukraine, Gaza Strip
The two ongoing wars have different and distant origins in time.
The causes of the Russo-Ukrainian war, if we confine it to the regional context, could be traced back to the turmoil of Euromaidan in November ten years ago, the subsequent annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, the policies against Russophones in Donbass implemented by Kiev, and the self-proclaimed separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. In contrast, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, considering the regional scope alone, dates to the civil war of June 2007 when Hamas managed to secure total control of the Gaza Strip.
In reality, both the wars have much earlier origins, and, above all, they cannot be simply confined, regarding not only the causes but also the international effects, to their respective regional dimensions. This is due to the significant interests of other involved actors, which are both local and global.
The long post-Cold War era and the unipolar moment
The clash between the Russian Federation and Ukraine is a dramatic manifestation of the long post-Cold War period that followed the Soviet collapse; in some aspects, it marks its end. This post-war period is, moreover, bizarre and tragic, as it is punctuated by an impressive series of military events.
The beginning of this post-war period, as dramatic as its conclusion, can be traced back to the Balkan wars of the decade 1991-2001, culminating in the Allied Force operation led by NATO. Europeans, still under the effects of the brief but intense optimistic euphoria related to the spectacular fall of the Berlin Wall (November 1989), abruptly awoke. Instead of witnessing the “end of history” (Fukuyama F., The End of the History? in “The National Interest,” Summer 1989, The End of History and the Last Man, 1992), they witnessed, in their own continent and for an entire decade, a bloody civil war and the devastating actions of two operations by the Atlantic Alliance, the aforementioned Allied Force in 2001 and Deliberate Force in 1995.
Situated temporally at the end of the long post-Cold War era, the current conflict between Russians and Ukrainians is also a civil war among Slavic populations and a clash between post-Soviet republics. However, unlike the Balkan wars that erupted at the most critical moment of the geopolitical earthquake triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the USSR, and the Warsaw Pact, this war occurs after three decades of U.S. global hegemony. The conclusion drawn is that it represents another example of the incapacity of the Western, particularly U.S.-led, world to manage the so-called “unipolar moment.”
In the last thirty years, the “Indispensable Nation” – as proudly defined by President Clinton in his second inaugural address on January 20, 1997 (“America stands alone as the world’s indispensable nation“) – has repeatedly demonstrated such incapacity. This was abundantly proven in the context of the war on terrorism and the “export of democracy with bombs” during the Bush presidencies. The most recent example? The abandonment of Afghanistan after twenty years of war, leaving behind a devastated country and thousands of dead, wounded, and disabled.
The “Special Military Operation” – as defined by the Kremlin for the invasion of Ukrainian territory – which began on February 24, 2022, undoubtedly constitutes a stern Russian response to the gradual penetration of the West into the Eurasian continental mass, particularly the expansion of NATO towards the western borders of the Russian state. It is a predictable response, considering the brief Russo-Georgian conflict in August 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The “Special Military Operation” of 2022 highlights the irrelevance of the European Union in terms of security planning, its limited ability to define a distinct stabilizing geopolitical role in the post-bipolar world, and ultimately, its total and uncritical subordination to the United States – its primary ally – and NATO. This war tells us, once again, that the European Union does not know how to conceive itself as an autonomous and independent entity apart from the Western context dominated by the USA. Furthermore, by not understanding or not wanting to understand the current historical process, the EU fails to see what is happening at its borders or to contemplate what might occur in the immediate future. As a result, it consistently finds itself dramatically unprepared and, therefore, morally culpable for at least four disasters that persist or have occurred in its immediate neighborhood: a) the Balkan wars of 1991-2001; b) the destabilization of Libya in 2011; c) the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022; d) the Israeli-Palestinian war of 2023, not to mention the inability to find a solution to the serious migration problem over three decades since its emergence.
Regarding the countries of Eastern Europe, directly and indirectly involved, the Russo-Ukrainian conflict has shown, after three decades, that their ruling classes—whether political, economic, or intellectual—enclosed in their narrow and short-sighted neo-nationalism, have been unable to develop an autonomous regional project or put forward a proposal useful for their specific geopolitical and geostrategic role in the new context that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union, characterized by the concurrent process of globalization.
Caught between the seduction exerted by Brussels and the Atlantic pressures exerted by London and Washington on one side, and the reinterpretation and reconstruction of their national identities based on Russophobia on the other, these ruling classes have not seized the historical opportunity offered to them by the Soviet collapse: the option to emancipate themselves from both the East and the West, to present themselves as a cohesive, autonomous area, playing the role of a pivot and hinge between the member countries of the European Union and the Russian Federation.
The fear of the imposing neighbor, perceived as dangerous and aggressive (although Russia in the early 1990s could hardly be considered a “dangerous” country to its neighbors), along with NATO pressures, led these countries to first join the Atlantic Alliance and subsequently the European Union. The ruling classes of Eastern Europe, therefore, made the not-so-subtle choice to abandon one field—the Russo-centric one—to arrive at another, the Euro-Atlantic, thereby losing an opportunity difficult to recover: that of positioning themselves as a hub for exchange and compensation between East and West.
Eastern Europe, seen in a medium-term historical perspective, passed from the Soviet sphere of influence to the Atlantic sphere of influence, that is, from the cage of the Warsaw Pact to the cage of the Atlantic Pact, from one master to another. By choosing the destiny of becoming the extreme eastern periphery of the Western camp hegemonized by the USA, this portion of Europe has chosen to become a permanent arc of crisis between the West and the Russian Federation.
Clash of civilizations: cui prodest?
Of course, one could object to what has been written so far that the conflict between Moscow and Kiev is part of a possible Kremlin project aimed at re-establishing Moscow’s dominance over a territory that first belonged to the Tsarist Empire, then to the Soviet Union. Although there is certainly no shortage of neo-imperial echoes in Russian public discourse (moreover marginal, but worthy of attention for their mobilizing force), some of which are even tinged with a certain ambiguous civilizing spiritualism that interprets the current clash in the smoky eschatological terms of showdown between Good, Light, Tradition (Orthodox Russia) and Evil, Darkness, Decadence (the materialistic and atheist West); however, this possible project, this hypothetical strategy of the Kremlin does not stand up to a less emotional and romantic reading of the current events and to an analysis of their causes, as well as, in particular, to a more objective and realistic description of the current “values” expressed from Russia and the West.
Some clarifications by President Putin on Russia’s superiority in values compared to the West – which would seem at first sight to support the neo-imperial and civilizing echoes mentioned above – can be traced back to the dialectical clash with the main political exponents of the opposing camp (the “collective West”) , which equate the government of the Federation to an autocracy in the wake of the tsarist tradition, accuse the Kremlin of promoting obscurantist theories and of exercising a liberticidal and oppressive regime.
More important and full of political realism are Putin’s continuous statements, starting at least from his speech during the Munich Conference (2007), regarding the neutrality of the areas neighboring the Federation due to its security needs.
Returning to the Kremlin’s alleged desire to re-establish imperial Russia or a re-edition of what was the Soviet Union, it should be noted that the neo-imperial and civilizing narrative, paradoxically, becomes functional to the North American strategy aimed at maintaining global hegemony, as well as broadly and masterfully defined by the two canonical texts which are undoubtedly those of Samuel P. Huntington and Zbigniew Brzezinski, authors respectively of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) and The Great Chessboard. American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997).
In the event that the Kremlin succumbed to the temptation of the “neo-imperial” civilizing narrative and – on the basis of this – made strategic choices, it would irremediably fall into the trap of the clash of civilisations, exposing itself and the entire Eurasian mass to the proliferation of the of crises foreseen by Brzezinski and the danger of fragmentation of its national space and of the entire continent, along religious and ethnocultural fault lines: it would ultimately fulfill the dream, hegemonic and messianic at the same time, of the USA, that of being the indispensable nation, the only dispenser of civilization and values.
From the Arab-Israeli war to the Israel-Hamas conflict
The ongoing war between the Gaza Strip and the State of Israel began on 7 October this year with the al-Aqsa Flood operation, desired and organized by Hamas, to which Israel promptly reacted by implementing a disproportionate response with the operation Iron Swords, is an episode of the broader Arab-Israeli conflict that began way back in 1948. It constitutes the third phase of the direct clash between Israel and Gaza. That is, it follows operations Cast Lead and Protective Edge, launched by Israel against Gaza in 2008 and 2014 respectively.
It is useful to quickly retrace the historical path of this long conflict, of which the current war constitutes a significant part, due to some elements that distinguish it from previous episodes: the asymmetry of the contenders, the impressive quantity of victims, mostly children, the passivity of the so-called international community and the Arab countries, the hybridization between religious war and national liberation, the strategy of the Axis of resistance sponsored by Iran.
The three wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973 are conflicts between Arab coalitions and Israel. They are wars that express the will of some Arab nations to resolve the question of the Palestinian people, through a military confrontation, following the proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948 by the Zionist authorities in Palestine. In some ways these Arab-Israeli wars are daughters of the Thawra Filasṭīn (Palestine Revolution), the great revolt of the Palestinian Arabs, which lasted about three years, from 1936 to 1939, against the policy of Jewish settlements, permitted by the English following the Declaration Balfour of 1917. The settlement policy had seen the Jewish population go from 80,000 to around 360,000 units in the space of just 18 years, creating a significant demographic and socioeconomic upheaval to the detriment of the native populations. Palestine, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and its dissolution, was governed from 1920 to 1948 by the British (Mandatory Palestine) and extended over a territory of approximately 28,000 square kilometres. Following the partition of 1947, the birth of the Israeli state and the outcomes of the three Arab-Israeli wars (’48, ’67, ’73), the territory of what was Palestine under the British mandate is today divided between Israel (20,770 km2) and the state of Palestine (6,020 km2) which includes the West Bank (5,655 sq km) and the former key Gaza Strip (365 sq km).
After the disappointing results of the three Arab-Israeli wars mentioned above, the Arab coalitions for various reasons crumbled and the Palestinian population was, so to speak, left to its own fate. In fact, Egypt and Jordan reached an agreement with Israel and signed peace treaties with the Jewish state in 1979 and 1994 respectively. While Syria, Lebanon and Iraq did not recognize the State of Israel and continued to support the Palestinian cause.
From the Yom Kippur War (1973) onwards, Palestinian resistance expressed itself in asymmetrical ways and with sporadic actions, the most relevant episodes of which were the long and bloody uprisings that went down in history as intifadas: the first intifada or intifada of stones, which began December 8, 1987 will end approximately six years later, on July 13, 1993 and the second intifada or al-Aqsa intifada, which began in 2000 and ended in 2005.
It is precisely with the intifadas, in particular that of 1987, that the most radical Palestinian resistance will begin to oppose the Israeli state not only in the context of a national liberation struggle, but also in terms of a religious war. This is precisely the case of the Sunni-inspired Islamist organization Hamas which was born during the first intifada and managed, starting from the second half of 2007, to control the Gaza Strip. This is also the case with the Shiite-inspired Lebanese Islamist organization Hezbollah.
The shift from the traditional model of national liberation struggles, based on the principle of self-determination of peoples, which achieved clear success in the independence of Algeria and Tunisia and constituted a theoretical point of reference for the PLO, to the practice of the “holy war” is due to several factors. Among these, it is important to highlight the growing influences of Iran, especially after the conclusion of the war with Iraq, and of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestinian political organizations. If until 1973 the struggle to establish a Palestinian state involved state actors, i.e. the main states of the region (Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon), today it mainly involves radical, ideologically motivated organizations that participate in the Axis of Resistance. The objective of which is not only the liberation of Palestine, but the total fight against Israel and the political influences of the United States and Israel itself in the Near and Middle East region.
The strong disparity in forces and international support between Israel – which enjoys, let us remember, the support of the USA and the entire West – and the Gaza Strip which has regional support, as radical as it is fragmented, tragically re-proposes the biblical struggle between the giant Goliath and David.
The two ongoing wars and the uni-multipolar transition
The two wars currently underway constitute two hotbeds of crisis localized in specific regions of the Eurasian mass capable of rewriting global geopolitical structures.
Prolonged destabilization of such areas, together with potential flashpoints in other parts of the Eurasian landmass, such as in the Indo-Pacific or Central Asia, could contribute to a complex transition from the US-dominated unipolar order to a more balanced world, oriented towards containing competition between nations and promoting international cooperation.
The Russian-Ukrainian crisis represents a first factor that exacerbates the fracture between continental and central-eastern Europe and the Russian Federation. In fact, over time, it distances the possibilities of collaboration between Russia, rich in energy resources, and European countries, highly industrialized but dependent on energy. It also delays the need to develop a shared security architecture. The main beneficiaries of this potential lasting division between Europe and the Russian Federation appear to be the United States, from both a geopolitical and geostrategic point of view.
The hotbed of crisis, never subsided and recently rekindled in Palestine, constitutes a second factor which in the long term intervenes to complicate the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar order, also due to the current equidistance of global players such as Russia, China and India. Hypothetically, if on the one hand a pro-Gaza attitude of these three countries and the global South could accelerate the transition process, on the other hand it could increase the risk of a generalized conflict if not actually trigger it with unpredictable consequences. By indirectly involving regional powers from the so-called global South, such as Iran, Syria and in certain aspects also Erdogan’s Turkey (lately diverging from the indications of the US-led West), the outbreak of the current Israeli-Palestinian crisis would hinder the capacity of these countries to actively proceed towards the construction of a new multipolar or polycentric system. Furthermore, the continuation of this critical and strongly unbalanced situation in Israel’s favor would provide the United States with the opportunity to use Israel as an armed (and nuclear) stabilizing force in the Near and Middle East region. Israel would therefore stand as a necessary pillar – in synergy with Turkey or as an alternative to Ankara should the latter continue its eccentricity with respect to the Atlantic alliance – of North American policy in the eastern Mediterranean and in the Middle Eastern region. Again, among global players, the main geopolitical beneficiary appears to be the overseas power.
As highlighted, the application of the crisis arc model to understand current wars allows us to analyse them in the context of the transition from the unipolar to the generally multipolar order. It also underlines the need for the declining power, the United States – visibly in crisis due to the loss of the hegemonic role played so far, due to new actors such as China and India – to adopt a generalized strategy to promote areas of tension (geopolitics of chaos) in the Eurasian mass. This scenario would predictably also extend to Africa to counter Russian and Chinese influences, with the aim of hindering if not disempowering those who are shaping the new world order.
In conclusion, the crisis hotbed model helps us understand the transition from the unipolar to the multipolar one, still being defined. From this perspective, the “crisis centres” appear to be functional to the US strategy of slowing down the ongoing transition towards a multipolar system and aimed at prolonging Washington’s unipolar hegemony.