STEVE PIECZENIK TALKS

Putin’s Chess Game: Outflanking USA in the Middle East, Arctic, and Asia.

The recent arrival of Russian forces into Syria is beginning to show what Putin has in mind when dealing with his perceived arch-rivals, USA and EU. He has displayed his chess game, where all his bishops and knights, along with his queen, are all pre-positioned for a check mate.

What would a check-mate look like?

In the world of superpowers, America had shown that it could maneuver with ease in all the necessary choke points of strategic value. At one time, these geopolitical imperatives included a major projection of force in the Middle East, Asia and the Arctic Circle. In fact, the northern tier nations bordering the arctic assumed that they were in safely contained within a NATO partnership that would obviate any Russian or other foreign intrusions into the zone of comfort.

Yet for the past year, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland have found that they had to engage in some type of phantom war with Russia fighter jets and sea-borne provocations. Nothing underlies this feeling more than the fact that Russia has already declared the Arctic [rich with petroleum resources] to be part and parcel of their sphere of influence. Similarly, as POTUS drew his red lines for potential engagement in the Syrian civil war but did not follow through, Putin realized that he had the ability to maneuver into a major position of controlling the chess game in the Middle East.

Putin allowed Dr. Bashar Assad to continue his war of terror against his presumed enemies including ISIS and other Sunni rebel groups. In reality, Putin could care less about Assad or Syria. Assad is using chlorine gas and barrel bombs [makeshift weapons] to decimate his enemies. This has made his country into a heap of rubble.

Putin has partnered with Iran in order to guarantee a major shift of political power away from the USA, NATO and the EU. He has overflown Bulgaria and Greece in order to place his ground, aerial and sea based troops into their proper position along the Mediterranean Sea. At the same time, despite his cap-in-hand begging for more time and money from China, he has started to forge an alliance with China as that country tries to assume a financial and geopolitical hegemony around Asia and Central Asia.

Recently, Putin quietly implemented full mobilization of Central Asia’s Azerbaijan military. This indicates to me that Putin is also in play in a region where the USA has airbases for rapid deployment for protection of oil interests of international companies. 

There is nowhere in the world where Putin has not inserted his chess pieces. Even the refugees streaming into Europe has the earmarks of Putin’s hand. His support of the Syrian massacres forces the mass movement of refugees disrupting the European continent. Putin has successfully moved his military chess pieces into strategic choke points that have placed American civilian/military/intelligence strategists into a complete pre-checkmate position.

While our White House is concerned with defending a treaty that should have passed a long time ago, and the American public is consumed by the show business of a faux presidential election, Putin, despite dwindling resources, has moved rapidly to pre-position his chess pieces before our administration can even figure out what he has done and will be doing. This what Rudyard Kipling, the brilliant British author called, “The Big Game of Nations”.

America has lost any real capacity to assess the world situation in a coherent, systematic fashion. Now we just have a knee-jerk reaction to every major crisis with no long term strategy. The age of strategic reasoning, which had characterized our post WWII successes, has disappeared.

The end of the Soviet Union [which I helped to foster ] was not the beginning of our deficit in strategic thinking and tactically maneuvering. It was the disappearance of any institution of learning that left Washington D.C. drowning in ersatz think tanks. Studying anything for money and offering no real substantive analytic perspective to America’s national security interests became the new normal.

As I tried to tutor our senior military personnel who multiplied like farm cats, I discovered that I was wasting my time and ideas. America spends billions of dollars on all types of military/intelligence institutions and centers for counter-terrorism. I was completely shocked that the money our government spends on outsourcing everything from thinking to fighting. Our once great nation is now stilted and reactive in our geopolitical interests and positions.

To be quite honest with you all, we have never really been a nation of strategists. Strategy and survival was more of the bread and butter of the Europeans, Chinese, South East Asians and Russians. Americans took the high road of morality to explain our interventions into everything that never was of critical importance including: Vietnam, Korea, Iraq [twice], Afghanistan and then the piece de resistance –Libya [brought to you by Susan Rice/Samantha Power & Hillary Clinton].

For the present, I do not see a shift in the paucity of our strategic thinking. Instead of worrying about how many centrifuges Iran will or will not have, we should be concentrating on a full board assessment of what I have talked about in these blogs and radio shows:
“What is America going to do with the new power balance in the Middle East as Iran and Turkey and now Russia become the dominant forces?”

Our civilian /military leadership are wanting in critical thinking. Our country no longer want to play chess with a master of the game, who has been seriously wounded and is quite angry. Putin will not wait to be comforted by our paltry overtures nor threatened by our military. 

I fear time is not on our side. Pax Americana has descended upon us in a very deliberate, stealthy way- where indolence of thought and timidity of action has become our shibboleth for the present and future.

As Rudyard Kipling once said in “The Light That Failed”:

“We’re all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.”