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Mensaje: <blockquote data-quote="guido-f" data-source="post: 1798644" data-attributes="member: 15396">RussiaRussia faces no shortage of geographic obstacles to success — its wide-open borders invite invasion, its vast open spaces prevent it from achieving economies of scale, its lack of navigable rivers makes it poor, and its arid and cold climate reduces crop yields. Over the years, however, Russia has managed to turn many weaknesses into strengths.It has consolidated political and economic forces to serve as tools of the central state, so that all of the nation's power may be applied to whatever tasks may be at hand. This may be woefully inefficient and trigger periods of immense instability, but it is the only method Russia has yet experimented with that has granted it any security. Russia has even turned its lack of defensible borders to its advantage. Russia's vast spaces mean that the only way it can secure its borders is to extend them, which puts Russia in command of numerous minorities well-aware that they are being used as speed bumps. To manage these peoples, Russia has developed the world's most intrusive intelligence apparatus.This centralization, combined with Russia's physical location in the middle of the flat regions of northern Eurasia, makes the country a natural counterbalance to the United States and the state most likely to participate in an anti-American coalition. Not only does Russia's location in the flatlands of Eurasia require it to expand outward to achieve security (thus making it a somewhat "continent-sized" power), its natural inclination is to dominate or ally with any major power it comes across. Due to its geographic disadvantages, Russia is not a country that can ever rest on its laurels, and its strategic need to expand makes it a natural American rival.Unfortunately for the Americans, Russia is extremely resistant to American influence, whether that influence takes the form of enticement or pressure.• Russia's lack of a merchant or maritime culture makes any Bretton Woods-related offers fall flat (even today Russia remains outside of the WTO).• Russia is the biggest state in its region, making it rather nonsensical (at least in the current context) for the United States to offer Russia any kind of military alliance, since there would be no one for Russia to ally against.• Russia's maritime exposure is extremely truncated, with its populated regions adjacent only to the geographically pinched Baltic and Black seas. This insulates it from American naval power projection.• Even the traditional American strategy of using third parties to hem in foes does not work as well against Russia as it does against many others, since Russia's intelligence network is more than up to the task of crippling or overthrowing hostile governments in its region (vividly demonstrated in Russia's overturning of the Kremlin-opposed governments in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan in recent years).This means that the only reliable American option for limiting Russian power is the same strategy that was used during the Cold War: direct emplacement of American military forces on the Russian periphery. But this is an option that has simply been unavailable for the past eight years. From mid-2003 until the beginning of 2011, the entirety of the U.S. military's deployable land forces have been rotating into and out of Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving no flexibility to deal with a resurgence of Russian power. The American preoccupation with the Islamic world has allowed Russia a window of opportunity to recover from the Soviet collapse. Russia's resurgence is an excellent lesson in the regenerative capacities of major states.Merely 12 years ago, Russia was not even in complete control of its own territory, with an insurgency raging in Chechnya and many other regions exercising de facto sovereignty. National savings had either disappeared in the August 1998 ruble crisis or been looted by the oligarchs. During the American wars in the Islamic world, however, the Russians reorganized, recentralized and earned prodigious volumes of cash from commodity sales. Russia now has a stable budget and more than half a trillion dollars in the bank. Its internal wars have been smothered and it has re-assimilated, broken or at least cowed all of the former Soviet states. At present, Russia is even reaching out to Germany as a means of neutralizing American military partnerships with NATO states such as Poland and Romania, and it continues to bolster Iran as a means of keeping the United States bogged down in the Middle East.Put simply, Russia is by far the country with the greatest capacity — and interest — to challenge American foreign policy goals. And considering its indefensible borders, its masses of subjugated non-Russian ethnicities and the American preference for hobbling large competitors, it is certainly the state with the most to lose.The United StatesThe greatest threat to the United States is its own tendency to retreat from international events. America's Founding Fathers warned the young country to not become entangled in foreign affairs — specifically European affairs — and such guidance served the United States well for the first 140 years of its existence.But that advice has not been relevant to the American condition since 1916. Human history from roughly 1500 through 1898 revolved around the European experience and the struggle for dominance among European powers. In the collective minds of the founders, no good could come from the United States participating in those struggles. The distances were too long and the problems too intractable. A young United States could not hope to tip the balance of power, and besides, America's interests — and challenges and problems — were much closer to home. The United States involved itself in European affairs only when European affairs involved themselves in the United States. Aside from events such as the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812 and small-scale executions of the Monroe Doctrine, Washington's relations with Europe were cool and distant.But in 1898 the Americans went to war with a European state, Spain, and consequently gained most of its overseas territories. Those territories were not limited to the Western Hemisphere, with the largest piece being the Philippines. From there the Americans participated in the age of imperialism just as enthusiastically as any European state. Theodore Roosevelt's Great White Fleet steamed around the world, forcing Japan to open itself up to foreign influence and announcing to the world that the Americans were emerging as a major force. Once that happened, the United States lost the luxury of isolationism. The United States not only was emerging as the predominant military and economy of the Western Hemisphere, but its reach was going global. Its participation in World War I prevented a German victory, and by the end of World War II it was clear that the United States was one of only two powers that could appreciably impact events beyond its borders.Such power did not — and often still does not — sit well with Americans. The formative settler experience ingrained in the American psyche that life should get better with every passing year and that military force plays little role in that improvement. After every major conflict from the American Revolution through World War I, the Americans largely decommissioned their military, seeing it as an unnecessary, morally distasteful expense; the thinking was that Americans did not need a major military to become who they were and that they should have one only when the need was dire. So after each conflict the Americans, for the most part, go home. The post-World War II era — the Cold War — is the only period in American history when disarmament did not happen after the conflict, largely because the Americans still saw themselves locked into a competition with the Soviet Union. And when that competition ended, the Americans did what they have done after every other conflict in their history: They started recalling their forces en masse.At the time of this writing, the American wars in the Islamic world are nearly over. After 10 years of conflict, the United States is in the final stages of withdrawal from Iraq, and the Afghan drawdown has begun as well. While a small residual force may be left in one or both locations, by 2014 there will be at most one-tenth the number of American forces in the two locations combined as there were as recently as 2008.This has two implications for the Americans and the wider world. First, the Americans are tired of war. They want to go home and shut the world out, and with the death of al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden on May 2, 2011, they feel that they have the opportunity to do so. Second, the American military is battle-weary. It needs to rest, recuperate and digest the lessons of the wars it has just fought, and American politicians are in a mood to allow it to do just that. But while the U.S. military is battle-weary, it is also battle-hardened, and alone among the world's militaries it remains easily deployable. Three years from now the U.S. military will be ready once again to take on the world, but that is a topic to revisit three years from now.Between now and then, potential American rivals will not be able to do anything they wish — American power is not evaporating — but they will have a relatively free hand to shape their neighborhoods. American air and sea power is no small consideration, but inveterate land powers can truly be countered and contained only by ground forces.• Russian power will consolidate and deepen its penetration into the borderlands of the Caucasus and Central Europe. While the Americans have been busy in the Islamic world, it has become readily apparent what the Russians can achieve when they are left alone for a few years. A U.S. isolationist impulse would allow the Russians to continue reworking their neighborhood and re-anchor themselves near the old Soviet empire's external borders, places like the Carpathians, the Tian Shan Mountains and the Caucasus, and perhaps even excise NATO influence from the Baltic states. While the chances of a hot war are relatively low, Stratfor still lists Russia's regeneration as the most problematic to the long-term American position because of the combination of Russia's sheer size and the fact that it is — and will remain — fully nuclear armed.• Iranian power will seek to weaken the American position in the Persian Gulf. A full U.S. pullout would leave Iran the undisputed major power of the region, forcing other regional players to refigure their political calculus in dealing with Iran. Should that result in Iran achieving de facto control over the Gulf states — either by force or diplomacy — the United States would have little choice but to go back in and fight a much larger war than the one it just extracted itself from. Here the American impulse to shut out the world would have imminent, obvious and potentially profound consequences.• Stratfor does not see Chinese power continuing to expand in the economic sphere on a global scale. China suffers under an unstable financial and economic system that will collapse under its own weight regardless of what the United States does, so the United States turning introverted is not going to save China. But America's desire to retreat behind the oceans will allow the Chinese drama to play itself out without any American nudging. China will collapse on its own — not America's — schedule.• German power will creep back into the world as Berlin attempts to grow its economic domination of Europe into a political structure that will last for decades. The European debt crisis is a catastrophe by all definitions save one: It is enabling the Germans to use their superior financial position to force the various euro nations to surrender sovereignty to a centralized authority that Germany controls. Unlike the Russian regeneration, the German return is not nearly as robust, multi-vectored or certain. Nonetheless, the Germans are manipulating the debt crisis to achieve the European supremacy by diplomacy and the checkbook that they failed to secure during three centuries of military competition.The Americans will resist gains made by these powers (and others), but so long as they are loath to re-commit ground forces, their efforts will be half-hearted. Unless a power directly threatens core U.S. interests — for example, an Iranian annexation of Iraq — American responses will be lackluster. By the time the Americans feel ready to re-engage, many of the processes will have been well established, raising the cost and lengthening the duration of the next round of American conflict with the rest of the world.</blockquote>

Verificación: Libertador de Argentina