Part 5 in The Kellogg Plan is DOA Series
By George McMillan, owner of McMillan Geostrategic Consulting
The Role of Trading Blocs in Geopolitics
The specific purpose of moving the EU and NATO Eastward during the late 1990s, despite the promise by the Reagan administration to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989, was to prevent affordable Russian natural gas via pipeline from going to the European market for two essential reasons. I wrote about this topic in the seven “Russian Natural Gas and Geopolitical Realignment” articles of the previous series.
First, the West wanted to prevent Russia from using the profits of the Gazprom natural gas sales to fund an export-led growth import substitution industrialization investment program that would modernize their economy and military which could make them a rival power once again.
Secondly, and most importantly, an overland logistical supply route of natural gas, oil, and railroad infrastructure would allow Russia to re-emerge as a major regional power and build alliances with Central Europe, India, China, South Korea, and Japan to form a super Eurasian Economic Union trading bloc that would rival the current North American, Anglosphere Five Eyes and EU/NATO alliance system. To US planners, a reemergence of Russo-Sino superpower alignment could create the conditions for a realignment of the German-World Industrial Power center as a major partner to the Russo-Sino Bloc in Western Europe, as well as potentially Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in the Pacific Island chain becoming partners in a greater Eurasian Economic Union trading bloc (due in large part to their need for cheap energy to remain industrially competitive). Under the Wolfowitz plan to prevent any near-peer superpower from emerging, this is unacceptable and worthy of significant operations to prevent.
The Sea Power Versus Land Power Grand Strategies