The Sum of all Geo-Strategic Follies

When Turkey seemed to drop its opposition to Sweden and Finland Joining NATO, about a month and a half ago, the outgoing Estonian minister of defense, Kalle Laanet, proclaimed ecstatically that this move would open a path to turn the “Baltic into an internal NATO sea”. As if to assure all doubters that this “internal sea” asinine vision is really an official Estonian geo-strategic policy, the incoming minister of defense, Hanno Pevkur, said in a recent interview with Iltalehti that the Baltic Sea might become an internal sea of NATO. Then he went on to further emphasize the geo-strategic implications by announcing that Estonia and Finland have agreed to unite their coastal defense a move that would close access to the Baltic Sea for Russian warships. A vainglorious statement of intend, and rather ludicrous when coming from an inconsequential (except for it geographical location) nation.

Envisioning the Baltic Sea as controlled for navigation by NATO, and deploying forces for that purpose, is a most aggressive conventional move by NATO –second only to opening a military campaign against Russia. Pevkur makes the tactical reasoning in executing the strategic policy very clear: “we need to integrate our coastal defenses. The flight range of Estonian and Finnish missiles is greater than the width of the Gulf of Finland. This means that we can connect our missile defenses and share all our information with each other”. This assessment of the means to destroy Russian ships (civilian and military) navigating through the “Gulf of Finland” was issued during a “working visit” to Finland on the 12 of August. No comment came from the relevant Finland authorities.

On the eastern edge of the gulf, there lays St. Petersburg, yes, St. Petersburg. Now a NATO member is delineating how easy it will be to put it under naval siege, once Finland joins NATO. However, that is not all, once Sweden joins the so-defensive alliance, then Kaliningrad, a major strategic naval and missiles base, will also be under threat of complete blockade by a Swedish-Danish pincer-move . So the Russian Baltic Fleet (indeed secondary to the Northern Fleet, but dear to the Russian heart) is expected, according to this containment hallucination, to limit itself to short cruises out of St. Petersburg ports and Kaliningrad. A masterplan, to be followed by Zelensky taking over Crimea and “neutralizing” the Russian Black Sea fleet.

Let me be very clear, once applied, this “NATO’s Lake” travesty will come very close to a Casus-Belli for Russia. Not just for Putin’s Russia, even a leader like the noble Gorbachev would not have swallowed and stand idle while St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad are under the threat of total naval blockade. In its zero-sum spirit and geo-strategic recklessness, this damn maneuver is akin to the malevolent and humiliating triumphalist geopolitical (expansion to Russia’s borders) and aggressive non-conventional strategic (deploying anti-Missile systems on Russia’s borders) maneuvers in which the West (read NATO, read U.S.) exploited Russia’s struggles after Gorbachev. The consequences, intended and unintended, are strewn all over Ukraine and reverberate all over the globe.

I have elaborated on this moral-historical evil folly in other writings and posts (to sum up: the invasion- unjustified; the Russian conduct of war — deserves war crimes investigation; NATO’s expansion and anti-missile deployment –a crime against humanity). For now, I will conclude by asserting that the “Internal Sea” move means opening a path for the kind of escalation that will raise the “nuclear stakes” of the West-Russia crisis to a humanity-endangering level.