One cannot help wondering about the secret of the Anglo-Saxon geopolitics, which allows them for more than two centuries by now to dominate the greater part of the planet,
to wage wars on all continents, and never once during this period to admit the enemy on their territory.
This question is not quite simple as it could seem. At least twice – Napoleon in 1812, and Hitler in 1940 – the adversaries of Great Britain had enough power to crush it. But they attacked Russia instead, leaving their back open to the British. Indeed, if we assume that Napoleon would have persuaded Alexander I to conclude an alliance and obtain the hand of his sister in marriage, the Great Britain would have been doomed. Instead, he got himself involved into a suicidal campaign against Moscow.
After a century and a half, Hitler did repeat the same mistake. How would Europe and the world have looked today, had Napoleon bound himself with the Russian emperor by ties of kinship, and had Hitler not violated the peace treaty with the USSR? It is unlikely that Britain could have withstood the onslaught of a united Europe.
Why did the two European superpowers of their time, instead of the obvious path to domination in Europe (and consequently, in the world) through conquering a small and vulnerable Britain, get involved in a hopeless war with the Eurasian giant?
We may as well ask a symmetrical question regarding Russian geopolitics that allowed the country to be drawn into exhausting wars with enormous human and material losses. Alexander I could have avoided the war with Napoleon who, for the sake of union with him, twice asked the hand of his sisters in marriage. Nicholas II could have steered clear of the senseless and fatal First World War with his cousin. Both times Russia played for Britain, and both times, it suffered huge losses. The first time it paid with the ruin of Moscow, and thereafter with costly restoration of European monarchies and upkeep of the royal courts that hated us. The second time brought death of the empire, civil war, and millions of innocently lost lives.
The British, on the other hand, both times turned up winners. As a result of the defeat of Napoleon’s Europe, Britain took control of the European market and became the "queen of the seas," eliminating its main competitor in the struggle for overseas colonies. The First World War resulted in collapse of all monarchial empires that remained in Europe, the territory of which, with the exception of Soviet Russia, was left completely open to be developed by English capital. The British government did not even consider it necessary to dissemble its profound satisfaction with the overthrow of the Russian Tsar, who was a relative of Her Majesty. When the Prime Minister Lloyd George learned about the Emperor’s abdication, he rubbed his hands and said: "One of the war goals has been achieved"
[1]. And as soon as a civil war burst out in Russia, the recent ally resorted to military intervention, trying to seize Russian territory and, together with France, Japan and the U.S., to
dismember the country into zones of influence.
Of course, historians will find many explanations to all these events.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that they represented a striking success of British geopolitics on the one hand, and the Russian losses from involvement in it on the other hand. This concerns other countries as well, for which a cooperation with the British turned into disasters. As was wisely noted by the Russian geopolitician Alexei Edrikhin (Vandam):
"There can only be one thing worse than enmity with an Anglo-Saxon, that is, friendship with him"[1].
[1] Vandam A.E.
Velichayshee iz iskusstv. Obzor sovremennogo mezhdunarodnogo polozheniya pri svete vysshey strategii [The greatest of the arts. A review of the current international situation in the light of the highest strategy] (1913) – St. Petersburg, Nauka Publ., 2009. (In Russian)
[1] Ogorodnikov A.
Brestskiy mir. Predystoriya [Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Prehistory].
Zavtra, October 29, 2013. (In Russian)
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