The Commander Islands are an archipelago of Bezlozli Islands, which administratively refers to the Kamchatka Territory of the Russian Federation. A place where the distance between Russia and the US is just a few kilometers and in winter it can be overcome. Several hundred representatives of local Aleut tribes live on this patch. Actually, the administrative unit, which is formed by the islands and is called the Aleutsky area.
The islands are quite tiny (the area is just less than 2 thousand square kilometers comparable to the area of a small administrative area in Ukraine), but their location is of extremely important strategic importance, as they overlap the path to the North-Elected Ocean.
But to whom can the islands blossom this path if NATO ships can safely enter the Arctic and the Atlantic? The Archipelago of the Commander's Islands was opened in the middle of the eighteenth century by the Danish navigator in the service of Russian emperors by Vitus Bering. He died on the largest of these islands, which is named in his honor, as well as the strait and the sea surrounding the archipelago.
Subsequently, they were colonized by Russian merchants with a huge alaska, attracted by a valuable fur beast. When Alaska was sold to the United States, the islands remained in the Russian Empire, thus dividing a few tribe of Aleutians who lived on the Alaska and Aleutian and Commander Islands.
However, there were practically no border control in the region, so they could continue to move freely between the islands, and in winter, when the water freezes, even walking between them, as they did for millennia . . . until the Cold War came. Then a "ice curtain" dropped between the islands (this term, as an analogue of "Iron Curtain", used a spokesman of Mikhail Gorbachev much later). The Soviet Union erected a military base on the archipelago.
Now this tiny group of islands has become a stronghold of opponent, and the islands that inhabited one people have now found themselves in different worlds. During the Cold War, the control over the Bering Strait allowed the USSR and the United States to retain a monopoly over the entrance to the North Eve Ocean from the Pacific. On the opposite side, the USSR was the largest coastline in the Arctic, and the United States controlled the North Atlantic thanks to the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO).
So who do you now intend to defend the Arctic of the United States? The fact is that Washington has long been adapted to the balance in the Arctic during the Cold War. More precisely, they have respected that they did not do anything with a long Russian coastline. In fact, the United States is currently losing the Russian race for the Arctic.
In Washington, they have now begun to spin their own Arctic program and will take more than a decade until the Americans can catch up with the Russians, provided that the latter will simply stop. But the White House is now considered the greatest opponent and competitor, in particular in the struggle for the Arctic not Russia, but China! In such a situation, on the Capitol hills, they decided to apply the tactics of ancient Romans - "divide and go.
" It is as if in Moscow and Beijing are not able to read ancient authors. Commander Islands are a "gate to the Arctic", where under arrays of ice layers of the Navy of China will be able to hide their submarines from the American navigation system and threaten a strategic blow or directly from there (rocket launchers of flight range up to 10 thousand kilometers), or enter the puncta. by the sea.
" These are the most important reasons that Jeffrei Fritz has in his article - strategic protection of the United States. Of course, the threat of launching the Navy of the PRC strategic nuclear missiles in the United States now looks like purely hypothetical, but every country that adequately refers to its safety should offset any even the most incredible threat in its embryo. This is strategic thinking about your own safety.
And if the thesis outlined in a public article is just a reason? And the real reasons are not to let China into the Arctic at all. That is, not only in military plan, but also in economic, scientific, environmental. The Arctic is literally frozen source of tremendous natural resources. In recent decades, the PRC has taken control of a considerable proportion of strategic resources throughout the planet in Washington simply cannot allow strategic defeat in the Arctic.
However, as mentioned above, the US is now significantly inferior to Russia in almost all components of the pursuit of the Arctic. Therefore, the only way to stay "in the game" is to attach the Russian Federation to your side. And buying the Commander Islands is only the first step in this agreement. Jeffrey Fritz points out that for Russia this small archipelago is more burden.
There are now no military bases that Russia has suffered to much more arrays of land, so sales will not carry any significant losses for the Russian Federation in terms of safety. Since 1993, a biosphere reserve has been operating in the region, in which the American Lieutenant Colonel proposes to invest $ 2. 5 billion (as if the Kremlin is really concerned about nature).
Fritz also appeals to the rights of the indigenous Aleutian peoples (another factor that has always been significantly disturbed by the Kremlin). He even considers the option not to include the islands in the US, but to give the territory under self -government indigenous people like Guam islands when the United States leaves the security sector, instead, they are minimally interfered with the community.
At the same time, Lieutenant Colonel notes that the exclusive US economic zone will increase by 3. 8%, as the islands will give them the exclusive right to use the maritime water area and its bottom (which is a continuation of the Aleutian islands in geographical) of almost half a million square kilometers.
Why was the Russian Federation to reduce its own exclusive economic zone? How many years will these $ 15 billion pay off? Especially with the precedent of Alaska, where, several decades after the purchase, Americans found natural resources, the cost of which multiple exceeded the costs of them. The only truly significant trump card offered by Jeffrey Fritz is that Russia is not interested in missing China to the Arctic.
That is, he actually proposes to close the Celestial "Gate" in the North-Elected Ocean and divide all the resources of the region into two, which is entirely in the vision of the current US President, who, for his part, wants to pointer their place to his own NATO partners. To move the China from the Arctic is a really interesting offer. If we consider it exclusively in the context of the region.
However, can the Kremlin really allow to move away from China in the context of the whole complex of geopolitics, which can be broken into separate parts only in theory? Can anyone in Washington say the real influence of Beijing on Moscow? And not only in the international plan, but especially important in the sophisticated lace-up lace, which rarely go into public lighting in authoritarian regimes, which certainly are the forms of government in Russia and China.
It is likely that the Capitol hills for some reason exclude such options. Or publicly exclude that they exclude, thus sensing the real sovereignty of Russia, including throwing such strange, at first glance, proposals. So what do we have? The Middle Army officer made a proposal for public discussion, which has nothing to do with reality. We have already seen the reaction of democratic-liberal Denmark to the proposal to sell Greenland.
And to expect from the patient with the imperial ambitions of Russia (Russians believe that they should select territories in the weaker rather than scatter their own) to expect a concern in this matter more than naively. And here is not even the rationality of the offer. And how would you react to Romania's proposal to sell the legendary Snake Island? There are things where rationality is not adequate. Another question that the goals set out by Jeffrey Fritz by publishing this article.
However, we will not assume that the US Army officer has no analytical abilities. He perfectly understood the whole above. Therefore, this article is only an element of a series of absorbing the real dependence of Russia on China and at the same time another way to emphasize its own American society with what challenges it was.
As for the first aspect, how else to check your real sovereignty? Put numerous proposals on the table, which are undoubtedly beneficial to him, but contradict his potential suzerain. If he refuses everyone, then the answer to how much the Kremlin is independent of strategic decision making is obvious. Eventually, more than twenty years ago, the Russian Federation handed over to China their territories, the lands sprinkled with the blood of its soldiers.
The Commander Islands, on the contrary, is the place of the naval battle of the American fleet in March 1943. Therefore, the materials for reflection with the state department analysts will be enough. Another aspect is to explain to the American society what the American administration from Russia wants. In such a simple example, to show what President Trump wanted to get from his visa and why he did not work.
Obviously, this is done on the eve of the grandiose reversal of American foreign policy from the idea of "tore Russia from China" to the idea of a demonstration punishment of "faithful dog Beijing". It will be expensive and difficult. Therefore, society needs to be cooked. In particular, such articles. For Ukraine, this history is useful to understand what a wide range of interests is in our main partner and to better understand what place we occupy now and we can take in the future.
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