© The Moscow TimesRouhani • Putin • Erdogan
The fall of the Russian Empire, more even than that of the Austro-Hungarian or German, was fundamentally the broadest cause of the Second World War. When Lenin forfeited vast swaths of territory in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, it set the stage for a myriad of ethno-nationalist conflicts in the areas from which Russia withdrew. Such a sudden withdrawal, contrasted with the gradual shifts of sovereignty over the territories traded between Russia, Poland, Iran and Ottoman Turkey over centuries of wars, unleashed a cataclysmic rush for territory in the 1920s and 1930s. Whether Turk versus Armenian (to the west) and Greek (to the west) in the south, or the conflicts between Russian Estonian, Polish, Latvian and Lithuanian in Eastern Europe, the clumsily drawn and openly disputed borders of the post-1918 map of central and Eastern Europe as well as the western flanks of Eurasia, ultimately caused the scramble for territory and resources that began the Second World War.
The collapse of the Russian Empire also gave Britain and France a free hand in the Middle East. Throughout the 19th century, Britain and France continually feared Russia's southward expansion from the Indus Valley to the Dardanelles. Because of this, Britain and France were originally set to make concessions to Russia as part of the secretive Sykes-Picot Agreement to divide the Middle East in 1916. However, the October Revolution meant that Russia was no longer a threat to British and French ambitions and Russia was subsequently dropped form the agreement.
After 1991, a similar phenomenon of ultra-nationalism in newly constituted entities was unleashed setting about a race for resources in small states among the great powers. Most notably, the US raced to consolidate its power in a post-1991 Middle East, Central Asia, the eastern Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. At the turn of the 21st century, as the US pushed further and further into Eurasia both via the Middle East and via Russia's Eastern European borderlands,
it became clear that a new war between Turkey, Iran and Russia may have been inevitable as each of the traditional powers of western Eurasia would become provoked into a competition for influence and resources in the states destabilised by the United States.
Comment: Reports about Macron aren't so endearing: