[MUSIC] The end of the Cold War, the time of transition from the so-called classical to contemporary geopolitics was another example of international relations when critical geopolitics can be used in order to explain events of those times. We remember that it was the role of Mikhail Gorbachev in the end of the Cold War and this is particularly the example of another human factor. How one person meaning the first and the last president of the Soviet Union considering his own change in worldview perception of the world to world decided to call back Soviet military troops from Europe. And allowed the Eastern European socialist countries go their own way according to the so-called Sinatra Doctrine as it was named by some journalists. So it was the time of significant influence of human factor and particular of factor of one person. However, as we discussed previously, the end of the Cold War did not mean the overall end of geopolitics. Geopolitics continued to lead, geopolitics continued to exist in terms of confrontation between different countries. And as long as we're now in the frames of critical geopolitics, geopolitics continue to be determined by certain human factors, the only difference was that these human factors were not the same as in the times of the Cold War. There was no more ideology. There was impact of different personalities, but still the human factors remained in geopolitical competition. We're going to look at this particularly in the examples of three geopolitical confrontations. The so-called concept of clash of civilizations, the relations between Russia and the west in the broad sense and the US-China relations. We can use critical geopolitics or popular geopolitics to explain for example the absence of confrontation at the popular level between Russia and China. There is really very little background for such a confrontation. To the opposite, we can give example of the western civilization in broad sense and the Islamic civilization. Confrontation in mass culture between these two civilizations was predetermined by several events. Probably we can find some roots in deep involvement in politics of the region of the United States, in the Middle East and the role that the United States played in The Great War in the early 1990s. Second, we can obviously mention the terrorist attacks against the United States in 2001 after which a lot of American politicians, and in mass culture it was present as well, declared some state in the Middle East supporters of terrorism and even terrorist states. As a result of those events, the United States decided to invade Iraq and Kuwait which caused again very bad public reaction and another wave of critics against the United States and the Western World. So here is a very good example of how mass culture can dictate politicians and can influence the geopolitical confrontation in this case at the level of civilizations. Relations between the West and Russia is another good example. On the one hand, we can see that after the end of the Cold War in 1990s, there was no more confrontation in these relations. On the other hand, we can use critical geopolitics, for example formal and practical geopolitics, to explain re-emergence of these confrontation in the 2000s and to answer the question why it continues today. Let's start with NATO expansion. In 1990s, there was no need for need to expand because Russia was not an enemy for the European countries. However, the legacy of the Cold War and the previous experience did not allow many European politicians to overcome perception of the past perception of Russia as a potential enemy. As a result, NATO included Eastern European countries in the end of 1990s and in the early 2000s. Protection of this Eastern European countries against Russia was not declared as an official goal when the Eastern European countries join NATO. However, Russian politicians also had this past experience of confrontation with the West and obviously they considered NATO expansion as a potential attack, as a potential threat to security of their own country. Overall, we can see that on both sides, both states were headed by the politicians who had this previous experience of confrontation with each other in the times of the Cold War. And these previous experience explains why many academics, many scientists, many politicians and even journalists continue to reproduce these rhetoric of confrontation of the times of the Cold War nowadays at the level of relations between Russia and Europe, Russia and the United States, Russia and the West in general. And the third example where we can use critical geopolitics to explain relations between countries is relations between the United States and China. Here I remind you that relations between the United States and China were very good in the times of confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. For several couple decades, the United States considered China as a potential ally and with great assistance of Henry Kissinger himself and some other American diplomats and politicians, the United States invested a lot into Chinese economies. It brought some technologies to China. Overall, it became a very big background for further rapid economic development of this Republic. However, nowadays economic growth of China is viewed in the United States absolutely different. The United States for a long time ,for more than a century was the main economy, the first economy in the world. This country was from the very early times of its existence focused on international trade, on liberal trade. And of course today, the United States consider China as something absolutely opposite to its interests and its values. According to the United States, Chinese government and Chinese politicians, they break the rules of international trade, they steal technologies. And in terms of interests, they threaten, they challenged in interests of the United States, the US companies in order to struggle with this situation. The previous president of the United States Barack Obama decided to establish the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership, which excluded China, which included a lot of other Pacific states in order to dictate rules of international trade and to make China follow this rules. The contemporary President of the United States Donald Trump refused from the previous strategy, he refused from Trans-Pacific Partnership. However, it looks like he continues strategy of Barack Obama, but only with different instruments. He is not afraid of using tariffs and sanctions against China, but the logic seems to be the same, to preserve America's number one place in the world in terms of economic development. And to limit or to slow down economic development of China as potentially the main economic and probably there for political competitor of the United States. Ultimately, after we went through all stages of development of geopolitics, including traditional geopolitics prior to the second World War, classical geopolitics in the time of the Cold War and contemporary geopolitics. We use critical geopolitics to explain human factors behind something that seemed previously to us as something objective. We proved that there was a lot of subjectivity in decisions made by geopoliticians, geopolitical scholars, their concepts. Well, after all these sad, it looks like geopolitics as we discussed it previously is irrelevant. So let's now try to answer the question whether it is really so or still there is certain place for classical geopolitics. [MUSIC]
