Source: American Interest
By
"By virtue of our unique geography”, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in a 2011 Foreign Policy article, “the United States is both an Atlantic and a Pacific power.” Russia, meanwhile, has seen itself as a Euro-Asian country, as Vladimir Putin has argued from the start of his first term in the Kremlin. The American attitude, which in Secretary Clinton’s locution is about as uncontroversial a statement as an American Secretary of State can make, reflects the country’s historic “maritime” vocation. The Russian one reflects the longstanding fascination with the country’s continental scale and reflects its traditional terrestrial focus. It is really no surprise, when you think about it, that during the “space race” Americans fetched their returning astronauts at sea, while Russians did so over land.
By
"By virtue of our unique geography”, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in a 2011 Foreign Policy article, “the United States is both an Atlantic and a Pacific power.” Russia, meanwhile, has seen itself as a Euro-Asian country, as Vladimir Putin has argued from the start of his first term in the Kremlin. The American attitude, which in Secretary Clinton’s locution is about as uncontroversial a statement as an American Secretary of State can make, reflects the country’s historic “maritime” vocation. The Russian one reflects the longstanding fascination with the country’s continental scale and reflects its traditional terrestrial focus. It is really no surprise, when you think about it, that during the “space race” Americans fetched their returning astronauts at sea, while Russians did so over land.
Despite these different conceptions of the Pacific,
which is now the most dynamic region in the world, both the United
States and the Russian Federation have made similar mistakes. The most
striking of these has been the equation of the Pacific Rim with Asia and
Asians. American and Russian policymakers and experts have commonly
spoken of the Asia-Pacific or Asian-Pacific region, respectively. Both
groups presuppose that the Pacific Rim cannot even be imagined without
the primacy of Asian nations, tacitly agreeing that among them China
appears to be a natural leader. The recent and ongoing shift of global
wealth toward the Pacific is therefore widely interpreted as a harbinger of the “Asian century.”
