My off the wall thoughts are based on the game of Acquire in which players expand their influence until stability is achieved. There are a number of areas in the world that are historically unstable. My focus below is with that of Russia and it's plans for growth of political power with aspirations of future economic stability. It's only one a many scenarios forcing change on the European map by non adherence to principles of peaceful coexistence which Russia has recently shed and may never have had its heart in.
Russian thought is based on the notion of struggle to attain goals that are always elusive...
These aspirations can come by democratic consensus or by force majeur efforts precipitated by economic necessity real or imaginary. In any event, the West needs to be aware of the tightening economic box that is presently the Russian sphere of influence. So expect, Russia to fight wild and risk oriented to attain a form of manifest destiny based on the structural logic of its emerging situation having thrown away the trappings of a socialist state based on communism in favour of something more akin to corporate national socialism, which we know has antecedents in Germany. Russian technology and economic planning is focused on failing fossil based industries and an emerging militarism grounded in nationalism and phoney forms of racism linked to language and proximity to the Russian heartlands.
The developments in the Ukraine are real economic suicide for Russia unless it can capture a critical population mass on which to grow its small concentrated youthful economy and sphere of political influence, which suggests a strategic war / effort to eventually recapture all of former territories and the northern economies so as to take advantage of Western preoccupation with the future / immediate consequences of changes and disruption due to restructuring forced from global warming. Russia is a fossil of an economy and has not embraced the need to engage in slowing down global land and ocean heating from the release of toxic gases into the earth's atmosphere.
What follows is a possible strategic plan for Russia. It could be attained by force or by democratic means, but it is essential if Russia is to maximize its economic potential as an independent influential state, matching Europe, India, China, Japan, Australia / Indonesia, Africa, the Middle East and the two Americas.
That is because the Russian economy can't grow meaningfully unless it joins or steals territory and people from the European economy, or surrounding economies, which together form the largest most advanced economic nucleus in the world. Russia's strategy would be to reduce the size of Europe by acquing the Ukraine and adjacent territories, and by stimulating demands for revolution in the UK, Scotland and Ireland, then isolating the Northern economies of Norway, Sweden and Finland. Invasion of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, Poland, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Slavic nations which would form key parts of this military / economic strategy.
British, Irish, and Scots are well behind the ball on the threat that Russia conceivably poses to the future map of Europe. By invading the Northern areas and the former Russian influence region, Russia would contain European expansion, have warm water ports and gradually be able to divest itself of Muslim countries with which it has associations only pretence in a federalist sense and less substance for a community centred in Moscow.
Conceivably, Russia's move is racially based, reactionary yet futuristic defined from the logic of its territory which directs its efforts along a path of least resistance with the goal of capturing the common racial mix of northern territories. Affinities of Russian peoples with the racial mix of northern economies is possibly a remnant of its past and still highly motivating to the Russian sense of its manifest destiny as a great power and economy.
World war three may not look like a war because it is a need, a need of an economy that is committing suicide before our eyes in order to transform itself violently into a major player in world politics over the next century. The developed of a future map of Europe have already have entered a second stage based on climate change denial, nationalism, Russian cartels / capitalism and an emerging polemic of racism?
It's not that any form of Russian control of the northern economies and a swath of people near Russia is stated, but that it could be a logical sequence of its need to grow as an economy with a sufficiently influential population mass. The breakup of Europe and the UK as envisioned by UKIP and the Scottish Nationalists feeds directly into the new world order that Russian now needs to attain its own sphere of influence.
Russian expansionism is driven by necessity and a belief that it is the only possible path towards sufficient economic influence. It chops away most of Eastern Europe and the non continental northern territories, orienting these towards the cold mass of Russian economic influence.
Inaction by the West feeds on this strategic focus with rail links from Paris via Russia to New York once territory has been acquired and a new economic reality established based on the new climate economy favouring Russia.
