Shirvan on the geopolitics of the Cold War.

I am impressed by the analyses of Shirvan, the Azeri author of the Caspian Report at YouTube. He writes with independent mind from an unusual perspective, drawing on academic resources. I am alert and watchful for manipulative writing on the web. His work seems genuinely independent. He has written now a paper and oral presentation on the geopolitics of the Cold War, to be found here. I commend it.

I added a comment, which I copy here:

Thank you Shirvan for this elegant report. My background in Australia more in the practical dimensions of the cold war from a western allied perspective. Of the theorists you mention, Mahan clearly the most influential in the US and thus of critical significance; the era of American dominance itself a Mahanian phenomenon. Mahan's vision easier seen from US-Australian oceanic perspective than mid continental Caspian. During the Cold War to 1991 there was tension between concepts of strategic balance on the one hand and on the other the persistent need for force commanders to have forces that would not balance but conquer. In practice balance does not apply to naval thinking preoccupied with staying afloat not sinking. So there was public notion of balance but planning intent for example to eliminate Soviet naval forces in the Pacific in a few hours in a central war. The US doctrine presented the third leg of the nuclear triad, the underwater submarine missile force, undetected, as fundamental to war avoidance because it could reply to any first strike from Moscow with huge prompt megadeaths, from underwater. But in fact the Soviet missile submarines were granted no such status as safe underwater, being monitored by aircraft with dropped sonars, moment to moment, with no capacity to survive. The highly entertaining movie "The Hunt for Red October" muddles all this. In the post 1991 era, the notional and fabled US dominance has meant Mahan realised and applied everywhere. Except that it doesn't work. The tendency in the cold war years for big minds, from Kissinger to Brzezinski to disregard local reality and run puppet wars without need to understand reality, led later, with sense of victory in the cold war, into the enveloping disasters and widening ruin of projected force undertaken without understanding governance, the readiness to turn badly run countries into ungovernable spaces. And in democracies, the inability of leaders so say "we were wrong".So we come through to the present where mahanic fantasies of superior capability, uninhibited power projection, destruction without consequence, Bolton certainty place us in far more jeopardy than did the Cold War... though I did not know life in Azerbaijan in the 1970-80s. In naval thought it's straightforward. You go to the bottom or stay on top. Woven among peoples in a diverse and alive world none of this makes sense. Something I wrote recently mentioning Mahan is out there now as yet unpublished, the next thoughts are shaping here http://cephalophoria.blogspot.com/2019/05/new-perspectives-new-facts-new.html