Russia proved for Adolf Hitler what Spain was for Napoleon Bonaparte between 1808 and 1813--a running sore that drained resources and gave nothing back. Whether Operation Barbarossa was the legitimate strategic option or an ideologically motivated exercise in genocide, the question remains whether Hitler would have been better advised to explore a Middle Eastern option. Hitler's trans-Atlantic ambitions depended on eventually acquiring bases on the North African coast. If Britain could not be directly invaded, then perhaps cutting its Mediterranean "lifeline" might bring the island empire to reason. More concretely, given what field marshal Erwin Rommel achieved in North Africa with Germany's military leftovers, the consequences of adding even a half dozen mobile divisions to his order of battle continues to engage war gamers and counterfactualists.
Analyzed at closer range, the Mediterranean scenario had significant drawbacks as well as inviting possibilities. Diplomatically, it involved balancing the claims and ambitions of Italy, Spain, and Vichy France--a task that proved well beyond the capacities of the Führer and his officials. Spain refused to participate without guaranteed compensation from France's colonial empire--on which Benito Mussolini also had designs. France was determined to maintain its position in North Africa. The resulting imbroglios were never resolved--only put on the back burner when Hitler turned toward Russia...

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The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and its reconfiguration as a congeries of middle-sized regional powers generated as much anxiety as gratification among diplomats, soldiers, politicians, and intellectuals in the rest of the world. In forty years the Cold War had become familiar enough to seem the natural order of things. Even the threat of thermonuclear conflict was increasingly an abstraction. Particularly in hindsight, the bipolarity that developed after 1947 seemed accompanied by clarity, at least on major issues. Now every state faced a prospect of autonomy that tended to be more frightening than reassuring...

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As the Eastern Front stabilized after the great battles of 1915, grandiose projects of exploitation increasingly appeared in memoranda at the highest levels of the government and the army. A Central European customs union, new thrones in the Baltic states and Poland, German colonization of lands vacated by wartime migrations--all seemed possible. German general Erich Ludendorff suggested annexations of land ranging as far east as the Caspian Sea. The discourse reflected a developed consciousness of the East as a source of both current German power and endless possibilities for the future...

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The Caspian Sea seabed contains many unexplored and undeveloped oil and gas reserves. These reserves are potentially worth billions of dollars to the nations and companies that develop them. Although some development is underway, legal wrangling by the five Caspian Sea border nations over who owns the reserves has held up production and led to intense negotiations over the sea's future.

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Long described in the historiography of the Great War as a German cat's-paw, Austria-Hungary is being restored to the status of an independent actor in the diplomacy that led up to the outbreak of hostilities. Since the Bosnian Crisis (1908), the Dual Monarchy's viability was being increasingly questioned. Austria was under increasing economic pressure in the Near East even from its ostensible ally, Germany. British publicists and French diplomats pictured brave futures for the Slavs of southeastern Europe once the Habsburg Empire should disappear. The increasingly strident claims of Austria that its great-power status was being ignored went overlooked--with few questions as to what might happen should Austria not accept its assigned fate and merely fade away...

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The first Russian Revolution (March 1917) grew out of a complex synergy of factors, all traceable to a common source: comprehensive war-weariness. The Provisional Government that replaced the Tsarist Empire had no general mandate. It consisted of an uneasy coalition of politicians and bureaucrats from the more-conservative parties and the more-liberal element of the former administration. It began by breaking sharply with its predecessor on many fronts. The new government proclaimed freedom of speech, press, and assembly. It abolished restrictions based on class, nationality, and religion. It declared its intention to call for a freely elected national assembly. It shared de facto power with the radical Petrograd Soviet, and the two bodies worked together in the early days of the revolution despite mutual suspicion...

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Grand prince of Kiev and first Christian ruler in Russia, whose reign consolidated the Eastern Slavs and Finnish-Baltic tribes into a single Russian state...

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Westernization of Russia...

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Prince of Novgorod and grand duke of Vladimir, whose policy of collaboration with the Mongols resulted in the unification of Russia and forever altered its history...

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Realization by the Tsar that some social change was inevitable...

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