Romania's Confused Geopolitics

 Starting with 1968, Romania's geopolitical situation and the foreign policy of the Romanian state stopped taking into account the country's historical ties and the geographical area it belongs to .This situation has changed unfortunately little since.

For a long period of time, the modern Romanian state had a policy of alliances that reflected the fact that the country's political elites had a very clear idea about Romania's actual enemies, its potential enemies and the states that could be of help in obtaining or defending its independence.

Until the end of the 19th century, the number one enemy of the newly created Romanian state was the Ottoman Empire, against which the Romanian army fought, alongside the Russian troops, to obtain its independence. Second on the list of Romania's enemies was, until its disappearance in 1918, the Austro-Hungarian empire.

After the union with Transylvania, Moldova and Bucovina in 1918 and the victory of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the main enemy of Greater Romania became the USSR, a communist state that emerged from the ruins of the old Russian empire. This enmity, it is worth emphasising, did not have a historical or geopolitical basis, being of a purely ideological nature ( in fact, between 1934 and 1936 Titulescu negotiated with USSR's Litvinov a non-aggresion pact with the Soviet Union ). For the Romanian political class in the interwar period, however, Soviet communism represented a permanent and real threat, because the infiltration of Moscow's agents had the potential to undermine the stability of the Romanian state.

The second great enemy of Romania in the interwar period was Nazi Germany, which in 1938 imposed on Romania, through the Vienna Diktat, the cession of northwestern Transylvania to Hungary. The success of the Nazis in Vienna encouraged Stalin in 1940 to demand by means of an ultimatum the reunification of Moldova with the USSR.

Until 1937, Romania had a policy of regional alliances well thought out by the then foreign minister, Nicolae Titulescu. This is how the Little Entente appeared, a pact signed in 1920-21 between Romania, Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbo-Croatian-Slovenes directed against Austro-Hungarian revisionism and the Balkan Pact of 1934 between Greece, Romania, the Kingdom of Serbo-Croatian-Slovenian and Turkey.

In 1941, the first and perhaps the most serious geopolitical error occurred, when Marshal Antonescu - the head of the Romanian state at the time - decided to participate with a million soldiers in the Nazi invasion of the USSR, although the dictator Salazar of Portugal advised him, in a secret diplomatic communication, to opt for Romania's neutrality.

After the occupation of Romania în 1945 by the Red Army, the ally of the Romanian state became the USSR, together with all the member states of the Warsaw Treaty. This time, Romania had a collective enemy, Western Europe, represented militarily in the area by NATO, which appeared in 1949.

It is nevertheless remarkable that the communist regime in Bucharest managed to convince Moscow to withdraw its troops from Romania as early as 1958, 31 years before that happened in the other communist states from Central and South-Eastern Europe.

After 1968, the Ceaușescu regime opted for a bizarre geopolitical orientation, anti-Soviet but pro-Chinese and pro-American, a fact that largely isolated Romania from the other alliance partners from the Soviet bloc and contributed to strategic destabilization in the area. For the first time in Romania's history, the Romanian state sought economic and political support outside Europe, from countries on other continents, such as the USA or China, located thousands of kilometers away, but which in turn had a adversarial relationship with the USSR .

Even more curious was the 1976 affiliation of Romania to the Group of 77, promoter of a policy of non-alignment. Since the group had only Yugoslavs and Romanians as members in Europe, Romania was included in the group of Latin American states of the G77. Again, Romania's potential allies were countries from other continents, thousands of kilometers away from our area of ​​the world. In this context, it should also be mentioned the alliances of the Ceaușescu regime with countries from Africa or the Middle East, which betrayed the exaggerated great power ambitions of the Romanian dictator.

Unfortunately, the disappearance of the USSR in 1991 did not lead to a return to normal from a geopolitical point of view or to re-establishing Romania's traditional alliances. Romania's accession to NATO in 2003, an alliance led from a distance of 7000 km from Europe, by Washington , is a case in point. Becoming a member of this alliance did not contribute to the geopolitical stabilization of the area, or to more secure Romanian borders , as the war in Ukraine currently demonstrates, on the contrary. Sadly, although since 2007 Romania has become a European Union member, the EU has been systematically prevented by the US to build its own collective security structures.

When History repeats itself as a Farce

 

On the 20th of October the US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin visited Bucharest, where he met with President Iohannis and Defence Minister Ciuca. A day later, President Iohannis designated Ciuca as the next Prime Minister of Romania, to replace the disgraced Vasile Citu. 

At first, General Ciuca sought a parliamentary vote of confidence in a PNL minority government and failed. For his second attempt, President Iohannis enlisted the help of Romania's social democratic party (PSD), which he brought - against the wishes of many Liberal party members - into a coalition with the ruling Liberals, not before destroying the former coalition between the Liberals and a smaller centre-right party, USR Plus.

Iohannis - who for years has campaigned and got re-elected as president on an anti-PSD platform (which was regularly labelled by him as the "red plague") - has thus stunned most members of his Liberal party, as well as the country's leading writers and artists who had hitherto supported his policies and presidential bids. Moreover, he single-handedly imposed Citu as the new president of the Liberal party and provoked the expulsion of the incumbent party president, former PM Ludovic Orban, who was against undoing the coalition with USR Plus. (To fully understand the character of Iohannis, it's worth mentioning the fact that it was Ludovic Orban who had convinced his party members in 2014 to accept Iohannis and to support his presidential bid.)

Lloyd Austin came to Bucharest in the middle of the crisis provoked by the political clumsiness of the Romanian president. In all probability, he was the one who advised Iohannis to promote general Ciuca to the post of Romanian PM, the first general to lead the government since the end of WWII.

A historical retrospective is in order here. In 1940, Hitler was preparing the invasion of the USSR and badly needed Romania's oil reserves and military help. As a result, general Ion Antonescu was the prime minister selected to lead Romania during the war, with the support of Nazi Germany. The tragedy of Romania after 1945 sprung from the nefarious alliance concluded by Antonescu with Hitler, which ended up in the occupation of the country by the victorious Red Army.

As Marx was fond of reminding his readers, history can only be repeated twice: first as a tragedy, and the second time as a farce. 

To put things into perspective, it is fair to say that Putin is nowhere near as fierce an enemy of the West as Stalin once was. Lloyd Austin's efforts to prepare the Eastern flank of NATO for a Russian invasion of Ukraine are largely misguided. What's more, the American Secretary of Defence is guilty of gross interference in Romania's internal political affairs and of playing an identical role in Romanian eyes to that of Hitler in 1940. In other words, Lloyd Austin behaved in Bucharest like a Hitler 2.0 of sorts, provoking the ire of the Romanian intellectual and artistic elites who feel they're witnessing a grotesque political farce all over again.