At least at the present-time, and for the past few decades as well, Russia (by any name) has been ridiculed for its desire to secure its own security by dominating its near-abroad. With a core region in the far expanse of Eastern Europe near the border of that subcontinent with Asia, Russia has traditionally needed to deal with the threats of nomads to its east and sometimes South, whatever nations dominate the Caucasus and Anatolia to the South, as well as European powers in the Baltic Sea regions and Central Europe. Repeatedly, when Russia has been weak, it has been invaded by nations as diverse as the Swedes, Poles, Germans, French, and Mongols, and this threat of weakness due to the indefensibility of the European plain has made Russia seek after defense in depth by controlling a broad pale region that forces invaders to invade through a lot of peripheral space before approaching core Russian cities. Let us not act, though, as if Russia’s own obvious insecurity in the face of its geopolitical weaknesses, or its own desire for domination of its near abroad, is by any means unique.

I happen to be a patriotic American citizen myself, and it is by no means any slam against my own country when I point out that America has, at least since the 1800s, sought to dominate its own near-abroad, either through denying the area to others in the aftermath of the War of 1812 and the wars of independence in Latin America, or in dominating the area itself outright in from the late 1890s through the building of the Panama Canal and the building of powerful Atlantic and Pacific fleets that could coordinate to control a large ring of territory extending from Alaska to a large group of Pacific islands like Hawaii, Guam, and American Samoa, through the quiescent nations of Central and South America, to the Caribbean with American presence in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands (after 1917), as well as American assurance of friendly rule in such areas as the Azores, Greenland, and Iceland, even up through the middle of Europe and Oceania and East and Southeast Asia after 1945. The United States has a very large near-abroad, where it considers it vital to have friendly regimes, even apart from its beliefs in being the world’s policeman, a largely thankless task.

Nor is this all. We may indeed say that once a nation becomes sufficiently powerful that it is able to seek after its own security concerns that it will seek to exert power over a near abroad where it seeks friendly regimes and the preservation of its security concerns, as well as seeking economic and cultural ties that bind peripheral areas to its own central core. Israel, for example, seeks to defend its near abroad, which includes southern Lebanon as well as the areas of Palestine, even as a small nation that has long punched above its weight. Nigeria, at present, as we recently discussed, is seeking to dominate its near abroad, which includes the nation of Niger to its north, through its leadership of ECOWAS. Iran has sought to expand its influence to support Shi’ite minorities in Lebanon and Syria, as well as the area of Herat in Western Afghanistan with its Persian-based languages, as well as the Shi’ite Arabs of southern Iraq and Bahrain, and perhaps even the Eastern region of Saudi Arabia. South Africa long dominated Namibia and Rhodesia, Egypt long dominated Sudan, Sudan itself long dominated South Sudan, Morocco seeks to dominate Western Sahara and also would like to remove Spanish control from the Spanish enclaves (including Ceuta) on its northern coast. Ethiopia fought for decades to dominate Eritrea as well as preserve its hold over Somali-speaking regions in the Ogaden. Such examples could easily be multiplied, including Chile’s control over Easter Island, Ecuadorian control over the Galapagos, Mexico’s domination of Chiapas and its unsuccessful attempts to control California and Texas and New Mexico, or Australia and New Zealand’s domination of a host of Pacific states.

This ubiquity of states seeking to dominate their near-abroad whenever they have strong enough rulership and control of their core regions suggests that such efforts at expansion come from a core aspect of human nature. A core region is made up of regions that are of fundamental importance, the people who matter the most, whose interests are closest to the heart of any regime, and whose well-being is most to be secured through government expenditures and efforts at development. Peripheral regions, in contrast, are those regions which provide a buffer between core regions and potential enemies but whose people are less valued and whose well-being is less important to those in charge. These peripheral regions are labeled as flyover country, they are ruled by central governments who lack an interest in preserving or celebrating their regional cultures, and are labeled by such terms as pales, autonomous territories, or marches, lacking firm economic integration or a great deal of focus in development of local peoples and economies, except as a means for extracting what is of value in such areas and using such areas as a forward defense for more important core regions. It is not hard for people to know where they stand, and even groups as small as families can know if they are core or periphery based on the extent to which their concerns are heard and the extent to which they feel comfortable speaking up about what they want and need. It is remarkable that this desire to ensure our own safety as people or groups of people by controlling enough territory or space around us to keep our most important and most vulnerable areas safe and sound is not better recognized and more often discussed, but it is perhaps an impolite thing to draw attention to such universal insecurities. Those who live in glass houses might not wish to acknowledge even the existence of stones.