Putting the Band (Barrier) Back Together?

Earlier today, May 28, 2025, Finnish President Alexander Stubb gave an interview with CNN, reproduced on YouTube, here.

I strongly suspect that Stubb's sense of geopolitics is not especially informed by George Friedman's book, The Next Hundred Years (2009, Wikipedia summary here), but both noted the rise of Turkey and Poland as regional powers, and Finland, especially if combined with Sweden and the Baltics, might fairly constitute a third player in that bloc.

But wait!

There was a time when one might identify a Finno-Sweden, Poland-Lithuania, and Turkey with some Balkan allies, as forming a bulwark against Russian ambitions in Eastern Europe. The three powers among themselves did not exactly form a coherent coalition, yet what brought them together on one side was, indeed, the ambition of Russian leaders like Peter the Great, and on the other, Western support. In particular, France was notable for lending subsidies, political support, and at least on occasion, arms — what we would today call foreign aid, diplomatic cover, and, still, arms! The French knew this combination of powers as the Barrière de l'Est, or eastern barrier, broadly intended to keep Russia out of the affairs of the rest of Europe.

There seems to be even more to the conversation, as the Guardian notes here, and not for the first time. Invoking Peter's endurance in the Great Northern War (1700-21), Russian diplomats in the recent Istanbul summit hinted at their intention simply to outlast Western aid to Ukraine. President Putin does correctly note Russia's victory in the Northern War, though this was also the major occasion, at least at times, when France, Sweden-Finland, Poland-Lithuania, and Ottoman Turkey came together most coherently.

Putin might also note that Peter (fl.1682-1725), and pretty much all the rest of Russia's leaders of the 18th and 19th centuries, and well into the 20th, all had their eye on penetrating this eastern barrier so that Russia could not only march west, but also, and rather, engage with the West. Carrying forward Peter's legacy, Russia as a state wanted to be Western, to fit into the European systems of commercial and intellectual exchange, as well as foreign relations!

I opened this blog post thinking that I would discuss the Eastern Barrier coming back together, which it may well do. I close it, however, thinking about Putin not as repeating or even emulating the achievement of Peter the Great, but rather profoundly reversing it, and undoing some 300 years of Russian strategic thought. Thinking on earlier generations, the Treaties of Nerchinsk (1689) and Kiakhta (1727, 1768) were all designed to define and stabilize the East so successive Russian leaders could turn their attention to the West. If Putin and his successors in the coming years put Finlandization to rest, and truly have a NATO-Russia border, then well might we see, not even so much the renewed rise of the old Barrier powers, but rather the return of Russia to what it was before Peter's time: primarily a power of the Eurasian steppe lands, largely excluded from the community of European states.