Empires know no necessary or obvious limits to their borders. This boundlessness offers pliability but also breeds insecurity. This held especially true for the Ottoman and Russian empires, whose vast territories were contiguous and whose populations overlapped. Kurds, Armenians, Circassians, Greeks, Tatars, Caucasian Turks, Assyrians, and Cossacks among others inhabited both empires and moved back and forth between them. The imperial states were interpenetrating. They could, and did, project their influence and power beyond formal borders to challenge the authority of the other inside its own territory. The identities, loyalties, and aspirations of their heterogeneous subjects pointed in multiple directions, offering rich opportunities to exploit and creating vulnerabilities to shield. In unstable borderlands, such conditions invite fierce contestation.

It should therefore be no surprise that the Ottoman and Russian empires pursued their competition through channels beyond those of formal diplomacy, channels that included espionage and subversion. No less than formal diplomacy, the hidden pursuit of power was sensitive and responsive to the changing nature of the global order in the early twentieth century. The national idea's effect upon the conduct of interstate competition was profound. It altered not merely the rules of interstate interaction, but also the perceptions of bureaucrats and policymakers, changing the very categories that defined their visions of the political world inside as well as outside the boundaries of their states.