The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

global
system at a time
when Edwardian-era minds were still employed in exertions over a European
continental
system.
23
That continental system had its roots in the post-
Napoleonic Congress of Vienna almost a hundred years earlier, and was in its
dying days though few, save for Mackinder and some others, intuited it. The
cataclysm of World War I, which erupted a decade after the publication of “The
Geographical Pivot of History,” pitted Germany-Prussia and czarist Russia
against each other on the eastern front, and German land power against British-
French maritime power on the western front, thus upholding in a vague manner
Mackinder’s struggle-for-the-Heartland idea, while at the same time adding
complications and adjustments to it. 
Democratic Ideals and Reality
was his
book-length update to “The Geographical Pivot of History,” appearing the same
year as the Versailles Peace Conference. He warned the peacemakers “that the
issue between sea power and land power had not been finally resolved and that
the duel between Teuton and Slav was yet to be fought out,” despite a war that
had cost millions of lives.
24
“The Geographical Pivot of History” was a theory
only; 
Democratic Ideals and Reality
, rather, a revised and expanded thesis that
was also a far-sighted warning.
The writing in 
Democratic Ideals
seethes with description, erudition, and
illuminating tangents about both contemporary and antique landscapes, as
Mackinder presents the world from both a seaman’s and a landsman’s
perspective. Nile valley civilization, he tells us, thinking like a seaman, was
protected on the east and west by deserts, and never suffered from Mediterranean
piracy only because of the marshlands of the Delta to the north: this helped
provide Egyptian kingdoms with extraordinary levels of stability. To the north of
Egypt in the eastern Mediterranean lay the island of Crete, the largest and most
fruitful of the Greek islands, and therefore “the first base of sea power” in the

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Western world, for “the man-power of the sea must be nourished by land fertility
somewhere.” From Crete, mariners may have settled the Aegean “ ‘sea-
chamber’ ” that formed the very basis of Greek civilization: Greek sea power
flourished until challenged by Persian land power, Mackinder goes on. But the
Persian effort failed. It was the half-Greek Macedonians to the north, “in the root
of the Greek Peninsula itself,” who finally conquered the whole Aegean. For
Macedonia, being more remote from the sea than Greece, bred a race of
“landmen and mountaineers,” who were more obedient to their rulers even as
they were excellent warriors, and yet still close enough to the sea to have a sense
of the wider world. It was this Macedonian conquest, making the Aegean a
“closed sea”—thus depriving the Greeks and the Phoenicians of their bases—
that allowed Alexander the Great, a Macedonian, the luxury to attempt the land
conquest of the Greater Near East. Mackinder then illuminates the geographical
origins of Roman and later empires, even as he admits that geography is not
always an explanation for history: for example, the Saracens from the Sahara in
the southern Mediterranean conquered Spain in the northern Mediterranean,
while the Romans in the northern Mediterranean conquered Carthage in the
southern Mediterranean, in both cases because of the will of men in the form of
exceptional sea power.
And yet, as Mackinder suggests, however dramatic the accomplishments of
individuals, geographical forces, acting upon human cultures, tend ultimately to
win through. For example, there is the case of Petersburg, which Peter the Great
made the capital of Russia in “the teeth of a hostile geography,” even as culture
and highly motivated individuals made its survival technically possible. So in the
short run Peter triumphed, and for two centuries “the Russian Empire was ruled
from this ‘folly.’ ” But in the end landbound Moscow—and geography—again
won out. Human volition has its limits.
25
Mackinder’s departure point for the post–World War I era is his salient
perception from the “Pivot” that we are confronted for the first time in history
with a “closed system,” in which “political ownership of all the dry land” has
been “pegged out.” In this new global geography, the dry-land area forms a “vast
cape,” or “World-Promontory,” as he puts it, stretching from the British Isles and
Iberia south all the way around the bulge of West Africa and the Cape of Good
Hope, and then across the Indian Ocean up to the Indian Subcontinent and East
Asia. Thus, Eurasia and Africa together form the “World-Island,” something that
as the decades march on will be increasingly a cohesive unit:
26
There is one ocean covering nine-twelfths of the globe; there is one
continent—the World-Island—covering two-twelfths of the globe; and

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there are many smaller islands, whereof North America and South
America are, for effective purposes, two, which together cover the
remaining one-twelfth.
27
Furthermore, one could say that 75 percent of the human population lives in
Eurasia (to speak nothing of Africa), which contains most of the world’s wealth,
60 percent of its gross domestic product, and three-quarters of its energy
resources.
28
The implicit assumption in Mackinder’s thesis is that Eurasia will dominate
geopolitical calculations, even as Europe will be less and less of an entity
separate from the rest of Eurasia and Africa. “The Old World has become
insular, or in other words a unit, incomparably the largest geographical unit on
our globe.” From the end of the Napoleonic Wars, with the exception of
Portuguese Mozambique, German East Africa, and the Dutch East Indies, British
sea power encompassed this “World-Promontory.” Mackinder compares the
Roman control of the Mediterranean, with its legions along the Rhine frontier,
with British domination of the Indian Ocean (the Promontory’s chief sea), while
the British army stakes out the northwest frontier of India against an encroaching
czarist Russia.
29
The implications of Mackinder’s “closed system,” in which it is possible to
conceive of the entire breadth of Eurasia and Africa as one organic unit, and the
further closing of that system throughout the course of the twentieth century and
beyond, forms the core point of my own study, from which others will emerge.
But it is equally crucial to acknowledge that even a closed system, in which, for
example, the Indian Ocean is a vascular center of the world economy, with
tankers in the future collecting oil and natural gas from Somalia for deposit in
China, is still divided from within by geography. Geography, in fact, becomes all
the more important in a closed system, because of that system’s propensity to
make the effect, say, of a harsh terrain in Afghanistan register politically from
one end of the World-Island to the other.
For now, let us return to explore exactly what Mackinder meant by the
Heartland, which so much affects the destiny of the World-Island.
Mackinder both begins and sums up his thinking with this oft-quoted grand and
simplistic dictum: