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

The
Geographical Journal
in London. Mackinder’s thesis is that Central Asia,
helping to form as it does the Eurasian Heartland, is the pivot on which the fate
of great world empires rests: for the earth’s very layout of natural arteries
between mountain ranges and along river valleys encourages the rise of empires,
declared or undeclared, rather than states. Before exploring how this notion,
slightly redefined, helps illuminate our own geopolitics, it is worth describing
how Mackinder reached his conclusion. For his article, taking in the whole of
history and human settlement patterns, is the archetype of the geographical
discipline, recalling the work of Herodotus and Ibn Khaldun, and presaging
stylistically the work of McNeill, Hodgson, and the French historian and
geographer Fernand Braudel. As Mackinder writes, in the manner of Braudel,
“Man and not nature initiates, but nature in large measure controls.”
8
Mackinder’s opening sentence suggests the epic sweep of his article:
When historians in the remote future come to look back on the group
of centuries through which we are now passing, and see them fore-
shortened, as we to-day see the Egyptian dynasties, it may well be that
they will describe the last 400 years as the Columbian epoch, and will

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say that it ended soon after the year 1900.
9
He explains that whereas medieval Christendom was “pent into a narrow
region and threatened by external barbarism,” the Columbian age—the Age of
Discovery—saw Europe expand across the oceans into other continents against
“negligible resistances.” But from the present time forth, in the post-Columbian
age (he writes from the vantage point of 1904), “we shall again have to deal with
a closed political system,” and this time one of “worldwide scope.” Elaborating,
he says:
Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a
surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will
[henceforth] be sharply reechoed from the far side of the globe, and
weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world
will be shattered in consequence.
10
By perceiving that there was no more room on the planet for European
empires to expand, he also understood that European wars would have to be
played out on a worldwide scale, something which would come true in World
Wars I and II. Yet, as I learned years ago at a seminar at the United States
Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, 
attrition of
the same adds up to big change
. In other words, while the Age of Discovery had
more or less ended by 1900, throughout the twentieth century and up through the
present day—and especially looking forward to the coming decades—that closed
and crowded map or chessboard of Mackinder’s, as I’ve already indicated, has
filled up even more: not just in terms of population, but in terms of the range of
weaponry. The Middle East, for example, in the last fifty years alone has gone
from a rural society to one of immense megacities. The world, as I’ve learned as
a foreign correspondent for the past thirty years, is even in some of its remotest
parts heavily urbanized. We will later revisit in depth all the implications of this
newly crowded map, but to do that we must first return to Mackinder and his
Eurasia pivot theory.
Mackinder asks us to look at European history as “subordinate” to that of
Asia, for he believes that European civilization is merely the outcome of the
struggle against Asiatic invasion. Ahead of McNeill by decades, Mackinder
points out that Europe became the cultural phenomenon that it is mainly because
of its geography: an intricate array of mountains, valleys, and peninsulas—from
which individual nations would emerge—set against the immense and
threatening flatland of Russia to the east. That Russian flatland was divided

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between forest to the north and steppe to the south. The earliest incarnations of
Poland and Russia were established, as Mackinder explains, wholly in the
protective embraces of the northern forest; for out of the naked southern steppe
from the fifth to the sixteenth centuries came a succession of nomadic invaders:
Huns, Avers, Bulgarians, Magyars, Kalmuks, Cummins, Patzinaks, Mongols,
and others. For on the Heartland steppe the land is unceasingly flat, the climate
hard, and the vegetable production limited to grass, in turn destroyed by sand,
driven by powerful winds. Such conditions bred hard and cruel races of men
who had at once to destroy any adversaries they came across or be destroyed
themselves, as there was no better means of defense in one spot than in another.
It was the union of Franks, Goths, and Roman provincials against these Asiatics
that produced the basis for modern France. Likewise, Venice, the Papacy,
Germany, Austria, Hungary, and other burgeoning European powers would all
originate, or at least mature, through their threatening encounter with Asiatic
steppe nomads. As Mackinder writes:
When we reflect that through several centuries of the Dark Ages the
Norse pagans in their ships were at piracy on the Northern seas, and
the Saracen and Moorish infidels in their ships at piracy on the
Mediterranean, and that the horse-riding Turks from Asia raided thus
into the very heart of the Christian peninsula when it was clasped by
hostile seapower, we have some idea of the pounding, as between
pestle and mortar, which went into the making of modern Europe. The
pestle was landpower from the Heartland.
11
Meanwhile, Russia, protected by forest glades against many a rampaging host,
nevertheless fell prey in the thirteenth century to the Golden Horde of the
Mongols. Thus would Russia be denied access to the European Renaissance, and
branded forever with the bitterest feelings of inferiority and insecurity. The
ultimate land-based empire, with no natural barriers against invasion save for the
forest itself, Russia would know forevermore what it was like to be brutally
conquered, and as a result would become perennially obsessed with expanding
and holding territory, or at least dominating its contiguous shadow zones.
Whereas the Mongol invasions out of Central Asia decimated and
subsequently changed not only Russia, but Turkey, Iran, India, China, and the
northern reaches of the Arab Middle East, Europe in many parts knew no such
level of destruction, and thus was able to emerge as the political cockpit of the
world.
12
 Indeed, given that the Sahara Desert blocked Europe off from almost all
of Africa, the macro-destiny of medieval Europe up until the Columbian epoch,

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according to Mackinder, was to be generally conditioned by what happened on
the Asian steppe. And it wasn’t only the Mongols that we are talking about; the
Seljuk Turks, bursting out of the heartland steppe in the tenth and eleventh
centuries, overran much of the Middle East, and it was their ill treatment of
Christian pilgrims at Jerusalem that ostensibly led to the Crusades, which
Mackinder considers the beginning of Europe’s collective modern history.
Mackinder goes on in this vein, laying out for the reader a Eurasia bounded by
ice to the north and tropical ocean to the south, which has four marginal regions
at its extremities, all of them positioned under the shadow of the vast and pivotal
expanse of Central Asia and its Mongol-Turkic hordes. These four marginal
regions, as he informs us, correspond not coincidentally to the four great
numerical religions: for faith, too, in Mackinder’s judgment, is a function of
geography. There are the “monsoon lands,” one in the east facing the Pacific
Ocean, the home of Buddhism; the other in the south facing the Indian Ocean,
the home of Hinduism. The third marginal region is Europe itself, watered by the
Atlantic to the west, the hub of Christianity. But the most fragile of the four
outliers is the Middle East, home of Islam, “deprived of moisture by the
proximity of Africa,” and “except in the oases … thinly peopled” (in 1904, that
is). Devoid of forest, dominated by desert, and thus wide open to nomadic
invasions and to subsequent upheavals and revolutions, the Middle East is, in
addition—because of its propinquity to gulfs, seas, and oceans—particularly
vulnerable to sea power (even as it benefits by it). Strictly speaking, the Greater
Middle East, in Mackinder’s wholly geographic viewpoint, is the ultimate
unstable transition zone, the sprawling way station between the Mediterranean
world and Indian and Chinese civilizations, registering all the monumental shifts
in power politics. This is an altogether consistent precursor to Hodgson’s
depiction of the Greater Middle East as the Oikoumene of the world of antiquity,
which gave birth to three of the great confessional religions (Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam), and continued its pivotal role in geopolitics into modern
times.
And yet for Mackinder, writing in an age before Big Oil and pipelines and
ballistic missiles, the globe’s geographical pivot, nevertheless, lies slightly
afield. For he brushes aside the Middle East and plows onward with his thesis.
The Columbian epoch, he writes, featured the discovery of the sea route to
India around the Cape of Good Hope, thus bypassing the Middle East. Whereas
in the Middle Ages, Europe was “caged between an impassable desert to south,
an unknown ocean to west … icy or forested wastes to north and northeast,” and
“horsemen and camelmen” to the east and southeast, she now suddenly had
access via the Indian Ocean to the entire rimland of southern Asia, to say

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nothing of her strategic discoveries in the New World.
But while the peoples of Western Europe “covered the ocean with their
fleets,” Russia was expanding equally impressively on land, “emerging from her
northern forests” to police the steppe with her Cossacks against the Mongol
nomads. So just as Portuguese, Dutch, and English mariners triumphantly
rounded the Cape, Russia was sweeping into Siberia and sending peasants to
sow the southwestern steppe with wheat fields, outflanking the Islamic Iranian
world. Toynbee and others would make this point decades later, but Mackinder
was among the first.
13
It was an old story this, Europe versus Russia: a liberal
sea power—as were Athens and Venice—against a reactionary land power—as
was Sparta and Prussia. For the sea, in addition to the cosmopolitan influences it
bestows by virtue of access to distant harbors, provides the sort of inviolate
border security necessary for liberalism and democracy to take root. (The United
States is virtually an island nation bordered by two oceans and the thinly peopled
Canadian Arctic to the north. Only to its south is it threatened by the forces of
Mexican demography.)
Mackinder notes that in the nineteenth century steam and the Suez Canal
increased the mobility of sea power around the southern rimland of Eurasia,
even as the development of railways began to act as “feeders for ocean-going
commerce.” But as he also notes, railways were now beginning to do the same
for land power as they already had for sea power, and nowhere so much as in the
heartland of Eurasia, which was previously hampered by the lack of stone and
timber necessary for road making.
At last, he reaches his main point:
As we consider this rapid review of the broader currents of history,
does not a certain persistence of geographical relationship become
evident? Is not the pivot region of the world’s politics that vast area of
Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to
the horse-riding nomads, and is to-day about to be covered with a
network of railways?
In Mackinder’s view, the centrality of an expanded Russia at the beginning of
the twentieth century would replace that of the Mongol hordes, which some
might argue had the greatest effect on world history during the second
millennium. Just as the Mongols banged at—and often broke down—the gates of
the marginal regions of Eurasia (Finland, Poland, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Persia,
India, and China), so, too, now would Russia, sustained by the cohesiveness of
its landmass, won by the recent development of its railways. For as Mackinder

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writes, “the geographical quantities in the calculation are more measurable and
more nearly constant than the human.” Forget the czars and in 1904 the
commissars-yet-to-be, they are but trivia compared to the deeper, tectonic forces
of geography and technology. This is not to say that Mackinder was helped by
current events. For within two weeks of his famous lecture, the Japanese navy
attacked Port Arthur at the southern entrance to Manchuria in the first battle of
the Russo-Japanese War. The war ended a year later with the Battle of Tsushima
Strait, where the Japanese won a great victory at sea. In other words, while
Mackinder was proclaiming the importance of land power, it was sea power that
defeated the most sprawling land power on earth in this early conflict of the
twentieth century.
14
Still, Mackinder’s seeming determinism prepared us well for the rise of the
Soviet Union and its enormous zone of influence in the second half of the
twentieth century, as well as for the two world wars in the first half, which were,
as the historian Paul Kennedy points out, struggles for Mackinder’s “rimlands,”
running from Eastern Europe to the Himalayas and beyond.
15
 From the Russian
Revolution right up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, railways in Central
Asia and Siberia expanded by 45,000 miles, proving Mackinder’s point.
16
Cold
War containment strategy, moreover, would depend heavily on rimland bases
across the Greater Middle East and the Indian Ocean. Indeed, the U.S. projection
of power into the rimlands of Afghanistan and Iraq, and America’s tension with
Russia over the political fate of Central Asia and the Caucasus—the
geographical pivot itself—have given yet more legitimacy to Mackinder’s thesis.
In his last paragraph, Mackinder raises the specter of Chinese conquests of
Russian territory, which would make, he says, China the dominant geopolitical
power. If one looks at how Chinese migrants are now demographically claiming