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

participation in the army plot against Hitler. This was after Haushofer and his
family had been incarcerated. Then there was the fact that Haushofer’s wife was
part Jewish: the couple was protected from Nazi race laws by Hess, who was
imprisoned in Britain in 1941 after a solo flight there to negotiate a separate
peace. The contradictions in Haushofer’s life must have become too much to
bear, as he gradually became aware of the monumental carnage and destruction
in a world war that he did his part to bring about. Haushofer’s life is a signal
lesson in the dangers inherent for men of ideas who seek desperately to
ingratiate themselves with those in power. Soon after Germany’s defeat and an
Allied investigation of him for war crimes, both Haushofer and his wife
committed suicide.
Strausz-Hupé’s work is not merely designed to discredit Haushofer and rescue
the reputation of Mackinder, but to implore Americans to take geopolitics
seriously, because if they don’t, others of ill intent will, and in the process
vanquish the United States. As he writes at the end of his book:
The Nazi war machine is the 
instrument
of conquest; 
Geopolitik
is the
master plan
designed to tell those who wield the instrument what to
conquer and how. It is late, but not too late to profit by the lessons of
Geopolitik
.
8

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For Strausz-Hupé is every inch a realist. Exposing some of the intellectual
underpinnings of a totalitarian state’s program of conquest is not enough for him,
and in addition is much too easy. He knows the uncomfortable truth that just as
Mackinder’s reasoning is flawed in crucial ways, Haushofer’s reasoning, though
perverted, does have a basis in reality. Therefore, Strausz-Hupé’s aim is to imbue
Americans—who live in splendid isolation by virtue of being bounded by two
oceans—with a greater appreciation of the geographical discipline, so that the
United States can assume its postwar role as a stabilizer and preserver of the
Eurasian balance of power, which the Nazis, helped by Haushofer, attempted to
overturn.
As for the Heartland thesis itself, Strausz-Hupé, who is extremely skeptical of
it to begin with, says that air power—both commercial and military—may render
it meaningless. Nevertheless, he does believe that Industrial Age technology
provided the advantage to big states: large factories, railway lines, and tanks and
aircraft carriers are best taken advantage of by states with depth of distance and
territory. “The history of our times appears to reflect, with malignant fatality, the
trend toward empires and super-states predicted by the Ratzels, Spenglers, and
Mackinders.”
9
Of course, the postindustrial age, with its emphasis on smallness
—microchips, mobile phones, plastic explosives—has empowered not only large
states but individuals and stateless groups, too, adding only a deeper complexity
and tension to geopolitics. But Strausz-Hupé intuits some of this in his
discussion of frontiers, which he takes up on account of Haushofer’s misuse of
Curzon in this matter.
Despite Haushofer’s nihilism, Strausz-Hupé will not be intimidated into
debunking him outright. For the very fact of frontiers shows a world beset by
political and military divisions. “The sovereign state is, at least by its origins,
organized force. Its history begins in war. Hence its frontiers—be they ‘good’ or
‘bad’—are strategic frontiers,” Strausz-Hupé writes. He tellingly selects a
quotation from Curzon in which the latter notes that frontier wars will increase
in number and intensity as “the habitable globe shrinks,” at which time “the
ambitions of one state come into sharp and irreconcilable collision with those of
another.”
10
 In other words, Haushofer is not altogether wrong in his assumption
of perpetual conflict. Even after the war, there will be little respite from the
tragedy of the human condition. The very crowding of the planet in recent
decades, coupled with the advance of military technology, in which time and
distance have been collapsed, means that there will be a crisis of “room” on the
map of the world.
11
This crisis of room follows from Mackinder’s idea of a

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“closed system.” For now let us note that it adds urgency to Strausz-Hupé’s plea
that America, which for him represents the ultimate source of good in a world of
great powers, can never afford to withdraw from geopolitics. For geopolitics and
the competition for “space” is eternal. Liberal states will have to gird themselves
for the task, lest they leave the field to the likes of Haushofer.

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