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Chapter VI
THE RIMLAND THESIS
Robert Strausz-Hupé was not the only naturalized American to be warning his
fellow citizens during the war about the need to take geopolitics out of Nazi
hands, restore its reputation, and employ it for the benefit of the United States.
Nicholas J. Spykman was born in 1893 in Amsterdam. During the First World
War, when the Netherlands was neutral, he traveled extensively as a foreign
correspondent in the Near East (1913 to 1919) and in the Far East (1919 to
1920). Following the war, he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at the
University of California, Berkeley, where he also taught, and then went to Yale,
where he founded the Institute of International Studies in 1935.
1
He imbued his
students with an awareness of geography as the principal means to assess the
dangers and opportunities that his adopted country faced in the world. He died of
cancer in 1943 at the age of forty-nine, but not before publishing the prior year
America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of
Power
, a book that even more than the work of Mackinder gives us a framework
for understanding the Post Cold War world. Spykman, who lived later, in some
senses updates Mackinder.
In the vein of Strausz-Hupé, Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, and other
European immigrants in the middle decades of the twentieth century, who
brought realism to a country that had given them refuge but which they felt was
dangerously naive, Spykman would have none of the idealism and
sentimentalism that was a characteristic of much American thinking. Geography
is everything, he argues. The United States was a great power less because of its
ideas than because, with direct access to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it was
“the most favored state in the world from the point of view of location.”
2
With
Spykman there is no respite from the heartlessness of the map and the
consequent struggle for space. He writes, “International society is … a society
without a central authority to preserve law and order.” It is in a state of anarchy,
in other words. Thus, all states must struggle for self-preservation. Statesmen
can strive for the universal values of justice, fairness, and tolerance, but only so
far as they do not interfere with the quest for power, which to him is
synonymous with survival. “The search for power is not made for the
achievement of moral values; moral values are used to facilitate the attainment
of power.” Such a statement could almost have been made by Karl Haushofer,
and there is much tragedy in that realization. But that should not blind us to the
fundamental difference between the two men. Spykman, like Mackinder and
Strausz-Hupé, believes in the “safety” of “balanced power,” not in domination.
From that difference flows all the others. For the “balance of power,” Spykman
is careful to say, corresponds with the “law of nature and Christian ethics”
because it preserves the peace.
3
While Strausz-Hupé focuses down-and-in on Nazi geopolitical theory and in
the process defends Mackinder, Spykman focuses up-and-out on the world map
to assess the prospects of Nazi domination, as well as to outline the power
configurations of a postwar world that he would not live to see. He begins with a
geographical explanation about how the United States became a great power.
“History,” Spykman says, “is made in the temperate latitudes,” where moderate
climates prevail, “and, because very little of the land mass of the Southern
Hemisphere lies in this zone, history is made in the temperate latitudes of the
Northern Hemisphere.” It is not that sub-Saharan Africa and the Southern Cone
of South America do not matter, for they matter much more in our day than in
the past because of transport and communications technology that has allowed
every place to affect every other; rather, it is that they still have less worldwide
impact than do places in the Northern Hemisphere, and particularly those places
in the northern temperate zone. James Fairgrieve, a near-contemporary of
Mackinder, explains that because of the lack of solar energy compared to the
tropics, human beings in the temperate zones must work harder to deal with
greater varieties of weather, and with the differences in seasons that lead to
definite times for sowing and harvest: thus, it is in the temperate zones where
human beings “advance from strength to strength.” And whereas at the South
Pole there is a great continent surrounded by an unbroken ring of ocean, around
the North Pole there is an ocean surrounded by a near-unbroken ring of land—
the land where human beings have been the most productive. Strausz-Hupé is
even more specific in this regard, telling us that history is made between “twenty
and sixty degrees north latitude.” This area includes North America, Europe, the
Greater Middle East and North Africa, most of Russia, China, and the bulk of
India. Mackinder’s “wilderness girdle” is roughly consistent with it, for it takes
in the Heartland and adjacent marginal zones of Eurasia. The critical fact about
the United States, according to this line of thinking, is that, located below the
Canadian Arctic, it occupies the last great, relatively empty tract of the temperate
zone that wasn’t settled by urban civilization until the time of the European
Enlightenment. Furthermore, America initially prospered, Spykman writes,
because the east coast, with its estuaries and indentations, provided
“innumerable favorable locations for harbors.”
4
Ultimately, in this view,
geography was the early sustainer of American freedom.
America’s great power position exists because the United States is the
regional hegemon in the Western Hemisphere, with, as Spykman says, “power to
spare for activities outside the New World,” so that it can affect the balance of
power in the Eastern Hemisphere.
5
This is no mean feat, and something the
United States should not take for granted, for it is rooted in the specifics of Latin
American geography. No other nation in the world, not China or Russia, is a
hegemon of hemispheric proportions. In explaining how this came about,
Spykman brings South America—which Mackinder largely ignores—into the
discussion of geopolitics. Because of Mackinder’s concentration on Eurasia, and
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