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

by Robert D. Kaplan

  But Mackinder, at least initially, was proven wrong in this matter. He does not seem to have realized, as Toynbee did, that a Europe whose borders were drawn up on the principle of national self-determination was liable to be a Europe dominated by Germany—larger, geographically better positioned, and more powerful than any of the other ethnically bound states. Indeed, Germany would conquer Eastern Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s, and Russia, in reaction, would conquer these newly independent states of Mackinder’s buffer zone, keeping them in a prison of nations from 1945 to 1989. Only in the last generation has hope arisen that a spiritual Central Europe can survive between the two land powers of Russia and Germany. So why did Mackinder, the arch-realist, suddenly go soft, as it were, in supporting what were, in effect, “Wilsonian” principles of national self-determination? Because, as one scholar, Arthur Butler Dugan, suggests, Mackinder was, his daring and deterministic theories notwithstanding, a child of his time, “a product of the ‘climate of opinion’ more than he realized.”33

  Mackinder deep down was a liberal, or at least became one. He imagined the British Commonwealth as becoming an association of cultures and peoples, different but equal; and he believed that a league of democracies would be the best defense against an imperial superpower in the heart of Eurasia (thus foreseeing NATO’s struggle against the Soviet Union).34

  Mackinder’s drift toward Wilsonian principles, which began in Democratic Ideals and Reality, forms the centerpiece of his revision of his own “Heartland” theory. The theory was first expounded in the “Geographical Pivot” article, without using the term “Heartland.” The term was actually coined by Fairgrieve in his own book, Geography and World Power, in 1915. To the pivot areas of Central Asia identified in 1904, Mackinder added in 1919 the “Tibetan and Mongolian upland courses of the great rivers of India and China,” and the whole broad belt of countries going north to south from Scandinavia to Anatolia, and including Eastern and Central Europe: so that the new Heartland would more or less approximate the Soviet Empire at the height of its power during the Cold War.35 Or I should say: the Soviet Empire plus Norway, northern Turkey, Iran, and western China. Because the bulk of the Chinese population live not in the west but in the monsoonal coastlands, Mackinder’s Heartland is the bulk of interior Eurasia that is relatively sparsely populated, with the demographic immensities of China, India, and the western half of Europe to the sides of it. The Middle East (specifically Arabia and the Fertile Crescent) was neither heavily populated nor part of the Heartland, but as Mackinder writes in 1919, now central to the destiny of the World-Island, because it is the “passage-land” from Europe to the Indies and from the northern part of the Heartland to the southern part, as well as being accessible by several water bodies around the Arabian Peninsula.36 But the destiny of Arabia, as that of Europe, is heavily influenced by the Heartland; and the most proximate part of the Heartland to Arabia is Iran, a lesson we should bear in mind for our own time. Indeed, the Iranian plateau is critical, and I will deal with it later.

  A fascinating exception here is Greece, which is geographically part of the independent tier of buffer states between Germany and Russia, but which Mackinder leaves out of his expanded Heartland of 1919 because Greece, as he says, is so much bounded by water and therefore accessible to sea power. Greece was the first of these states to be liberated from German control in World War I. Here, too, Mackinder showed prescience. “Possession of Greece by a great Heartland power,” he writes, “would probably carry with it the control of the World-Island.”37 In fact, that almost happened. After heavy fighting in a civil war between pro-Western and communist guerrillas, Greece became the only one of these buffer lands not to fall within the Soviet orbit after World War II, and later formed with Turkey a strategic southern ridgeline of NATO. The Soviets, as it happened, would go on to lose the Cold War.

  According to Mackinder, Europe and the Middle East are much more affected by the Heartland than India and China, whose hundreds of millions of people are self-contained and thus able to peacefully develop. This leads him to predict that the future lies to a large extent in the “Monsoon lands of India and China.”38

  But why is the Heartland so important in the first place? Is control of the broad lowlands and tablelands of the Eurasian interior truly pivotal to world power? Yes, they are rich in oil and strategic minerals and metals, but is that even enough? Mackinder’s idea is mechanical in the extreme. And yet, partly as a consequence, it provides a vehicle for explaining so much about the spatial arrangement of states and peoples around the Eastern Hemisphere. It is easier to explain the relationships between one end of Eurasia and the other by having the center of it as a reference point, rather than any coastal margin. The Heartland may best be seen as a register of power around the World-Island rather than the determiner of it. Near the end of Democratic Ideals and Reality Mackinder posits that if the Soviet Union emerges from World War I ahead of Germany, “she must rank as the greatest land Power on the globe,” because of her ability to garrison the Heartland.39 The Soviet Union did so eventually emerge, and did so again after World War II. Thus, it came to face off, as Mackinder indicated it would, against the world’s preeminent sea power, the United States. It was in quest of sea power—the search for a warm-water port on the Indian Ocean—that the Soviets ultimately invaded Afghanistan, a small part of the Heartland that had eluded its grasp. And by getting entrapped by guerrillas in Afghanistan the Kremlin’s whole empire fell apart. Now Russia, greatly reduced in size, tries to reconsolidate that same Heartland—Belarus, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. That, in and of itself, a century after Mackinder put down his theories, constitutes one of the principal geopolitical dramas of our time.

  Chapter V

  THE NAZI DISTORTION

  As heirs to land power, Germans and Russians have over the centuries thought more in terms of geography than Americans and Britons, heirs to sea power. For Russians, mindful of the devastation wrought by the Golden Horde of the Mongols, geography means simply that without expansion there is the danger of being overrun. Enough territory is never enough. Russia’s need for an empire of Eastern European satellites during the Cold War, and its use of military power, subversion, and the configuration of its energy pipeline routes all designed to gain back its near-abroad, and thus reconstitute in effect the former Soviet Union, are the wages of a deep insecurity. But Germans, at least through the middle of the twentieth century, were more conscious of geography still. The shape of German-speaking territories on the map of Europe changed constantly from the Dark Ages through modern times, with the unification of a German state occurring only in the 1860s under Otto von Bismarck. Germany stood at the very heart of Europe, a land and sea power both, and thus fully conscious of its ties to maritime Western Europe and to the Heartland of Russia–Eastern Europe. Germany’s victories against Denmark, Habsburg Austria, and France were ultimately the result of Bismarck’s strategic brilliance, anchored in his acute sense of geography, which was actually the recognition of limits: namely, those Slavic regions to the east and southeast where Germany dare not go. Germany’s abjuration of Bismarck’s caution led to its loss in World War I, which gave Germans a keener sense of their geographic vulnerability—and possibilities. Historically changeable on the map, lying between sea to the north and Alps to the south, with the plains to the west and east open to invasion and expansion both, Germans have literally lived geography. It was they who developed and elaborated upon geopolitics, or Geopolitik in German, which is the concept of politically and militarily dominated space. And it was such geographical theories, which in the first half of the twentieth century owed much to Mackinder, that was to lead to the Germans’ undoing—discrediting geography and geopolitics for generations of Germans since World War II.

  The rise and fall of Geopolitik, in which one theoretician after another both built on and misused the work of his predecessor, began in earnest with Friedrich Ratzel, a late-nineteenth-century German geographer and ethn
ographer, who coined the idea of Lebensraum, or “living space.” The concept actually owes its origin to a German immigrant in early-nineteenth-century America, Friedrich List, a journalist, political science professor, business speculator, and friend of Henry Clay, who drew inspiration from the Monroe Doctrine, with its notion of a vast and virtually sovereign geographical area. As for Ratzel, he was also much influenced by the writings of Charles Darwin, and thus developed an organic, somewhat biological sense of geography in which borders were constantly evolving depending upon the size and makeup of the human populations in the vicinity. While we regard borders as static, as the very representation of permanence, legality, and stability, Ratzel saw only gradual expansion, contraction, and impermanence in the affairs of nations. For him the map breathed as though a living being, and from this came the idea of the organic-biological state whose expansion was written into natural law.

  One of Ratzel’s students, a Swede, Rudolf Kjellén, would as a political scientist at the universities in Uppsala and Göteborg coin the word “Geopolitik.” Kjellén, an intense Swedish nationalist, feared Russian expansionism in quest of the relatively warm waters of the Baltic Sea. He wanted an expansionist Sweden and Finland to counter Russia’s designs. While Kjellén found support for his views with members of the aristocracy and upper middle classes, nostalgic for Sweden’s past grandeur under kings such as Gustavus Adolfus and Charles XII, there was ultimately too little public support for his views. The appetite for great power preoccupations in Scandinavia, even by the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, was long past. Kjellén transferred all his hopes to a Greater Germany—to stand forth against Russia and England, both of which he especially detested. Kjellén’s German empire-of-the-future, as he cataloged it, included all of Central and Eastern Europe as well as the Channel ports along the French coast, and the Baltic provinces of Russia, Ukraine, Asia Minor, and Mesopotamia (to be connected to Berlin by a great railway). Employing Ratzel’s ideas, Kjellén categorized human societies in racial, biological terms, conceiving of the state in terms of the Volk, which, if sufficiently virile and dynamic, would require an especially large amount of living space. It is the very glibness and windiness inhabiting the thought of Ratzel and Kjellén that a later generation of murderers would make use of to justify their acts. Ideas matter, for good and for bad, and hazy ideas can be especially dangerous. Whereas legitimate geography shows us what we are up against in the challenges we face around the world, Ratzel’s and Kjellén’s is an illegitimate geography that annihilates the individual and replaces him with the vast racial multitude.

  This is all but prologue to the life of Karl Haushofer, the geopolitician of Nazism and steadfast admirer of Mackinder. The tragic perversion of Mackinder’s work by Haushofer, as well as the danger posed by Nazi Geopolitik, is elegantly told in a largely forgotten but classic work of political science, Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power by Robert Strausz-Hupé, published in 1942. Strausz-Hupé, an Austrian immigrant to the United States, was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and a U.S. ambassador to four countries (including Turkey) during the Cold War years. In 1955 in Philadelphia, he founded the Foreign Policy Research Institute, with which I have been loosely affiliated for two decades. Strausz-Hupé’s book, written before the tide turned in the Allies’ favor in World War II, was a clear-cut attempt not only to explain the danger of Nazi Geopolitik to the fellow citizens of his adopted country, but to explain what geopolitics is and why it is important, so that the forces of good can make use of it in a much different way than the Nazis were doing. Strausz-Hupé thus rescues the reputation of Mackinder and the discipline itself, while performing an act of individual agency in doing his intellectual part to win the war.

  Major General Professor Doktor Karl Haushofer was born in 1869 in Munich. His grandfather, uncle, and father all wrote about cartography and travel. Thus was his life marked. Haushofer joined the Bavarian army and in 1909 was appointed artillery instructor to the Japanese army. He became infatuated with the military rise of Japan, with which he advocated a German alliance. Haushofer fought in World War I as a brigade commander, and had as his aide the Nazi Rudolf Hess, to whom he would later dedicate several books. After the war Haushofer was appointed to the chair of geography and military science at the University of Munich, where Hess followed him as a disciple. It was through Hess that Haushofer met the “rising agitator” Adolf Hitler, whom Haushofer would visit and provide academic briefings on geopolitics while Hitler was imprisoned at Landsberg fortress, following the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Hitler was writing Mein Kampf at the time, and as a partially educated man, he needed, despite his intuition, to know more about the real world. And here was this university professor who could fill some of the gaps in his knowledge. Chapter 14 of Mein Kampf, which defines Nazi foreign policy and the Nazi ideal of Lebensraum, was possibly influenced by Haushofer, who was in turn influenced by, among others, Ratzel, Kjellén, and especially Mackinder. For Mackinder had written that world history has always been made by the great outward thrusts of landlocked peoples located near Eastern Europe and the Heartland of Eurasia.1

  Strausz-Hupé takes us on a journey along the line of thought by which Haushofer came to be mesmerized by his contemporary Mackinder. Mackinder, though obsessed with land power, never actually denigrated the importance of sea power. But he was pessimistic about the ability of British sea power to prevent a raid on the Heartland by German land power. And once in possession of the Heartland, Germany could build a great navy to aid in its conquest of the World-Island. In the twentieth century, Mackinder explained that, more than ever, sea power required a broader and deeper landward reach to take advantage of industrialization. The Industrial Age meant a world of big states, and the strong ate the weak. Haushofer adopted this theory of Mackinder “to the opposite German point of view,” Strausz-Hupé writes, “and concluded that the path to German world power lay along the lines that had frightened the English, i.e., consolidation of the German and Russian ‘greater areas.’ ” Haushofer, in the words of Strausz-Hupé, goes positively cloudy and mystical and nebulous when describing Mackinder’s Heartland. It is the “cradle of world conquerors,” “a gigantic citadel reaching from ‘the Elbe to the Amur,’ ” that is, from central Germany to Manchuria and the Russian Far East, deep into which Germany can withdraw her vital war industries while its army and navy can strike outward in all directions.2

  Whereas Mackinder, influenced by Wilsonianism and the need to preserve the balance of power in Eurasia, recommended in 1919 a belt of independent states in Eastern Europe, Haushofer, inverting Mackinder’s thesis, calls a few years later for the “extinction of such states.” Haushofer, Strausz-Hupé reports, calls them “bits of states … fragments,” whose inhabitants think only in terms of “narrow space,” which to Haushofer, as Strausz-Hupé explains, “is the unmistakable symptom of decay.” Strausz-Hupé goes on, uncovering Haushofer’s “neat logic” about the dissolution of the British Empire and the need to break up the Soviet Union into its component ethnic parts, which will all lean on a Greater Germany, which in Haushofer’s view is the only state entitled to national self-determination. For in Haushofer’s own words, “one-third of the German people [are] living under alien rule outside the borders of the Reich.” German Geopolitik, Strausz-Hupé warns, is a world of “acrobatics on the ideological trapeze,” with conclusions of “stark simplicity.” The German new world order presupposes a Greater East Asia under Japanese hegemony, a U.S.-dominated “Pan-America,” and a German-dominated Eurasian Heartland with a “Mediterranean–North African subregion under the shadow rule of Italy.” But for Haushofer, this is only an intermediate step: for, according to Mackinder, the Heartland dominates the World-Island and hence the world.3