 |
| Click to Enlarge |
By James R. Holmes
Last March retired U.S. Pacific Fleet commander Patrick Walsh gave an interview with Asahi Shimbun in which he likened the South China Sea to a new “strategic pivot”—nooooo, not the pivot word again!—in the Asia-Pacific region. Admiral Walsh summoned up the ghost of land-power theorist Sir Halford Mackinder to illustrate his analogy. Mackinder was a founding father of geopolitics and a foil for Alfred Thayer Mahan. In an indirect riposte to Mahan’s thesis that command of the sea was a decisive force in history, Mackinder summarized his argument (in 1919) thus: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland: Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: Who rules the World-Island commands the World.”
Bracing stuff. Eurasia was the World-Island in Mackinder’s lexicon, while the Heartland lay in Central Asia. It was the “geographic pivot of history,” to borrow the title of his famous 1904 essay. The great power that held sway over the region could exploit its “interior lines,” along with rapid advances in land transportation—mainly railroads—to move forces about more nimbly than navies could around the periphery. Their geographic positions situated Russia and Germany for struggle over the Heartland. Mackinder thus foreshadowed the bloodlettings of the world wars.
Read the full story at The Diplomat