By Artyom Lukin
China has emerged as a new contender for control over Mackinder’s “Heartland.”
In 1904 the founder of geopolitics Sir Halford Mackinder famously pronounced (PDF) the end of “the Columbian epoch” – that of the dominance of the Western sea power – and the advent of the age of land power, in which the Heartland of Eurasia, or “the pivot area,” would hold the key to the world domination. The pivot area largely corresponded to the territory of the then Russian Empire – occupying central and northern Eurasia.
Mackinder’s main concern was that a rapidly industrializing and expansionist Tsarist Russia could successfully challenge the West’s sea-power-based primacy, taking advantage of the Heartland’s geostrategic centrality and harnessing the huge potentialities of Inner Eurasia’s vast landmass. In actuality, Russia was never able to pull off such a feat – neither under the Tsar, nor in its Soviet reincarnation. It seems even less capable of achieving it now, being reduced to a rump of its former imperial glory and struggling with a shaky economy.
Nevertheless, it may be a little bit too early to write off Mackinder’s prophecies. For there has emerged another contender for the control over the Heartland: China. Although Beijing is making inroads in places as far away as Africa and Latin America, its main game is in Eurasia. We can only guess if Chinese leaders have read Mackinder, but the strategies they are pursuing are more or less in line with the British geographer’s theory.
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