The Eurasian Map

Geography the very basis for strategy and geopolitics

Strategy- the art of using time and space in military and diplomatic manner
Geopolitics - constitutes the study of the outside environment faced by every state when
determining its own strategy: that environment being the presence of other states also struggling for
survival and advantage
-the influence of geography upon human divisions
to know a nations geography is to know its foreign policy
MACKINDER:
To be sure, because the aim of geopolitics is to achieve a balance of power, and the Nazis attempted
nothing less than to OVERTHROW the balance of power -> the Nazis use of Mackinder was a
perversion of Mackinders own thinking.
The balance of power (Mackinder) forms the very basis of freedom because it grants each nation
its security.
Geography- the generalists answer to academic specialization
The Geographical Pivot of History : Central Asia (helping to form as it does the Eurasian
Heartland) the pivot on which the fate of great world empires rests: for the earths very layout of
natural arteries between mountain ranges and along river valleys encourages the rise of empires,
declared or undeclared, rather than states.
Man and not nature initiates, but nature in large measures control.
European history as subordinate to that of Asia -> European civilization is merely the outcome of
the struggle against Asiatic invasion.
Europe became the cultural phenomenon that it is mainly because of its geography (an intricate
array of mountains, valleys, and peninsulas) from which individual nations would emerge set
against immense and threatening flatland of Russia to the East.
Russian flatland was divided between
o Forest to the north
o Steppe to the south
For on the Heartland steppe the land is unceasingly flat, the climate hard, and the vegetable
production limited to grass, in turn destroyed by sand, driven by powerful winds. Such
conditions bred hard and cruel races of men who had at once to destroy any adversaries they came
across or be destroyed themselves, as there was no better means of defense in one sport than in
another
Russia fell prey in the 13th century to the Golden Horde of the Mongols. thus would Russia be
denied access to the European Renaissance, and branded forever with the bitterest feelings of
inferiority and insecurity

Russia would know forevermore that it was like to be brutally conquered, and as a result
would become perennially obsessed with expanding and holding territory, or at least dominating its
contiguous shadow zones

 the Mongol invasions out of Central Asia decimated and subsequently changed not only
Russia, but Turkey, Iran, India, China, and the northern reaches of the Arab Middle East, Europe in
many parts knew no such level of destruction, and thus was able to emerge as the political cockpit(camp
de lupta) of the world.

Eurasia bounded by ice on the N and tropical ocean to the S had 4 marginal regions as its
extremities (correspond to the 4 great numerical religions):
o monsoon lands in E facing the Pacific Ocean : BUDDHISM
o In S facing the Indian Ocean: HINDUISM
o Europe itself, watered by the Atlantic to the W : CHRISTIANITY
o Middle East: ISLAM dominated by desert, and thus wide open to nomadic invasions
and to subsequent upheavals and revolutions, the Middle East is particularly vulnerable to
sea power (because of its propinquity to gulfs, seas and oceans)
While the peoples of W Europe , covered the ocean with their fleets, Russia was expanding
equally impressively on land , emerging from her northern forests to police the steppe with her
Cossacks against the Mongol nomads.
Europe vs Russia : a liberal sea power against a reactionary land power
19th century : steam and the Suez Canal increased the mobility of sea power around the southern
rimland of Eurasia , even as the development of railways began to act as feeders for oceangoing commerce
o railways were now beginning to do the same for land power as they already had for sea
power, and nowhere so much as in the heartland of Eurasia, which was previously
hampered by the lack of stone and timber necessary for road making.
The centrality of an expanded Russia at the beginning of the 20th century would replace that of
the Mongol hordes, which some might argue had the greatest effect on world history during the
2nd millennium .
just as the Mongols banged at the hates of the marginal regions of Eurasia ( Finland,
Poland, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Persia, India and China), so, too, now would Russia won by
the recent development of its railways.
Mackinder was proclaiming the importance of land power, it was sea power that defeated the
most sprawling land power on earth in this early conflict of the 20th century : the Japanese
navy attacked Port Arthur at the southern entrance to Manchuria in the 1st battle of the RussoJapanese war. ->the war ended a year later with the Battle of Tsushima Strait, where the
Japanese won a great victory at sea.
Human agency can overcome the dictates of geography
Those who are working in harmony with environmental influences will triumph over those who
strive against them.
Geography can be conquered through technological innovation.
The cataclysm of WWI , which erupted a decade after the publication of The Geographical
Pivot of History, pitted Germany-Prussia and czarist Russia against each other on the eastern

front, and German land power against British-French maritime power on the western front, thus
upholding in a vague manner.
Nile valley civilization- protected on the E and W by desert
- Never suffered from Mediterranean piracy only because of the marshlands of the
Delta to the N : this helped provide Egyptian kingdoms with extraordinary levels
of stability
N of Egypt , in E Mediterranean : the island of Crete the largest and most fruitful of the Greek
the 1st of sea power in the W world
for the man-power of the sea must be nourished by land fertility somewhere
from Crete, mariners may have settled the Aegean sea-chamber that formed the
very basis of Greek civilization: Greek sea power flourished until challenged by
Persian land power the Persian effort failed. It was the half-Greek
Macedonians to the N , who finally conquered the whole Aegean
It was this Macedonian conquest, making the Aegean a closed sea ( thus
depriving the Greeks and the Phoeniciand of their bases) that allowed Alexander
the Great(un Macedonian) the luxury to attempt the land of conquest of the
Greater Near East.
Mackinder thesis: Eurasia will dominate geopolitical calculations, even as Europe will be less
and less of an entity separate from the rest of Eurasia and Africa; The Old World has become
insular , or in other words a unit, incomparably the largest geographical unit on our globe.
Who rules East Europe commands the HeartlandWho rules the Heartland commands
the World IslandWho rules the World-Island commands the World.
With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires as a result of the war, the
diplomats at Versailles had as one of their central purposes the rearrangement of the map of
Eastern Europe.
A Europe whose borders were drawn up on the principle of national self-determination was liable
to be a Europe dominated by Germanylarger, 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 Mackinders buffer zone, keeping them in a prison of nations from 1945 to
1989.
The Heartland may best be seen as a register of power around the World-Island rather than the
determiner of it.