BRAUDEL, MEXICO, AND GRAND STRATEGY - The Revenge of Geography - page 249

from the Canadian Arctic to the Central American jungles. Not to continue to deepen links
with Mexico and Central America, whose combined populations account for half the popu-
lation of that of the United States, would be to see Mexico and perhaps some of its southern
neighbors slip into a hostile diplomatic and political orbit in a world where Eurasia will be
closer than ever before. The way to guard against a pro-Iranian Venezuela and other radical
states that may emerge from time to time in the Western Hemisphere is to wrap the Greater
Caribbean into a zone of free trade and human migration that, perforce, would be Amer-
ican dominated, as Mexico's and Central America's younger populations supply the labor
force for America's aging one. Of course, this is happening already, but the intensity of the
human exchange will, and should, increase.
“Global war, as well as global peace,” writes Nicholas Spykman, “means that all fronts
and all areas are interrelated. No matter how remote they are from each other, success or
failure in one will have an immediate and determining effect on the others.” 41 That is far
truer today than it was in 1944 when that statement was published posthumously. It will be
far truer in the future. Robert Strausz-Hupé notes, “The history of Greece is the struggle for
survival against the cyclic irruptions of Asia.” 42 Think of how close ancient Greece was to
Persia, and one may get a sense of how close we are to Eurasia now, given the revolution
in transportation and communications. Making sure that one power in the Eastern Hemi-
sphere does not become unduly dominant, so as to threaten the United States in the Western
Hemisphere, will be a much easier task if we advance unity in the Western Hemisphere in
the first place.
We must be a balancing power in Eurasia and a unifying power in North Amer-
ica—doing both will be easier than doing just one. Preserving the balance of power, of
course, must be done for a specific purpose that goes beyond the physical and economic
protection of the United States. And that purpose is to use the stability guaranteed by a bal-
ance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere to advance nothing less than the liberal intellectu-
al cause of a Mitteleuropa writ large across the globe. Just as Stephen Dedalus affirms “his
significance as a conscious rational animal,” in effect resisting fate, we must never give in
to geography, but must fundamentally be aware of it in our quest for a better world. For the
yearning after the Post Cold War ideal of a cosmopolitan Central Europe which informed
the beginning of this study is where we are at the end of it. Whether or not that goal is
achievable, it is something always worth striving for, hopefully with Mexico by our side.
Mackinder intuited this in his call for vibrant and independent buffer states between Mari-
time Europe and the Heartland, noting that a world balanced is a world free.