THE EURASIAN MAP - The Revenge of Geography - page 47

THE EURASIAN MAP
Times of global upheaval, testing as they do our assumptions about the permanence of the
political map, lead to a renaissance in thinking about geography. This is particularly so be-
cause geography is the very basis for strategy and geopolitics. Strategy as defined by Na-
poleon is the art of using time and space in a 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. 1 In short, geopolitics is the influence of geography upon human divisions. 2
As Napoleon said, to know a nation's geography is to know its foreign policy. 3
Morgenthau calls geopolitics a “pseudoscience” because it erects “the factor of geography
into an absolute.” Writing soon after World War II, he had in mind the great British geo-
grapher Halford Mackinder, whose turn-of-the-twentieth-century theories were revived in
the midst of the Second World War and misused by the Nazis to justify their idea of Lebens-
raum , or German “living space.” 4 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 Mackinder's own thinking. The
balance of power, according to Mackinder, because it grants each nation its security, forms
the very basis of freedom. 5 Morgenthau may be too hard on Mackinder. In any case, Mor-
genthau's aversion to Mackinder, as well as his careful summary of Mackinder's theories,
is itself an indication of Mackinder's powerful influence over Western geopolitical thought
over many decades. Mackinder keeps getting denounced, and yet remains relevant through
it all, especially in eras like our own, with large numbers of American troops still on the
ground in the Greater Middle East and Northeast Asia. Clearly, there is some unsettling, un-
derlying truth to his work, though there is also the risk of taking it too far.
Mackinder clearly had a gift. The dictum of his life's work was that geography is the gen-
eralist's answer to academic specialization. 6 In 1890, he gave a singular example of how
knowledge of geography enriches one's thinking on world affairs:
Suppose I am told that a certain sample of wheat comes from Lahore, and that I do
not know where Lahore is. I look it out in the gazetteer and ascertain that it is the
capital of the Punjab.… If I know nothing of geography, I shall get up with the idea
that Lahore is in India, and that will be about all. If I have been properly trained in
geography, the word Punjab will … probably connote to me many things. I shall
see Lahore in the northern angle of India. I shall picture it in a great plain, at the
foot of a snowy range, in the midst of the rivers of the Indus system. I shall think
of the monsoons and the desert, of the water brought from the mountains by the ir-