Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
region of the world's politics that vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to
ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomads, and is to-day about to
be covered with a network of railways?
In Mackinder's view, the centrality of an expanded Russia at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century would replace that of the Mongol hordes, which some might argue had the
greatest effect on world history during the second millennium. Just as the Mongols banged
at—and often broke down—the gates of the marginal regions of Eurasia (Finland, Poland,
Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Persia, India, and China), so, too, now would Russia, sustained by the
cohesiveness of its landmass, won by the recent development of its railways. For as Mac-
kinder writes, “the geographical quantities in the calculation are more measurable and more
nearly constant than the human.” Forget the czars and in 1904 the commissars-yet-to-be,
they are but trivia compared to the deeper, tectonic forces of geography and technology.
This is not to say that Mackinder was helped by current events. For within two weeks of his
famous lecture, the Japanese navy attacked Port Arthur at the southern entrance to Man-
churia in the first battle of the Russo-Japanese War. The war ended a year later with the
Battle of Tsushima Strait, where the Japanese won a great victory at sea. In other words,
while Mackinder was proclaiming the importance of land power, it was sea power that de-
feated the most sprawling land power on earth in this early conflict of the twentieth cen-
tury.
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Still, Mackinder's seeming determinism prepared us well for the rise of the Soviet Union
and its enormous zone of influence in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as for
the two world wars in the first half, which were, as the historian Paul Kennedy points out,
struggles for Mackinder's “rimlands,” running from Eastern Europe to the Himalayas and
ways in Central Asia and Siberia expanded by 45,000 miles, proving Mackinder's point.
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Cold War containment strategy, moreover, would depend heavily on rimland bases across
the Greater Middle East and the Indian Ocean. Indeed, the U.S. projection of power into
the rimlands of Afghanistan and Iraq, and America's tension with Russia over the polit-
ical fate of Central Asia and the Caucasus—the geographical pivot itself—have given yet
more legitimacy to Mackinder's thesis. In his last paragraph, Mackinder raises the specter
of Chinese conquests of Russian territory, which would make, he says, China the dominant
geopolitical power. If one looks at how Chinese migrants are now demographically claim-
ing parts of Siberia from Russia, even as Russia's political control of its eastern reaches
shows strains, one can envision Mackinder being right once more.
Mackinder has been attacked as an arch-determinist and an imperialist. Both charges are
to a degree unfair. An educator all his life, he was not by nature extreme or ideological.
