THE EURASIAN MAP - The Revenge of Geography - page 54

No, Mackinder was no mere fatalist. He believed that geography and the environment
could be overcome, but only if we treat those subjects with the greatest knowledge and re-
spect.
To be sure, Machiavelli's The Prince has endured partly because it is an instructional
guide for those who do not accept fate and require the utmost cunning to vanquish more
powerful forces. So, too, with Mackinder's theories. He sets out a daunting vision that ap-
pears overwhelming because of the power of his argument and prose, and so there is the
sensation of being bludgeoned into a predetermined reality when in reality he is actually
challenging us to rise above it. He was the best kind of hesitant determinist, understanding
just how much effort is required of us to avoid tragedy.
Determinism implies static thinking, the tendency to be overwhelmed by sweeping
forces and trends, and thus to be unaffected by the ironies of history as they actually unfold.
But Mackinder was the opposite. Like a man possessed, he kept revising his 1904 “Pivot”
thesis, adding depth and insights to it, taking into account recent events and how they af-
fected it. The real brilliance of “The Geographical Pivot of History” lay in its anticipation
of a global system at a time when Edwardian-era minds were still employed in exertions
over a European continental system. 23 That continental system had its roots in the post-
Napoleonic Congress of Vienna almost a hundred years earlier, and was in its dying days
though few, save for Mackinder and some others, intuited it. The cataclysm of World War I,
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 Mackinder's struggle-for-the-Heartland idea, while at the same time adding
complications and adjustments to it. Democratic Ideals and Reality was his book-length
update to “The Geographical Pivot of History,” appearing the same year as the Versailles
Peace Conference. He warned the peacemakers “that the issue between sea power and land
power had not been finally resolved and that the duel between Teuton and Slav was yet to
be fought out,” despite a war that had cost millions of lives. 24 “The Geographical Pivot of
History” was a theory only; Democratic Ideals and Reality , rather, a revised and expanded
thesis that was also a far-sighted warning.
The writing in Democratic Ideals seethes with description, erudition, and illuminating
tangents about both contemporary and antique landscapes, as Mackinder presents the world
from both a seaman's and a landsman's perspective. Nile valley civilization, he tells us,
thinking like a seaman, was protected on the east and west by deserts, and never suffered
from Mediterranean piracy only because of the marshlands of the Delta to the north: this
helped provide Egyptian kingdoms with extraordinary levels of stability. To the north of
Egypt in the eastern Mediterranean lay the island of Crete, the largest and most fruitful of
the Greek islands, and therefore “the first base of sea power” in the Western world, for “the