THE EURASIAN MAP - The Revenge of Geography - page 58

Mackinder deep down was a liberal, or at least became one. He imagined the British
Commonwealth as becoming an association of cultures and peoples, different but equal;
and he believed that a league of democracies would be the best defense against an imperial
superpower in the heart of Eurasia (thus foreseeing NATO's struggle against the Soviet
Union). 34
Mackinder's drift toward Wilsonian principles, which began in Democratic Ideals and
Reality , forms the centerpiece of his revision of his own “Heartland” theory. The theory
was first expounded in the “Geographical Pivot” article, without using the term “Heart-
land.” The term was actually coined by Fairgrieve in his own topic, Geography and World
Power , in 1915. To the pivot areas of Central Asia identified in 1904, Mackinder added in
1919 the “Tibetan and Mongolian upland courses of the great rivers of India and China,”
and the whole broad belt of countries going north to south from Scandinavia to Anatolia,
and including Eastern and Central Europe: so that the new Heartland would more or less
approximate the Soviet Empire at the height of its power during the Cold War. 35 Or I should
say: the Soviet Empire plus Norway, northern Turkey, Iran, and western China. Because
the bulk of the Chinese population live not in the west but in the monsoonal coastlands,
Mackinder's Heartland is the bulk of interior Eurasia that is relatively sparsely populated,
with the demographic immensities of China, India, and the western half of Europe to the
sides of it. The Middle East (specifically Arabia and the Fertile Crescent) was neither heav-
ily populated nor part of the Heartland, but as Mackinder writes in 1919, now central to
the destiny of the World-Island, because it is the “passage-land” from Europe to the Indies
and from the northern part of the Heartland to the southern part, as well as being access-
ible by several water bodies around the Arabian Peninsula. 36 But the destiny of Arabia, as
that of Europe, is heavily influenced by the Heartland; and the most proximate part of the
Heartland to Arabia is Iran, a lesson we should bear in mind for our own time. Indeed, the
Iranian plateau is critical, and I will deal with it later.
A fascinating exception here is Greece, which is geographically part of the independent
tier of buffer states between Germany and Russia, but which Mackinder leaves out of his
expanded Heartland of 1919 because Greece, as he says, is so much bounded by water and
therefore accessible to sea power. Greece was the first of these states to be liberated from
German control in World War I. Here, too, Mackinder showed prescience. “Possession of
Greece by a great Heartland power,” he writes, “would probably carry with it the control
of the World-Island.” 37 In fact, that almost happened. After heavy fighting in a civil war
between pro-Western and communist guerrillas, Greece became the only one of these buf-
fer lands not to fall within the Soviet orbit after World War II, and later formed with Turkey
a strategic southern ridgeline of NATO. The Soviets, as it happened, would go on to lose
the Cold War.