Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
According to Mackinder, Europe and the Middle East are much more affected by the
Heartland than India and China, whose hundreds of millions of people are self-contained
and thus able to peacefully develop. This leads him to predict that the future lies to a large
extent in the “Monsoon lands of India and China.”
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But why is the Heartland so important in the first place? Is control of the broad lowlands
and tablelands of the Eurasian interior truly pivotal to world power? Yes, they are rich in oil
and strategic minerals and metals, but is that even enough? Mackinder's idea is mechanical
in the extreme. And yet, partly as a consequence, it provides a vehicle for explaining so
much about the spatial arrangement of states and peoples around the Eastern Hemisphere.
It is easier to explain the relationships between one end of Eurasia and the other by hav-
ing the center of it as a reference point, rather than any coastal margin. The Heartland may
best be seen as a register of power around the World-Island rather than the determiner of it.
Near the end of
Democratic Ideals and Reality
Mackinder posits that if the Soviet Union
emerges from World War I ahead of Germany, “she must rank as the greatest land Power
eventually emerge, and did so again after World War II. Thus, it came to face off, as Mac-
kinder indicated it would, against the world's preeminent sea power, the United States. It
was in quest of sea power—the search for a warm-water port on the Indian Ocean—that
the Soviets ultimately invaded Afghanistan, a small part of the Heartland that had eluded
its grasp. And by getting entrapped by guerrillas in Afghanistan the Kremlin's whole em-
pire fell apart. Now Russia, greatly reduced in size, tries to reconsolidate that same Heart-
land—Belarus, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. That, in and of itself, a century
after Mackinder put down his theories, constitutes one of the principal geopolitical dramas
of our time.
