Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of Nazi domination, as well as to outline the power configurations of a postwar world that
he would not live to see. He begins with a geographical explanation about how the United
States became a great power.
“History,” Spykman says, “is made in the temperate latitudes,” where moderate climates
prevail, “and, because very little of the land mass of the Southern Hemisphere lies in this
zone, history is made in the temperate latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.” It is not that
sub-Saharan Africa and the Southern Cone of South America do not matter, for they matter
much more in our day than in the past because of transport and communications techno-
logy that has allowed every place to affect every other; rather, it is that they still have less
worldwide impact than do places in the Northern Hemisphere, and particularly those places
in the northern temperate zone. James Fairgrieve, a near-contemporary of Mackinder, ex-
plains that because of the lack of solar energy compared to the tropics, human beings in the
temperate zones must work harder to deal with greater varieties of weather, and with the
differences in seasons that lead to definite times for sowing and harvest: thus, it is in the
temperate zones where human beings “advance from strength to strength.” And whereas at
the South Pole there is a great continent surrounded by an unbroken ring of ocean, around
the North Pole there is an ocean surrounded by a near-unbroken ring of land—the land
where human beings have been the most productive. Strausz-Hupé is even more specific
in this regard, telling us that history is made between “twenty and sixty degrees north latit-
ude.” This area includes North America, Europe, the Greater Middle East and North Africa,
most of Russia, China, and the bulk of India. Mackinder's “wilderness girdle” is roughly
consistent with it, for it takes in the Heartland and adjacent marginal zones of Eurasia. The
critical fact about the United States, according to this line of thinking, is that, located be-
low the Canadian Arctic, it occupies the last great, relatively empty tract of the temperate
zone that wasn't settled by urban civilization until the time of the European Enlightenment.
Furthermore, America initially prospered, Spykman writes, because the east coast, with its
timately, in this view, geography was the early sustainer of American freedom.
America's great power position exists because the United States is the regional hegemon
in the Western Hemisphere, with, as Spykman says, “power to spare for activities outside
the New World,” so that it can affect the balance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere.
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This is no mean feat, and something the United States should not take for granted, for it is
rooted in the specifics of Latin American geography. No other nation in the world, not Ch-
ina or Russia, is a hegemon of hemispheric proportions. In explaining how this came about,
Spykman brings South America—which Mackinder largely ignores—into the discussion of
geopolitics. Because of Mackinder's concentration on Eurasia, and particular its Heartland,
