Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Spykman describes the Heartland as vaguely synonymous with the Soviet Empire,
bordered by ice-blocked Arctic seas to the north, between Norway and the Russian Far
East; and to the south ringed by mountains, from the Carpathians in Romania to the plat-
eaus of Anatolia, Iran, and Afghanistan, and turning northeastward to the Pamir Knot, the
Altai Mountains, the plateau of Mongolia, and finally over to Manchuria and Korea. This
to him was the world's key geography, which would be perennially fought over. To the
north and inside this belt of mountain and tableland lies the Heartland; to the south and out-
side this belt lie the demographic giants of Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, and
Japan, as well as the oil-rich Middle East. These marginal areas of Eurasia, especially their
littorals, was what Spykman called the Rimland. Spykman held that the Rimland was the
key to world power; not Mackinder's Heartland, because in addition to dominating Euras-
ia, the maritime-oriented Rimland was central to contact with the outside world.
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Of course, both men are really talking about the same thing; for Mackinder says that
he who controls the Heartland is in the best position to capture the Rimland, which then
provides through sea power the key to world domination. As Mackinder writes, “If we
would take the long view, must we still not reckon with the possibility that a large part of
the Great Continent might someday be united under a single sway, and that an invincible
sea-power might be based upon it?” This, of course, was the dream of the Soviet Union,
to advance to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean through the invasion of Afghanistan
and the attempted destabilization of Pakistan in the 1980s, and thus combine sea power and
land power.
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Still, Spykman with his emphasis on the Rimland has the slight advantage here. Given
the present state of the world, with Rimland upheavals in the Greater Middle East and ten-
sions throughout South Asia, as well as the Korean Peninsula, Spykman with his concen-
tration on the Rimland and his more complexified view of geopolitics seems almost con-
temporary. For the body of Mackinder's theories emerge from the world at the turn of the
twentieth century and the First World War; whereas Spykman is arguing from the facts of
life of a later war, in which the Heartland was in the hands of an ally, Soviet Russia, and
thus not an issue; whereas the Rimland was endangered by the Axis powers.
While the Axis powers lost the war, the competition for the Rimland continued into the
Cold War. The Soviet Union constituted the great Heartland power that threatened the Rim-
land in Europe, the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula, and elsewhere, and was opposed by
Western sea power. Consequently, “containment,” the Cold War policy against the Soviet
Union enunciated in 1946 by the diplomat and Russia expert George Kennan in his Long
Telegram, had both a Spykmanesque and Mackinderesque feel. Containment is the peri-
Western Europe, Israel, moderate Arab states, the Shah's Iran, and the wars in Afghanistan
and Vietnam all carried the notion of preventing a communist empire from extending con-
