Eighty-three years ago this month, Foreign Affairs published Sir Halford Mackinder’s last iteration of his “heartland” theory of global geopolitics titled “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace.” It is one of the most important, though least appreciated, essays he ever wrote, and it significantly modified the two earlier iterations of his global theory—“The Geographical Pivot of History” (1904) and Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919). Far too many scholars and commentators on international relations invoke Mackinder by referencing his two earlier works without noting or assessing his last word on the subject. That kind of selective invocation of Mackinder’s ideas does a disservice to Mackinder and, more important, to the application of Mackinder’s ideas to current global politics.
Halford Mackinder was born in 1861 in Gainsborough, England. He studied at Epsom College and at Oxford, where he fell under the influence of geographers Henry Nottidge Mosely and Michael Sadler. One of Mackinder’s biographers, W.H. Parker, noted the young Mackinder’s love of history, exploration, international affairs, and maps. In 1886, he became a lecturer in natural science and economic history, and joined the Royal Geographical Society. In one of his earliest professional writings, Mackinder argued that the geographer’s role was to “look at the past [so] that he may interpret the present” and, perhaps, gaze into the future of international politics. Mackinder was both a theoretical and practical geographer, lecturing students on the relation of geography to history, and participating in geographical explorations, including climbing Mount Kenya where today a valley bears his name.
Most of Mackinder’s professional writings focused on geography in its historical contexts. Occasionally, however, he turned his magnificent mind to an analysis of global politics. His first book, Britain and the British Seas, assessed the “strategic geography” of the British Empire and noted the “dominant value of sea-power” in global geopolitics due to what he described as “the unity of the ocean.” But in that same book, he also recognized that great continental powers like Russia and the United States could harness their natural and human resources to challenge Great Britain’s preeminent world position.
On January 25, 1904, Mackinder delivered an address to the Royal Geographical Society titled “The Geographical Pivot of History.” This was his first iteration of his famous “heartland” theory which argued that the northern—central core of the Eurasian landmass was a region that if politically consolidated and sufficiently populated could host a world empire because the globe was now a “closed political system” where “every explosion of social forces . . . will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence.” In essence, Mackinder argued, a great Eurasian land power could eventually become the world’s dominant sea power, too, and he compared Russia’s geographical position to that of the Mongol Empire of the 13th and 14th centuries. Towards the end of the paper, he even suggested that China could one day conquer the heartland or pivot state and threaten the democratic sea powers.
Mackinder was a Member of Parliament during the First World War and its immediate aftermath. He viewed the most significant development of that war as the struggle for eastern Europe and the heartland waged by Germany and Russia, and predicted in his 1919 book Democratic Ideals and Reality that if the democracies failed to adjust their defense policies to geographical realities a second struggle for the heartland between Germany and Russia would occur. And so it did two decades later.
In this 1919 iteration of his heartland theory, Mackinder argued that control of Eastern Europe and the heartland could enable a great Eurasian-based power to command the world. As he did in 1904, Mackinder warned that a great power or alliance of powers that controlled the resources of Eurasia could become the world’s dominant sea power because Eurasia along with Africa formed the “World-Island,” which combined potential insularity with great human and natural resources. He also foresaw the rise of China and India, which he referred to as “Monsoon countries” and situated them in the Asiatic coastland. In the aftermath of the First World War, Mackinder, like Winston Churchill, urged Great Britain to strangle Bolshevism in its Russian cradle, viewing communism as a great threat to the world’s democracies.
The United States didn’t fully appreciate Mackinder’s geopolitical theory until the outbreak of the Second World War. The War Department belatedly hired American geographers, such as Isaiah Bowman, who were familiar with Mackinder’s writings. Democratic Ideals and Reality was reissued in 1942, and the popular Life magazine wrote about Mackinder and geopolitics. That same year, Yale Professor Nicholas Spykman’s America’s Strategy in World Politics, which approached the war from a distinctly geopolitical framework similar to Mackinder’s, was published.
The editors of Foreign Affairs asked Mackinder to update his geopolitical concepts and in July 1943, Mackinder’s “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace” appeared in the widely read and widely respected journal. He readjusted the geography of the heartland, roughly equating it with the territory of the Soviet Union (minus the lands east of the Lena River), which he said would emerge from the war as the “greatest land Power on the globe” and would occupy “the greatest natural fortress on earth.” He did not envision the division of Germany that occurred after the war, but he did foresee a North Atlantic alliance which he called the “Midland Ocean” that would help balance the heartland power. Sea power, with its accompanying air power, he wrote, must balance land power.
Then, in perhaps the most neglected part of the 1943 essay by modern geopolitical thinkers, Mackinder envisioned the rising “Monsoon lands” of China and India, which, he wrote, would complete a “balanced globe of human beings.” Mackinder, who died in 1947 at the age of 86, did not foresee China becoming a communist-ruled country and allying with the Soviet Union as it did in the early 1950s. The postwar Sino-Soviet bloc threatened to upset the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia that Mackinder envisioned in “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace.” The subsequent Sino-Soviet split, brilliantly exploited by President Richard Nixon and his top foreign policy aide Henry Kissinger, ensured that Mackinder’s “balanced globe of human beings” persisted.
Unfortunately, U.S. foreign policy from the end of the Cold War until the first Trump administration, facilitated the strategic reunion of China and Russia, instead of conducting a 21st century version of Nixon’s triangular diplomacy that was so vital in helping us win the Cold War. President Trump has made it clear that while the United States has a vital interest in containing China’s ambitions in the western Pacific and lessening its influence in the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere, war with China is neither desirable nor inevitable. Deterring China, consolidating our hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, ending the war in Ukraine, stabilizing the Middle East, and increasing burden-sharing among our allies in Europe, are now the five pillars of Trump’s foreign policy. Some call it recognizing legitimate spheres of influence. In the end, what President Trump is aiming for is what Mackinder called in “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” a “balanced globe of human beings.”
Francis P. Sempa writes on geopolitics.
