THE GEOGRAPHICAL PIVOT OF HISTORY
Background
Let's get under the skin of these global power players - such as the neocons - and feel where they are coming from.
The fundamental number one essential idea that we must understand before everything else is that the battle is about global sovereignty. Sovereignty, power, is primordial because no one wants to have a boss and be told what to do - instead if it is you the global sovereign then it is you that sets the rules for everyone else and if it is not to you then you have to follow someone else's rules at the expense of your own interests. The elite got there because they are - unlike most of us - interested in pure power, control and setting the rules and agenda for others to dance to.
Summary
Over one hundred years ago, Halford Mackinder warned that control of the Eurasian landmass would decide the fate of global power. Today, as land powers rise and maritime empires weaken, his warning feels prophetic. The West still believes it commands the seas — yet it is strategy, not geography, that has changed the game.
1. The Central Idea
• Geopolitics means the study of how geography shapes this power - political power to decide who gets what in the carve up.
• Mackinder’s focus was Eurasia — the vast continent linking Europe and Asia, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Arctic to the Arabian Sea.
• His principle was blunt - who controls Eurasia controls the world. It goes like this:
"Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
who rules the World-Island commands the world."
• For centuries, this single geographical fact has driven the rivalries that defined power and global history.
2. From Silk Road to Sea Power
• Ancient Eurasia was connected by the Silk Road - decentralised land and sea routes carrying ideas, culture, and goods.
• The Mongols were the last to keep that system open. Its collapse in the 14th century gave way, two centuries later, to a maritime revolution.
• European explorers - Magellan, da Gama, Díaz - linked continents by sea, creating a new power system centred on ports and maritime choke points.
• Maritime trade could be monopolised; land trade could not. And with the Industrial Revolution, European powers gained the technology to dominate both commerce and colonisation. Financial was the third source of British power.
3. Pax Britannica: The First Global Sea Empire
• By the 19th century, Britain had defeated France and Napoleon, establishing Pax Britannica, a century of peace enforced by naval supremacy.
• The Royal Navy’s control of global routes was the backbone of world order, later inherited by the United States.
• Yet during this same period, Russia’s push through Central Asia exposed Britain’s vulnerability: sea power alone could not control the interior of Eurasia.
• The 19th-century Great Game. This was the long duel between Britain and Russia over Central Asia that ended with Afghanistan as a buffer state. But the Trans-Siberian Railway soon gave land power a new reach from Moscow to the Pacific.
4. Mackinder’s Warning
• In 1904, Mackinder presented The Geographical Pivot of History to the Royal Geographical Society.
• His warning: the industrial age and the railway had erased the sea’s monopoly. Land powers could now move armies, goods, and ideas across Eurasia faster than fleets.
• His famous formula: Who rules Eastern Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World.
• For the British, and later the Americans, this became strategic gospel.
5. From Empire to Containment
• The United States adopted Mackinder’s logic after 1945.
• National Security documents from 1948 onwards spoke of preventing any single power from dominating the Eurasian landmass.
• America’s answer was to control the maritime periphery ie Europe in the west, Japan and the island chains off China in the east. This is a belt of bases and alliances known as “containment.”
• The logic was simple: keep the Heartland divided: prevent Russia, Germany, or China from uniting.
6. The Eurasian Response
• Russian thinkers such as Savitsky proposed an alternative: cooperation across the continent instead of division from the sea.
• The tragedy of Russia, they said, was pretending to be a Western maritime power. Its natural destiny was continental.
• After the fall of the Soviet Union, Moscow still turned West, hoping for a “Greater Europe.”
• Washington, however, pursued the Wolfowitz Doctrine (1992), declaring that no rival, friend nor foe, should ever rise again in Eurasia. Even allies like Germany or Japan were viewed as potential competitors.
7. America’s Grand Chessboard
• Zbigniew Brzezinski, advisor to several presidents, refined the doctrine in The Grand Chessboard (1997).
• US dominance, he argued, required keeping Eurasian powers divided and dependent on American security.
• Hence the modern alliance blocs: on one side dependent vassals, on the other contained adversaries.
• Russia, weakened, became what Brzezinski called a “geostrategic black hole.” If it resisted, it should be broken into smaller regions.
• Simultaneously, Washington launched its own “Silk Road” projects : pipelines and corridors designed not to unite Eurasia but to sever Central Asia from Russia and China.
8. The Eurasian Turn
• Around 2014, the pattern began to break.
• The coup in Ukraine ended Moscow’s hopes for a shared European order.
• Meanwhile, China lost faith in the US-led global system and launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a 21st-century Silk Road linking continents by land, sea, and fibre-optic cable.
• Russia, turning east, joined with China in what Mackinder would have called his worst nightmare: two continental giants, side by side, building infrastructure, banks, and trade routes beyond maritime control.
9. Multipolar Eurasia
• The new projects - BRI, the Eurasian Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and BRICS - now link much of Asia, West Asia (the Middle East), and parts of Africa.
• The International North-South Transport Corridor connects Russia, Iran, and India. The Northern Sea Route along the Arctic shortens Europe-Asia trade and is outside US naval reach.
• From South Korea to Turkey, nations are aligning around practical cooperation. No one power can impose terms; interests must be harmonised for land powers.
• The logic has shifted from hegemony to multipolarity: shared power, regional balance, pragmatic trade.
10. The Western Dilemma
• The West still clings to the illusion of control.
• Freezing Russian funds, sanctioning Chinese tech, and weaponising finance have only convinced others to seek alternatives.
• The result is self-isolation: the more coercive the system becomes, the faster partners look east.
• What once was an empire of sea routes is becoming "an archipelago of fear".
• Mackinder’s law endures: geography does not care about ideology.
11. A Realist’s Reflection
• I want the West to survive, but survival demands adaptation.
• Our elites cling to narratives that made sense a century ago; today, their arrogance blinds them to a world no longer theirs.
• Multipolarity is not collapse; it’s correction. Yet our refusal to accept it will turn adjustment into breakdown and collapse.
• As Machiavelli warned: Men see things not as they are, but as they wish them to be ... and they are ruined.
12. The Asian Future
• Dostoyevsky wrote: “Russians are as much Asiatic as European... It is time to turn away from ungrateful Europe; our future is in Asia.”
• That line now feels prophetic. The West’s contempt has pushed the centre of gravity eastwards.
• The new Silk Roads - routes, railways, data cables, pipelines - are already remapping the world.
• We are watching the end of five centuries of sea power and the rebirth of the land.
Glossary
• Geopolitics – how geography shapes power and policy.
• Heartland – Mackinder’s core of Eurasia, from Eastern Europe to Siberia.
• World-Island – the joined continents of Eurasia and Africa.
• Multipolarity – distribution of power among several centres.
• Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – China’s global infrastructure and trade strategy.
• INSTC – International North–South Transport Corridor (Russia-Iran-India).
References
• Halford J. Mackinder, The Geographical Pivot of History (1904).
• Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard (1997).
• “Defense Planning Guidance” (1992) – Wolfowitz Doctrine.
• US National Security Strategy (1988).
• Official papers on BRI, AIIB, and INSTC (2013–2015).
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Keep it clean, keep it lean