area into (1) continental rimland and (2)
In the Chinese view, the Russian are
maritime rimland. The difference between the
two is not geographical but functional. It
depends on the orientation of the states, and
this orientation itself has changed for most
parts in the course of time.
The case of China is particularly clear
and, at this present time, relevant. A seaward
orientation has alternated with a landward:
In her early history only a very shallow fringe of the
southern coast was of maritime orientation. The
basic cultural pattern developed in the northern
interior near the contact zone with the heartland.
Land-based northerners have dominated Chinese
culture throughout most of her history and
whenever they have been in political control, as
under the Han, T’ang, Mongol and Manchu
dynasties, China has been oriented primarily
inwardly as a landed, peasant society with her
strategic frontier resting upon the steppe zone of
the heartland region. On the other hand, when
control was exercised by South China groups, as
under the Southern Sungs, the Mings, and the recent
Nationalist government, a strong maritime outlook
was emphasized.
The replacement of Nationalist by
Communist control represented the reversion
from the outward, maritime orientation to an
inward orientation toward the Soviet Union. But
even this inward orientation has been modified.
Relations between the two great powers, China
and the Soviet Union, which together occupy
the greater part of the Eurasian land mass, have
become strained. There are differences
between their Communist ideology, but it is
more likely that these are the expression of
political differences than that the political
conflict is derived from differences in ideology.
In fact, both political rivalry and ideological
conflict have their roots in the long history of
Russian expansion eastward across the Eurasian
continent.
the heirs to the Tartars.
Similarly he changes in orientation of
India and Southeast Asia, of the Middle Eastern
countries, and of the Europe can be analyzed.
Western Europe has generally looked outward
to the oceans; Central Europe has fluctuated.
Germany’s alliances with czarist Russia and with
its successor, the Soviet Union, belong to its
inward looking phase (Figure 15-4). Today the
so called “Iron Curtain” serves as a boundary
between continental and maritime rimland. This
boundary is not fixed because it is not grounded
exclusively in the facts of geography. It
fluctuates; Yugoslavia within the span of only a
few years has found itself on each side, and,
translated into these terms, the American policy
of containment has been to prevent any part of
the maritime rimland from transforming itself
into part of the continental rimland. But the
course of events has never been simple. The
forces of nationalism are powerful among the
rimland peoples, who probably want most to be
neutral in the conflict of continental and
maritime powers. How, furthermore are we to
understand the ramifications of Albanian
policy? Albania, clearly part of the rimland, was
in turn a dependency of Yugoslavia, a close ally
of the Soviet Union and today is China’s only
major ally apart from North Korea and North
Vietnam.
It was implicit in Mackinder’s thesis that
the islands and island groups which lie beyond
the coast of Eurasia are necessarily maritime in
their interests. Nothing could be further from
the truth. An island people is not necessarily a
seafaring people. Great Britain, in virtue of its
navy, its merchant marine, its fishing fleet, and
its overseas possessions, must rank as a
maritime power, but it has not always been so.
FIGURE 15-4 INNER AND OUTER-ORIENTED RIMLAND
It was not nature or instinct that drew the
British to the sea and beyond the sea but the
difficulty supplying their needs from within
their own islands. The Irish on the other hand,
have remained obstinately averse to seafaring
activities. The Japanese, occupying a somewhat
similar location off the coast of Euro-Asiatic
land mass, had a period of maritime activity
during their early history; then, in the seventh
century, they cut themselves off from outside
contacts. In this condition they remained until,
in 1853, Commodore Perry demonstrated how
much the rest of the world had changed since
the Japanese had begun to seclude themselves
and, in 1867, the Tokugawa period of isolation
ended. Few island groups can demonstrate such
complete changes of outlook, in turn
“extrainsular” and “intrainsular”, to use the
terminology of Meaning, but most, if not all,
have in some degree shown such alterations.
Thus, in place of the outward-looking
marginal crescents of Mackinder, we have a
rimland and neighboring island groups, in part
and at times inward looking toward the
heartland and sometimes and to some extent
outward-looking to the oceans. It is difficult to
detect any rhythm in these changes in
orientation and thus no prediction is possible.
One cannot say, in Mackinder’s words that
“whoever controls the heartland rules the
rimland” – only that whatever political power
controls the heartland is likely, under certain
conditions, to dominate some part of the
rimland and may aim at controlling it all.
Mackinder’s thesis had been too rigid; it
ignored too many situations which contradicted
it, and, despite its many disclaimers, it was too
fatalistic. Meinig leaves scope for the play of
personality and policy; he merely sketches an
analytical framework within which the interplay
of heartland and rimland can be studied.
More recently Professor William Kirk has
offered yet another reinterpretation of the
Mackinder thesis. He does not question the
importance of pivot area or heartland, but he
assigns to it a negative role. “Has not this area
been essentially and relatively a negative zone
of the earth until the nineteenth century when
ploughs were developed that could deal with
the tough grass sward of the continental
prairies and railways helped to reduce the
dimensions of these vast terrains?”36 Of
Mackinder’s “cloud of ruthless and idealess
horsemen” he observed that “the invaders were
quickly absorbed by the superior numbers and
civilization of the populations they conquered”
36
William Kirk, Geographical Pivot of History, Leicester
University Press, 1965, p. 9.
To Kirk the principal pivot area in human history
has been that belt of land and marginal seas
which encloses the heartland and corresponds
roughly with Mackinder’s “Inner or Maginal
Crescent” (Figure 15-5).
Figure 15-5 The zone of ancient civilizations, in
relation to the heartland. (Adapted from
William Kirk, Geographical Pivots of History,
Leicester University Press.) This map has been
drawn on Aitoff’s projection.
In the early history of mankind there can now be no
shadow of doubt which zone was the most prolitic in
the production of new ideas and ways of life.
Archeological exploration of the earth’s surface has
progressed sufficiently far to make it most unlikely
that any rival region will emerge to contest the
claims of the northern sub-tropical zone of the Old
World with its interesting and significant counterpart
in the New. For the majority of man’s time on earth
this was truly the Zone of Initial tropical conditions,
but this zone seems to have played an important
part in those processes leading to racial
diversification. Its plant and animal resources wee
sufficiently varied and abundantly reproductive to
give rise to a tremendous variety of hunting-and-
collecting cultures, the range of which has now been
revealed through the work of anthropologists and
archaeologists. Its biosteps in the domestication of
plants and animals which we still rely upon some ten
thousand years later. . . Here too the first cities were
built . . . the first experiments were carried out in the
organization and government of large number of
people; and long-distance trade routes first evolved .
. . So far as the World Island is concerned . . . it can
be stated without hesitation that for most of the
early history of mankind it was this subtropical Zone
of Initiation that constituted the most significant
Pivot of Histoy. 37
37
Ibid, pp 11-14.
 Many others have attempted to
simplify the relations between the political and
the physical world and to derive generalizations
from them. In a sense, A.J.Ioynbee was doing
this with the aid of an immense historical
erudition. Others have attempted the same
with even greater boldness and incomparably
less historical and knowledge.
One of the major syntheses of recent
years been that of Saul B. Cohen.38 His object,
as he himself expressed it, was to delimit
“geostrategic regions,” units of the earth’s
surface which, he claimed, were “large enough
to possess certain globe-influencing
characteristics and functions” but at the same
time possessed some degree of unity “in terms
of location, movement, trade orientation, and
culture or ideological bonds.”
Though he outlined ten, such regions,
as shown in Figure 15-6, he grouped them
under four heads:
1. Trade-dependent maritime world
2. Eurasian continental power
Figure 15-6 The geostrategic zones of Saul B.
Cohen. (Based on Saul B. Cohen, Geography
and Politics in a Divided World, New York,
1964.)
3. Shatter belts
4. Independent geopolitical region
This is an analysis of the interrelations of states
which is valid for only a short period of time. It
gives no indication either of past patterns or of
current trends. The “Heartland and Eastern
Europe,” presented here as a “Eurasian
continental power,” may not long remain in this
category. Its naval presence is already apparent
in the Mediterranean, and it is not
inconceivable that it may extend to the Red Sea
and Indian Ocean China, the other “continental
power,” is already intervening commercially
and politically in East Africa and may have
ambitions to dominate the Southeast Asian
“Shatter belt.” It is not impossible, indeed, that
there might one day be a Soviet-Chinese
confrontation in the Indian Ocean, and that
would doubtless terminate the “independent
geopolitical region of South Asia.”
 One may quarrel also with the
boundaries drawn to delimit the geostrategic
regions. Indeed, the process of dividing,
classifying, and reducing to order the divided
political world of yesterday or today is both
difficult and dangerous – difficult because of
the complexity of the data and the irrational
acts to which decision makers are always liable,
and dangerous because the divisions which
result, defined inevitably in the most simplistic
of terms, tend to produce stereotyped view of
what should be expected of them.
THE CONTEMPORARY ROLE OF THE
HEARTLAND
Mackinder has been criticized for leaving the
advance of technology out of his synthesis, for
thinking in terms of past rather than of future
methods of transportation and war. Do the
modifications and extensions of Mackinder’s
thesis that have been reviewed make the same
kind of error, that of planning the next war’s
strategy in terms of the last war’s weapons and
logistics. A major conflict which can be most
readily envisaged, is that of the so-called “free
world” versus some part of the Communist
world. All lesser conflicts must take their color
from this. If we equate the Communist world
with the Soviet Union, China and their satelites,
we are presented with a compact area,
encircled – or almost so – by members of the
free world. The geographical arrangement of
the territorial bases of both the major
contestants suggests that the struggle is likely
to take the shape of an outward pressure by the
members of the Communist bloc and of
attempts by the encircling tier of states to
restrain this pressure. If this is so, then the
analyses presented by Mackinder, Spykman and
others have a very considerable element of
truth and may be said to give us a framework
within which to analyze the international
situation. We are being confronted with a series
of outward jabs from the bloc countries,
directed now toward Berlin and Germany, now
toward Turkey, Iran or Afghanistan, now toward
Laos, Vietnam, and the offshore islands and
Formosa, or Korea. The pressure is not always
long sustained, and it is not every instance
military, though it is generally backed by the
armed strength of the Soviet Union or, to a
lesser extent, of Mainland China. These events
are suggestive of that “persistence of
geographical relationship” to which Mackinder
referred, and they appear to justify some kind
of policy of containment.
But such a policy implies a certain
degree of coherence and of unity of policy
within the Communist bloc. Such does not exist,
and the bloc has fragmented, if, indeed it ever
really existed. Containing the “Communist
heartland” is like putting a fence around a will-
of-the-wisp; it may not even be there.
But although history goes on repeating
itself because, perhaps, of its common features,
which are geography and human nature, it
always does so with a difference. Technology
and ideology change in the meanwhile. The
continued reliance on a sort of modified
Mackinder thesis, which is the essence of the
containment thesis, emphasizes the unchanging
geographical factors and the continuation into
the present of the old power lusts of the
Russian czars. It fails to take into consideration
the advance in technology and the power
ideological forces.
The technological advances of the
greatest significance in this regard have been
the development of weapons of hitherto
inconceivable explosive power and, at the same
time, the perfecting of the mechanisms –
manned aircraft, rockets, submarines, and
perhaps satelites – for delivering these more
powerful weapons to their targets. In the past,
wars have been won by the movement of
armies over the ground and by the surface
engagements on land and sea. The use of
aircraft and rockets during the Second World
War was subordinate and, some would argue
not of fundamental importance until, on August
6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima. Wars had hitherto been won by
“push of pike.” The local wars of recent years
have also been fought with traditional
technology. We are led to suppose however,
that in any major war in the future very heavy
reliance would be placed on nuclear weapons.
If this latter assumption is correct,
expansion from the Soviet heartland will not
necessarily be against the enclosing and
“containing” ring of states. Given a rocket with
a range of about 10,000 miles, direct attack
could be launched from somewhere within the
Soviet Union against any point on the earth’s
surface. The policy of containment was
predicated upon the assumption that Soviet
aggression would be by land armies moving
outward from the Soviet Union over the land
surface. A wall or rampart of free nations ceases
to be a sufficient protection against the
aggression of an enemy that can attack directly
at any point behind it.
We dare not assume that the old-style
containment thesis has outlived its usefulness.
Expansion from the Communist states of
Eurasia by traditional means of aggression or
attack is easier, cheaper, and less likely to
provoke violent retaliation than the use of the
newest rocket-propelled nuclear warheads. Any
weakening of the ability of the West to bring
traditional kinds of military aid to the containing
nations, such as Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, or South
Korea, would invite attack on these countries
with traditional weapons. Any loss of
momentum in the buildup of nuclear weapons
might invite a kind of atomic blackmail by the
Soviet Union or China. There are two alternative
patterns of strategy, the traditional and the
nuclear, and one of the strongest weapons in
the Communist armory is its apparent ability to
dictate the technological pattern of a future war
and to prepare for it. The non-Communist world
has to plan for the possibility of war at two
levels, localized, brush-fire wars, roughly
conforming to the geographical pattern
prescribed by Mackinder, and also global
nuclear war. Containment is no longer enough,
nor is it possible today.
As well as changing technology, the
Mackinder thesis and its modifications failed to
take changing ideology into account. At no
point have they allowed for the fact that, over
parts of the globe of remote from the heartland
itself, social and political conditions might
predispose people to favor a sociopolitical
system similar to that of the Soviet Union and
to welcome Soviet or Chinese aggression that
might bring such a system nearer reality.
Granted that such an attitude would be strongly
influenced by propaganda and that it would not
be based upon accurate knowledge of
economic, social, and political conditions within
the Soviet bloc, nevertheless the African or
Latin American who is revolted by the poverty
and ignorance around him may turn to Marxism
or to communism for a solution to his problems.
There may be enough like-minded persons to
form the nucleus of a party or even to seize
political power. There are no geographical limits
to this kind of attach on the institutions of the
non-Communist world. It constitutes a kind of
“fifth column,” operating behind the containing
tier of states that as we saw in Chapter 12, is
linked unevenly together in NATO, CENTO, and
SEATO. It operates in Cuba and the Republic of
the Congo and the Republic of the Congo, the
Middle East, Bolivia, and Indonesia. One major
defense against it is the elimination of poverty
and want. There will in all probability be
Communist intellectuals for a very long period
of time; the mounting human misery in many –
if not also in most – of the developing nations
provide grievances enough for them to exploit.
On the other hand, it may be confidently
assumed that current rifts between Communist
states are more likely to deepen than to heal,
and that a united Communist heartland will be
even farther from reality in the future than it
was in the past or is today.
On balance, it seems likely that the
Soviet Union and China may in turn knock on
the doors of the enclosing and containing tier of
states. This was the weapon of the Russian
czars and even of their predecessors, the
Mongol tribes. It continues to be a weapon of
the Soviets, supplemented and reinforced by
the threat of the nuclear attack in depth and by
the opportunities, wherever and whenever they
arise, of revolution far behind the lines. A
threefold policy, containment, the nuclear
deterrent, and economic aid, is necessary to
withstand this three-pronged strategy.
GEOPOLITICS
In the preceding pages we have reviewed a few
of the many attempts that have been made to
analyze the political-geographical pattern of the
world and to predict the future trend of events.
It is not always clear whether the authors of
these views saw in the physical environment a
force which compels man, through its influence
on his character and health or through some
other physiological mechanism, to act in a
certain way, or whether it merely “advises us . .
. given our preferences.”39 Nor is it apparent
how the German school of geopoliticians
regarded this relationship between geography
and policy. Geopolitics, according to the
German journal that was its formal mouthpiece,
. . . is the science which deals with the dependence
of political events upon the soil [i.e the physical
setting]. It is based upon the broad foundations of
geography, especially political geography . . .
Geopolitics aims to furnish the weapons for political
action, and the principles for guidance in political life
. . . Geopolitics must become the geographical
conscience of the State.40
In other words, so it appears, the study
of geopolitics should suggest the future course
of political action and, like the still, small voice
of conscience, keep reminding politicians of
what they should do in the best interests of
their country. Yet geopolitics was something
more than strategy because it helped to
formulae the objective of policy as well as being
the means by which that objective might
ultimately be reached.
One cannot appreciate the objectives
and influence of German geopolitics without
understanding something of the career of Karl
Haushofer, who gave it the form and substance
which we know. Karl Haushofer was a career
officer in the German Army. In 1908 he was
sent on a military mission to Japan. His voyage
there, with stops at numerous military and
naval bases, most of them British, gave him
time to contemplate Britain’s great power. The
prospect did not please him, and it became one
of his objectives to help Germany break through
this supposed ring of British power which
girdled the Old World. He was impressed with
what he saw in Japan, he liked the political
unity which he found and the subordination of
person and party to the collectivist concepts of
the state, and he would have been happy if
such a monolithic political system could have
been established in Germany.41
Haushofer was at this juncture provided
with ammunition from an unexpected source.
He read Mackinder’s paper of 1904 on the
geographical pivot of history. Here were both
analysis and prescription. The pivot area (later
called “the heartland”) can dominate the Old
World: therefore Germany must ally herself
with the ruler of the heartland, Russia, and with
her break the fetters which Haushofer believed
Great Britain had cast around the world island.
The German government did not take the
advice of its rather junior officer. Germany was
defeated, and that officer contributes his own
explanation of the defeat: Germany’s leaders
had stumbled into the war completely unaware
if its world-political connotations. While they
had worked out their military strategy down to
the last detail, their political strategy betrayed
their lack of understanding of the real issues at
stake.42
Haushofer had learned another lesson
during his stay in Japan, namely, that peace
(Raum) is also a factor in power. He listened to
the claim of the Japanese propagandists that
their people required more space and that the
mere fact that the population and, of course, in
the possession of land to support this increase.
Planned conquest in Korea and China was to
satisfy at once the political, territorial, and
economic needs of Japan.43
A final element was introduced into
Haushofer’s though from the geographical
writings of his own fellow countrymen,
reinforced by those of Rudolf Kjellen, a Swede.
This was the concept of the state as an
organism for which growth is a rule of life. From
these elements, location, space, and growth,
Haushofer forged the terrible weapon of
German Geopolitik. Perhaps its most concise
definition come not from Haushofer himself but
from his disciple, the geographer Otto Maull.
Geopolitik concerns itself with the state, not as a
static concept, but as a living being. Geopolitik
investigates the state primarily in relation to its –
environment -- its
39
Ladis K.D. Kristof. “The Ougms and Evolution of
Geopoltics,” Journal of Conflict Resolution vol. 4 p. 19.
1960
40Quoted from Zeuschutt fur Geopolitik, in Hans W.
Wetgert , Generals and Geographers, Oxford University
Press, New York, 1942, p.14.
41Andreas Dorpalen, The World of Generl Haushofer,
Pattar & Rineheart, INC., New York, 1942, p.4. Most would
claim that Haushofer’s Germany fell little short of Japan in
these respects.
42 Ibid., p. 14.
43Charles A. Fisher, The Expansion of Japan: AStudy in
Oriental Geopolitics,” G.I., vol. 115, pp. 1-19, 179-193,
1950.