The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Strausz-Hupé tells us that Mackinder’s concept of the Heartland “is colored by the very personal point of view of an Edwardian Englishman.” For Mackinder’s generation, Russia had been Great Britain’s antagonist for almost a century, and consequently British statesmen lived with the fear of a Russia that would control the Dardanelles, consume the Ottoman Empire, and fall upon India. Thus, Mackinder fixated upon a tier of independent buffer states between Russia and maritime Europe, even as he identified the Heartland inside Russia itself as a visual tool of strategy. “Mackinder’s vision,” Strausz-Hupé writes, “accorded only too well with the morbid philosophy of world power or downfall which explains so much about German national pathology. There is in Mackinder’s dogma just the kind of finality for which the Wagnerian mentality yearns.” And yet Strausz-Hupé ultimately rescues Mackinder’s reputation:

  Mackinder’s book—written when the armies had not yet returned from the battlefields—is dignified by a cool detachment and never loses sight of the broad perspectives of history. It is his faith in the individual which his German admirer so woefully lacks. For, though Haushofer likes to stress the part of heroism in the shaping of history, it is the collective sacrifice of the battlefield rather than the anonymous struggles of ordinary men and women … which he has in mind.4

  Strausz-Hupé and Mackinder both believe in human agency, in the sanctity, as they say, of the individual, whereas the German Geopolitikers do not.

  Whereas in Mackinder’s hands the Heartland is an arresting way to explain geopolitics, in Haushofer’s hands it becomes both a crazed and dreamy ideology. Yet Strausz-Hupé takes it very seriously, and informs his fellow Americans to do likewise: “To the Nazis,” Strausz-Hupé writes, Haushofer “transmitted something that the vaporous cerebrations of Adolf Hitler had failed to provide—a coherent doctrine of empire.” While Mackinder saw the future in terms of a balance of power that would protect freedom, Haushofer was determined to overthrow the balance of power altogether: thus he perverted geopolitics. To wit, just as Haushofer distorted Mackinder, he also distorted Lord George Nathaniel Curzon. Curzon delivered a lecture in 1907 about “Frontiers.” Haushofer, inspired by Curzon, wrote a book entitled Frontiers, which was, in fact, about how to break them. According to Haushofer, only nations in decline seek stable borders, and only decadent ones seek to protect their borders with permanent fortifications: for frontiers are living organisms. Virile nations build roads instead. Frontiers were but temporary halts for master nations. To be sure, German Geopolitik is perpetual warfare for “space,” and thus akin to nihilism. Strausz-Hupé adds:

  It should not be assumed, however, that this perverted use, destructive to world peace as it is, necessarily invalidates all geopolitical theories; anthropology is no less a science for having served as a vehicle to racism.5

  Haushofer, even within the confines of his own violent worldview, had few fixed principles. On Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, in 1939, he described the Führer as a “statesman” who combined in his person “Clausewitz’s blood and Ratzel’s space and soil.”6 Haushofer greeted the Russo-German pact of 1939 with enthusiasm in an editorial, stressing Germany’s need to join its land power forces with those of Russia. Yet after Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, he wrote another editorial, celebrating the invasion as a way to capture the Heartland. Of course, nobody dared criticize Hitler’s decision. There is a strong case to be made that Haushofer’s specific links to Hitler were greatly exaggerated, even as Haushofer, nevertheless, came to represent a typical Nazi strategic view.7 In any case, as the war turned badly, Haushofer fell out of favor with the Führer, and was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp in 1944. The same year, Haushofer’s son, Albrecht, also a geopolitician, was executed for his participation in the army plot against Hitler. This was after Haushofer and his family had been incarcerated. Then there was the fact that Haushofer’s wife was part Jewish: the couple was protected from Nazi race laws by Hess, who was imprisoned in Britain in 1941 after a solo flight there to negotiate a separate peace. The contradictions in Haushofer’s life must have become too much to bear, as he gradually became aware of the monumental carnage and destruction in a world war that he did his part to bring about. Haushofer’s life is a signal lesson in the dangers inherent for men of ideas who seek desperately to ingratiate themselves with those in power. Soon after Germany’s defeat and an Allied investigation of him for war crimes, both Haushofer and his wife committed suicide.

  Strausz-Hupé’s work is not merely designed to discredit Haushofer and rescue the reputation of Mackinder, but to implore Americans to take geopolitics seriously, because if they don’t, others of ill intent will, and in the process vanquish the United States. As he writes at the end of his book:

  The Nazi war machine is the instrument of conquest; Geopolitik is the master plan designed to tell those who wield the instrument what to conquer and how. It is late, but not too late to profit by the lessons of Geopolitik.8

  For Strausz-Hupé is every inch a realist. Exposing some of the intellectual underpinnings of a totalitarian state’s program of conquest is not enough for him, and in addition is much too easy. He knows the uncomfortable truth that just as Mackinder’s reasoning is flawed in crucial ways, Haushofer’s reasoning, though perverted, does have a basis in reality. Therefore, Strausz-Hupé’s aim is to imbue Americans—who live in splendid isolation by virtue of being bounded by two oceans—with a greater appreciation of the geographical discipline, so that the United States can assume its postwar role as a stabilizer and preserver of the Eurasian balance of power, which the Nazis, helped by Haushofer, attempted to overturn.

  As for the Heartland thesis itself, Strausz-Hupé, who is extremely skeptical of it to begin with, says that air power—both commercial and military—may render it meaningless. Nevertheless, he does believe that Industrial Age technology provided the advantage to big states: large factories, railway lines, and tanks and aircraft carriers are best taken advantage of by states with depth of distance and territory. “The history of our times appears to reflect, with malignant fatality, the trend toward empires and super-states predicted by the Ratzels, Spenglers, and Mackinders.”9 Of course, the postindustrial age, with its emphasis on smallness—microchips, mobile phones, plastic explosives—has empowered not only large states but individuals and stateless groups, too, adding only a deeper complexity and tension to geopolitics. But Strausz-Hupé intuits some of this in his discussion of frontiers, which he takes up on account of Haushofer’s misuse of Curzon in this matter.

  Despite Haushofer’s nihilism, Strausz-Hupé will not be intimidated into debunking him outright. For the very fact of frontiers shows a world beset by political and military divisions. “The sovereign state is, at least by its origins, organized force. Its history begins in war. Hence its frontiers—be they ‘good’ or ‘bad’—are strategic frontiers,” Strausz-Hupé writes. He tellingly selects a quotation from Curzon in which the latter notes that frontier wars will increase in number and intensity as “the habitable globe shrinks,” at which time “the ambitions of one state come into sharp and irreconcilable collision with those of another.”10 In other words, Haushofer is not altogether wrong in his assumption of perpetual conflict. Even after the war, there will be little respite from the tragedy of the human condition. The very crowding of the planet in recent decades, coupled with the advance of military technology, in which time and distance have been collapsed, means that there will be a crisis of “room” on the map of the world.11 This crisis of room follows from Mackinder’s idea of a “closed system.” For now let us note that it adds urgency to Strausz-Hupé’s plea that America, which for him represents the ultimate source of good in a world of great powers, can never afford to withdraw from geopolitics. For geopolitics and the competition for “space” is eternal. Liberal states will have to gird themselves for the task, lest they leave the field to the likes of Haushofer.

  Chapter VI

  THE RIMLAND THESIS

  Ro
bert Strausz-Hupé was not the only naturalized American to be warning his fellow citizens during the war about the need to take geopolitics out of Nazi hands, restore its reputation, and employ it for the benefit of the United States. Nicholas J. Spykman was born in 1893 in Amsterdam. During the First World War, when the Netherlands was neutral, he traveled extensively as a foreign correspondent in the Near East (1913 to 1919) and in the Far East (1919 to 1920). Following the war, he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also taught, and then went to Yale, where he founded the Institute of International Studies in 1935.1 He imbued his students with an awareness of geography as the principal means to assess the dangers and opportunities that his adopted country faced in the world. He died of cancer in 1943 at the age of forty-nine, but not before publishing the prior year America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power, a book that even more than the work of Mackinder gives us a framework for understanding the Post Cold War world. Spykman, who lived later, in some senses updates Mackinder.

  In the vein of Strausz-Hupé, Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, and other European immigrants in the middle decades of the twentieth century, who brought realism to a country that had given them refuge but which they felt was dangerously naive, Spykman would have none of the idealism and sentimentalism that was a characteristic of much American thinking. Geography is everything, he argues. The United States was a great power less because of its ideas than because, with direct access to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it was “the most favored state in the world from the point of view of location.”2 With Spykman there is no respite from the heartlessness of the map and the consequent struggle for space. He writes, “International society is … a society without a central authority to preserve law and order.” It is in a state of anarchy, in other words. Thus, all states must struggle for self-preservation. Statesmen can strive for the universal values of justice, fairness, and tolerance, but only so far as they do not interfere with the quest for power, which to him is synonymous with survival. “The search for power is not made for the achievement of moral values; moral values are used to facilitate the attainment of power.” Such a statement could almost have been made by Karl Haushofer, and there is much tragedy in that realization. But that should not blind us to the fundamental difference between the two men. Spykman, like Mackinder and Strausz-Hupé, believes in the “safety” of “balanced power,” not in domination. From that difference flows all the others. For the “balance of power,” Spykman is careful to say, corresponds with the “law of nature and Christian ethics” because it preserves the peace.3

  While Strausz-Hupé focuses down-and-in on Nazi geopolitical theory and in the process defends Mackinder, Spykman focuses up-and-out on the world map to assess the prospects 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 technology 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, explains 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 latitude.” 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 below 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 estuaries and indentations, provided “innumerable favorable locations for harbors.”4 Ultimately, 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.5 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 China 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, Mackinder is vital to an understanding of Cold War geography; whereas Spykman has a more organic conception of the entire globe, and thus is more relevant than Mackinder in an age in which every place can affect every other place.

  The strategic and geographic heart of the New World is what Spykman calls the “American Mediterranean,” that is, the Greater Caribbean Sea, including the Gulf of Mexico. Just as Athens gained effective control of the Greek archipelago by dominating the Aegean, and Rome took command of the Western world by dominating the European Mediterranean, America, Spykman explains, became a world power when it was able, finally, in the Spanish-American War of 1898, to take unquestioned control of the “middle sea,” or Caribbean, from European colonial states, which would allow for the construction of the Panama Canal soon after. “No serious threat against the position of the United States can arise in the region itself,” he says about the Caribbean basin. “The islands are of limited size, and the topography of Central America, like that of the Balkan peninsula … favors small political units. Even the countries of large size like Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela are precluded by topography, climate, and absence of strategic raw materials from becoming great naval powers.” The U.S. Navy can blockade the eastern boundary of the Caribbean and cut these states off from world markets, thus they are in the final analysis dependent on the United States. Spykman’s strength, as well as that of other thinkers I cover here, is the ability to see through the hurly-burly of current events and reveal basic truths. And the basic geographical truth of the Western Hemisphere, he says, is that the division inside it is not between North America and South America, but between the area north of the equatorial jungle dominated by the Amazon and the area south of it. It follows that Colombia and Venezuela, as well as the Guianas, although they are on the northern coast of South America, are functionally part of North America and the American Mediterranean. Their geopolitical world is the Caribbean, and they have relatively little to do with the countries south of the Amazonian jungle, despite sharing the same continent: for like the European Mediterranean, the American Mediterranean does not divide but unites. Just as North Africa is part of the Mediterranean world, but is blocked by the Sahara Desert from being part of Africa proper, the northern coast of South America is part of the Caribbean world, and is se
vered by geography from South America proper. As Spykman explains:

  The mountain ranges which bend eastward from the Andes, separate the Amazon basin from the valleys of the Magdalena and the Orinoco and form the southern boundaries of the Guianas. Beyond this lies the enormous impenetrable jungle and tropical forest of the Amazon valley. The river and its tributaries offer an excellent system of communications from west to east but they do not provide transportation for movements north and south.6

  As for the southern half of South America, geography works to marginalize its geopolitical importance, Spykman explains. The west coast of South America is crushed between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes, the highest mountain range in the world save for the knot of the Himalayas, Karakoram, and Pamirs, which separate China from the Indian Subcontinent. The valleys through the Andes, compared with those through the Appalachians that give the east coast of America access westward, are narrow and few. The rivers are not navigable, so that countries such as Chile and Peru, eight thousand miles across the Pacific from East Asia, and many thousands of miles from either coast of the United States, are far from the main global channels of communication and historical migration, and thus cannot raise great navies. Only central and southern Chile lie in the temperate zone, and as Henry Kissinger once reportedly quipped, Chile is a dagger thrust at Antarctica. As for the east coast of South America, it is, too, remote and isolated. Because South America does not lie directly below North America, but to its east, the populated parts of South America’s Atlantic coast, from Rio de Janeiro to Buenos Aires—far to the south, below the thickly wooded Amazon—are no closer to New York than they are to Lisbon. Dominating the American Mediterranean, and separated from the heart of South America by yawning distance and a wide belt of tropical forest, the United States has few challengers in its own hemisphere. The Southern Cone of South America, Spykman writes, is less a “continental neighbor” than an “overseas territory.”7