The Revenge of Geography Read Online Free

pessimistic about the ability of British sea power to prevent a raid on the Heartland by German land power. And once in possession of the Heartland, Germany could build a great navy to aid in its conquest of the World-Island. In the twentieth century, Mackinder explained that, more than ever, sea power required a broader and deeper landward reach to take advantage of industrialization. The Industrial Age meant a world of big states, and the strong ate the weak. Haushofer adopted this theory of Mackinder “to the opposite German point of view,” Strausz-Hupé writes, “and concluded that the path to German world power lay along the lines that had frightened the English, i.e., consolidation of the German and Russian ‘greater areas.’ ” Haushofer, in the words of Strausz-Hupé, goes positively cloudy and mystical and nebulous when describing Mackinder’s Heartland. It is the “cradle of world conquerors,” “a gigantic citadel reaching from ‘the Elbe to the Amur,’ ” that is, from central Germany to Manchuria and the Russian Far East, deep into which Germany can withdraw her vital war industries while its army and navy can strike outward in all directions. 2
    Whereas Mackinder, influenced by Wilsonianism and the need to preserve the balance of power in Eurasia, recommended in 1919 a belt of independent states in Eastern Europe, Haushofer, inverting Mackinder’s thesis, calls a few years later for the “extinction of such states.” Haushofer, Strausz-Hupé reports, calls them “bits of states … fragments,” whose inhabitants think only in terms of “narrow space,” which to Haushofer, as Strausz-Hupé explains, “is the unmistakablesymptom of decay.” Strausz-Hupé goes on, uncovering Haushofer’s “neat logic” about the dissolution of the British Empire and the need to break up the Soviet Union into its component ethnic parts, which will all lean on a Greater Germany, which in Haushofer’s view is the only state entitled to national self-determination. For in Haushofer’s own words, “one-third of the German people [are] living under alien rule outside the borders of the Reich.” German
Geopolitik
, Strausz-Hupé warns, is a world of “acrobatics on the ideological trapeze,” with conclusions of “stark simplicity.” The German new world order presupposes a Greater East Asia under Japanese hegemony, a U.S.-dominated “Pan-America,” and a German-dominated Eurasian Heartland with a “Mediterranean–North African subregion under the shadow rule of Italy.” But for Haushofer, this is only an intermediate step: for, according to Mackinder, the Heartland dominates the World-Island and hence the world. 3
    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 ofheroism in the shaping of history, it is the collective