The Revenge of Geography Read Online Free Page B

plan
designed to tell those who wield the instrumentwhat 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 strategicfrontiers,” 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 VIII

THE “CRISIS OF ROOM”
    As a visiting professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis some years back, I taught a course about future challenges in national security. I started the semester by having the midshipmen read
Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age
by Yale political science professor Paul Bracken. A brief and clairvoyant tour de force that sold poorly when it was published in 1999, Bracken’s book is very much in the spirit of Mackinder and Spykman, even as there are no references to them in his text.