The Revenge of Geography (16 page)

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 severed by geography from South America proper. As Spykman explains:

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.”
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But there is a negative flip side to much of this. Yes, the Caribbean basin unites rather than divides, and the trail of cocaine and marijuana from Colombia through Central America and Mexico to the United States shows this in action. The so-called drug war is a salient lesson in geography, which now threatens the U.S. in its hemispheric backyard. The same with the populist, anti-American radicalism of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, who has been an affront to American global interests not simply because he has been allied with Russia and Iran, but because he has been allied with Russia and Iran from his perch on the Caribbean basin: were he situated below the Amazon rainforest in the Southern Cone, he would have been less of a threat. Globalization—the Information Age, the collapsing of distance, the explosion of labor migration from demographically young countries to demographically graying countries—has brought the U.S. into an uncomfortably closer relationship with an unstable Latin America around the Caribbean. Whereas the Caribbean was previously a place that the U.S. Navy dominated, but which was otherwise separated from the main currents of American society, it is now part of the very fabric of American life. Spykman’s ideas presage these developments, even as, obviously, he could not have predicted their specifics.

Writing in the midst of World War II like Strausz-Hupé, before the fortunes of war turned in the Allies’ favor, the worldwide threat posed by the Nazis was uppermost in Spykman’s mind. Consequently, he saw the separation of the United States from southern South America as of considerable geographical importance: it was a strategic advantage in that the U.S. did not have to master the region, the way it had to master the Caribbean basin; but it was a vulnerability in that the U.S. had no special geographical advantage in the event of the region being threatened by an adversary from Europe. And the Southern Cone, from Rio de Janeiro southward—what Spykman calls the “equidistant zone”—contained the continent’s most productive agricultural regions, three-quarters of South America’s population, and the major cities of the two most important South American republics at the time, Brazil and Argentina. Even allowing for its geographic insignificance compared to Eurasia, Spykman worried about the Southern Cone becoming part of the encirclement strategy of a hostile power. Just as the geography of the Americas allowed for the emergence of the United States as a hemispheric hegemon, the breakup of the Americas into a free north and an Axis-dominated south would have spelled the end of that preponderance. “Many of the isolationists,” he writes, “accepted the policy of hemisphere defense because it seemed a way of avoiding conflict with Germany, but they overlooked the fact that, even if the U.S. could have avoided war with Germany over Europe, it could not have avoided a struggle with Germany for hegemony over South America.”
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Even though the Axis powers were to be defeated, Spykman’s warning still stands, after a fashion. Europe, Japan, and China have made very deep inroads in trade with Spykman’s equidistant zone, and there is no guarantee that the United States will remain the dominant outside power in a region in which under 20 percent of its trade is with the U.S., and the flying time from New York to Buenos Aires is eleven hours, the same time it takes to fly from the U.S. to the Middle East. Although his obsession was with winning the war, by his single-minded focus on geography, Spykman is able to show us the world we currently inhabit.

Spykman was a generation younger than Mackinder, deriving his frame of reference and inspiration from the English geographer. Latin America constitutes a long tangent from Spykman’s central concern about Eurasia, which he shared with Mackinder. Mackinder’s work suggests the struggle of Heartland-dominated land power versus sea power, with Heartland-based land power in the better position. Here is Spykman essentially acknowledging the spiritual influence of Mackinder—even if they assessed differently the relative importance of sea and land power:

Spykman describes the Heartland as vaguely synonymous with the Soviet Empire, bordered by ice-blocked Arctic seas to the north, between Norway and the Russian Far East; and to the south ringed by mountains, from the Carpathians in Romania to the plateaus of Anatolia, Iran, and Afghanistan, and turning northeastward to the Pamir Knot, the Altai Mountains, the plateau of Mongolia, and finally over to Manchuria and Korea. This to him was the world’s key geography, which would be perennially fought over. To the north and inside this belt of mountain and tableland lies the Heartland; to the south and outside this belt lie the demographic giants of Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan, as well as the oil-rich Middle East. These marginal areas of Eurasia, especially their littorals, was what Spykman called the Rimland. Spykman held that the Rimland was the key to world power; not Mackinder’s Heartland, because in addition to dominating Eurasia, the maritime-oriented Rimland was central to contact with the outside world.
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Of course, both men are really talking about the same thing; for Mackinder says that he who controls the Heartland is in the best position
to capture the Rimland, which then provides through sea power the key to world domination. As Mackinder writes, “If we would take the long view, must we still not reckon with the possibility that a large part of the Great Continent might someday be united under a single sway, and that an invincible sea-power might be based upon it?” This, of course, was the dream of the Soviet Union, to advance to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean through the invasion of Afghanistan and the attempted destabilization of Pakistan in the 1980s, and thus combine sea power and land power.
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Still, Spykman with his emphasis on the Rimland has the slight advantage here. Given the present state of the world, with Rimland upheavals in the Greater Middle East and tensions throughout South Asia, as well as the Korean Peninsula, Spykman with his concentration on the Rimland and his more complexified view of geopolitics seems almost contemporary. For the body of Mackinder’s theories emerge from the world at the turn of the twentieth century and the First World War; whereas Spykman is arguing from the facts of life of a later war, in which the Heartland was in the hands of an ally, Soviet Russia, and thus not an issue; whereas the Rimland was endangered by the Axis powers.

While the Axis powers lost the war, the competition for the Rimland continued into the Cold War. The Soviet Union constituted the great Heartland power that threatened the Rimland in Europe, the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula, and elsewhere, and was opposed by Western sea power. Consequently, “containment,” the Cold War policy against the Soviet Union enunciated in 1946 by the diplomat and Russia expert George Kennan in his Long Telegram, had both a Spykmanesque and Mackinderesque feel. Containment is the peripheral sea power’s name for what the Heartland power calls encirclement.
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The defense of Western Europe, Israel, moderate Arab states, the Shah’s Iran, and the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam all carried the notion of preventing a communist empire from extending control from the Heartland to the Rimland. In his landmark work,
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy
, published in 1957, the young Henry Kissinger writes that “limited war represents the only means for preventing
the Soviet bloc, at an acceptable cost, from overrunning the peripheral areas of Eurasia,” especially since, as Kissinger continues, the Soviet Union as the Heartland power possesses “interior lines of communications” that allow it to assemble a considerable force “at any given point along its periphery.”
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Poland, Iran, Afghanistan, Vietnam—battlegrounds all in the history of the Cold War, and all were on the periphery of Soviet and Chinese communism. This was Mackinder’s world, but with the sensibility of Spykman.

As Spykman looks out from the vantage point of 1942 beyond World War II, we see the anxious foresight of which the geographical discipline is capable. Even as the Allies are losing and the utter destruction of Hitler’s war machine is a priority, Spykman worries aloud about the implications of leaving Germany demilitarized. “A Russian state from the Urals to the North Sea,” he explains, “can be no great improvement over a German state from the North Sea to the Urals.” Russian airfields on the English Channel would be as dangerous as German airfields to the security of Great Britain. Therefore, a powerful Germany will be necessary following Hitler. Likewise, even as the United States has another three years of vicious island fighting with the Japanese military ahead of it, Spykman is recommending a postwar alliance with Japan against the continental powers of Russia and particularly a rising China. Japan is a net importer of food, and inadequate in oil and coal production, but with a great naval tradition, making it both vulnerable and useful. A large, offshore island nation of East Asia, it could serve the same function for the United States in the Far East as Britain serves in Europe. Spykman underscores the necessity of a Japanese ally against a powerful China, even as in the early 1940s China is weak and reeling under Japanese military devastation: