The Revenge of Geography (17 page)

Perhaps Spykman’s most telling observation concerns Europe. Just as he is opposed to both German and Russian domination of Europe, he is also opposed to a united Europe under any circumstances. He prefers a balance of power among states within Europe as more advantageous to American interests than a European federation, even were it to come about peacefully and democratically. “A federal Europe,” he writes, “would constitute an agglomeration of force that would completely alter our significance as an Atlantic power and greatly weaken our position in the Western Hemisphere.” Because the European Union is still in an intermediate phase of development, with strong national leaders pursuing coordinated, yet ultimately independent, foreign policies, despite the creation of a single currency zone, it is too soon to pass judgment on Spykman’s prediction. Yet already one can see that the more united Europe becomes, the greater its tensions with the United States. A true European super-state with armed forces and a single foreign policy at its command would be both a staunch competitor of the U.S., and possibly the dominant outside power in the equidistant zone of southern South America.
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(Of course, Europe’s current financial crisis make this prospect doubtful.)

Here is where Spykman differs markedly from Mackinder and Cold War containment policy.
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Containment policy, which encouraged a united Europe as a bulwark against Soviet communism, was rooted in the liberal ideals of a free society as well as in geopolitics. George Kennan, when he wrote the Long Telegram, put his faith in the Western way of life, which he believed would outlast the totalitarian strictures of Soviet communism. It followed, therefore, that like-minded
democratic European states were to be encouraged in their efforts toward a common political and economic union. Spykman, though, is even more cold-blooded than Kennan—himself a hardcore realist. Spykman will simply not let any elements outside of geographical ones enter into his analysis. Unlike Haushofer, it is not that he doesn’t believe in democracy and a free society: rather, it is that he does not feel the existence of it has much of a role in geopolitical analysis. Spykman sees his job not as improving the world, but in saying what he thinks is going on in it. It is this very ice-in-his-veins sensibility that permits him to see beyond Kennan and the Cold War. Thus, in 1942 he can still write about today:

In other words, because of air power and the expeditionary ability of, in particular, the American military to deploy quickly anywhere, the entire earth is in play. But it isn’t only in play for us, but for everyone in Mackinder’s “closed system,” thanks to communications technology, of which air power is related. Nevertheless, the planet is too big a system to be dominated by one hegemon, so, as Spykman writes, there will a “regional decentralization of power,” with each big area affecting the other. He intuits a world of multiple hegemons: similar to the multipolarity that we now all talk about, and which exists already in an economic and political sense, but not quite yet in a military one, because of the great distance still separating the United States from other national militaries. But an emerging world of regional behemoths: the United States, the European Union, China, India, and Russia—with middle powers such as Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, Vietnam, Brazil—would bear out his observations.
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What will be the dynamics of such a world? Spykman practices futurology in the best way possible, by staring at maps from different angles. His most arresting insights come from a northern polar map. “Two significant features clearly stand out: the concentration of the land masses in the Northern Hemisphere, and their starfishlike dispersion from the North Pole as a center toward Africa and the Cape of Good Hope, South America and Cape Horn, and Australia.” Looking at this projection, land is nearly everywhere; whereas if you stare at a southern polar projection, it is water that is nearly everywhere. The northern polar map shows how the northern continents are relatively close to one another, and the southern continents are far apart. Of course, in this projection the distance between the southern continents is exaggerated, yet the map is still symbolic of how far away Australia is from South America, and South America from Africa. Thus, the geographically close relationship between North America and Eurasia is dynamic and constitutes “the base lines of world politics,” while those between the southern continents are much less important. Again, he is not saying that South America and Africa are insignificant in and of themselves, only that their relationships with each other are. South America and Africa achieve significance in geopolitics only in their relationships with the northern continents. But the real message about this polar map is the organic relationship between North America and Eurasia. We think of the vast Pacific as separating the west coast of North America from East Asia. But the polar route indicates that it is just a matter of flying north to Alaska and then south, down across the Russian Far East, to the temperate zone of Japan, Korea, and China. The Arctic, especially if it warms, will give new meaning to sea power and especially air power in future decades. Supersonic transport may cut the distance between the west coast of the United States and cities in Asia by two-thirds. The increased use of polar routes will lock the United States, Russia, and China in an ever tighter embrace. Geography, because it will be more accessible, will, counterintuitively, become more crucial.
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Globalization, understood as the breaking down of walls, results in an increase in the number and intensity of contacts, which
holds out the greater likelihood of both political conflict and cooperation.

Mackinder argues that once the world becomes “a closed political system, the ultimate geographical reality would make itself felt.”
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By that he means the recognition of the World-Island as a single unit in geopolitics, with North America as the most significant of the continental satellites in the surrounding seas. It is the Northern Hemisphere that Mackinder is talking about here, as all of mainland Eurasia and much of Africa—the components of the World-Island—fall inside it. Spykman’s Rimland thesis fits neatly with this scenario, with the marginal zones of Europe, the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, and the Far East together dominating the seaboard continuum around Eurasia in the Indian and Pacific oceans, buttressed by their substantial populations, economic development, and hydrocarbon resources: together, they check the Heartland power of Russia, even as Russia gains the warming waters of its northern Arctic seaboard.
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Just as the Arctic will be a hub of planes and ships connecting North America with the northern reaches of the World-Island, the Greater Indian Ocean will form the maritime interstate of the World-Island’s commercial and military traffic, connecting Africa and the Middle East with East Asia.

Still, the Eurasian Rimland will not be united in any strictly political sense. In a world of multiple regional hegemons, the danger with which both Mackinder and Spykman were concerned, that of a single land power dominating Eurasia, or a single sea power dominating the Eurasian Rimland, appears nowhere on the horizon. Not even the Chinese, with their rising sea power, appear capable of this achievement, checked as they will be by the American, Indian, Japanese, Australian, and other navies. Nevertheless, as we shall see, a world of subtle power arrangements, where trade and economics will erode sheer military might, will still be one of geopolitics governed by geography, especially in the world’s oceans, which will be more crowded than ever. To see this maritime world better, we will next turn to another thinker from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Whereas Mackinder’s emphasis was on land power because of emerging technological developments in rail and road transport, the same Industrial Revolution made American Navy captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a slightly older contemporary of Mackinder, a proponent of sea power. Mahan thought sea power not only more important than land power in the fight for dominance, but also less threatening to international stability. Mahan noted that it is “the limited capacity of navies to extend coercive force inland” that makes them no menace to liberty. Mahan thought that instead of the Heartland of Eurasia being the geographical pivot of empires, it was conversely the Indian and Pacific oceans that constituted the hinges of geopolitical destiny. For these oceans would allow for a maritime nation to project power around the Eurasian Rimland, affecting political developments inland—thanks to the same rail and road feeder networks—deep into Central Asia. Nicholas Spykman, with his own emphasis on the Rimland
around the Indian and Pacific oceans, was as profoundly influenced by Mahan as he was by Mackinder.

Though Mackinder was awed by the strength of Russia, given its control of the Heartland, Mahan, whose book
The Problem of Asia
preceded Mackinder’s “The Geographical Pivot of History” article by four years, espied Russia’s vulnerability, given its distance from the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. Russia’s “irremediable remoteness from an open sea has helped put it in a disadvantageous position for the accumulation of wealth,” and, as Mahan goes on, “This being so, it is natural and proper that she should be dissatisfied, and dissatisfaction readily takes the form of aggression.” Thus does Mahan reveal the deepest psychological currents—based, in fact, on geography—of the Russian national character. Mahan calls the nations lying to the south of Russia and north of the Indian Ocean the “debatable ground” of Asia, “the zone of conflict between Russian landpower and British seapower.” (Spykman, four decades later, will call this area the Rimland.) Of this debatable ground, Mahan emphasizes the importance of China, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey. It is no coincidence that in 1900 he is able to identify the pivotal states of geopolitical significance in our own time: for geography is unchangeable.

Geography helped dictate a containment strategy against the Soviet Union from the southern tier of Eurasian states during the Cold War that involved all of these Rimland nations; and geography helps determine the importance of China, as a state and civilization extending from the Eurasian Heartland to the warm waters of the Pacific Rim, even as geography helps determine Afghanistan and Iran as two Heartland nations critical to the destiny of the Middle East. It was Mahan who, in 1902, first used the term “Middle East” to denote the area between Arabia and India that held particular importance for naval strategy. India, he points out, located in the center of the Indian Ocean littoral, with its rear flanks protected by the Himalayan mountain system, is critical for the seaward penetration of both the Middle East and China. Sea power, it emerges, provides the Mahanian means by which a distant United States can influence Eurasia in a Mackinderesque “closed system.”
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Mahan’s ocean-centric view has its flaws. As Robert Strausz-Hupé explains in
Geopolitics
, “In the fact that Britain and the United States clung to the doctrine of Mahan they [Haushofer and the other German
Geopolitikers
] saw Germany’s shining opportunity. As long as the Anglo-Saxon powers made that [Mahanian] doctrine—so appealing because it promised security
and
business as usual—the basis of their defense—Germany was assured of just that breathing space she needed for organizing total war.”
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Mahan’s sea power doctrine, in other words, concentrating as it did on grand Eurasian security, did not, as aggressive as it was, sufficiently take into account the ability of a land power to quickly lay siege of Europe from Iberia to the Urals.

Yet Mahan did cover his tracks. For he wrote that “the due use and control of the sea is but one link in the chain of exchange by which wealth accumulates.”
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Nevertheless, his thinking was more suited to the sea power expansion of the United States around the world than it was to the preservation of the balance of power within Europe. There was, in Strausz-Hupé’s words, a “lusty imperialism” to Mahan, who saw the ultimate goal of American power to be more than just the “sea-to-shining-sea” of Manifest Destiny, but also to encompass the domination of the Caribbean and the Pacific, which would make the United States the world’s preponderant power. Mahan held that a nation must expand or decline—for it was impossible for a nation to hold its own while standing still. As a tactician he was often similarly unnuanced, believing in the concentration of naval power through battle fleet supremacy: “the massed fleet of line-of-battle ships.”
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