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V. Machiavelli’s Virtue
In encouraging unrestricted imperialism, Machiavelli breaks with both
the classical and medieval prescriptions for foreign policy. Indeed, he
subtly points to his break with medieval Christianity in Chapter III in
observing that the pagan Romans adhered to the rules of conquest
better than his Christian contemporaries and blaming Louis XII’s failure
to conquer Italy in large part on his desire to keep faith and avoid war
with the pope. Machiavelli’s disagreement with the classics and
medievals is derivative of a more profound disagreement concerning the
ends of politics and of man, which we must consider in order to
understand the foundation of Machiavelli’s strategic guidance. The
classics and the medievals regard the acquisitiveness that Machiavelli
promotes as a moral vice. And inasmuch they hold that moral virtue is
essential to human happiness and that the promotion of moral virtue for
the sake of human happiness is the proper end of politics, they would
disapprove of Machiavelli’s liberation of acquisitiveness. The classics and
the medievals understand that the desire to acquire security, wealth,
power, and honor is deeply rooted in human nature, but think that
human beings long ultimately to transcend those goods. These goods
are to be counted as good insofar as they enable human beings to be
virtuous. While neither the classics nor the medievals think that moral
virtue is sufficient for human happiness—the former hold that moral
virtue points beyond itself to philosophy and the latter to piety—they
hold that, in political life, moral virtue is properly to be regarded as an
end in itself.
From this vantage point, imperialism appears dubious. While the classics
countenance harsh measures in foreign policy, including conquest of and
fomenting civil war in other cities, they do so not for the sake of empire
or glory but rather to preserve the city’s freedom and its way of life. As
Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus shows, imperialism is at odds with the
sort of morally serious, aristocratic republic favored by the classics. So,
while they would concur with Machiavelli’s insistence that a city’s foreign
policy be determined solely according to its own good, they conceive of
the city’s good in such a way as to favor, in principle, defensive
isolationism over imperialism. Yet to hold that politics at its peak is in
tension with imperialism is not to deny that cities must, under some
circumstances, follow an imperial course. The practical lesson of the
classics, then, is not always to avoid imperialism, but rather to
recognize that, when cities are compelled by necessity to become
empires, the possibilities of domestic political life will tend to diminish.
Machiavelli revises this lesson insofar as he insists that necessity almost
always dictates imperialism and insofar as he denies that this necessity
poses any kind of limit to our highest political aspirations. Machiavellian
imperialism is even more opposed to the medieval Christian outlook
according to which war is legitimate only for the sake of retribution for
injustice. Insofar as all men are to be regarded as God’s children and
therefore deserving of love, states are morally obliged to seek peace
with one another in most cases.
Machiavelli evidently doubts that human beings long to transcend the
mundane concerns of political life whether for the sake of moral virtue,
philosophy, or piety. Accordingly, he proposes a new conception of
virtue as the shrewd pursuit of security, wealth, power, and glory.
Winning glory becomes the peak of political life, if not human life
altogether. Far from being an end in itself, Machiavellian virtue is a
means to these goods. Whether a quality counts as a virtue depends
entirely on whether it yields success. This means that what the classics,
medievals, or the ordinary moral man for that matter would condemn as
a vice might, under certain circumstances, be a virtue. For example,
Machiavelli argues that well-used cruelty, that is, cruelty “done at a
stroke, out of the necessity to secure oneself, and…not persisted in
but…turned to as much utility for the subjects as one can,” is virtuous
(37-38). He goes so far as to contend that princes who are unafraid to
have a reputation for cruelty will, for the most part, be more merciful in
practice than those who are so afraid. For the former will not fear to
take the harsh steps necessary for establishing and maintaining order,
which is a good enjoyed not only by the prince but also by the people
(65-66).
This example points to the humane intention guiding Machiavelli’s
reconception of virtue. In counseling princes, he aims to benefit not only
or even primarily the ambitious few but also the people. According to
Machiavelli, a common good obtains between the prince and the people
in most cases. The people, unlike “the great” who desire to rule, desire
merely not to be oppressed. For this reason, Machiavelli advises princes
to build their power on the people rather than the great (38-42). The
prince can achieve his highest goal of winning glory by satisfying the
people’s desires for freedom and security. As his high praise for the
virtue of Severus, a Roman emperor who oppressed the people, shows,
Machiavelli’s cultivation of virtuous princes will not always redound to
the people’s good, it will, Machiavelli believes, generally yield more
humane results.
Thus, it is paradoxically in a spirit of humanity that Machiavelli criticizes
classical political philosophy and the Bible for obscuring the harsh
necessities of politics. This is what he is up to on the deepest level in the
two chapters (XIII and XIV) immediately preceding the one in which he
explicitly breaks with those traditions and presents his new conception
of virtue. In Chapter XIII, he argues for his famous and oft-repeated
maxim: Rely on your own arms. He identifies the tyrant Hiero of
Syracuse and David as exemplary followers of this maxim. But
Machiavelli conspicuously misrepresents the details and spirit of the
story of David’s defeat of Goliath in the Bible. He reports that David
chose to fight Goliath with his sling and knife and refrained from
accepting Saul’s arms, omitting the crucial point that David refused
Saul’s arms not because he relied on himself but because he relied on
God. In truth, then, Machiavelli is challenging the Biblical story. One
sees that he is also implicitly challenging the Biblical account of Moses’s
political success when one recalls that he compared Hiero to Moses in
Chapter VI (25). Like Hiero, Moses rose to and held onto power by
relying on himself and not refraining from the use of cruelty. The Bible,
Machiavelli suggests, falsifies political history in such a way as to
encourage reliance on divine providence, which, in Machiavelli’s view, is
not forthcoming, rather than on oneself.
In the next chapter, Machiavelli urges princes constantly to prepare for
war in thought and in action. He suggests that, to this end, they ought
to study classical histories. But he implicitly indicates that the Roman
general Scipio learned the wrong lessons from Xenophon’s Education of
Cyrus. He notes that Scipio conformed “in chastity, affability, humanity,
and liberality…to what had been written of Cyrus by Xenophon” (60).
Only later, in Chapter XVII, does Machiavelli reveal that these virtues
turned out to be vices for Scipio as his “excessive mercy” led his armies
to rebel against him (68). Just as the Bible does in the case of Moses,
Xenophon obscures the similarity between Cyrus and cruel tyrants such
as Hiero and thereby leads his princely readers to ruin. As Machiavelli
proceeds to argue in the next chapter, it is necessary to turn away from
the ideal in favor of the real, to go directly to “the effectual truth” (61).
Thus Machiavelli promises to be a better guide than classical or medieval
political philosophy.
V. State of Nature
Hobbes begins Chapter I of On the Citizen with an emphatic denial of
Aristotle’s thesis that man is by nature a political animal. He insists that
human beings are essentially self-interested individuals moved by two
fundamental passions, the love of “advantage” or physical pleasure and
the love of “glory” (I.2). In the absence of government, that is, in the
apolitical condition in which men naturally find themselves, these
passions necessarily lead men into “a war of every man against every
man” (I.12). To begin, the condition of scarcity is such that the pursuit
of advantage ends in violent competition. Making matters worse, some
men are not content merely to have their physical needs met but, vainly
believing themselves to be superior to others, demand dominion over
and honor from others. The threat posed by these “aggressive” men
compels even the “modest man” to will harm unto others lest he lose his
“property and liberty” (I.4). Here Hobbes seems to echo the Athenian
thesis from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, a work which
he translated (1629) and admired greatly, namely, that war is caused
by the compelling power of honor, fear, and advantage. Yet, by contrast
with the Athenians, Hobbes suggests that honor, unlike fear and
advantage, is not compelling. While he blames the vainglorious for their
aggression, he excuses the harm done by the modest in self-defense.
Asserting that man is compelled to pursue what appears good to him
and to avoid what appears bad to him and that death is the worst thing
for man, Hobbes claims that man cannot help but do and, therefore, has
a natural right to do whatever he thinks is necessary to preserve
himself. In effect, then, “[n]ature has given each man a right to all
things” (I.10). Yet because all men cannot have all things, no one
actually enjoys this right in the state of nature. To insist on this right is
effectively to declare war upon all men and in doing so to endanger
one’s life, liberty, and property.
The way out of this vicious circle begins with the recognition that war is
utterly inimical to one’s good. The great obstacle to recognizing this is
the opinion that one is so superior to others in strength and wit that one
can achieve dominion over others. Hobbes does not go so far as to deny
that such dominion can be achieved for a time. He actually argues that
the victor, merely by dint of his greater power, can justifiably command
the vanquished, that the latter are obliged to obey the former precisely
because they cannot do otherwise (I.14). Nevertheless, he warns that
pursuing dominion by violent conquest is dangerous and imprudent on
the grounds that no one is so superior as to be invulnerable. All men are
equally capable of killing and being killed (I.3). Hobbes stakes out this
egalitarian position in part because he regards it as true, but also
because he thinks that, as a practical matter, the achievement of peace
requires deflating the pride of the aggressive, vainglorious men who are
the first to take up and the last to lay down arms. Broadly speaking, the
state of nature teaching is intended not only as an account of human life
in the absence of government but also as a reminder of our vulnerability
and therewith an inducement to seek our preservation through peaceful
association.
Background
Jeremy Bentham, jurist and political reformer, is the philosopher whose
name is most closely associated with the foundation of the utilitarian
tradition.[5] He was born in 1748 in London and was the son of an
attorney, Jeremiah Bentham. He attended Queen’s College, Oxford and
later the Court of King’s Bench, Westminster Hall as part of his
preparation for a law career. He returned briefly to Oxford in 1763 to
attend the lectures of William Blackstone, which were published in four
celebrated volumes as Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–
69). Bentham was not impressed by Blackstone and detected fallacies in
Blackstone’s natural law reasoning. In 1769, Bentham was called to the
Bar, but his legal career was brief. That year he discovered the utility
principle and related ideas in the writings of Hume, Helvétius and
Beccaria and chose instead a career dedicated to analytic jurisprudence,
law, social and political reform. He started his career as a legal theorist
in 1776 when he published anonymously A Fragment on Government.
This is an offshoot of a larger critique of Blackstone that was not
published until the twentieth century, titled A Comment on the
Commentaries.
Bentham’s career spanned almost seventy years, from the Seven Years’
War to the early 1830s, a period characterized by revolutions.[6] In
1776, Bentham co-authored the official British government response to
the American Declaration of Independence, anonymously, with his friend
the lawyer John Lind.[7] It was during the American war that Bentham
introduced utility as the fundamental principle of his political theory and,
as David Armitage notes, it was also then that he first attempted to
create a Universal Jurisprudence.[8] In addition, Fragment on
Government was promoted by Bentham himself as the product of a
global moment in British and human history because it was published
just after James Cook’s return from his second voyage around the world
in 1775.[9]
In the first page of Fragment on Government, Bentham notes that “ours
is a busy age; in which knowledge is rapidly advancing towards
perfection. In the natural world, in particular, everything teems with
discovery and with improvement. The most distant and recondite
regions of the earth traversed and explored ... are striking evidences,
were all others wanting, of this pleasing truth”[10] It is in Fragment on
Government that he first proposes his axiom: “it is the greatest
happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and
wrong.”[11]
In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham
introduces his basic postulates on utility and the utility
principle.[12] Worth mentioning is the role the Genevan exile Étienne
Dumont (1759–1829), would play in making Bentham’s name and
philosophy known in continental Europe and elsewhere through the
publication of a number of translations and redactions of his early
writings.[13] The most important of these were the three volumes
of Traités de législation civil et pénale in 1802, assembled from early
manuscript drafts. The first two volumes on civil and penal law were
later re-translated into English by the American utilitarian Richard
Hildreth and published as The Theory of Legislation in 1840. They
remained at the center of utilitarian studies in the English-speaking
world through to the middle of the twentieth century.[14] Bentham's
work was translated into Spanish and widely read throughout Spanish
America; it was adopted as a basic text for study at University level in
Buenos Aires and Santiago, for example. Bentham's other works would
enjoy similar admiration and his ideas were constantly cited and
debated in the republics of Spanish America.[15]
In 1786–87, while visiting Russia, he wrote A Defence of Usury, his first
text on economic affairs, in which he rejected Adam Smith’s defense of
a legal maximum for interest rates. The book later received its widest
audience in the United States, where it was reprinted on many occasions
and frequently cited in the debates over the usury laws.[16] It was in
Russia that Bentham developed the ideas that were published
in Panopticon or The Inspection House. [17] Here, taking into account
the inefficiency and inhumane conditions in Britain’s penal regime,
Bentham advanced the idea of the panopticon penitentiary as a
substitute penal system.
Principles of International Law
Bentham’s writings have presented unique challenges for scholars,
because the dates of publication were often far removed from the time
of writing. Many essays were published posthumously, and some others
have yet to appear in authoritative editions. Bentham’s work on
international law represents only a small fraction of his voluminous
written production.
As noted above, Bentham first publicly treated the law of nations in
his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation,[18] in which
he coined the term International. Later, in his Comment on the
Commentaries,[19] which he preferred not to make the public but which
informed his other works on the topic, he developed further his critique
of the traditional notion of the law of nations.[20]
In the second half of the 1780s, Bentham drafted a series of proposals
under the general headings of “Law Inter National 1786” and
“Pacification and Emancipation.”[21] These remained incomplete and in
manuscript form until edited and published as four essays in 1843,
under the title Principles of International Law, in the second volume of
John Bowring's edition of Bentham's collected works.[22] The essays are
therefore a bit sketchy and reflect the editor’s choice about what to
include or omit.
The four essays deal with international matters, but it is the
first, Objects of International Law and the fourth essay, A Plan for an
Universal and Perpetual Peace, which identifies most clearly Bentham's
aims for international law.[23] According to M.W. Janis, “Bentham's
basic technique in the essays was to apply his utilitarian methods to
international law, much as he had applied utilitarianism to municipal
law.”[24]
Objects of International Law begins with the following explanation: "If a
citizen of the world had to prepare an universal international code, what
would he propose to himself as his object? It would be the common and
equal utility of all nations: this would be his inclination and his
duty."[25] Bentham initially questions whether a particular legislator,
being a citizen of one nation, could at the same time be trusted to
develop laws for the whole world. He attempts to resolve the dilemma
by arguing in favor of surrendering national self-interest: "But ought the
sovereign of a state to sacrifice the interests of his subjects for the
advantage of foreigners? Why not?-provided it be in a case, if there be
such a one, in which it would have been praiseworthy in his subjects to
make the sacrifice themselves."[26] His point of departure is the
utilitarian principle of the “greatest happiness for the greatest number.”
He explains it as follows:
[H]e [the legislator] would follow the same route which he would follow
with regard to international laws. He would set himself to prevent
positive international offences - to encourage the practice of positively
useful actions.
He would regard as a positive crime every proceeding-every
arrangement, by which the given nations should do more evil to foreign
nations taken together, whose interests might be affected, than it
should do good to itself.
In the same manner, he would regard as a negative offence every
determination, by which the given nation should refuse to render
positive services to a foreign nation, when the rendering of them would
produce more good to the last-mentioned nation, than it would produce
evil to itself.[27]
As David Armitage notes, “Bentham’s international legal writings applied
the principle of utility not only to the relations between sovereigns
assovereigns but also to the relations of sovereigns with the rest of
humanity taken as an aggregate.”[28] Indeed, Bentham argues that the
extension of the greatest happiness principle to include all nations is
essential if the legislator’s duty to promote the welfare of his own people
is not to be prosecuted at the expense of the well-being of all others.
Bentham states that “expressed in the most general manner, the end
that a disinterested legislator upon international law would propose to
himself, would therefore be the greatest happiness of all nations taken
together. The resulting international code would have as its ‘substantive’
laws the laws of peace, while the laws of war ‘would be the adjective
laws of the same code.”[29]
This essay first appeared in the Claremont Review of Books, Vol. XIII,
Number 2 - Spring 2013. Reprinted by permission.
Becoming the world's only superpower can cause strange dreams. In the
case of the United States, which achieved this status over 20 years ago,
many who should know better have dreamed that economic
interdependence, multilateral institutions, technological change, global
democratization, the rise of non-state actors—even Barack Obama's
charming personality—will have a transformational effect on world
affairs, rendering irrelevant the geopolitics underlying American national
security. But geopolitical competition between major world powers
obviously continues, and these dreams, which are recognizably liberal
dreams, remain delusive and dangerous.
The very word "geopolitics" strikes such dreamers as having a kind of
reactionary, outmoded, even sinister quality. It represents to them a
distasteful way of thinking about the world. In reality, geopolitics is
simply the analysis of the relationship between geographical facts on the
one hand, and international politics on the other. These geographical
facts include natural features, such as rivers, mountains, and oceans
along with elements of human and political geography, such as national
boundaries, trade networks, and concentrations of economic or military
power. To try to make foreign policy while closing one's eyes to
geopolitical factors in world politics is like trying to play chess without
noticing the configuration of the board, and the powers of the pieces.
A number of excellent recent books show the continued relevance of
classical geopolitical insights today. Jakub Grygiel's Great Powers and
Geopolitical Change (2006) uses historical case studies from the 16th
century to show that states prosper or decline depending on whether
they match their foreign policies to underlying geopolitical realities. C.
Dale Walton's Geopolitics and the Great Powers in the 21st
Century (2007) argues that the coming era of great power competition
centered on the eastern half of the Asian continent will be characterized
by the need for shifting, fluid alliances, requiring considerable American
versatility and skill. Angelo Codevilla's A Student's Guide to International
Relations (2010) reminds us that a geopolitical framework is not
incompatible with an appreciation for the ways in which cultures,
regimes, and civilizations differ in their approaches toward international
relations, and that the United States is entirely justified in pursuing its
own distinct interests abroad rather than conforming to progressive
visions of transnational governance. Alexandros Petersen's The World
Island: Eurasian Geopolitics and the Fate of the West (2011) makes a
powerful case for the U.S. and its NATO allies to pursue a vigorous
forward strategy around Russia's perimeter, with the aim of integrating
the smaller nations of the former Soviet Union more deeply into
Western-oriented market and democratic institutions. And Robert
Kaplan's The Revenge of Geography (2012)—one of his best books in
years—provides a characteristically engaging geopolitical world tour for
the reader, concluding with recommendations for close U.S. cooperation
with Mexico on issues of trade, immigration, and counternarcotics.
In addition to their useful differences, these books present certain
common themes of geopolitical analysis, which might be summed up as
follows: The international system is a competitive arena in which great
powers play a disproportionate role, struggling for (in the bland terms of
modern social science) security, resources, position, and influence.
Military force is critical to that influence. Given their essential autonomy,
states not unreasonably tend to fear their own encirclement by other
powers, and try to break out of it through strategies of counter-
encirclement. The realities of geography and material capability set very
definite constraints on foreign policy decision-makers, which they ignore
at their peril. At the same time, there is considerable room for human
agency and political leadership to respond to these constraints and
pursue worthwhile ends with skill, courage, and success. Despite
technological and institutional changes over the years, these underlying
features of world politics have never really changed much. This is one
reason the study of history is instructive for statesmen.
Classical Geopolitics
What has changed, among other things, is the distribution of power
within the international system. Today, it is China's economic and
military power that is rising, not only on land, but at sea. Yet the basic
patterns of its rise are hardly unprecedented. So it is appropriate that
we go back for perspective, and even wisdom, as these recent books do,
to the classical geopolitical theorists. In the past century or so, three
stand out: Alfred Mahan, Halford Mackinder, and Nicholas Spykman.
U.S. rear admiral Alfred Mahan was in his time the preeminent theorist
of maritime power in world politics. Disturbed by the lack of
governmental or popular attention to the state of the U.S. Navy, in 1890
he published his greatest work, The Influence of Sea Power upon
History, 1660-1783. In it, he argues that sea power is central to the rise
and decline of great nations. Sea power is defined by Mahan as not
simply a strong navy—although it certainly includes that—but a national
orientation toward the ocean, in terms of geographical position,
commercial shipping, maritime production, and intelligent policies. The
military essence of sea power, for Mahan, is the concentrated
possession of numerous capital ships, with well-trained and aggressive
crews, capable of defeating enemy navies in battle. The possession of
such naval forces, when properly led, carries the immeasurable benefit
of driving the enemy's fleet and commerce from the open seas. Mahan
refers to this type of naval predominance as "command of the sea." In
wartime, command of the sea allows maritime powers to intervene
decisively on land, whether through naval blockade, or in direct support
of allied armies. In peacetime, command of the sea allows for the
operation of friendly maritime trade, which in turn gathers wealth to
finance the maintenance of the navy. Maritime shipping, a strong navy,
and the benefits of seaborne commerce thus operate in a kind of
virtuous circle for the leading naval powers, giving them a great
advantage over nations whose capabilities are bound mainly to the land.
Mahan argued that the self-reinforcing nature of sea power was best
demonstrated in modern times by the rise of Great Britain, which
achieved worldwide preeminence by defeating the navies of Spain,
Holland, and France in turn. But he worried that modern democracies
were not sufficiently attuned to the necessity of maintaining sea power.
His own United States, in particular, he viewed as preoccupied with
internal matters, and neglectful of its navy. He therefore recommended
not only the expansion of the U.S. battle fleet, but the careful
development of naval bases, canals, and coaling stations overseas, so
that the oceans would act as a strategic asset for America rather than as
a liability in the face of more aggressive competitors. Effective control
over vital maritime choke points, bases, and ocean lanes would allow
the seagoing nations to project their influence inland while constraining
the expansion of great land powers such as Russia—but that control
would have to be exercised and maintained energetically.
Halford Mackinder was much less confident than Mahan that Anglo-
American command of the sea could be used to check the consolidation
of great land powers in Europe and Asia. A British parliamentarian and
founder of the discipline of geostrategy, Mackinder formulated his core
argument only a few years after Mahan's appeared. In aGeographical
Journal article from 1904, and later in a book entitled Democratic Ideals
and Reality, Mackinder asked his readers to think of Europe, Asia, and
Africa as one great continent, which he called the "world island." This
single world island, Mackinder pointed out, contained much greater
human and natural resources than the rest of the planet's islands and
continents combined. Moreover the world island's "Heartland"—at its
maximum extent including Russia, Mongolia, Iran, Tibet, Central Asia,
and Eastern Europe—had the great advantage of virtual inaccessibility to
sea power. Historically, it was not so unusual for land powers to defeat
and overcome sea powers. After all, sea power was ultimately based
upon the land. Were the European and Asian continents ever to fall
under the domination of a single political entity emanating from the
Heartland, that entity would necessarily overpower through sheer
weight the outer crescent of insular maritime nations such as the United
States, Great Britain, Australia, and Japan. In this sense, the most
relevant precedent for the future might not be European maritime
dominance, but the sprawling Mongol empires of the 13th century.
Mackinder suggested that starting in about 1500 A.D., with the launch
of what he called the Columbian era, Western European nations had
been able to employ specific naval and technological advantages to
explore, penetrate, and colonize the rest of the world. The Asian
Heartland had thereby been outmaneuvered. But by the start of the
20th century, that era was coming to an end. The surface of the earth
had been largely navigated and partitioned by Europe's great empires;
the international system was now closed, without more possibilities for
external discovery. Furthermore, railways now crisscrossed massive
distances, bringing new advantages to trade, transport, and
communication by land. The future tendency would therefore be toward
the consolidation of continental-sized land powers in Eurasia, raising the
danger of Britain's relative decline and encirclement. The aftermath of
the First World War, including the Bolshevik Revolution and Germany's
failed bid for continental dominance, illustrated Mackinder's argument
that the Eurasian landmass could not be allowed to fall under the control
of a hostile authoritarian power. His specific response was to call for the
creation of an independent tier of East European buffer states, at the
Heartland's perimeter, to guard against either German or Soviet
expansion. But like Mahan, Mackinder feared that modern liberal
democracies were not inclined to think strategically over the long run.
Woodrow Wilson's brainchild, the League of Nations, confirmed his fear.
Mackinder urged the West's great maritime democracies to defend
themselves by establishing favorable balances of power on land; Wilson
created the League with the intention of putting an end to balances of
power altogether.
The failure of the League of Nations to prevent fascist aggression led to
a new wave of Western geostrategy, in which Nicolas Spykman was the
leading figure. A Sterling Professor of International Relations at Yale,
Spykman built on Mackinder's work and modified it significantly in two
books written during the early 1940s: America's Strategy in World
Politics, and The Geography of the Peace. In particular, Spykman
introduced the concept of the "Rimland," a belt of nations stretching
from France and Germany across the Middle East, to India, and finally to
China. What distinguished Rimland nations was their amphibious nature:
they were neither purely land powers nor sea powers. But taken
together, it was these Rimland powers—and not Mackinder's Heartland—
that contained most of the human population and economic productivity
on the planet. Spykman therefore characterized great geopolitical
struggles such as the Second World War not as contests of sea power
versus land power, but as conflicts between mixed alliances—each on
sea and land—over control of the Rimland. And control of the Rimland
meant control of the world.
Spykman renamed Mackinder's outer crescent of maritime powers the
"Offshore Islands and Continents." To offshore islanders like the
Americans, a purely naval or isolationist approach is always appealing.
Aware of his countrymen's intense reluctance to engage in military
conflicts overseas, Spykman nevertheless denied that an isolationist
policy was a viable option for the United States, either during or after
World War II. If the U.S. did not exercise effective control over the
airspace and sea lanes of the two oceans on either side of it, then
somebody else would. Specifically, Spykman pointed out the southern
cone of South America was so far away from the United States that
German influence there was a real possibility if Hitler was permitted to
win the war in Europe. U.S. hemispheric defense would then inevitably
collapse into something even more impoverished and constrained,
allowing the Axis powers to dominate vital resources from Europe and
Asia. Altogether, the Rimland's combined potential meant there was
simply no safe resting place for Americans on this side of the water. The
U.S. would have to ensure, through serious and costly effort, that the
resources of the Old World were not combined and mobilized against the
New World. Spykman was more optimistic than Mackinder that this
could actually be done, through the exercise of a forward strategic
presence and with the development of modern American air power. He
further warned, in anticipation of World War II's conclusion, that from
the perspective of the leading Offshore Continent (America), a Rimland
dominated by the Heartland (Russia) was no improvement on a
Heartland dominated by the Rimland (Nazi Germany and Japan).
For both Spykman and Mackinder, the geopolitical nightmare for the
West was an autocratic Heartland-Rimland conglomeration able to
dominate the Old World to such an extent that the seagoing Anglo-
American democracies would be outmaneuvered. This dire scenario has
often been dismissed over the years as highly improbable. But the great
struggles of the 20th century, including two world wars and one cold
one, were fought to prevent it, and without American intervention there
is good reason to believe that either an authoritarian Germany or the
Soviet Union would have dictated world politics for decades to come.
Eastern Rimland
The other way in which Mackinder's 1919 book, especially, appears to
have been prophetic, was in its prediction of a long-term power shift
from West to East, reversing the trend of previous centuries. During
most of the modern era, Europe was at the center of international
politics, with the world's most capable militaries, most dynamic
economies, and most assertive foreign policies. As Brendan Simms
shows in Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy (2013), the focus of great
power competition from the early modern era well into the 20th century
was ultimately the Holy Roman Empire and its successor states. Even
during the Cold War, when Rimland nations in Western Europe were
finally overshadowed by the actions of external superpowers, the
European continent—particularly Germany—remained the supreme
geopolitical prize for which those superpowers contended. The end of
the Cold War was taken by many liberal dreamers to mean the end of
geopolitics. But in reality, it merely introduced a new distribution and
ranking of great powers, characterized by a predominant America, a
resentful Russia, a strategically incoherent European Union, and a rising
set of Asian nations. As the Chinese economy has grown rapidly,
allowing them to build up and modernize their armed forces, there has
been a massive shift in relative economic and military capabilities from
the Atlantic to the Pacific. The chief focus of international great power
competition is now along the eastern rather than the western end of
Spykman's Rimland.
In geopolitical terms, China is not a Heartland but a Rimland power.
That is to say, it is accessible by sea and land, with security concerns in
both directions. The collapse of the Soviet Union represented a windfall
for China, reducing the threat from the north. Starting in the 1990s,
Beijing also resolved many of its border disputes with neighboring
countries. This has sometimes been taken as an indication that China
has few aggressive intentions. But in fact the resolution and security of
China's vast land frontier—an exceptional achievement, by historical
standards—allows Beijing to be more assertive and expansionist at sea.
In recent years, aware of America's preoccupations with economic
recession and Mideast terrorism, China has begun throwing its weight
around in the South and East China Seas, triggering a series of
dangerous maritime incidents with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines,
and Vietnam, as well as with U.S. surveillance ships. At the same time,
China has built up and modernized its navy, both to lend greater weight
to its diplomatic assertions in the region and to protect its extensive and
growing merchant marine. As James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara detail
in their very useful book, Red Star over the Pacific (2010), numerous
Chinese naval strategists explicitly invoke Admiral Mahan and his
concept of sea command.
China's practical goal appears to be command over the South China
Sea. Admittedly, the Chinese navy—the People's Liberation Army Navy,
as it is called—is still not comparable to the U.S. Navy, but it doesn't
have to be. By building up large numbers of frigates, submarines, and
land-based missiles ready to attack U.S. forces in unorthodox fashion—
for example, in concert with cyber strikes—China has created a new
correlation of forces which an American president might be reluctant to
challenge during a crisis. The purpose of the Chinese naval buildup is
not to go looking for war with the United States, but to deter the U.S.
from acting in the region, notably in defense of Taiwan. Securing control
of Taiwan would constitute not only a sweeping national accomplishment
for the Chinese Communist Party, but a dramatic improvement in
China's geopolitical situation at sea. What Chinese strategists call the
"first island chain," stretching from Japan to Malaysia, would then be
breached. Beyond that, the Chinese themselves may not know how they
plan to use their newfound sea power. But history suggests they will
continue to define their maritime interests more expansively as they
acquire greater and greater maritime capabilities.
I'll attempt to persuade first the rulers and the soldiers, then the rest of
the city, that the rearing and education we gave them were like dreams;
they only thought they were undergoing all that was happening to them,
while, in truth, at that time they were under the earth within, being
fashioned and reared themselves, and their arms and other tools being
crafted. When the job had been completely finished, then the earth,
which is their mother, sent them up. And now, as though the land they
are in were a mother and nurse, they must plan for and defend it, if
anyone attacks, and they must think of the other citizens as brothers
and born of the earth. [1]
"God," as John Locke says, "gave the World to Men in Common." [2] But
every political community begins by acquiring and establishing dominion
over a particular part of the world. Men must acquire property for the
sake of life and of a good life, for which reason Aristotle says that "the
art of acquiring property is a part of managing the household," or what
we call economics. [3] This sounds tranquil and domestic enough. But
the art of acquiring property is a species of the art of war. The art of
war, from this point of view, is "a natural art of acquisition," acquisition
of the natural necessities and utilities of life. [4] The statesman must be
concerned with acquisition of territory for the sake of the existence and
the self sufficiency of his political community. The primary concern of
politics with geography lies here: in the necessity of acquiring and
securing territory for the sake of political existence. To paraphrase
the Federalist, the first act of politics is the exercise of the different and
unequal faculties of acquiring territory. [5]
In seeking to understand the nature of politics, ancient Greek political
philosophers thought it necessary to contemplate the idea of the best
regime. [6] This idea is abstract and universal and is not subject to the
coercive material necessities of any actual and particular place or time.
It is a utopia, a no-place. Every actual political community, however,
must claim and occupy a particular, more or less defined, portion of the
earth's surface as its own, with its own peculiar topography, climate,
wealth or dearth of natural resources, and location with respect to
neighboring nations, to land and sea routes of trade and travel, and to
the rest of the world's powers. Next to the people themselves, the land
they live on is the most fundamental and necessary material condition of
political life. The rest of political life depends upon the acquisition and
defense of this particular territory, and the need to preserve this
territory is never absent from political life. This particular necessity is
then an ineradicable part of all actual politics and can be seen as "the
ultimate determinant of the nature of political society." [7]
Because politics must always be concerned with acquiring and
preserving the material necessities of political life (in the first instance,
territory) the art or science of acquisition is often equated with the art
or science of politics itself. As Aristotle writes, most people think that
statesmanship or the political art is the ability to establish and maintain
dominion (over territory and people) and, in most states, if the laws aim
at any one thing, they aim at domination. [8] From this point of view,
the soul of politics is conquest and war. [9] And the paramount concern
of politics with geography is a concern with the application of physical
power or force.
This is a harsh and repugnant view of politics. It means nothing less
than that "for everyone there always exists by nature an undeclared [or
declared] war among all cities." [10] Common decency averts the eyes
from such a prospect. Nonetheless, as a hardened student of these
matters writes, if this is the nature of politics, then "[t]his is the way in
which the matter must be viewed, and it is to no purpose, it is even
against one's own interest, to turn away from the consideration of the
real nature of the affair because the horror of its elements excites
repugnance." [11] One who did not turn away from consideration of "the
real nature of the affair" of politics but faced the horror with relish was
Niccolo Machiavelli.
"[T]ruly," wrote Machiavelli, "it is a very natural and ordinary thing to
desire to acquire, and always, when men do it who can, they will be
praised or not blamed." [12] The unlimited "desire to acquire" is the
natural disposition of men. The ability to satisfy that unlimited desire—
the art of acquisition or the art of war—is the essence of the art or
science of politics. And this art or science of acquisition contains within
itself no intrinsic limiting principle. It involves, as Clausewitz wrote, "the
use of physical power to the utmost extent," the use of force
"unsparingly, without reference to the bloodshed involved.… [T]o
introduce into the philosophy of War [or politics] itself a principle of
moderation would be an absurdity." [13] Machiavelli's Prince is advice
on how to "acquire" on the grandest scale, how to acquire
"principalities" or states. Because this is the nature of the affair of
politics, "a prince should have no other object, nor any other thought,
nor take anything else as his art but the art of war and its orders and
discipline; for that is the only art which is of concern to one who
commands." What "enables you to acquire [states] is to be a
professional in this art.… Therefore, [a prince] should never lift his
thoughts from the exercise of war, and in peace he should exercise it
more than in war." [14] Such an understanding of politics is found in our
time, among other places, in the thinking of what has come to be called
the "realist" school of international politics, according to which politics is
"rooted in the lust for power which is common to all men." [15]
If statesmanship or the political art is synonymous with the art of war or
the art of acquisition on the grandest scale, then mastery of geography
becomes "the first part" of the statesman's arsenal. "[H]e should learn
the nature of sites, and recognize how mountains rise, how valleys open
up, how plains lie, and understand the nature of rivers and marshes—
and in this invest the greatest care.… And the prince who lacks this skill
lacks the first part of what a captain must have." [16] If the "desire to
acquire" or the "lust for power" is inherently unlimited and is the
governing principle of politics, then the primary concern of politics with
geography, the concern with acquisition of territory, in principle knows
no bounds.
The concern of politics with geography, at a certain point in history,
expanded its scope, not just in principle but in fact, to encompass the
world. The British geographer, Sir Halford J. Mackinder, in his famous
paper delivered to the Royal Geographical Society in 1904, identified
this moment as the close of the "Columbian epoch" at the turn of the
twentieth century. In the four centuries since the first voyages of
Columbus and the other European explorers, Mackinder wrote, the world
had become virtually completely discovered; these same 400 years had
also witnessed the world's "virtually complete political
appropriation." [17] Henceforward, "in the post-Columbian age, we shall
… have to deal with a closed political system, and none the less that it
will be one of world-wide scope. Every explosion of social forces, instead
of being dissipated in a surrounding curcuit of unknown space and
barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the
globe." [18] Nicholas J. Spykman, an American student and critic of
Mackinder, restates Mackinder's point in a lecture delivered in the midst
of the Second World War: "[T]he total earth's surface has, today,
become a single field for the play of political forces. The whole world is
now known geographically and changes in the arrangement of forces in
one region must affect the alignment of forces in others.… The
conditions of power on one continent are inevitably reflected in the
distribution of power on another and the foreign policy of any state may
be affected by events taking place throughout the world." [19]
The fundamentally new, global dimensions of the relations between
geography and politics created the need for a new branch of study, a
new political discipline capable of understanding these relations in their
most comprehensive scope. Under the new conditions, "military
strategy," for example, "must consider the whole world as a unit and
must think of all fronts in their relations to one another." [20] The
discovery and political appropriation of virtually the whole world made
such a new discipline not only necessary but, for the first time, possible.
Because of our unprecedented vantage point, Mackinder thought, "we
are for the first time in a position to attempt, with some degree of
completeness, a correlation between the larger geographical and the
larger historical [or, for our purposes, political and strategic]
generalizations." [21]According to Spykman, it was Alfred Thayer Mahan
who "first comprehensively recognized and analyzed" the fundamental
new condition of global politics. But it was Sir Halford Mackinder "who
first studied in detail the relations between land and sea power on a
truly global scale." [22] The political and strategic aspect of this study
came to be called geopolitics.
By the close of the Columbian era, according to Mackinder, it had for the
first time become possible to see that Europe, Asia, and Africa
constituted a "joint continent," which Mackinder called the "World-
Island." This World-Island is "incomparably the largest geographical unit
on our globe," and is "possessed potentially of the advantages both of
insularity and of incomparably great resources." In this new view, one
could see that there is "one ocean covering nine-twelfths of the globe;
there is one continent—the World-Island—covering two-twelfths of the
globe; and there are many smaller islands, whereof North America and
South America are, for effective purposes, two, which together cover the
remaining one twelfth." Mackinder estimated that, in his time, "[m]ore
than fourteen-sixteenths of all humanity live on the Great Continent,
and nearly one-sixteenth more on the closely offset islands of Britain
and Japan.… [O]nly about one-sixteenth live in the lesser continents."
Anticipating that the foreseeable future would not materially alter these
proportions, and assuming that "given its climate and history, the
interior of Asia … [might] nourish a population as virile as that of
Europe, North America, or Japan," he raised the question: "What if the
Great Continent, the whole World-Island or a large part of it, were at
some future time to become a single and united base of sea-power?"
Might not this power be "invincible"? [23]
If the World-Island is the dominant geopolitical fact within the world
ocean, what Mackinder called the "Heartland" is the dominant
geopolitical fact within the World-Island. "[T]he World-Island and the
Heartland are the final geographical realities in regard to sea-power and
land-power." [24] He defines the heartland somewhat differently at
different times and considers it historically and strategically as well as
geographically. Geographically, we may understand the heartland as
"the northern part and the interior of Euro-Asia. It extends from the
Arctic coast down to the central deserts, and has as its western limits
the broad isthmus between the Baltic and Black Seas." In the heartland
lies the "widest lowland plain on the face of the globe." [25] It consists
of "steppes spread[ing] continuously for 4000 miles from the Pusstas of
Hungary to the Little Gobi of Manchuria." The rivers of these interior
steppelands of Eurasia drain either into the frozen Arctic Ocean or into
the inland Caspian and Aral seas, so that the entire expanse is "wholly
unpenetrated by waterways from the ocean." [26] The heartland is
bounded on the north by the bulwark of the Arctic Coast; on the east by
over three million square miles of "rugged country of mountains,
plateaux, and valleys, covered almost from end to end with coniferous
forests" through which flows the Lena river; and on the south by the
"mighty barriers" of the Tianshan mountains, Pamirs, Karakoram
mountains, Hindu Kush, Himalayas, the Tibetan plateau, and the
Tibetan, Gobi, and Iranian deserts. [27] These features make the
heartland "the greatest natural fortress on earth." [28]
"To east, south, and west of this heart-land are marginal regions,
ranged in a vast crescent, accessible to shipmen. According to physical
conformation, these regions are four in number.… The first two are the
monsoon lands, turned the one towards the Pacific, and the other
towards the Indian ocean. The fourth is Europe, watered by the Atlantic
rains from the west." These three regions, when Mackinder delivered his
famous lecture, contained "two-thirds of the world population." The
remaining region Mackinder called "the land of the Five Seas" and we
would call the Middle East. [29]These regions, taken together, are called
by Mackinder the "inner crescent" or the "marginal crescent." Spykman
calls them "the rimland." Whereas the heartland is a "wholly
continental" or land power, the lands of the inner crescent or rimland
are "partly continental, partly oceanic"; or as Spykman puts it, they are
"amphibious." "The rimland … [is] an intermediate region, situated …
between the heartland and the marginal seas" that surround the
Eurasian land mass. "It functions as a vast buffer zone of conflict
between sea power and land power." [30]
Beyond the rimland or inner crescent "lie the islands and off-shore
continents of the outer crescent." [31] England and Japan hem Eurasia
on west and east respectively. Southwest, beyond the Mediterranean
Sea and the great barrier of the Sahara desert stretches sub-Saharan
Africa; southeast, beyond the "Asiatic Mediterranean Sea" lies Australia.
On the "fringes of the oceans," when one is looking at a global map
centered on Eurasia, lie the "overseas continents of the Western
Hemisphere." [32]
Looking back over the centuries at such a map, Mackinder was
convinced that the heartland must be viewed as "the pivot region of the
world's politics" or the "Geographical Pivot of History." This vast steppe
land in the heart of the Eurasian continent, while inaccessible to ships,
had "all the conditions for the maintenance of a sparse, but in the
aggregate considerable, population of horse-riding and camel-riding
nomads." "For some recurrent reason … these Tartar mobile hordes
have from time to time in the course of history gathered their whole
strength together and fallen like a devastating avalanche upon the
settled agricultural peoples" to their east, south and west, so that "all
the settled margins of the Old World sooner or later felt the expansive
force of mobile power originating in the steppe." To the east and south,
access from the heartland to the settled margins is impeded by a
"system of mighty barriers" through which there are only a few narrow
and difficult "natural ways." For this reason, although "both China and
India have been repeatedly invaded from the Heartland, … the empires
thus founded have usually soon become detached from the rule of the
steppemen." "There was no [such] impediment to prevent the horsemen
from riding westward." There is an "open passage from the Heartland
into Europe." Because of this, "[f]or a thousand years [from the fifth to
the sixteenth century] a series of horse-riding peoples emerged from
Asia through the broad interval between the Ural mountains and the
Caspian sea, rode through the open spaces of southern Russia, and
struck home into Hungary in the very heart of the European peninsula,
shaping by the necessity of opposing them the history of each of the
great peoples around—the Russians, the Germans, the French, the
Italians, and the Byzantine Greeks." Thus Mackinder, at the outset of
the twentieth century, came in a sense to look upon world history in
what has become at the close of this century a "politically correct"
manner. He came "to look upon Europe and European history as
subordinate to Asia and Asiatic history." His reasons, however, are of a
flavor somewhat different from current fashionable opinion, his point
being that European civilization was, "in a very real sense, the outcome
of the secular struggle against Asiatic invasion." [33]
It is from this point of view that Mackinder sees the historic significance
of "[t]he revolution commenced by the great mariners of the Columbian
generation."
The all-important result of the discovery of the Cape road to the Indies
was to connect the western and eastern coastal navigations of Euro-
Asia, even though by a circuitous route, and thus in some measure to
neutralize the strategical advantage of the central position of the
steppe-nomads by pressing upon them in rear. … The one and
continuous ocean enveloping the divided and insular lands is, of course,
the geographical condition of ultimate unity in the command of the sea,
and of the whole theory of modern naval strategy.… The broad political
effect was to reverse the relations of Europe and Asia.… [Europe] now
emerged upon the world, multiplying more than thirty-fold the sea
surface and coastal lands to which she had access, and wrapping her
influence round the Euro-Asiatic land-power which had hitherto
threatened her very existence. New Europes were created in the vacant
lands discovered in the midst of the waters.… Britain, Canada, the
United States, South Africa, Australia, and Japan are now a ring of outer
and insular bases for sea-power and commerce, inaccessible to the land-
power of Euro-Asia. [34]
"[T]he development of ocean navigation and the discovery of sea routes
to India and America" fundamentally altered the geopolitical
relationships among the powers of the world island. [35] Sea power,
owing to its greater mobility on a global scale, had gained the ascendant
over continental land power; in doing so, it made it possible for the first
time "to conceive of the Eurasian continent as a unit" and introduced the
"age of world politics." [36]
For some four centuries, the European oceanic empires maintained their
strategic advantage against the great land empires of Eurasia. [37] The
establishment of European dominion over such a vast expanse of the
globe from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries had been
made possible largely by "advances in naval shipbuilding, navigation,
and weaponry." [38] This global dominion was extended and entrenched
in the latter part of the nineteenth century by means of "two
technological innovations that revolutionized the way in which people
and materials are moved across" land and sea (notably the application
of steam power to sea and land transportation); and by additional
inventions (the telegraph and later the radio) making possible "the rapid
transmission of the human voice across the airwaves above." [39] Even
as he first began to reflect on these global relationships between land
and sea power, however, Mackinder thought he saw the potential for
another historic reversal. The latest technologies of transport,
production, and communications, which had made possible the
extension and entrenchment of global maritime empire in the nineteenth
century, might also make possible the establishment of a continental
land power in Eurasia of unprecedented potency.
Mackinder draws a "most interesting parallel" between "the advance of
the sailors over the ocean from Western Europe and the contemporary
advance of the Russian Cossacks across the steppes of the Heartland."
While western Europe was expanding over the sea to establish dominion
across the "oceanic margins of Asia," the land power of Russia was
reversing the centuries old movement in the interior of Eurasia and
expanding eastward across the heartland "from Moscow through
Siberia." During the nineteenth century, the Russian empire was
practically coterminous with the heartland and "seemed to threaten all
the marginal lands of Asia and Europe." During the same century in
which Great Britain had come to dominate the world ocean and was
bringing pressure to bear on the rimland of Eurasia from the sea, Russia
was exerting an opposing pressure outward from the heartland. The era
of world politics came to light in the confrontation between a global sea
power and a continental land power across the whole expanse of the
Eurasian rimland. Unlike the storied horsemen from the steppe,
however, the Russian was able to establish the conditions to sustain
"the necessary man-power upon which to found a lasting empire." This
man-power—located in the geographic pivot of world power, sustained
by modern production and industry, harnessed by superior organization,
armed with modern weapons, and made mobile by the new modes of
overland transport—threatened to reverse the centuries old relation of
sea power to land power on a global scale. Such man-power under such
conditions could be "sufficient to begin to threaten the liberty of the
world from within [the] citadel of the World-Island." [40]
To understand the strategic significance of modern Russian domination
of the heartland Mackinder thought it necessary to understand the
geopolitical source of that domination. Only then could one accurately
conceive of the necessary strategic response for a global sea power such
as Great Britain. The source of Russian power was not spread across the
whole vast and vacant breadth of the Eurasian steppeland; it was
concentrated in "the real Russia" which "lies wholly in Europe,… between
the Volga and the Carpathians and between the Baltic and Black Seas."
More precisely, "Russian rule in the Heartland was based … in East
Europe." Looking back over the hundred years following the French
revolution, Mackinder saw that "East Europe was in command of the
Heartland." It was the man-power, organization, production, and
industry concentrated here in modern times that could enable a
heartland empire, for the first time, to make of most or all of the World-
Island a single, united, and invincible base of global sea-power. It is this
analysis that led Mackinder to his famous formula:
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island:
Who rules the World-Island commands the World. [41]
Throughout most of the nineteenth century it was Russian land-power
emanating from East Europe that "was opposed by the sea-power of
Britain round more than three-quarters of the margin of the Heartland,
from China through India to Constantinople." There was nothing
inevitable, however, in this land-power being Russian. Already at the
end of the nineteenth century "Berlin had supplanted Petrograd as the
center of danger in East Europe" and aimed at domination of the
heartland. [42] For the reasons given, Mackinder's analysis required
that "West Europe, both insular and peninsular, must necessarily be
opposed to whatever Power attempts to organize the resources of East
Europe and the Heartland." [43]
Mackinder would add, more generally, that "it is the plain duty of the
insular peoples" to protect the Eurasian rimlands "from Heartland
conquest." [44] From this broader view, what Britain had long been to
Europe, America had become to a considerable extent with respect to
Eurasia as a whole. Spykman emphasizes that the insular peoples must
also (as Spykman argues Great Britain historically had done) prevent "a
dominating rimland power" from gaining command of the
heartland. [45] From this perspective, the survival and independence of
all the insular peoples of the world "depended on the preservation of a
power equilibrium between the maritime and continental states of the
world island." [46] The focus of this strategic concern is not so much on
the heartland as on the rimland of Eurasia. Thus Spykman would replace
the Mackinder dictum with his own:
Who controls the rimland rules Eurasia;
Who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world. [47]
The broad outlines of the two world wars in the first half of this century
and the "cold war" that dominated the second half of the century are
illuminated by this geopolitical analysis. Germany's intention in the first
World War, as Mackinder says, was to establish in continental Europe
and the Asiatic heartland "the naval base from which she would have
fought Britain and America in the next war." [48] Spykman reminds us
that Japan, while allied with Great Britain and the United States in that
war, was nonetheless "engaged in trying to achieve complete control
over the Far East." [49]These efforts by Germany and Japan, in league
for a time with the Soviet Union, were continued in the 1930s and led to
the second World War. The global strategic significance of both wars
was the prospect "that the rimland regions of the Eurasian land mass
would be dominated by a single power" or coalition of powers with the
vast resources of the world island at their disposal. [50] Writing in the
midst of World War II, Spykman tentatively anticipated the essential
source of global conflict for the following half century: "[I]t may be," he
wrote, "that the pressure of Russia outward toward the rimland will
constitute one important aspect of the post-war settlement." [51] The
American policy of containment was the global strategy of an insular
power to defend the Eurasian rimland against this most recent and
formidable outward pressure from the heartland. The strategic logic of
that policy was indebted to the geopolitical logic of Mackinder and
Spykman. [52] The dissolution of the Soviet Union is a result—certainly
of chance and of the inherent infirmity of the Soviet system—but just as
certainly of the remarkably tenacious application by the insular powers
and their allies of a strategy grounded in the realities of geopolitics. This
restructuring of a great heartland power may reflect a historic
reordering of the power constellation within the eastern hemisphere. It
does not, however, alter the fundamental facts of geography. It remains
in the permanent interest of all the "insular peoples," indeed in the
interest of the "liberty of the world," to maintain an equilibrium between
the maritime and continental powers of Eurasia and to prevent the
dominion of any one power or coalition over the world island. [53]
The two world wars and the "cold war" illustrate the strategic conditions
that must obtain if the insular powers are to prevent an overwhelming
power from being developed in Eurasia. First is needed a secure base
with resources, reserves of man-power, and organization capable of
opposing the military force that can be accumulated by a great Eurasian
land power. This base should be distant or as inaccessible as possible to
offer the advantages of defense in depth. In the twentieth century only
the United States has possessed these attributes in sufficient measure.
Next this base must be able to project its power onto the Eurasian
continent. This requires naval mastery over the world ocean. [54] To
translate its sea power into amphibious power on the littoral of Eurasia,
the United States requires one or more "moated forward stronghold[s]"
such as Great Britain provided for the purposes of the Normandy
landings of 1944. Finally, a "defensible bridgehead" is required, "a
continental ally who can provide a base from which land power can be
exercised." [55] Spykman thought that, following the second world war,
Russia might be the "most effective base" for such purposes, provided
"she does not herself seek to establish a hegemony over the …
rimland." [56] Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, this could
conceivably be the case again, depending on the capacity and inclination
of the successor regime to dominate the rimland.
Geopolitics is properly concerned with the material necessities of
political life, specifically with the "physical features of the world" that are
"most coercive of human action" on the largest scale. [57] It is
concerned with the location, topography, climate, resources, manpower,
and organization that affect the ability of a people to exert physical
power over the land and sea. Such concerns are part of the unending
concern of politics with geography, part of the political necessity of
acquiring and defending a particular parcel of the earth's surface for the
sake of political life. Geopolitics adds something new only in its scope,
though this is no small thing. When the concern of politics with
geography expanded to encompass the world, the real prospect of world
empire was placed before men for the first time. Those who understood
the art of politics to be synonymous with the art of acquisition or the art
of war had no reason not to apply this art on a global scale. Because
this, in fact, occurred, geopolitics came to have a bad odor among
decent people. [58]
Geopolitics, however, is a part of politics. And politics, though it must
always be concerned with war and other coercive necessities, is in the
final analysis not reducible to such concerns. Even Sun Tzu, that great
teacher of the art of war, insisted that "[t]hose who excel in war first
cultivate their own humanity and justice and maintain their laws and
institutions." [59] States devoted to war and conquest necessarily breed
citizens equally driven to seek domination over their fellow citizens;
among such citizens there can be no justice or common good, and
political life comes to an end. Aristotle thought this to be evident no less
from reason than from experience, and therefore says that both
arguments and events testify that war is conducted ultimately for the
sake of peace. [60] The "real nature of the affair" of politics, then, is
revealed not in the horrors of war but in the domestic tranquility of
peace. And the political art, though it may often find the art of war
indispensable, is essentially an art of peace.
If political life characteristically begins with an act of war in the
acquisition of territory, it does not end here. Indeed, even in such
beginnings statesmen have found it necessary to contemplate the
"ends" for which political life is instituted. When the American founders
were still struggling to establish physical control over their newly
acquired territory, they were deeply concerned with a more lofty aspect
of the relation of geography to politics: whether republican liberty could
thrive in such an extensive sphere. [61]
If the art of applying physical power over territory is the "first part" of
the statesman's art, it is first only with respect to urgency or necessity.
The greater part of the statesman's concern with the relations of politics
and geography lies on higher ground. He must consider how a nation
may so conduct itself that the encroachment of another power upon its
territory could never in truth be said to be a blessing to the people of
that land; so that whatever territories and people should fall within its
dominions may truly be said to be better off because of that fact. He
must seek to arrange the political affairs of his land so that the citizens
can never with justice wish for the displacement of their country's rule
by that of an enemy. Such a nation will be neither self-aggrandizing nor
self-sacrificing. It will defend such dominions as its "interest, guided by
justice, shall counsel." [62]