Hey There.
Halford Mackinder is the most influential person you’ve probably never heard of.
Mackinder was a British Geographer.
He is seen as one of the founding fathers of geopolitics, which obviously makes him
important to the work of this YouTube Channel.
He’s tremendously influential, from the Kremlin to the Pentagon.
His most famous words are these.
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World
Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.
If you are doubting the influence of this long dead British academic, let me point you
to a Bloomberg opinion piece from June of 2019.
James Stavridis, a highly respected and decorated retired US Admiral thinks these ideas are
still worth talking about.
It’s very interesting stuff.
You can see why defense industry folks across the world love it.
The problem is that Halford Mackinder was just wrong.
About basically everything.
After about the eleventy billionth YouTube comment telling me that the US occupation
of Afghanistan or US expansion of NATO was rational because of Mackinder’s principles
I decided to actually read some of his work.
I don’t think anybody else has done this recently, because the problems are pretty
obvious.
The Geographical Pivot of History was first delivered as a talk in 1904.
It was seen as revolutionary because it turned older British ideas about the importance of
sea power upside down.
He argued that what would matter in the future was the control of the center of Eurasia,
not the coast lines that had been important up to that point.
The railroad had ended the old primacy of the waves.
The vast power of the Russian steppes would soon be what really mattered in geopolitics.
The power of the Soviet Union made this look sort of clever for a bit, but I think it also
kept people from re-examining just how drastically wrong Mackinder was about what the future
would bring.
He was laughably wrong in the Short term.
The 1904 essay talks about how impressive the Russian army in Manchuria was, and how
it showed the growing might of the land power!
In 1905 that Russian army was destroyed by the Japanese, a people whose power was very
much based in the sea.
That’s minor picture thing, but to illustrate just how wrong Mackinder’s whole thesis
is in the big picture I’m going to actually have to read a passage from the essay:
“The spaces within the Russian Empire and Mongolia are so vast, and their potentialities
in population, wheat, cotton and metals so incalculably great, that it is inevitable
that a vast economic world, more or less apart, will there develop inaccessible to oceanic
commerce”
Umm… does that strike you as describing what has happened over the past 115 years?
Is world culture awed by the achievements of the mega cities of Siberia?
Have Kazakhstan and Mongolia taken their place among the world’s economic and population
leaders?
Has the Volga become the new Mississippi?
Is suburban sprawl becoming a real issue in Vladivostock?
Sorry, I don’t want to rub people’s noses in it here.
But this is important.
This assumption, that Asia’s vast steppes were just about to become an economic juggernaut,
is at the center of the whole world island thesis.
The fact that it simply hasn’t happened 100 years later is really important.
It kicks the feet out from under a lot of US strategic planning.
There’s no there there.
And, importantly, there’s not going to be a there there.
The multi trillion dollar US presence in places like Afghanistan and Iraq is completely pointless.
Halford Mackinder was a good geographer, but he didn’t understand much about economics,
society or technology and how they were going to develop.
A lot of Mackinder’s mistake can be explained by the habitual British paranoia about Russia.
It was part of the mental toolbox of every Victorian, and it led to many worse results
than this silly theory about geography.
Much more defensibly, Mackinder was forecasting a future that looked a lot like what had just
happened in the United States over the course of the 19th century.
In 1904 the United States looked to be developing exactly the sort of inland empire that Mackinder
thought the railroads would bring to Eurasia.
In 1900 five of the ten biggest cities in the United States were located far from the
oceans.
100 years earlier none of these cities had been bigger than trading posts, and some of
them, like Chicago, hadn’t existed at all.
After growth like this the sky was certainly the limit!
It only seemed logical that something similar would happen on the vast inner plains of Russia.
Unfortunately Mackinder, and a lot of other people mistook a temporary situation for a
permanent condition.
The filling in of the United States relied on a whole bunch of impoverished immigrant
farmers whose highest aspiration was having some good agricultural land of their own.
That hasn’t been the goal of economic migrants for quite some time.
You make the money in the cities now, not by pioneering.
This is just as true of the United States as it is everywhere else.
Depending on how you count Dallas, the US has gone from five of the ten biggest cities
being in the interior to just two or three.
The future for the US interior lies in resource extraction, mega-agriculture super cute renovations
of ghost towns, and hopefully some expansion of the urban areas that already exist.
None of this involves all that many people compared to the coastal mega-cities of Texas,
California and Florida.
Russia and the Stans simply aren’t going to be building the empires of the future on
any of that.
OH, and Mackinder also based his theory on the idea that rail travel would soon be cheaper
than shipping by sea.
That’s still not true a century later.
Mackinder failed to foresee shipping containers.
Believe it or not, the US has the best freight rail network in the world.
Freight not Passenger.
Over a hundred years after Mackinder’s writing, it’s still cheaper to send something from
New York to LA by ship than it is by rail.
I’ve been a bit unfair to Mackinder here.
He was a genius.
The whole idea of looking at the big picture of geopolitics can be traced to him to some
degree.
He can’t be blamed for failing to predict the future.
The problem is that his central idea is very, very wrong, and very serious people, like
US admiral serious, still think there is something to his theories.
If you want a way to look at the world and the future that’s more useful than hyperventilating
about who holds the Eurasian world island, I suggest you check out my new book Avoiding
the British Empire, available now in paperback and on the Amazon Kindle.
Thanks for watching, please subscribe, and come back next time, when we’ll point out
why World War 3 will be the US’s fault.