Events | 2009.10.01
A very foreign policy | Tristram Hunt
In cancelling the European missile shield, Obama is overturning a century of foreign policy based on a one-hour lecture by a Victorian geographer
Barack Obama\'s decision to cancel the missile defence programme by closing radar bases in eastern Europe has provoked predictable derision on the Republican right. From Senator John McCain down, it has accused the president of naivety, weakness and, worst of all, ceding the Eurasian "heartland" to Russia. But while they might position themselves as modern, strategic realists, today\'s neocons are in fact bewitched by the foreign policy prescriptions of a late Victorian imperialist.
In 1904, the geographer Sir Halford J Mackinder rose, in a sparsely attended lecture theatre at the Royal Geographical Society, to deliver a talk entitled The Geographical Pivot of History. In one short hour, he set the perimeters for 20th-century geopolitics. The "Columbian age" of colonial expansion was at an end, he suggested, and a world criss-crossed by steam, telegram and train had become "a closed political system". As a result, "every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence."Global diplomacy was now a zero-sum game, with every national victory won through the crushing of a competitor. As such, all talk of ethics and morality in foreign policy was for the birds. What mattered was power and the taking and holding of political space. The most important landmass – the "geographical pivot of history" – was central Eurasia, stretching from the edges of Europe across the steppes, desert and grassland of Russia until the Sea of Japan. And the key to controlling this heartland was to gain supremacy over eastern Europe: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland/Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island/Who rules the World-Island commands the World."
So, in the aftermath of the first world war , Mackinder urged a buffer zone of friendly states – Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary – to prevent Germany and Russia joining forces. A single geopolitical entity in charge of the Ukrainian wheatfields, Ural riches and Siberia would pose a devastating threat to British imperial interests. This was very much Hitler\'s thinking – introduced to Mackinder\'s geopolitics by Rudolf Hess – when he established the Nazi-Soviet pact .
Then, as the Allies\' victory looked assured and Stalin started to make a bid for hegemony, the elderly Mackinder warned how "the territory of the USSR [was] equivalent to the heartland" and that "if the Soviet Union emerges from this war as conqueror of Germany, she must rank as the greatest land power on the globe". Here lay the seeds of US " containment " policy. When the architect of American postwar anti-Soviet strategy, diplomat George Kennan , argued that "our problem is to prevent the gathering together of the military-industrial potential of the entire Eurasian landmass under a single power threatening the interests of the insular and mainland portions of the globe", it was pure Mackinder.
Since then, Mackinder\'s thinking has found a secure place in the Pentagon. Under the patronage of Henry Kissinger and Zbiginiew Brzezinski, an appreciation of geographical dominance was obvious. The legacy lightened under the multilateralism and detente of Bill Clinton, but returned with red-blooded vigour under the neoconservative Project for the New American Century . In the post-cold war era, the neocons believed the US should seek total hegemony over the World Island without the interference of do-gooding idealists at the United Nations – which provides some insight into the war in Iraq.
Even now, much of that group-think remains evident in Washington. The latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine asserts that "the US projection of power into Afghanistan and Iraq, and today\'s tensions with Russia over the political fate of central Asia and the Caucasus, have only bolstered Mackinder\'s thesis". In a new essay for opendemocracy.net , Prince Hassan of Jordan has similarly spoken of how "the struggle for control of the \'energy ellipse\' from Eurasia to the Straits of Hormuz" has revealed the resonance of Mackinder\'s thinking "for the political power plays of today".
For it is in the resource-rich former Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Belarus that the battle for the heartland is being played out most obviously. Moscow is working hard to retain its zone of privileged interest, while America is using a string of military bases, oil contracts and development aid to boost its geopolitical influence.
So the decision to cancel the antiballistic missile shield and risk ceding the eastern heartland to the Russians is, from the Mackinder perspective, an act of monstrous strategic incompetence. Then again, it might just be another example of Obama\'s ability to think beyond the belligerent philosophy of the Pentagon and the prescriptions of a Victorian imperialist which so rarely offered a fair peace.
Tristram Hunt\'s Radio 3 programme on Mackinder airs on Sunday at 9.30pm
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]-missile-europe-foreign-policy
