YALE, 20 June 2004 — In a world that seems full of contending ideas and aspirations, perhaps none is more puzzling than the tension between democracy and realpolitik. Making the world safe for democracy, and pressing for all men and women to have the vote, are noble ideals. But what if your publics do not want to crusade abroad, or if foreign publics dislike you and your interfering ways? Above all, what if attempts to improve global affairs simply fly in the face of hard geopolitical facts? What if they are undoable and unsustainable?
This year marks the centenary of a remarkable article, The Geographical Pivot of History, published in the Geographical Journal and written by Sir Halford Mackinder, the founder of the school of geopolitics. Geopolitics may be defined, crudely, as the influence of geography upon politics: How distance and terrain and climate affect the affairs of states and men. Because of geography, for example, Athens was a thalassocracy — a sea empire — whereas Sparta was a land power. Eighteenth-century Britain, as an island, enjoyed the freedom of the seas; eighteenth-century Prussia was ringed by foes on all sides. One of the US’s current great advantages is that, in contrast to Prussia then or Russia today, it has no great powers on its borders. Mackinder’s article argued that the coming of steam power, electricity and the railways was at last permitting continental nations to overcome the physical obstacles that had hampered their development in the past. In particular, the railway was enabling Czarist Russia to exploit its vast internal resources and to make strategic inroads in the Far East and toward India that its imperial rival Great Britain could not counter. Land power was thus eroding the geopolitical advantages that had been enjoyed by the Western sea powers.
The rest of the 20th century bore witness to Mackinder’s thesis. The two world wars were struggles for control of what the author called the “rimlands”, that swathe of territories running from Eastern Europe to the Himalayas and beyond, just outside the Asian “heartland” itself. Soviet domination of that region during the Cold War caused many a US geopolitician (Nicholas Spykman, for example) to recall Mackinder’s theories. And the recent projection of US military power into Afghanistan and various Central Asian republics has rekindled interest in the hypothesis.
But another work by Mackinder deserves equal attention — namely, his book “Democratic Ideals and Reality”, published in 1919 during the debates surrounding the Versailles peace treaty.
Imperial Russia had been obliterated, but civil war was raging. France was intent upon driving Germany into the ground. Tumultuous events were occurring in Poland, Hungary and the Caucasus. America had projected its power across the Atlantic, then abruptly retreated. The Far East was stirring, and so was India. It all called out urgently for deep thought and wise strategies.
But the British people were thinking otherwise. The war had knocked the stuffing out of their late-Victorian jingoism. Concern for what was going on in Turkestan or Archangel was minimal. Creating “a land fit for heroes” (Lloyd George’s nimble phrase) was much more important. Moreover, the 1918 Representation of the People Act had greatly increased the size of the electorate, especially among those classes eager to see the government focus upon social, economic and educational improvements at home. The result, Mackinder lamented, was that geopolitics had to take a back seat. Democracy, he said, “refuses to think strategically except in wartime.”
For much of the 1920s and 1930s, Mackinder’s apprehensions proved accurate. The three leading Western democracies — France, Britain and the US — quarreled with each other and went their separate ways. Britain and the US drastically cut their defense spending shortly after 1919, while economic weakness forced France to do the same in the 1930s. None of them wished to confront directly the challenges that Japan, Italy and Germany were posing to the League of Nations system. Only very late in the day — too late in France’s case — did they begin to rearm and prepare for the impending war. Only then did they start to think strategically. Right now, with hundreds of thousands of US troops in the Eurasian rimlands and with an administration constantly explaining why it has to stay the course, it looks as if Washington is taking seriously Mackinder’s injunction to ensure control of “the geographical pivot of history”. Some of today’s US neocon intellectuals make admiring reference to former British rule in that region, and have called for the creation of a US “Colonial Office”.
But what if US democracy, in its turn, refuses to “think strategically”? While many Americans still support US troops in Iraq, doubts are growing fast about the wisdom of the Bush administration’s intentions in the Middle East and further afield, about the severe overstretch of the army, about the scandals of prison torture, about taking on the whole Arab world.
Already the neocons are running for cover, and some conservative critics are calling the whole Iraq affair misconceived and bungled. Though the administration will vigorously deny it, the State Department, the National Security Council and the Pentagon must each be searching for an exit strategy. The worms are turning, very fast. Even if President Bush clings on in office after November’s elections, many of his supporters in the Senate and House may have been swept away.
But those who would rejoice at such an outcome ought to bear in mind Mackinder’s second concern. A US democracy that rejects Rumsfeldian imperial overstretch in the Middle East is also one that may be nervous of engagements elsewhere; that blocks Security Council resolutions for fresh peacekeeping and peace-enforcement missions, however much needed; that declines to help deal with genocide in Africa. The pendulum could indeed swing too far. And the consequences for all of us, but especially war-torn communities, could be severe.
Ever since 1945, US leaders have shouldered the responsibility of walking a fine line between doing too little and doing too much in world affairs. Drifting in either direction brings dangers and critics. It seems, though, that the Bush administration plunged a little too readily into large military interventions along Mackinder’s rimlands; and yet it is also true that an equally serious predicament awaits if the US public and politicians overreact and decline to assume the responsibilities called for by their country’s world position. The last thing we need is a US repeating its policies of 1919. What we really need is a US that can recapture its attitudes and policies of 1945, and blend democratic ideals with geopolitical wisdom. Is that really impossible?
— Paul Kennedy is the Dilworth professor of history and director of international security studies at Yale University. His books include The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
