Posts
From the conclusion to my
post regarding a look back at some of the early history of the Arab-Israeli
conflict in Palestine:
If history repeats itself, and the
unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from
experience.
This “unexpected” hasn’t gone on
for over one hundred years because political leaders are stupid, “incapable…of
learning from experience.” When
something like this is sustained – when the same “mistakes” occur repeatedly –
one might consider other reasons.
I will revisit my view for the
reasons behind this ongoing history in the coming days.
Today is “the coming days.”
Considering the comments I received to the post, I think I
threw a bit of a curveball with this conclusion. While the subject post was regarding conflict
in the Middle East, my views of the ongoing history see this as a mere portion
of the story.
Halford Mackinder
I remain swayed by the geo-political view first presented to
the Royal Geographical Society by Halford Mackinder in 1904: “The
Geographical Pivot of History,” also known as The Heartland Theory.
He begins by describing the preceding 400 years as “the
Columbian epoch,” the time when Europe explored and controlled the seas and
much of the coastline of the several continents.
He looks back to the long history of invasions from the east
– forming in the steppes of Central Asia and moving into Europe or China. He describes the geography of the region, the
rivers (and lack of navigable rivers), the climate.
He contrasts control over the oceans – as Europe has
demonstrated effectively over the preceding 400 years – with control, or lack
of control, over this Eurasian heartland.
The oceans give access to coastline over a vast and widely dispersed
space; the heartland is an area three times the size of North America, all accessible
by land.
While Europe – and by this time, specifically the British
Empire – has maintained control of the seas, there remains this land mass:
The Russian railways have a clear
run of 6000 miles from Wirballen in the west to Vladivostok in the east. The
Russian army in Manchuria is as significant evidence of mobile land-power as
the British army in South Africa was of sea-power. True, that the
Trans-Siberian railway is still a single and precarious line of communication,
but the century will not be old before all Asia is covered with railways. The spaces within the Russian Empire and
Mongolia are so vast, and their potentialities in population, wheat, cotton,
fuel, 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.
Of course, a detour through communism was first taken (with
a not insignificant push from the west), drastically delaying the possibility
of success.
He describes this as the pivot region of the world: Russia
is to the world island as Germany is to Europe, the key geo-strategic
player. According to Mackinder, Russia
was wise to part with Alaska, recognizing that Russia could not compete with
Britain over the seas.
Outside the pivot area, in a great
inner crescent, are Germany, Austria, Turkey, India, and China, and in an outer
crescent, Britain, South Africa, Australia, the United States, Canada, and
Japan.
For the visual:
Mackinder sees the United States and Germany as critical in
this equation:
