It was a reflection of the growing anxiety bubbling up as the fringes of the empire rebelled. If we can’t hold onto south Africa (The Boer War), for example, at least we should make sure no one controls the World Island as we retreat.
That’s why Sykes-Picot left us with a Middle East in tribal conflict. Israel only made things there worse. Pakistan was created as anti-India and Ukraine was split off from the USSR in such a way as to ensure we would be exactly where we are today.
Author: Tom Luongo
All of us so-called geopolitical analysts owe a debt to Halford John Mackinder. His 1904 paper, “The Geographical Pivot of History” is the basis for nearly all strategic thinking in today’s policy rooms, think tanks, and military academies of the West.
We’ve all heard the first three rules of Mackinder:
Who rules Eastern Europe commands the Heartland
Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island
Who rules the World Island commands the world
Because of the dominance of Mackinder’s ideas and the policies erected to support it, the world has been subjected to endless conflict over his conception of the “World Island,” which is basically Eurasia.
And that’s why there can be no losing for the West in Ukraine. To the Mackinderists at the top of the power structures in London, Washington D.C. and Brussels, losing Ukraine means losing the entire world, because they have this very-outdated view of world geography.
Mackinder-ism in today’s world is a tautology, reducing to: We have to control the Heartland because we can’t lose the Heartland.
In this singular quest to win the Heartland the West has bankrupted itself — economically, morally, and most importantly, spiritually. This has led to a political crisis gnawing at the center of western society.
Alastair Crooke’s latest piece sums up the situation perfectly, “The EU Is Over-Invested in the Ukrainian War-Project.“
But it isn’t just the EU that has done this. So has the UK. So too the US.
The cost/benefit analysis of continuing the Ukraine project has reached the tipping point. The problem now is too many in power, like European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, still believe they have room to maneuver in a conflict looking increasingly stuck in the geopolitical mud of the Donbass.
The optics at the G7 meeting couldn’t be more stark. Meeting in the one city that is the ultimate symbol of Western madness, Hiroshima, the symbolism was very clear. We are united in our self-righteousness and if you don’t like it, remember what happened to Japan.
We will destroy the planet in order to save it. Indivisible European/Asian security is a euphemism for global war.
No amount of failure seems to dissuade these people. Because failure is simply not an option.
The problem however, is that their myopia is predictable.
Bad Code
When you reduce all of your guiding principles to three lines of code, defeating that code becomes pretty easy, strategically. It doesn’t matter if Mackinder was right or not. He wasn’t. What matters is that the policy-makers think he was.
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