THE FAILURE OF AMERICA TO DOMINATE THE WORLD ISLAND

6 February 2025

There's an awful lot of column inches written and hours talked on YouTube explaining why The West hates Russia and more particularly why The West chose confrontation and block politics after the cold war, over what's called 'indivisible security': the 1975 Helsinki Agreement and later a joint security architecture for a common European home, proposed by Gorbachov.

The best explanation goes to Mackinder, who characterised the World Island as being home to a struggle for survival and dominance between a land power and sea power. 

Mackinder's 1904 paper, "The Geographical Pivot of History" pretty much created geography and geopolitics as a new discipline. His Heartland Theory argues that whoever controls the "World Island" (which is Eurasia) controls global power, and that there's a history of struggle between sea powers (maritime empires) and land powers (continental empires).

There's academic lead-up for this in the form of writings by Thucydides, Clausewitz and Alfred Thayer Mahan ( love to read them one day).

If you look at any map of the world with Greenwich at the centre, there are the Americas on the left; Asia, Europe and Africa on the right; and huge Greenland stuck between the two.

So there's geography and history behind his theory, as well as previous academic work.

But you don't need Mackinder to tell you that - just from looking at a map, Russia is far and away the biggest country in Europe, well the biggest part of its population is in Europe and its stuffed with the richest resources in the world, food energy and minerals, stretching all the way east to Vladivostok.

Then there's The North European Plain that stretches roughly from northern France across Belgium, the Netherlands, northern Germany, Poland and into western Russia.... All the Russian army needs to do is put on its skis and skate down into Western Europe and then take over Central Europe.

(Not that this has happened - after the invasions by Napoleon and Hitler, Russia moved into Central Europe, 'strue, in a move aimed at security rather than invasion.)

Putin's original idea was that Russia should be absorbed into NATO and the EU. But instead, The West thought they had won the cold war and decided on NATO expansion, thinking it would be relatively easy to overcome a weakened Russia.

And the rest, as they say, is history....