Mackinder’s Theory On World Power Explains The Practical Western Obsession With Russia

The cartoon “Pinky and the Brain” is about two laboratory mice who escape from their cage each night and try to take over the world. The leader, known as “the Brain,” spends his days masterminding plans of world domination, and his sidekick, “Pinky,” is a below-average intelligence mouse who would be happy with running in a wheel and eating his food pellets. Each night The Brain comes close to realizing his plans, and just before he does, something happens where they fail, often times due to the inept actions of Pinky.

While Pinky and The Brain is a cartoon, they reflect a reality of human existence consistent throughout history. There are some people who spend their days obsessed with taking over the world, and some who are content to be happy with where they are and what they have. For those in power seeking domination, they will go to extreme ends, and often times come close but then are defeated by small or stupid things, or even by accident from the people who they desire to subjugate.

Many people have “conquered” the world in that they have controlled a majority of the world’s resources, or become so powerful that other nations dare not risk interfering with them. But nobody has actually “conquered” the entire world in the sense of maintaining either through direct intervention or indirect vassal control the entire world’s territories. However, this has not stopped men from attempting to do so, as it is nearly a product of man’s fallen nature that without the redemption that comes from Christ, he would seek to continually attempt to take a world that he cannot keep, even at the risk of endangering himself and his soul.

In April 1904, the English Geostrategist Halford Mackinder wrote an essay entitled “The Geographical Pivot of History”, which you can read by clicking on the title. In this theory, Mackinder outlines a brief philosophy for world domination based on geographical “zones” and how those influence each other. Below is the map that he has provided:

As noted, there are three regions: The “marginal crescent,” the “outer crescent,” and the “heartland”. The marginal crescent encompasses all of the Americas and the Pacific, most of Africa, and Australia. The “outer crescent” includes Europe, east Asia, south Asia, and the Middle East. The “heartland” includes Central Asia and most of Russia as well as parts of China, the Caucasus, and parts of Eastern Europe.

The “heartland” is the area that Mackinder notes in his study is the most difficult area to control because it a landlocked region doubly insulated by a series of mountains and the freezing cold tundra. As one will also note, it is out of this “heartland” area that many of the Turkic empires were born, as well as from which came many of the peoples that formed global empires going all the way back to ancient times, of which include but are not limited to the Vandals, Avars, Huns, Tocharians, Mongols, Seljuks, Timurids, Moghuls, Mamluks, and Ottomans. This area has been a place out of which conquest comes but has seldom itself been conquered by other peoples. It is only until the last 500 years with the Russian expansion into the Far East and Central Asia that the Turkic peoples within have been “coralled,” and it is always a constant fear of the Russians that said peoples will attempt to rise up and attempt to overthrow Russia as they have done in the past.

However, the fact that Russia possesses said area gives them a significant geopolitical advantage in the by holding this region, they form a sort of natural “fortress” against other conquerors. It is the Russian equivalent of the Nazi “Festung Europa,” with the difference being that instead of constructing a wall, the wall is nature itself and the only concern is to keep the persons living within the walls in a sort of unity based on a concept of “Russianness” that recognizes the diversity of people living within her borders without sacrificing her concept of “identity,” lest she return to being conquered by the same Turkic peoples who subjugated Russia for centuries.

If Mackinder’s theory holds true, then one who truly desires to “conquer the world” must find a way to “subjugate” the “Heartland” from the “outer crescent” or even “marginal crescent.” This necessarily involves stripping said lands away from Russia by some means and securing control over them. There two ways to do this:

-A direct military invasion, occupation, and seizure
-An indirect conquest through revolution, most likely based on nationalist claims, and then subjugating said state to vassalage

For centuries, many people from the “outer crescent” have tried to conquer Russia, and all have failed, even as recently as World War II with Germany, for while Germany’s efforts were primarily focused on the Caspian Sea region for oil purposes, even the Nazi war machine was stopped by the harsh Russian winter. The Japanese, while marching to Siberia and even being able to hold territory by the Russia-Mongolia border until 1920, was still driven out by the Russians. To the contrary, the Slavic Russians have been subjugated from within by internal Turkic uprisings, and from which said uprisings have gone on to conquer regions in the outer crescent, such as the Mongol invasions during Medieval times.

One of the oldest techniques in police interrogations is to use the “good cop, bad cop” scenario. This is also reflected in national politics, corporate fights, and many other areas of life. In short, there is a “good guy” and a “bad guy” who press a subject for a certain piece of information, both use opposing techniques, but both are in the end working to the same end for the same group. The idea is to use a “fork” approach to “herd” a person or group from as many sides as possible to a desired end. In the case of Russia, in order to conquer the “heartland,” it appears that the US and her allies are making use of this strategy by means of the parallel “external-internal” approach, where externally the US and her allies engage in militaristic activities while causing internal chaos in Russia.

The external approaches are obvious, and are things that I and Ted have written about before that include the open support of nationalist groups in Ukraine, the establishment of military bases on the Russian border with Poland as well as a presence in the Baltic States, anti-Russian propaganda exaggerating claims about her military, breaking up the spiritual basis of Russia through the inherent tendencies of nationalism in “orthodoxy,” having NATO allies near Russia prepare for war such as Sweden and Germany, attacking select Russian targets meant to provoke a larger military reaction such as with attacking military planes on patrol, and even insulting Russia to her face in public meetings.

The internal approaches are just as serious as the external ones. These primary include promoting nationalism among the Turkic peoples in Russia, as well as within Central Asia and even with other nations. There is also the promoting the idea of religious “liberty” in order to break up the central philosophical union of Russia that is provided by the concept of orthodoxy regardless of the fact that almost none either believe or practice, and supporting as it is done in the Western world, the prevalence of the LGBT to effect the same ends as the breakup of the philosophical basis of Russia.

There are also dual external-internal measures that attack both Russia from without as well as within. Most of these attacks are based on economics by attempting to circumvent Russia’s massive physical size to build transport routes between Europe and Asia that do not need one to pass through Russian territory (see here, here, here, here, here, and here for detailed articles about these projects). Currently, the largest railway from Europe to Asia is the Transsiberian Railway that brings a man from Moscow and points Europe all the way to Vladivostok by the border of China and North Korea, and a quick boat ride across the Sea of Japan to the Land of the Rising Sun. This railway moves not merely people, but goods and services, most importantly raw materials and petroleum, between East and West and with Russia’s physical size makes her a physical obstacle between the two, of which said land also includes Mackinder’s “heartland.”

This is the reason why Russian strategist Aleksandr Dugin speaks of “Eurasia” as the future. Contrary to his position on “anti-Atlanticism,” the issue is not so much one of trying to “fight” the USA but rather to keep control over the “Heartland” and to prevent it from being made irrelevant by emerging high-speed railway lines that, in combination with Russia’s internal problems, pan-Turanian nationalism, and outward military pressure from her enemies in the USA, Germany, Japan, and Turkey threaten to rip her apart.

One of the weaknesses of Mackinder’s hypothesis was the state of America being part of the marginal crescent, for while that would seem to make the US’s influence irrelevant, to the contrary it has shielded the US from a great number of the geopolitical problems that the rest of the world faces. With very friendly relations between her only two land-border neighbors, both of which she could also easily conquer militarily if she desired and already economically tied to the US, two large oceans separating her from the rest of the world, and all the natural resources to supply her own food and economic power if she desired, the US has a luxury afforded to no other nation in the world in that she can walk up to another nation, act as she pleases, and then either associate or separate from the consequences at her leisure. Russia, a nation locked by her geography and history to over a dozen less than desirable neighbors, cannot simply indulge in the same activities as the US without the same consequences.

Likewise, as noted with NATO, the US is the strongest of the powers but is not a completely independent power militarily in that there are many other strong armies in the world such as France, Germany, the UK, Japan, and Turkey. They may not be able to defeat the USA alone, but together there is the potential they could. However, as they are all allies and close friends, their standing as one against Russia and China, the second and third strongest armies in the world, places them into a position of weakness by the assertion of tension against them from all sided economically as well as geographically.

As I noted before, Russia can win against Germany, Turkey, or Japan alone, and may be able to barely win or tie with the US. However, she cannot stand against a united force of the US with one or two others, let alone more. Even China with all of her influence is still economically and most importantly, food-dependent on other nations for her survival. If her access to platinum ore in South Africa was cut off, or her supplies of rice from southeast Asia were cut off, she would instantly collapse from within because she could neither build necessary supplies or feed her people.

In the terms of Operation Gladio, which this plan is a part of based off of the ideas learned from the British Empire’s “Great Game” against Russia leading up to the First World War, the result is a “strategy of tension” where Russia and China, in spite of their military posturing and threats, will find themselves being closed in on from all sides with no way to escape, and eventually suffocating.

How does this look for the future?

Militarily speaking, there are already plans being made to invade Russia that date back to 1952 according to documents from the CIA archive. This is why people say that no matter what politician they vote for, “nothing changes” because the President is not “in charge,” but is a machine operator for an already existing machine. It explains the eventual re-unification of Germany and as one sees, the continual remilitarization of Germany and Japan as well as the creation of the Turkish army by the US and Germany, and the rise in nationalism in the US and Europe.

Economically speaking, one must watch the railways and transport systems, especially between the Black and Caspian Seas, as well as transport to Central Asia and the Far East.

Socially speaking, one must pay attention to ethnic nationalism within Russia, especially among the Turkic peoples. Russia wants to channel said sentiments into a sense of “pan-Russian” identity, and is why Sergei Shoigu, a half-Russian half-Tuvan officer, was appointed to the head of the Russian Military, in order to represent the union of all the peoples of Russia as one force in his very makeup. This is the answer to the “Balkanization” strategy used in the Caucasus mountains, which provides for a series of “autonomous nations” that operate within Russia and are continually used by both the US and Russia as puppet states, but with different ends. For Russia, it is to create certain states and then have them “allied” to Moscow, while for the US it is to encourage separatism of said states and upon separating to become vassal nations from which to further divide Russia internally.

The Decline of Russia project, which we have written about extensively, notes that Russia suffers from a series of serious problems including a dropping population due to a refusal to reproduce, massive migration from Central Asia due to economic conditions, exploding drug use and HIV rates, some of the highest abortion rates on earth, a lack of economic development and a large amount of land which they have difficulty maintaining. The Chinese, while population heavy, as noted above is highly dependent on outside sources in Africa, Southeast Asia, and other areas in the world that could be easily cut off and cause an internal collapse, let alone other issues such as quality control over domestically made goods.

World War I and World War II were not just “European” conflicts, but were to a large part funded and initiated by US actions as a part of asserting herself in the world. Having defeated, rebuilt, and allied with her greatest potential competitors for domination, that being Germany and Japan, they are turning collectively towards Russia, this time looking to advance her already existing problems to realize her reduction to a mere shell of her former self and the conquest of the heartland through its breakup.

It also could not come at a more interesting time where Christianity is in decline, the LGBT is on the rise, and the threat of a looming darkness grows ever more powerful.

As such one must ask, is war the greatest threat, or is there one that may be even more serious coming?

That is to be seen.