26 March 2020
Alexander Lukin & Anatoly Torkunov
For many years, US geopolitical thinking focused primarily on the danger that would arise if an anti-US alliance, coalition of powers or single anti-US state were to gain dominance on the Eurasian continent. This idea has its roots in the writings of two pioneers of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman. They attached great strategic importance to the central part of the continent (the ‘Heartland’) that Russia had historically dominated and argued for the need to contain Russian influence. In their view, only military and political expansion by a major continental power could unify Eurasia. That would spell the defeat of the West and, effectively, world domination by that conquering power. According to Mackinder’s famous formula, ‘who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; and Who rules the World Island commands the World’.
Read more in Survival, 62:2
