The Round World and the Winning of the Peace

Author(s): Halford J. Mackinder

Source: Foreign Affairs, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Jul., 1943), pp. 595-605
Published by: Council on Foreign Relations
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 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Vol 21 JULY 1943 No. 4

THE ROUND WORLD AND THE

WINNING OF THE PEACE
By Sir Halford J. Mackinder
I HAVE been asked to carry further some of the themes with
which I have dealt inmy past writings, in particular to con
sider whether my strategical concept of a "Heartland" has
lost any of its significance under the conditions of modern war
fare. In order to set the concept into its context, I must begin
with a short account of how it originally came to take shape.
My earliest memory of public affairs goes back to the day in
as a small
September 1870 when, boy who had just begun attend
ance at the local grammar school, I took home the news, which I
had learned from a telegram affixed to the post office door, that
Napoleon III and his whole army had surrendered to the Prus
sians at Sedan. This came as a shock to Englishmen, who still
moved mentally in the wake of Trafalgar and the retreat from
Moscow, but the full effect of it was not realized until some
years later. Britain's supremacy on the ocean had not yet been
challenged, and the only danger she saw at that time to her over
seas empire was in the Asiatic position of Russia. During this
the London newspapers were quick to detect evidence of
period
Russian intrigue in every rumor from and in
Constantinople
every tribal disturbance along the northwest frontier of India.
British sea power and Russian land power held the center of the
international stage.
von
Thirty years later, at the turn of the century, Tirpitz
to build a German seas fleet. I was at this time
began high busy
setting up the teaching of and historical at
political geography
the universities of Oxford and London, and was noting current
events with a teacher's eye for move
generalization. The German
ment meant, I saw, that the nation
already possessing the great
est organized land power and the central strategical
occupying

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 596 .FOREIGN AFFAIRS

position in Europe was about to add to itself sea power strong

enough to neutralize British sea power. The United States was
also rising steadily to the rank of a Great Power. As yet, however,
its rise could be measured only in statistical tables; although in
childhood someone had been
my already impressed with Ameri
can resourcefulness, for I remember in our schoolroom a
picture
of the battle between the Merrimac and the Monitor^ the first
armored ship and the first turret ship. Thus Germany and the
United States came up alongside of Britain and Russia.
The particular events out of which sprang the idea of the
Heartland were the British war in South Africa and the Russian
war inManchuria. The South African war ended in 1902, and in
the spring of 1904 the Russo-Japanese war was
clearly imminent.
A paper which I read before the Royal
Geographical Society
early in the latter year, entitled "The Geographical Pivot of
was therefore a
History," topical, but it had background of
many years of observation and thought.
The contrast presented by the British war against the Boers,
fought 6,000 miles away across the ocean, and the war fought by
Russia at a comparable distance across the land expanse of Asia,
a
naturally suggested parallel contrast between Vasco da Gama
rounding the Cape of Good Hope on his voyage to the Indies,
near the end of the fifteenth century, and the ride of Yermak, the
Cossack, at the head of his horsemen, over the Ural range into
Siberia early in the sixteenth century. That comparison in turn
led to a review of the succession of raids made the no
long by
madic tribes of Central Asia, through classical antiquity and the
Middle Ages, upon the settled populations of the crescent of sub
continents: peninsular Europe, the Middle East, the Indies, and
China conclusion was that,
proper. My
... in the present decade we are for the first time in a position to attempt,
with some degree of completeness, a correlation between the larger
geographi
cal and the larger historical generalizations. For the first time we can perceive
something of the real proportion of features and events on the stage of the
whole world, and may seek a formula which shall express certain aspects, at
any rate, of geographical causation in universal history. If we are fortunate,
that formula should have a practical value as setting into perspective some of
the competing forces in current international politics.

The word Heartland occurs once in the 1904 paper, but inci
dentally and as a
descriptive and not a technical term. The ex
area" were used instead, thus:
pressions "pivot and "pivot state"

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 THE ROUND WORLD 597
The oversetting of the balance of power in favor of the pivot state, resulting
in its expansion over the marginal lands of Euro-Asia, would permit of the use
of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world
would then be in sight. This might happen if Germany were to ally herself
with Russia.
In conclusion, itmay be well expressly to point out that the substitution of
some new control of the inland area for that of Russia would not tend to reduce
the geographical significance of the pivot position. Were the Chinese, for in
stance, organized by the Japanese, to overthrow the Russian Empire and
conquer its territory, they might constitute the yellow peril to the world's free
dom just because they would add an oceanic frontage to the resources of the
great continent.

At the end of the First World War, my book, "Democratic

Ideals and Reality," was published in London and New York.1
Clearly the "pivot" label, which had been appropriate for an
academic thesis at the beginning of the century, was no longer
adequate to the international situation as it emerged from that
first great crisis of our world revolution: hence "Ideals," "Reali
ties" and the "Heartland." But the fact that, even when addi
tional criteria were brought to bear, the thesis of 1904 still sufficed
as the background for an estimate of the
position fifteen years
later, gave confidence that the formula sought had been found.
11
turn now to the main ?
We object of the present article the
an interim estimate of the value of the Heartland
drafting of
in a survey of the world to the coming
concept preliminary
settlement. It must be understood that I am dealing with strat
egy, which, of course, is effective in peacetime no less than in
wartime. I do not presume to join in the wide-sweeping debates
already in progress which look forward over generations to come;
I center my thoughts on the years during which the enemy is to
be held down while, in the language of Casablanca, his philosophy
of war is being killed.
The Heartland is the northern part and the interior of Euro
Asia. It extends from the Arctic coast down to the central deserts,
and has as its western limits the broad isthmus between the Baltic
and Black Seas. The concept does not admit of precise definition
on the map for the reason that it is based on three separate as
pects of physical geography which, while reinforcing one another,
1A new edition, with text unaltered, was last year Holt and Company,
published by Henry
New York.

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 598 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
are not we have in this region
exactly coincident. First of all, by
far the widest lowland plain on the face of the globe. Secondly,
there flow across that plain some great navigable rivers; certain
of them go north to the Arctic Sea and are inaccessible from the
ocean because it is cumbered with ice, while others flow into in
land waters, such as the Caspian, which have no exit to the ocean.
a zone which, until within the last
Thirdly, there is here grassland
century and a half, presented ideal conditions for the development
of high mobility by camel and horse-riding nomads. Of the three
features mentioned, the river basins are the easiest to
present
cartographically; the water divide which delimits the whole
group of Arctic and "continental" rivers into a single unit does
isolate on the map a vast coherent area which is the Heart
neatly
land according to that particular criterion. The mere exclusion of
sea
mobility and sea power, however, is a negative if important
differential; it was the and the grassland belt which offered
plain
the positive conditions conducive to the other type of mobility,
that proper to the prairie. As for the grassland, it traverses the
whole breadth of the plain but does not cover its entire surface.
Notwithstanding these apparent discrepancies, the Heartland
a sufficient
provides physical basis for strategical thinking. To
go further and to would be mis
simplify geography artificially
leading.
For our present purpose it is sufficiently accurate to say that
the territory of the U.S.S.R. is equivalent to the Heartland, ex
?
in one direction. In order to demarcate that a
cept ? exception
great
one let us draw a direct line, some 5,500 miles
long,
west
ward from Bering Strait to Rumania. Three thousand miles from
Bering Strait that line will cross the Yenisei River, flowing north
ward from the borders of Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean. Eastward
of that great river lies a generally rugged country of mountains,
and valleys, covered almost from end to end with
plateaux
coniferous forests; this I shall call Lenaland, from its central
feature, the great River Lena. This is not included inHeartland
Russia. Lenaland Russia has an area of three and three-quarter
million square miles, but a population of only some six millions, of
whom almost five millions are settled along the transcontinental
railroad from Irkutsk to Vladivostok. In the remainder of this
are on the average over three square miles for
territory there ?
every inhabitant. The rich natural resources timber, water
?
and minerals are as untouched.
power yet practically

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 THE ROUNDWORLD 599
West of the Yenisei lies what I have described as Heartland
a
Russia, plain extending 2,500 miles north and south, and 2,500
miles east and west. It contains four and a quarter million square
miles and a population of more than 170millions. The
population
is increasing at the rate of three millions a year.
The simplest and probably the most effective way of presenting
the strategical values of the Russian Heartland is to compare
them with those of France. In the case of France, however, the
historical background is the First World War while in the case
of Russia it is the Second World War.
France, like Russia, is a compact country, as long as it is broad,
but not quite so well-rounded as the Heartland and therefore
with a rather smaller area in proportion to the length of
boundary
to be defended. It is sea and mountain, except
encompassed by
to the northeast. In 1914-18 there were no hostile countries be
hind the Alps and the Pyrenees, and the fleets of France and her
allies dominated the seas. The French and allied armies, deployed
across the northeastern were therefore well de
open frontier,
fended on either flank and were secure in the rear. The tragic low
land gateway in the northeast, through which so many armies
have surged inward and outward, is 300 miles wide between the
Vosges and the North Sea. In 1914, the line of battle, pivoting on
the Vosges, wheeled backward to the Marne; and at the end of
the war, in 1918, it wheeled forward on the same pivot. Through
the four years' interval the elastic front sagged and bent but did
not break even in the face of the great German attack in the
as it
spring of 1918. Thus, proved, there was space within the
country sufficient both for defense in depth and for strategical
retreat. for France, however, her indus
Unfortunately principal
trial area was in that northeastern sector where the unceasing
battle was
waged,
Russia repeats in essentials the pattern of France, but on a
greater scale and with her open frontier turned westward instead
of northeastward. In the present war the Russian army is aligned
across that open frontier. In its rear is the vast
plain of the Heart
land, available for defense in depth and for strategic retreat.
Away back, this plain recedes eastward into the natural bulwarks
constituted by the "inaccessible" Arctic coast, the Lenaland
wilderness behind the Yenisei, and the fringe of mountains from
the Altai to the Hindu Kush, backed
by the Gobi, Tibetan and
Iranian deserts. These three barriers have breadth and sub

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 6oo FOREIGNAFFAIRS
stance, and far excel in defensive value the coasts and mountains
which engird France.
It is true that the Arctic shore is no longer inaccessible in the
absolute sense that held until a few years ago. Convoys of mer
chant ships, assisted by powerful icebreakers and with airplanes
reconnoitring ahead for water lanes through the ice pack, have
traded to the Obi and Yenisei Rivers, and even to the Lena River;
but a hostile invasion across the vast area of circum-polar ice and
over the Tundra mosses and Targa forests of Northern Siberia
seems almost in the face of Soviet land-based air
impossible
defense.
To complete the comparison between France and Russia, let
us consider the relative scales of some facts. Heartland
parallel
Russia has four times the population, four times as wide an open
frontier, and twenty times the area of France. That open frontier
is not disproportionate to the Russian
population; and to equal
the breadth of the Soviet to eke
deployment Germany has had
out her more limited manpower by diluting it with less effective
drawn one re
troops from her subject countries. In important
spect, however, Russia her second war with in no
began Germany
better position than France occupied in 1914; as with France, her
most
developed agriculture and industries lay directly in the path
of the invader. The second Five Year Plan would have remedied
that situation had the German aggression been delayed a couple
of years. Perhaps that was one of Hitler's reasons for breaking his
treaty with Stalin in 1941.
The vast potentialities of the Heartland, however, to say
of the natural reserves in Lenaland, are
nothing strategically well
are growing as the
placed. Industries rapidly in such localities
southern Urals, in the very pivot of the pivot area, and in the
rich Kuznetsk coal basin in the lee of the great natural barriers
east of the upper Yenisei River. In 1938 Russia produced more
of the following foodstuffs than any other country in the world:
wheat, oats, and sugar beets. More was
barley, rye manganese
was bracketed
produced in Russia than in any other country. It
with the United States in the first place as regards iron, and it
stood second place in production of petroleum. As for coal, Mik
statement that the resources of the Kuznetsk
haylov makes the
and Krasnoyarsk coal basins are each estimated to be capable of
supplying the requirements of the whole world for 300 years.2 The
2N.
Mikhaylov, "Soviet Geography/' London: Methuen, 1937.

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 THE ROUND WORLD 601

was to balance ex
policy of the Soviet Government imports and
the first Five Year Plan. in a very few com
ports during Except
modities the country is capable of producing everything which it
requires.
All things considered, the conclusion is unavoidable that if the
Soviet Union emerges from this war as conqueror of Germany,
she must rank as the greatest land Power on the globe. Moreover,
she will be the Power in the strategically strongest defensive
position. The Heartland is the greatest natural fortress on earth.
a
For the first time in history it ismanned by garrison sufficient
both in number and quality.
in

I cannot pretend to exhaust the subject of the Heartland, the

citadel of land power on the great mainland of the world, in a
short article like this. But a few words should be devoted to an
other concept to balance it.
From Casablanca there came lately the call to destroy the rul
German can be done
ing philosophy. That only by irrigating the
German mind with the clean water of a rival philosophy. I as
sume that for, say, two years from the time the "cease fire" order
is given, the Allies will occupy Berlin, try the criminals, fix
frontiers on the and other treatment so
spot complete surgical
that the older generation in Germany which will die impenitent
and bitter cannot again misrepresent history to the younger
But it would be worse than useless to
generation. obviously
set alien teachers to work in Germany to inculcate the theory of
freedom. Freedom cannot be taught; it can only be given to those
who can use it. However, the polluted channel might be swept
clear very effectively if it were controlled by strong embankments
?
of power on either hand land power to the east, in the Heart
land, and sea power to the west, in the North Atlantic basin.
Face the German mind with an enduring certainty that any war
must be a.war on two unshakable fronts, and
fought by Germany
the Germans themselves will solve the problem.
For this to happen it will be necessary in the first place that
there be effective and between America,
lasting cooperation
Britain and France, the first for
depth of defense, the second as
? ?
the moated forward a Malta on a scale
stronghold grander
and the third as the defensible no less
bridgehead. The last is
essential than the other two, because sea power must in the final

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 6o2 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
resort be if it is to balance land In the second
amphibious power.
it is necessary that those three and the fourth conqueror,
Lussia, be pledged
?lace, to immediately if any
together cooperate
breach of the peace is threatened, so that the devil in Germany
can never must die by inanition.
again get its head up and
Some persons today seem to dream of a global air power which
will "liquidate" both fleets and armies. I am impressed, however,
a recent utterance of a
by the broad implications of practical
airman: "Air power depends absolutely on the efficiency of its
ground organization." That is too large a subject to discuss
within the limits of this paper. It can only be said that no ade
quate proof has yet been presented that air fighting will not fol
low the long history of all kinds of warfare by presenting alterna
tions of offensive and defensive tactical superiority, meanwhile
effecting few permanent changes in strategical conditions.
I make no pretense to forecasting the future of humanity.
What I am concerned with are the conditions under which we set
about winning the peace when victory in the war has been
achieved. In regard to the pattern of the postwar world, now be
ing studied by many people for the first time, it is important that
a line should be and
carefully drawn between idealistic blueprints ?
realistic and scholarly maps presenting concepts political,
?
economic, strategic, and so forth based on the recognition of
obstinate facts.
With that inmind, attention might be drawn to a great feature
of global geography: a girdle, as it were, hung around the north
as one
polar regions. It begins as the Sahara desert, is followed
moves eastward by the Arabian, Iranian, Tibetan and Mon
golian deserts, and then extends, by way of the wildernesses of
Lenaland, Alaska and the Laurentian shield of Canada, to the
sub-arid belt of the western United States. That girdle of deserts
and wildernesses is a feature of the first importance in global
geography. Within it lie two related features of almost equal
significance: the Heartland, and the basin of the Midland Ocean
(North Atlantic) with its four subsidiaries (Mediterranean, Bal
tic, Arctic and Caribbean Seas). Outside the girdle is the Great
Ocean (Pacific, Indian and South Atlantic) and the lands which
drain to it (Asiatic Monsoon lands, Australia, South America and
Africa south of the Sahara).
Archimedes said he could lift the world if he could find a ful
crum on which to rest his lever. All the world cannot be lifted

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 THE ROUND WORLD 603
back to prosperity at once. The region between the Missouri and
the Yenisei, with its great trunk routes for merchant aircraft be
tween Chicago-New York and London-Moscow, and all that the
of them will stand for, must be the first care, for it
development
must be the fulcrum. Wisely the conquering of Japan waits for a
while. In due course China will receive capital on a generous
scale as a debt of honor, to help in her romantic adventure of
a quarter of a new civilization, neither
building for humanity
quite Eastern nor quite Western. Then the ordering of the Outer
World will be relatively easy, with China, the United States and
the United Kingdom leading the way, the last? two each followed
by its trail of a commonwealth of free nations for though their
histories will have been different the result will be similar. But
the first enterprise undertaken in economic rebuilding will surely
have to be in the area within the desert girdle, lest a whole civili
into chaos. What a
zation should deliquesce pity the alliance,
negotiated after Versailles, between the United States, the United
Kingdom and France was not implemented! What trouble and
sadness that act might have saved!
IV
And now, to complete my picture of the pattern of the round
world, let me add, briefly, three concepts to the two already vis
ualized. For the purposes of what I see described in American
writings as "Grand Strategy," it is necessary to build broad gen
eralizations in geography no less than in history and economics.
I have described my concept of the Heartland, which I have
no hesitation in ismore valid was
saying and useful today than it
either twenty or forty years ago. I have said how it is set in its
?
girdle of broad natural defenses ice-clad Polar Sea, forested
and rugged Lenaland, and Central Asiatic mountain and arid
tableland. The girdle is incomplete, however, because of an open
gateway, a thousand miles wide, from Peninsular
admitting
Europe into the interior plain through the broad isthmus be
tween the Baltic and Black Seas. For the first time in all history
there is within this vast natural fortress a garrison adequate to
deny entry to the German invader. Given that fact, and the de
fenses to the flanks and rear which I have described, the sheer
breadth of the open gateway is an advantage, for it provides the
opportunity of defeating the enemy by compelling him to make
a broad
deployment of his manpower. And upon and beneath the

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 6o4 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Heartland there is a store of rich soil for cultivation and of ores and
? or ?
fuels for extraction, the equal thereabouts of all that lies
upon and beneath the United States and the Canadian Dominion.
I have suggested that a current of cleansing counter-philos
ophy, canalized between unbreachable embankments of power,
may sweep the German mind clear of its black no
magic. Surely
one is to be mad enough to set to exorcize
going foreign teachers
the evil spirits from the soul of the conquered German nation.
Nor, after the first inevitable punitory years, do I have sufficient
trust that the conquering democracies will maintain garrisons of
the necessary spirit and number stationed in the vanquished lands;
for there is no use in asking democrats to
persist in
an attitude
to the and essence of The cleans
contrary very spirit democracy.
ing stream might better be released to flow from some regenerate
and German source, between the embankments of
regenerating
power I have named, the one within the Heartland and the other
within the territories of the three amphibious powers, American,
British and French. The two friendly forces facing one another
across the flow of the canal would be of equal power and should
always be equally ready for necessary action. Then Germany
would live continuously under the threat of immediate war on
two fronts should she be guilty of any breach of the treaties which
prohibited either physical preparation for war or the misleading
of youth which is another way of preparation for war. The demo
cratic garrisons in their home countries would be, by force of
the teachers.
example,
On this proposal follows my second geographical concept, that
? ?
of theMidland Ocean the North Atlantic and its dependent
seas and river basins. Without laboring the details of that concept,
? a
let me picture it again in its three elements bridgehead in
France, a moated aerodrome in Britain, and a reserve of trained

manpower, agriculture and in the eastern United

industries
States and Canada. So far as war-potential goes, both the United
States and Canada are Atlantic countries, and since instant land
warfare is in view, both the bridgehead and the moated aero
drome are essential to
amphibious power.
The three remaining concepts I shall do little more than sketch,
and only for the sake of globular completeness and balance.
Girdling the twin unit ?just described ?Heartland and the basin
of the Midland Ocean there appears on the globe the mantle
of vacancies, a continuous
constituting practically land-space

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 THE ROUNDWORLD 605
?
some twelve million square miles that is, about a
covering
quarter of all the land on the globe. Upon this vast area there
lives today a total population of less than thirty millions, or, say,
one-seventieth of the population of the globe. Airplanes will, of
course, fly along many routes over this girdle of wilderness; and
through it will be driven trunk motor roads. But for long to come
it will break social continuity between the major communities of
mankind on the globe.1
The fourth of my concepts embraces on either side of the South
Atlantic the tropical rain-forests of South America and Africa.
If these were subdued to agriculture and inhabited with the pres
ent sustain a thousand
density of tropical Java, they might
million people, always provided that medicine had rendered the
as of human as the zones.
tropics productive energy temperate
Fifthly, and lastly, a thousand million people of ancient ori
ental civilization inhabit the Monsoon lands of India and China.
They must grow to in the same years in which Ger
prosperity
and are to civilization. They will then
many Japan being tamed
balance that other thousand million who live between the Mis
souri and the Yenisei. A balanced globe of human
beings. And
happy, because balanced and thus free.
8
Some day, incidentally, when coal and oil are exhausted, the Sahara become the
may trap
for capturing direct power from the Sun.

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