What do foreign policy realists hope for? Not global democracy. Not the emergence of greater global governance. Not a unipolar world led by the United States or China. Not an end to all international conflict. Realists understand that some of the above are undesirable (e.g., a unipolar world, global governance) and some of the above are unattainable (e.g, global democracy and an end to all international conflict). What realists hope for was best expressed by Sir Halford Mackinder in his 1943 Foreign Affairs article “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace” — “A balanced globe of human beings.”
Meanwhile, the Biden administration busies itself promoting climate change … and reducing our naval force just at a time when it is most needed.
“The Round World and the Winning of the Peace” was Mackinder’s swan song — his last major contribution to the understanding of global geopolitics. The Second World War was still raging in 1943, but Mackinder sensed that the tide had shifted against the Axis powers, and that the war’s outcome would result in victory for the Allied powers. What would come after? “I make no pretense to forecasting the future of humanity,” Mackinder wrote. “What I am concerned with are the conditions under which we set about winning the peace when victory in the war has been achieved.” (READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: Terrorists Firing Missiles at Cargo Ships Are a Geopolitical Threat)
Mackinder had warned after the First World War in Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919) that unless the democratic powers adjusted their ideals to geographical realities another contest for global supremacy would engulf Eurasia and the world. “[I]t is important,” he wrote, “that a line should be carefully drawn between the idealistic blueprints and realistic and scholarly maps presenting concepts — political, economic, strategic, and so forth — based on the recognition of obstinate facts.” He sensed, with French General Ferdinand Foch, that the Versailles Treaty ending World War I was nothing more than “an Armistice for twenty years.” “No mere scraps of paper, even though they be the written constitution of a League of Nations,” he wrote, “are, under the conditions of to-day, a sufficient guarantee” against the outbreak of another world war.
The Second World War, tragically, confirmed Mackinder’s prescience. The balance of power in Europe and the Far East was shattered by Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan. It was tenuously restored by the Allied powers at great cost in human and material resources. And it likely would not have been restored had the Nazi-Soviet Pact endured. Some German geopolitical thinkers at the time, including Karl Haushofer, hoped that a German-Russian-Japanese axis could effectively control the Eurasian landmass. Fortunately, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and never coordinated war plans with imperial Japan.
Mackinder did not foresee the break-up of Germany after World War II, but he envisioned a maritime North Atlantic alliance (he called it the “Midland Ocean”) that would balance the great land power of Soviet Russia in Europe, while the great and generously populated civilizations of India and China (he called them the “Monsoon lands”) would provide balance in Asia after the defeat of Japan. Meanwhile, he envisioned the peoples of South America and Africa providing balance in the Southern Hemisphere.
The Soviet Union’s occupation of countries in Eastern and Central Europe and the installation of communist regimes in those countries coupled with the outcome of China’s civil war and Mao Zedong’s alliance with Stalin in 1950 presented a threat to the balance of power that was arguably greater than Hitler’s. The Warsaw Pact and Sino-Soviet bloc presented the Western powers with Mackinder’s geopolitical nightmare. As James Burnham pointed out at the time in Containment or Liberation?, if the Soviet Union successfully consolidated their Eastern-Central European empire and maintained the Sino-Soviet bloc, “their complete world victory is certain.” What likely kept the Cold War mostly cold was, initially, the American stockpile of atomic weapons and later the nuclear stalemate between Cold War adversaries. (READ MORE: Leningrad’s Winter of 1941–1942 and Its Unfathomable Horrors)
Looking back it is evident that two major geopolitical changes restored the global balance of power. First, the Sino-Soviet split, which was brilliantly exploited by President Nixon’s triangular diplomacy, undid the Sino-Soviet bloc. Second, the Reagan administration’s political and economic warfare in the 1980s led to the breakup of the Warsaw Pact. Contrary to claims made by certain neoconservative writers, the collapse of the Soviet empire did not result in America’s unipolar moment, it instead restored the global balance of power. The geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia was maintained.
The Nixon and Reagan policies were primarily realist approaches to the global balance of power. Nixon pursued an entente cordiale with Mao’s China — the most murderous regime in human history. Reagan did likewise. Nixon supported the Shah of Iran and Chile’s dictator Pinochet among other unsavory regimes to serve U.S. interests abroad. Reagan supported the South African apartheid government, the Contras in Nicaragua, the Afghan rebels, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in furtherance of America’s geopolitical interests. Both presidents adjusted their democratic ideals to the world’s geopolitical realities, just as Mackinder advised. Neither president took his eyes off the global balance of power.
The Nixon-Reagan achievements, sadly, have been frittered away during the last 30-plus years in periodic efforts to spread democracy and remake the world in America’s image — efforts largely inspired and implemented by neoconservative thinkers and policymakers. As a result of those misguided efforts, China and Russia are politically closer than at any time since the early 1950s. (READ MORE: Kennan and Kissinger)
The United States in the post-Cold War world has periodically engaged in fruitless idealistic crusades that diverted our attention from the balance of power, strained our resources both human and material, and left us ill-prepared to wage successful war in the western Pacific — where the global balance of power is most at stake. Meanwhile, the Biden administration busies itself promoting climate change, lecturing Israel on how to wage “humane” war against Hamas, rhetorically and idealistically dividing the world into good democracies and bad autocracies, instilling diversity, equity, and inclusion in our service academies and war colleges, and reducing our naval force just at a time when it is most needed. None of this will produce “a balanced globe of human beings.”
