China calls it the “Polar Silk Road.” It’s the “northern wing of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.” It consists of four maritime routes that traverse the Arctic: the Northern Sea Route, the Northwest Passage, the Transpolar Sea Route, and the Arctic Bridge Route. Climate change is thawing the Arctic ice at the same time that China and Russia have deepened their strategic partnership — a partnership aimed at the U.S.-led world order. The Polar Silk Road has been characterized as a new “strategic frontier” for China and described as “the heart of Moscow and Beijing’s play for the high north.” It’s about shipping, trade, energy resources, and geopolitics. In the long term, it’s about control of the World-Island.
READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: Back to the Future With Nicaragua
In 1919, British geographer and statesman Halford Mackinder wrote Democratic Ideals and Reality in an effort to warn the Western democracies that they needed to adjust their foreign policies to the “lasting realities of our earthly home.” World War I had recently ended. The Allies defeated the Central Powers, but that victory was not a foregone conclusion. It was, as the Duke of Wellington remarked about Waterloo, a close-run thing. “Had Germany elected to stand on the defensive on her short frontier towards France, and had she thrown her main strength against Russia,” Mackinder wrote, Germany would be in a position to control key parts of the World-Island and “establish[] her sea-power on a wider base than any in history,” and the “British and American insular peoples would not have realized the strategical danger until too late.”
Mackinder’s concept of the World-Island stemmed from his study of geography and history, especially the conflicts between peninsular Greece (under the Dorians) and Crete in the 12th century B.C. and Rome’s conquest of southeastern Britain after 43 A.D. In each case, the peninsular power based on greater resources overcame the insular sea powers. Importantly, the Dorians in Greece and the Romans astride the Mediterranean had no serious land power challenges at the time and thus were able to translate their peninsular land-based resources and energies into predominant sea power and, thereby, defeat their insular foes in their own element.
Updating his analysis to the early 20th century, Mackinder pictured the joint landmasses of Europe, Asia, and Africa as a geopolitical whole that he called the World-Island. Mackinder’s World-Island power (or alliance of powers) potentially boasted the three features that prefigured a global empire: incomparable resources (both human and material), insularity (it was surrounded by water on three sides and ice to the north), and few, if any, land-based distractions from other powers. The insular powers of Great Britain and the United States, Mackinder explained, “must no longer think of Europe apart from Asia and Africa. The Old World has become insular, or in other words a unit, incomparably the largest geographical unit on our globe.” Mackinder included a figure or drawing in the book that pictured a large round circle as the World-Island surrounded by the much smaller circles of Britain, Japan, North America, South America, and Australia. The foreign policies of the Western democracies, he wrote, must ensure that no power or alliance of powers achieves effective political control of the World-Island, or a large part of it, from whence it could use the vast resources of the “Great Continent” to defeat the surrounding insular powers in their own element (sea power).
In 1919, however, the World-Island was not yet insular. The polar ice caps of the Arctic prevented complete insularity and modern globalization was still in the future. That is now changing. As Robert Kaplan has so brilliantly pointed out, the 21st century has brought with it a new strategic geography where “the interactions of globalization, technology, and geopolitics, with each reinforcing the other, are leading the Eurasian supercontinent to become, analytically speaking, one fluid and comprehensible unit.” And further, “because of the reunification of the Mediterranean Basin, evinced by refugees from North Africa and the Levant flooding Europe, and because of dramatically increased interactions across the Indian Ocean from Indochina to East Africa, we may now speak of Afro-Eurasia in one breath.” The thawing Arctic provides an exclamation point to Kaplan’s analysis. Mackinder’s World-Island is here.
And China and Russia have expanded their strategic partnership to the Arctic, which includes energy, shipping, and infrastructure projects. One observer concludes that the “tightening Sino-Russian relationship has influenced the geopolitical environment” in the Arctic region. With this growing strategic relationship in the Arctic, China has expanded its Belt and Road Initiative to every corner of the World-Island. “What if the Great Continent, the whole World-Island or a large part of it. Were at some future time to become a single and untied base of sea power?” asked Mackinder in 1919. “Would not the other insular powers be outbuilt as regards ships and out-manned as regards seamen? Their fleets would no doubt fight with all the heroism begotten of their histories, but the end would be fated.” Perhaps this is why President Xi Jinping is so confident about China’s future takeover of Taiwan.
Image: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
