“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” – Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
In his lead essay, Jerry Hendrix argues that the United States and its leaders are unprepared for the re-emergence of great power competition. We agree that the leaders and populations of the free world are unprepared, but differ slightly on the character of that competition. Hendrix divides the world between authoritarian and liberal democracies. The world is a lot fuzzier and not as binary as this simplistic formula would suggest. We would propose that there is an older, more elemental framework at play today. The ghosts of the early twentieth-century prophets of geopolitics—Halford Mackinder, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Nicholas Spykman—have returned to haunt the twenty-first century, to deliver a warning and to offer a framework for understanding how grand strategy and geopolitics should be shaped in relation to emerging global forces and power structures.
Mackinder, as a continental power proponent, believed that control of the “World-Island”—the interlinked continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa (Afro-Eurasia)—would confer dominance of the international system. The key advantage of the World-Island was the Heartland, stretching from the Volga to the Yangtze and from the Himalayas to the Arctic, with the combined entity’s large East Asian coastline enabling it to become a major sea power. Meanwhile, he envisaged that the offshore continents of North America, South America, and Oceania, as well as the British Isles and Japan, would struggle to compete with a Heartland that, with expansion into Afro-Eurasia and internal lines of communication, could access and exploit over half of the world’s resources.
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