GEOPOLITICS USED AND ABUSED

Leonard Hochberg

A Book Review Essay

of

Hal Brands,

The Eurasian Century:

Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World

(W. W. Norton & Company, 2025)

OVERVIEW

Dr. Hal Brands, a professor of American history and foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, has written a useful and significant study of the international system from 1900 through the first quarter of the 21^st century. The volume may be divided into three interrelated themes.

First, Brands rapidly traces the history of democratic versus autocratic geopolitical thought for the general reader. Halford Mackinder, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Nicholas Spykman—the defenders of Western democracies—and Major General Karl Haushofer and Aleksandr Dugin—the proponents of Eurasian autocracies—each receive an appropriate mention. However, it is the work of Halford Mackinder that receives pride of place for having predicted the essential feature of the hot and cold wars of the modern world: In short, the offshore maritime powers of Great Britain, and later the United States, sought to maintain the balance of power in Eurasia. Why? To ensure that no one power or alliance of land-based powers would manage to unify Eurasia, thereby gaining undisputed access to the manpower and resources of that supercontinent. Such access would allow a unified Eurasia to build fleets that could threaten the thalassocracies of Great Britain and the U.S.

The second theme, a historical treatment of the hot wars and cold wars that erupted across Eurasia since the dawn of the twentieth century, comprises the bulk of Brand’s book. Approximately 40 pages is devoted to the origins, course, and consequences of World War I, World War II, the Cold War between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S., and the second Cold War between the P.R.C. and the U.S. These four chapters are strategic histories, as Colin Gray would have characterized them, rather than general histories of each period. The author elaborates the grand strategies of the protagonists, discusses military campaigns, evaluates the strategic dilemmas that decision makers attempted to resolve during their respective conflicts, and considers the consequences, intended and otherwise, of defeat or victory.

Third, Brands ends his book with policy recommendations. He draws these recommendations from how Great Britain and the United States managed to emerge victorious in the first three conflicts. The maritime powers frequently delayed addressing the dangers presented by the Eurasian autocracies—their quest for more territory, more manpower, more resources, more power—until it was almost too late. Brands suggests it is critical to maintain strong alliances to contain and deter such adversaries. Furthermore, military capability must be cultivated to issue timely and credible threats. The goal: keep Eurasia internally divided.

In effect, our current danger grew out of the fact that the United States assumed that, after the Cold War, liberal democracy was the wave of the future. However, the diffusion of our values and institutions depended not merely on the prestige that victory over the U.S.S.R. conferred on the United States, but more significantly on the maintenance of military capability. Reliance on a “rules based international order” is woefully insufficient in maintaining the hard power needed to guarantee national security. Furthermore, post-cold war hegemonic power of the United States prompted China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, despite their ideological differences, to eventually team up.[1] These revisionist powers seek to make the world safe for empire, their empires. Grey zone conflicts, proxy wars, and the threat of war have occurred across the Eurasian rimland.

CARTOGRAPHIC VISUALIZATIONS OF STRATEGIC HISTORY

There is much to recommend this book, not the least of which is the reintroduction of classical geopolitical theory to the general reader. Brands deserves applause for having done so as a way of making sense of our current situation. Many faculty will adopt this book as a secondary reading in advanced courses in the fields of American foreign policy, strategy, and national security. Nevertheless, there is one troubling and obvious oversight that should be highlighted: The general reader and the student will search in vain for maps drawn specifically to highlight classical geopolitical thought and Brands’ geohistorical arguments. A historical atlas will need to be purchased and carefully interpreted to get the most out of The Eurasian Century.

Furthermore, while one should never judge a book by its cover, perhaps it is legitimate to judge a cover by the themes presented in a book. The cover of Brands’ book depicts three Eurasian maps along a horizontal timeline, ~1890 to ~2030. In the first, overlaid on the timeline from ~1890 to 1930-1945, Central and Western Europe are highlighted, presumably as the Eurasian geopolitical cockpit of the period; in the third, 1978-1992 to ~2030, China, Taiwan, and the territories along the southern and western borders of China are highlighted as the new flashpoint. But what about the map of Eurasia that corresponds to the period 1930-1945 through 1978-1992?

Given the thesis of the book, a reader might expect to see the territory of the U.S.S.R. and the Warsaw Pact highlighted—that is the power that threatened the stability of Eurasia during the Cold War. Instead, the territory of the Indian subcontinent (including Pakistan and Bangladesh) is highlighted! What? How did this cartographic error occur? Publishers, not authors, frequently have control over what book covers depict; yet, given this egregious mistake, did the publisher miss the point of the book? Why didn’t the author demand that the central map be changed to reflect the Soviet threat?

Maps in a book about geopolitics do not merely adorn the argument. They should, at the very least, depict the locations mentioned in the text, saving the reader from having to constantly consult a historical atlas. However, to be truly effective, maps should offer a visual display of strategic concepts, highlight theoretically relevant locations where military conflicts begin, intensify, and are resolved, and indicate the relationship of process to critical locations, such as international commerce to maritime chokepoints.^[2]

GEOGRAPHY, EURASIA, AND MACKINDER’S HEARTLAND THESIS

The cartography on the cover is indicative of some deeper issues. Let’s start with the basics. Geographers frequently characterize regions as either “uniform” in nature or “functional.” A uniform region is characterized by its one essential and significant characteristic—for instance, an “industrial” region—to enable a comparison with another, different uniform region—such as an “agricultural” region. Brands frequently deploys “Eurasia” as a “uniform” region.[3] Why?

Brands may believe that the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea proto-alliance gives rise to a politically uniform region in which autocracy is the most salient characteristic. Or he may believe that the Trans-Siberian Railroad, when connected to the various transportation projects promoted by China under the Belt and Road and other infrastructure initiatives, has produced or will soon produce a single economic unit in Eurasia. Or he may have emphasized Europe and Asia as a unified source of danger to the United States as distinct from the China challenge in the Indo-Pacific region.[4] Geography is often gerrymandered for political purposes. These three points are mere speculation.

A fourth possibility is that Brands is simplifying his geographic terminology to appeal to an audience of general readers that, in the words of the old rock and roll song, “don’t know much about geography…” Turning to the text, Brands suggests that Mackinder’s stunning 1904 presentation on “The Geographical Pivot of History”^[5]

combined vague abstraction, meandering narration, distant history, and mountains of geographical detail. The talk featured a long, if graceful, discussion of rivers, steppes, peaks and monsoon lands; it was full of concepts (“Pivot Area,” “Inner Crescent,” “Outer Crescent”) that then probably seemed obscure.^[6]

Mackinder was addressing an audience of geographers and imperial policy makers, most of whom knew where the Ural Mountains, Manchuria, the Volga River, etc. were to be found. Did Mackinder depict his “obscure” concepts with maps? According to Dr. Brian Blouet, Mackinder’s biographer, Mackinder “illustrated” his talk, probably to identify the location where his concepts applied to Eurasian and world history.^[7] In the published version of “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Mackinder deployed five figures, the fifth of which explicitly showed the locations of these supposedly “obscure” concepts.^[8]

So, how does Hal Brands define Eurasia? Much depends on this definition, as “Eurasia” is not visualized in a map, even though it is his key unit of geographic analysis.

As the name implies, Eurasia consists of the combined expanse of those two Old World continents of the Northern Hemisphere, Europe and Asia. It includes the outlying islands of those continents, which are closely connected to them by Eurasia’s marginal seas, as well as North Africa, which is thoroughly linked to Europe by the Mediterranean as it is blocked from the rest of Africa by the Sahara. Eurasia thus runs from littoral Asia in the East to the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles in the West, from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south. This “world island,” as geographer Halford Mackinder called it, is a space unlike any other.^[9]

All but the last sentence in this characterization is correct.

In his masterpiece Democratic Ideals and Reality,^[10] Mackinder defines the “world-island” as comprised of six (uniform) subregions: (1) the Sahara, (2) the Southern Heartland,[11] south of sub-Saharan Africa, (3) Arabia, (4) the Monsoon Coastlands (of India, Southwest Asia, and China), (5) the “European Coastland,” and finally—Mackinder’s particular contribution to our understanding of geopolitics of the 20^th and the first quarter of the 21^st century—(6) the “Heartland.” Thus, despite Brands’ assertion that the boundaries of the “world-island” are conterminous with Eurasia, Mackinder includes in the world-island two subregions that fall outside of Eurasia.^[12] This may seem to be a mere geographical technicality, but details matter, especially when it comes to what constitutes Brands’ key unit of analysis, Eurasia, which he argues is a regional “prize without equal: it is the strategic center of the world.”^[13]

Halford Mackinder, when characterizing the world-island, did so as a “functional” region, that is, one in which the humans living in the subregions interacted with one another economically, socially, and militarily. At the strategic center of the world-island is the Geographic Pivot, occupied by Tsarist Russia, and later termed the Eurasian Heartland. In 1904 Mackinder asked,

Is not the pivot region of the world's politics that vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomads, and is to-day about to be covered with a network of railways? There have been and are here the conditions of a mobility of military and economic power of a far-reaching and yet limited character. Russia replaces the Mongol Empire. Her pressure on Finland, on Scandinavia, on Poland, on Turkey, on Persia, on India, and on China, replaces the centrifugal raids of the steppemen [sic]. In the world at large she occupies the central strategical position held by Germany in Europe. She can strike on all sides and be struck from all sides, save the north. The full development of her modern railway mobility is merely a matter of time.^[14]

Russia, as the “Pivot” or Heartland power, exerts pressure on the lands along its borders; however, as the Heartland power, it was relatively immune from the influence of maritime power due to rivers flowing to inland seas or the Arctic, and the way the polar ice cap limited the movement of shipping. With the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, Russia acquired not merely the means to access virgin agricultural land and new mineral resources, but also internal lines of communication, travel, and transport—factors essential for rapidly moving and deploying military force. For Mackinder, the Tsarist regime threatened to overturn the balance of power in Europe and beyond by suddenly transforming the territory of the Eurasian Heartland into an economically modern and politically unified new environment.

Hal Brands, in emphasizing Eurasia as his unit of geographic analysis, rarely mentions Mackinder’s Heartland thesis. Surprisingly, The Eurasian Century fails to note the Heartland in the index—either as a separate term or under Mackinder’s name. Yet, in one critical passage, Brands mentions the Heartland. He quotes, in an abbreviated fashion, Mackinder’s geopolitical catechism: “Who rules the Heartland rules the World-Island; whoever rules the World-Island commands the World.”^[15] Yet here too, Brands misses Mackinder’s deeper point, which is suggested by the full quote from Democratic Ideals and Reality:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:

Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island:

Who rules the World-Island commands the World.^[16]

Why does East Europe loom so large in Mackinder’s formulation in Democratic Ideals and Reality? First, East Europe was the land over which Germanic and Slavic peoples competed—one of the fundamental causes of World War I for Mackinder. Second, East Europe was (and remains) the gateway to the Heartland. The Northern European plain and the Danube Basin provide the two major land-based invasion routes into the Heartland. Third, in Democratic Ideals and Reality, Mackinder reformulated the Heartland thesis from a geographic region into a strategic region, where the great European autocratic powers threaten the lands along the littorals of the Baltic and Black seas.^[17]

Finally, Mackinder envisioned Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Great Bohemia, Hungary, Great Rumania, Bulgaria, Great Serbia, and Greece[18] as: (1) a make weight against the revival of German power, (2) a bulwark, keeping the post-war Russian Communist regime outside of Europe, and (3) the foundation for a restored European balance of power. One curiosity: although Ukraine is not explicitly mentioned in the text, it does appear (without territorial boundaries) on Mackinder’s map depicting Eastern Europe.[19] In short, the Wilsonian ideals of national self-determination of the East European states and collective security through the League of Nations needed to be brought into alignment with the realities of power. In Mackinder’s vision, these newly independent nations would align with France and Great Britain, thereby putting the League on a sound footing and restoring a balance of power to Europe.

According to Brands, “For Mackinder, then the most critical feature of the peace was not the League of Nations. It was the creation of a cordon sanitaire between Russia and Germany—a ‘tier of independent states’ that, in defending themselves, would keep Eurasia in balance.”[20] This interpretation is correct, but not quite good enough. For Mackinder, the independent states of East Europe, once allied with the democratic and maritime powers of Western Europe, would restore the balance of power and thereby stabilize the League as a mechanism for collective security.

Mackinder was not a modern “realist.”[21] He recognized that ideals, such as liberty, equality, and nationalism, had historically become institutionalized as features of reality.[22] Even collective security was on the verge of becoming institutionalized when Mackinder wrote. Such ideals needed to be considered when formulating a foreign policy designed to restructure the international order in the aftermath of World War I. Therefore, the fundamental issue for Mackinder wasn’t ideals versus the reality of power in the international arena; instead, it was how to reconcile democratic ideals with the reality of power. The title of Mackinder book was not Democratic Ideals or Reality.

Mackinder’s Democratic Ideals and Realty was written in recognition that post-World War I democratic populations were being carried away by an overly optimistic idea of what collective security could accomplish. A correction was needed; Mackinder supplied it by imagining a new geopolitical order that mobilized many of the hitherto submerged ethnic groups of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and German empires as autonomous nation-states.^[23]

Brands alludes to the importance of East Europe when he evaluates the geopolitical ideas of Major General Dr. Karl E. Haushofer, the thinker whose ideas are often associated with the rise of Adolph Hitler. According to Brands: “The world, wrote Haushofer, needed ‘a general political cleaning up, a redistribution of power.’ The young Eastern European countries lying athwart Germany’s path were ‘state fragments’ that ‘have no longer a right to exist.’”^[24] Brands is no doubt correct in interpreting Haushofer’s sentiment toward the East European states as a quest for lebensraum.

But it was more than just that. Haushofer’s attack on the legitimacy of the East European nations as mere “fragments” of states was tantamount to an assault on the inter-war balance of power, which was upheld by the alliances led by France and Great Britain. In the absence of a full-blown interpretation of Mackinder’s purpose in writing Democratic Ideals and Reality, Brands cannot provide a nuanced appreciation of Haushofer’s geopolitical thought and rhetorical tactics.

CONCLUSION

In the final analysis, Hal Brands’ book deserves to be read and discussed among students of international relations and within the foreign policy establishment. However, it does not do justice to the subtleties of classical geopolitical thought. At times, the geography in geopolitics is suppressed in favor of an aspatial assessment of great power competition and conflict. Brand’s failure to provide cartographic visualizations of strategic interactions is a telling aspect of how the geographic component in geopolitics is obscured.

Indeed, had Hal Brands attended to Mackinder’s overriding goal in Democratic Ideals and Reality—how to reconcile the enthusiasms and ideals of democracies with the geopolitical realities of power in international relations—he might have offered a more nuanced appreciation of how ideology and geopolitics should interact in the formulation of foreign policy. While he is undoubtedly correct that “ideology and geopolitics are inseparable,”^[25] this assertion is an insufficient guide to where, under what conditions, and at what cost maritime-commercial powers should ally with a territorial-autocratic regime of the Heartland to keep Eurasia divided.

Acknowledgements: The author thanks Paul Rahe, Jim Sheehan, Kelly Jordan, Geoff Sloan and Michael Hochberg for their comments. Finally, I must thank the presenters and participants in the Mackinder Forum seminar series and the Liberty Fund seminar devoted to Mackinder’s work for their intellectual stimulation. Any errors of fact or interpretation remain mine alone.

---

[1] Geopolitics need not be used exclusively for description. For an analysis of a geopolitical prediction see Michael Hochberg and Leonard Hochberg, “The Geopolitics of World War III,” Real Clear Defense (January 27, 2024): https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/01/27/the_geopolitics_of_world_war_iii_1007840.html.

^[2] How to use geography and maps in the formulation of foreign policy and military affairs is discussed in the following essays: Walter A. McDougall, “You Can’t Argue with Geography,” Footnotes (September 2, 2000): https://www.fpri.org/article/2000/09/you-cant-argue-with-geography/; Hillen, “Foreign Policy by Map,” National Review on line, February 23, 2015: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2015/02/23/foreign-policy-map/; and Andrew Rhodes, “Thinking in Space: The Role of Geography in National Security Decision-Making,” Texas National Security Review, Vol 2, No. 4 (August 2019), pp. 90-109; General Sir Rupert Smith, “Geography, Geostrategy, and Military Operations,” Mackinder Forum (November 15, 2022): https://mackinderforum.org/blog/geography-geostrategy-and-military-operations; and Jaehan Park, “Rethinking Geopolitics: Geography as an Aid to Statecraft,” Texas National Security Review, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Fall 2023), pp. 79-100: https://tnsr.org/2023/09/rethinking-geopolitics-geography-as-an-aid-to-statecraft/.

[3] Brands mentions in passing how Mahan and Spykman divide Eurasia into subregions. Eurasian Century, pp. 20-1 and 28-9.

[4] A participant in a recent Mackinder Forum seminar, who shall remain anonymous under the Chatham House Rule, suggested this point.

^[5] H. J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” The Geographical Journal, Vol. 23, No. 4 (April 1904), pp. 421-437: https://disp.web.uniroma1.it/sites/default/files/Mackinder_Geographical+Pivot+of+History.pdf.

^[6] Brands, Eurasian Century, p. 10

^[7] Private conversation, April 22, 2025.

^[8] “The Natural Seats of Power,” Figure 5, in Mackinder, “Geographic Pivot,” p. 435.

^[9] Brands, Eurasian Century, pp. xiii-xiv.

^[10] H. J. Mackinder, M.P., Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (London: Constable and Company LTD, 1919): https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t3xs5n41z&view=1up&seq=7&skin=2021&q1=who%20rules%20the%20Heartland.

[11] Geopolitical analysts have neglected Mackinder’s other “Heartland” for purposes of comparison or theorization.

^[12] Mackinder, Democratic Ideals, pp. 100-101.

^[13] Mackinder, Democratic Ideals, p. xiv.

^[14] Mackinder, “Geographic Pivot”, pp. 434 & 436.

^[15] Brands, Eurasian Century, p. 13. Brands’ text leaves out the crucial sentence on Eastern Europe; however, Brands does mention it in a footnote on page 251, note 48. Brands characterizes this sentence as the “preface to [Mackinder’s] dictum.” Brands briefly mentions Eastern Europe on p. 78 as the military gateway from and to the Heartland. Again, this is correct, but not quite good enough.

^[16] Mackinder, Democratic Ideals, p. 194.

^[17] Leonard Hochberg and Geoffrey Sloan, “Mackinder’s Geopolitical Thought Revisited,” Orbis, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Fall 2017), pp. 575-592. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals, pp. 135, Fig. 24, & p. 141, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t3xs5n41z&view=1up&seq=147; https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t3xs5n41z&view=1up&seq=153. For a cartographic comparison of the two formulations, see “Halford Mackinder’s Geographic Pivot 1904 and 1919”: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Halford-Mackinders-Pivot-in-1904-and-1919-10_fig1_256044062.

[18] Mackinder, Democratic Ideals, p. 207, Fig. 31; https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t3xs5n41z&view=1up&seq=219.

[19] Michael Hochberg and Leonard Hochberg, “’Confining the Enemy’: Halford Mackinder d Mackinder’s Theory of Containment and the Conflict in Ukraine,” Naval War College Review, Vol. 76, No. 2, Spring 2023, pp. 1-20: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8348&context=nwc-review; and Leonard Hochberg and Michael Hochberg, “Tragedy, National Insecurity, and War in Ukraine, RealClear Defense, April 30, 2022: https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2022/04/30/tragedy_national_insecurity_and_war_in_ukraine_829941.html.

[20] Brands, Eurasian Century, p. 78.

[21] Our esteemed colleague in the Mackinder Forum, Mr. Francis P. Sempa, would disagree with my analysis of Mackinder and Brands: “Trump, Theodore Roosevelt, and US Naval Power,” The American Spectator, April 16, 2025: https://spectator.org/trump-theodore-roosevelt-and-us-naval-power/; and .”Hal Brands Distorts Mackinder to Bash Trump,” The American Spectator, April 22, 2025: https://spectator.org/hal-brands-distorts-mackinder-to-bash-trump/.

[22] Mackinder, Democratic Ideals, pp. 6-7.

^[23] This interpretation of Democratic Ideals appeared in a Liberty Fund Colloquium proposal: Leonard Hochberg, “Liberty, ‘The Geographic Pivot,’ and the World of the Treaty of Versailles,” June 2018. I am grateful to Liberty Fund for agreeing to host an online seminar devoted to Mackinder’s thought.

^[24] Brands, Eurasian Century, p. 32.

^[25] Brands, Eurasian Century, pp. 226.

Biographic Sketch: Leonard Hochberg, PhD., cofounded Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (i.e., STRATFOR), was a faculty member at Stanford University, and was a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Real Clear Defense, Orbis, National Review on-line, Gatestone, Asia Times, and Naval War College Review have posted or published his (often co-authored) geopolitical analyses. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Center and the U.S. Coordinator of the Mackinder Forum (www.mackinderforum.org.)