The Heartland Theory & Vladimir Putin: Back to the 19th Century
Putin aims to return the world to a hierarchical and largely anti-democratic time when Great Powers called the shots. He must be stopped.
British geographer Sir Halford John Mackinder famously wrote:
Who rules Eastern Europe commands the Heartland
Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island
Who rules the World Island commands the world
“Heartland” refers to the vast lands from the Volga to the Yangtze Rivers, essentially Russia and China. “World Island” constitutes all of Eurasia and Africa. For Mackinder, a 19th century geostrategic theorist, Central and Eastern Europe were key to world domination. In so many words and actions, Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to agree. Hence, his war of conquest against Ukraine, a naked aggression on a scale not seen since World War II.
Will it work? Answer: With the same sterling successes of the two world wars and the Soviet Union. The First World War brought us four collapsed empires and one near-bankrupt one, plus 20 million dead, followed by the Great Depression. The Second World War rendered an expansionist Germany in ruins and Europe divided, plus another 80 million dead. And the Soviet Union entertained us with terror and oppression for all of 828 months of human history before it imploded under the weight of its own self-contradictions and colossal hypocrisy. That Putin sees the demise of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” predestines him to the proverbial trash heap of history. And the sooner, the better.
Putin ignores the dictum laid down by the chronicler of the decline of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, who said that “There is nothing perhaps more adverse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations, in opposition to their inclination and interest.” Putin as Nero? Two power-crazed, sadistic nutcases? Interesting thought. Tacitus said of Nero, “He wished to destroy virtue itself.” Missiles’ slamming into maternity hospitals certainly fits that bill.
Contemporary Russian strategists have embraced Mackinder, who wrote his seminal essay on the Heartland Theory in 1904 and died in 1947. A leading right-wing ideologue, Alexander Dugin, has the attention of the Kremlin. In his book, The Foundations of Geopolitics, Dugin virtually copies-and-pastes Mackinder, advocating for a “Euro-Asian empire” led by Russia to counter what he sees as American hegemony. He further calls for the dismemberment of the former Soviet republics and their re-inclusion into Russia. To give you a flavor of where Dugin is coming from, he stated that “the Waffen SS was an intellectual oasis.” Dugin has given lectures before Kremlin audiences and at Russia’s armed forces academy. He was an architect of Putin’s 2014 strategy to seize Crimea.
Russia traditionally has seen itself as a nation surrounded by enemies, and therefore requires “strategic depth” through territorial expansion and client states. This has been a continuum from the tsars through the Soviet period and now under Putin, who has demanded that NATO withdraw its troops to where they were as of 1997, i.e., before NATO expansion. Putin essentially calls for restoration of Russia’s Soviet era hegemony, which would include Ukraine.
“Putin and the current Russian elite have embraced the idea of Greater Russia. They have married the expansionist nationalism of the tsars to the absolutist military strategy of Lenin,” according to strategic analyst Martin N. Murphy.
In other words, by attempting to take over Ukraine, Putin is making a lunge to take control of Mackinder’s Heartland as a first step toward eventually dominating the World Island. Reconstructed 19th century delusional power mongering? That may be an understatement given today’s inclusion of nuclear weapons in the strategic equation.
Putin was very clear on this in his 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”:
I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia. Our spiritual, human and civilizational ties formed for centuries and have their origins in the same sources; they have been hardened by common trials, achievements and victories. Our kinship has been transmitted from generation to generation. It is in the hearts and the memory of people living in modern Russia and Ukraine, in the blood ties that unite millions of our families. Together we have always been and will be many times stronger and more successful. For we are one people.
Putin’s idealized blitzkrieg invasion of Ukraine has failed. Undaunted, Moscow has modified its strategy to: a) redeploy to eastern Ukraine and wear down Ukrainian forces; b) establish a land bridge from Donetsk and Crimea to Moldova; c) seize the port of Odessa, thereby denying Ukraine access to the Black Sea. The outcome would be a much diminished and weakened Ukraine, the creation of a buffer zone between Russia and NATO nations, and expansion of Russia's sphere of influence in the region. Putin, in fact, has invoked the need for re-establishment of spheres of influence, again, a very 19th century concept.
Former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski maintains that Ukraine fits into Mackinder’s view that whoever controls Eastern Europe controls the Heartland, telling BBC journalist Phil Tinline: “It’s the Egypt of Europe – a swing state, which is why we’ve had rivalry between Russia and the EU over the geopolitical orientation of Ukraine.” Mackinder’s ideas, he adds, provide convenient justification for Russian imperialism: “Those are dangerous ideas because you can waste a lot of national energy and kill a lot of innocent people trying to realize them.”
In fact, Russia has just issued its formula for eliminating Ukraine not only as a nation-state, but as a cultural community. Authored by a Putin hack, “What Should Russia Do With Ukraine?” calls for the “de-Ukrainization” and “de-Europeanization” of Ukraine, to include mass arrests, elimination of the intelligentsia and “re-education” of the population. In other words, all the same murderous stuff that marked the Soviet Union. Yale historian Timothy Snyder calls it “a genocide handbook for its war on Ukraine.”
In many ways, the world has been harkening back to the 19th century, Halford Mackinder’s century which was lorded over by kaisers, tsars, emperors and sultans, when realpolitik was marked by the moral conscience and actions of junkyard dogs, when cultural communities were divvied up like so much real estate and potentates drew lines on the map delineating spheres of influence. Vladimir Putin aims to return the world to this hierarchical and largely anti-democratic time when Great Powers called the shots.
He must be stopped.
If not, as Edward Gibbon warned, “Whole generations may be swept away by the madness of kings in the space of a single hour.”
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.