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FOREIGN AFFAIRSl. 21 JU L Y 1943 N o. 4

T H E R O U N D W O R L D A N D T H EW I N N I N G O F T H E P E A C EBy Sir Halford J. Mackinder

HAVE been asked to carry further some of the themes withwhich I have dealt in my past writings, in particular to con-sider whether my st rategical concept of a "Heart land" hasIn order to set the concept into its context, I must begin

My earliest memory of public affairs goes back to the day in1870 w hen , as a small boy who had ju s t begun atten d-

lenged, and the only dan ger she saw at th a t time to her over-

Thirty years later, at the turn of the century, von Tirpitz


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596 FO RE IGN AFFAIRSposition in Europe was about to add to itself sea power strongenough to neutralize British sea power. The United States wasalso rising steadily to the rank of a Grea t Pow er. As yet, however,its rise could be measured only in statistical tables; although inmy childhood someone had already been impressed with Ameri-can resourcefulness, for I remember in our schoolroom a pictureof the battle between the Merrimac and the Monitory the firstarmored ship and the first turret ship. Thus Germany and theUnited S tates came up alongside of Britain and Russia.The particular events out of which sprang the idea of theHeartland were the British war in South Africa and the Russianwar in Manchuria. The South African war ended in 1902, and inthe spring of 1904 the R usso-Japanese war was clearly imminent.A paper which I read before the Royal Geographical Societyearly in the latter year, entitled "The Geographical Pivot ofHistory," was therefore topical, but it had a background ofmany years of observation and thought.The contrast presented by the British war against the Boers,fought 6,000 miles away across the ocean, and the war fought byRussia at a comparable distance across the land expanse of Asia,naturally suggested a parallel contrast between Vasco da Gamarounding the Cape of Good Hope on his voyage to the Indies,near the end of the fifteenth cen tury , and the ride of Yermak, theCossack, at the head of his horsemen, over the Ural range intoSiberia early in the sixteenth century. That comparison in turnled to a review of the long succession of raids made by the no-madic tribes of Central Asia, through classical antiquity and theMiddle Ages, upon the settled populations of the crescent of sub-continents: peninsular Europe, the Middle East, the Indies, andChina proper. My conclusion was that,

. . . in the present decade we are for the first time in a position to attempt,with some degree of completeness, a correlation between the larger geographi-cal and the larger historical generalizations. For the first time we can perceivesomething of the real proportion of features and events on the stage of thewhole world, and may seek a formula which shall express certain aspects, atany rate, of geographical causation in universal history. If we are fortunate,that formula should have a practical value as setting into perspective some of


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THE ROUND V^ORLD 597The oversetting of the balance of power in favor of the pivot state, resultingn its expansion over the m argina l lands of Euro-Asia, would permit of the use

In conclusion, it may be well expressly to point out that the substitution ofome new con trol of the inland area for th a t of Russia would no t tend to reduce

r its territo ry , the y m igh t con stitute the yellow peril to the world's free-

At the end of the First World War, my book, "Democratic

i es" and the "Heart land." But the fact that , even when addi-ional criteria were brought to bea r, th e thesis of 1904 still sufficed

nW e turn now to th e m ain object of the present article thedrafting of an interim estimate of the value of the Heartland

w artim e. I do n ot p resum e to join in th e wide-sweeping de batesalready in progress which look forward over generations to come;held down while, in the lan guage of Casablanca, his philosophyf war is being killed.The Heartland is the northern part and the interior of Euro-a. I t exte nd s from th e A rctic coast down to the cen tral des erts,and has as its western limits the broad isthmus between the Baltic


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598 FO RE IGN AFFA IRSare not exactly coincident. First of all, we have in this region byfar the widest lowland plain on the face of the globe. Secondly,there flow across that plain some great navigable rivers; certainof them go north to the Arctic Sea and are inaccessible from theocean because it is cumbered with ice, while others flow into in-land w aters, such as the C aspian, which have no exit to the ocean.Thirdly , there is here a grassland zone which, un til within the lastcentury and a half, presented ideal conditions for the developmentof high mobility by camel and horse-riding nomads. Of the threefeatures mentioned, the river basins are the easiest to presentcartographically; the water divide which delimits the wholegroup of Arctic and "continental" rivers into a single unit doesisolate nea tly on the m ap a va st coherent area which is the Heart-land according to that particular criterion. The mere exclusion ofsea mobility and sea power, however, is a negative if importantdifferential; it was the plain and the grassland belt which offeredthe positive conditions conducive to the other type of mobility,that proper to the prairie. As for the grassland, it traverses thewhole breadth of the plain but does not cover its entire surface.Notwithstanding these apparent discrepancies, the Heartlandprovides a sufficient physical basis for strategical thinking. Togo further and to simplify geography artificially would be mis-leading.

For our present purpose it is sufficiently accurate to say thatthe territory of the U.S.S.R. is equivalent to the Heartland, ex-cept in one direction. In order to demarcate that exception agrea t one let us draw a direct line, some 5,500miles long, west-ward from Bering Strait to Rumania. Three thousand miles fromBering Strait that line will cross the Yenisei River,flowingnorth-ward from the borders of Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean. Eastwardoi that great river lies a gtn&tdiSiy rugged covintxy of mountainplateaux and valleys, covered almost from end to end withconiferous forests; this I shall call Lenaland, from its centralfeature, the great River Lena. This is not included in HeartlandRussia. Lenaland Russia has an area of three and three-quartermillion square miles, but a population of only some six millions, of


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TH E ROU ND WORLD 599West of the Yenisei lies what I have described as Heartlandles and a population of more than 170 millions. The populationThe simplest and probably the most effective way of presenting

France, like Russia, is a compact country, as long as it is broad,th a rather smaller area in proportion to the length of boundary

lies dominated the seas. The French and allied arm ies, deployedross the open no rtheastern frontier, were therefore well de-ended on either flank and were secure in the rear. The tragic low-sges and the N orth Sea. In 1914, the line of ba ttle, pivoting onwar, in 1918, it wheeled forward on the same pivot. Through

rial area was in that northeastern sector where the unceasingattle was waged.Russia repeats in essentials the pattern of France, but on af northeas tward. In the present w ar the Russian army is alignedcross tha t open frontier. In its rear is the vast plain of the Heart-


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6oo FOR EIGN AFFA IRSstan ce , and far excel in defensive v alue the coasts and mountainswhich engird France.It is true that the Arctic shore is no longer inaccessible in theabsolute sense that held until a few years ago. Convoys of mer-chant ships, assisted by powerful icebreakers and with airplanesreconnoitring ahead for water lanes through the ice pack, havetraded to the Obi and Yenisei Rivers , and even to the Lena River;but a hostile invasion across the vast area of circum-polar ice andover the Tundra mosses and Targa forests of Northern Siberiaseems almost impossible in the face of Soviet land-based airdefense.

To complete the comparison between France and Russia, letus consider the relative scales of some parallel facts. HeartlandRussia has four times the population, four times as wide an openfrontier, and twenty times the area of France. That open frontieris not disproportionate to the Russian population; and to equalthe breadth of the Soviet deployment Germany has had to ekeout her more limited manpower by diluting it with less effectivetroops drawn from her subject countries. In one im por tant re-spect, however, Russia began her second war with G ermany in nobe tter position than France occupied in 1914; as with F rance, hermost developed agriculture and industries lay directly in the pathof the invader. The second Five Year Plan would have remediedthat situation had the German aggression been delayed a coupleof years. Perhaps th at was one of Hitle r's reasons for breaking histreaty with Stalin in 1941.The vast potentialities of the Heartland, however, to saynothing of the na tural reserves in Lenaland , a re strategically wellplaced. Industries are growing rapidly in such localities as thesouthern Urals, in the very pivot of the pivot area, and in therich Kuznetsk coal basin in the lee of the great natural barrierseast of the upper Yenisei River. In 1938 Russia produced moreof the following foodstuffs tha n any othe r coun try in the world:wheat, barley, oats, rye and sugar beets. More manganese wasproduced in Russia than in any other country. It was bracketedwith the United States in the first place as regards iron, and it


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T H E R O U N D W O R L D 6oi

AH things conside red, th e conclusion is una void able th a t if them ust ran k as the greate st land P ower on the globe. Moreover,

I l lI cannot pretend to exhaust the subject of the Heartland, the

From Casablanca there came lately the call to destroy the rul-

me th a t for, say, tw o years from the time the "c eas e fire'* ordergiven, th e Allies will occupy Berlin, tr y the c riminals, fix

ear ve ry effectively if it were controlled by strong em bank m entsf power on e ither h an d land power to the east, in the H ea rt-

ought by Ge rm an y m us t be a war on two unshakable fronts, and


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T H E R O U N D W O R L D 603back to prosperity at once. The region between the Missouri andthe Yenisei, with its great trunk routes for merchant aircraft be-tween Chicago-New York and London-Moscow, and all that thedevelopment of them will stand for, must be the first care, for itmust be the fulcrum. Wisely the conquering of Japan waits for awhile. In due course China will receive capital on a generousscale as a debt of honor, to help in her romantic adventure ofbuilding for a quarter of humanity a new civilization, neitherquite Eastern nor quite Western. Then the ordering of the OuterWorld will be relatively easy, with China, the United States andthe United Kingdom leading the way, the last two each followedby its trail of a com m onw ealth of free nations for though theirhistories will have been different the result will be similar. Butthe first en terp rise u nd er tak en in economic rebuilding will surelyhave to be in the area within the desert girdle, lest a whole civili-zation should deliquesce into chaos. What a pity the alliance,negotiated after Versailles, between the U nited Sta tes, the U nitedKingdom and France was not implemented! What trouble andsadness that act might have saved!

IVAnd now, to complete my picture of the pattern of the roundworld, let me add, briefly, three concepts to the two already vis-ualized. For the purposes of what I see described in Americanwritings as "Grand Strategy," it is necessary to build broad gen-eralizations in geography no less than in history and economics.I have described my concept of the Heartland, which I haveno hes itation in say ing is m ore valid an d useful today than it waseither twenty or forty years ago. I have said how it is set in itsgirdle of b road n at u ra l defenses ice-clad Po lar Sea, forestedand rugged Lenaland, and Central Asiatic mountain and aridtableland. The girdle is incomplete, however, because of an opengateway, a thousand miles wide, admitting from PeninsularEurope into the interior plain through the broad isthmus be-tween the Baltic and Black Seas. For the first time in all history


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6o4 FO RE IGN AFFA IRSH eartlan d there is a store of rich soil for cultivation ando f ores anfuels for extraction , the equal or thereabouts of all that lieupon and beneath the United States and the Canadian DominionI have suggested that a current of cleansing counter-philosophy, canalized between unbreachable embankments of powermay sweep the German mind clear of its black magic. Surely noone is going to be mad enough to set foreign teachers to exorcizthe evil spirits from the soul of the conquered German nationNor, after the first inevitable punitory years, do I have sufficientru st th a t the conquering democracies will maintain garrisons othe necessary spirit and number stationed in the vanquished lanfor there is no use in asking democrats to persist in an attitudecontrary to the very spirit and essence of democracy. The cleansing stream might b ette r be released to flow from some regeneratand regenerating German source, between the embankments opower I have nam ed, the one within the Heartlan d and the othewithin the territories of the three amphibious powers, AmericanBritish and French. The two friendly forces racing one anotheacross the flow of the canal would be of equal power and shouldalways be equally ready for necessary action. Then Germanywould live continuously under the threa t of immediate war ontwo fronts should she be guilty of any breach of the treaties whichprohibited either physical preparation for war or the misleadingof youth which is ano ther way of preparation for war. Th e democratic garrisons in their home countries would be, by force oexample, the teachers.

On this proposal follows my second geographical concept, thaof the M idland Ocean the North A tlantic and its dependenseas and river basins. W ithout laboring the details of th a t conceplet me picture it again in its three elements a bridgehead inFrance, a moated aerodrome in Britain, and a reserve of trainedmanpower, agriculture and industries in the eastern UnitedStates and Canada. So far as war-poten tial goes, both the UnitedStates and Canada are Atlantic countries, and since instant landwarfare is in view, both the bridgehead and the moated aero


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TH E ROU ND WORLD 605ering some twelve million square miles that is, about a

less than th irty millions, or, say,ough it will be driven trunk motor roads. But for long to come

The fourth of my concepts embraces on either side of the Southhese were subdued to agriculture and inhabited with the pres-

Fifthly, and lastly, a thousand million people of ancient ori-

Some day, incidentally, when coal and oil are exhausted, the Sahara may become the trapcapturing direct pow er from th e S un.


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