The Revenge of Geography (15 page)

Haushofer, even within the confines of his own violent worldview, had few fixed principles. On Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, in 1939, he described the Führer as a “statesman” who combined in his person
“Clausewitz’s blood and Ratzel’s space and soil.”
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Haushofer greeted the Russo-German pact of 1939 with enthusiasm in an editorial, stressing Germany’s need to join its land power forces with those of Russia. Yet after Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, he wrote another editorial, celebrating the invasion as a way to capture the Heartland. Of course, nobody dared criticize Hitler’s decision. There is a strong case to be made that Haushofer’s specific links to Hitler were greatly exaggerated, even as Haushofer, nevertheless, came to represent a typical Nazi strategic view.
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In any case, as the war turned badly, Haushofer fell out of favor with the Führer, and was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp in 1944. The same year, Haushofer’s son, Albrecht, also a geopolitician, was executed for his participation in the army plot against Hitler. This was after Haushofer and his family had been incarcerated. Then there was the fact that Haushofer’s wife was part Jewish: the couple was protected from Nazi race laws by Hess, who was imprisoned in Britain in 1941 after a solo flight there to negotiate a separate peace. The contradictions in Haushofer’s life must have become too much to bear, as he gradually became aware of the monumental carnage and destruction in a world war that he did his part to bring about. Haushofer’s life is a signal lesson in the dangers inherent for men of ideas who seek desperately to ingratiate themselves with those in power. Soon after Germany’s defeat and an Allied investigation of him for war crimes, both Haushofer and his wife committed suicide.

Strausz-Hupé’s work is not merely designed to discredit Haushofer and rescue the reputation of Mackinder, but to implore Americans to take geopolitics seriously, because if they don’t, others of ill intent will, and in the process vanquish the United States. As he writes at the end of his book:

For Strausz-Hupé is every inch a realist. Exposing some of the intellectual underpinnings of a totalitarian state’s program of conquest is not enough for him, and in addition is much too easy. He knows the uncomfortable truth that just as Mackinder’s reasoning is flawed in crucial ways, Haushofer’s reasoning, though perverted, does have a basis in reality. Therefore, Strausz-Hupé’s aim is to imbue Americans—who live in splendid isolation by virtue of being bounded by two oceans—with a greater appreciation of the geographical discipline, so that the United States can assume its postwar role as a stabilizer and preserver of the Eurasian balance of power, which the Nazis, helped by Haushofer, attempted to overturn.

As for the Heartland thesis itself, Strausz-Hupé, who is extremely skeptical of it to begin with, says that air power—both commercial and military—may render it meaningless. Nevertheless, he does believe that Industrial Age technology provided the advantage to big states: large factories, railway lines, and tanks and aircraft carriers are best taken advantage of by states with depth of distance and territory. “The history of our times appears to reflect, with malignant fatality, the trend toward empires and super-states predicted by the Ratzels, Spenglers, and Mackinders.”
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Of course, the postindustrial age, with its emphasis on smallness—microchips, mobile phones, plastic explosives—has empowered not only large states but individuals and stateless groups, too, adding only a deeper complexity and tension to geopolitics. But Strausz-Hupé intuits some of this in his discussion of frontiers, which he takes up on account of Haushofer’s misuse of Curzon in this matter.

Despite Haushofer’s nihilism, Strausz-Hupé will not be intimidated into debunking him outright. For the very fact of frontiers shows a world beset by political and military divisions. “The sovereign state is, at least by its origins, organized force. Its history begins in war. Hence its frontiers—be they ‘good’ or ‘bad’—are strategic
frontiers,” Strausz-Hupé writes. He tellingly selects a quotation from Curzon in which the latter notes that frontier wars will increase in number and intensity as “the habitable globe shrinks,” at which time “the ambitions of one state come into sharp and irreconcilable collision with those of another.”
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In other words, Haushofer is not altogether wrong in his assumption of perpetual conflict. Even after the war, there will be little respite from the tragedy of the human condition. The very crowding of the planet in recent decades, coupled with the advance of military technology, in which time and distance have been collapsed, means that there will be a crisis of “room” on the map of the world.
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This crisis of room follows from Mackinder’s idea of a “closed system.” For now let us note that it adds urgency to Strausz-Hupé’s plea that America, which for him represents the ultimate source of good in a world of great powers, can never afford to withdraw from geopolitics. For geopolitics and the competition for “space” is eternal. Liberal states will have to gird themselves for the task, lest they leave the field to the likes of Haushofer.

Robert Strausz-Hupé was not the only naturalized American to be warning his fellow citizens during the war about the need to take geopolitics out of Nazi hands, restore its reputation, and employ it for the benefit of the United States. Nicholas J. Spykman was born in 1893 in Amsterdam. During the First World War, when the Netherlands was neutral, he traveled extensively as a foreign correspondent in the Near East (1913 to 1919) and in the Far East (1919 to 1920). Following the war, he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also taught, and then went to Yale, where he founded the Institute of International Studies in 1935.
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He imbued his students with an awareness of geography as the principal means to assess the dangers and opportunities that his adopted country faced in the world. He died of cancer in 1943 at the age of forty-nine, but not before publishing the prior year
America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of
Power
, a book that even more than the work of Mackinder gives us a framework for understanding the Post Cold War world. Spykman, who lived later, in some senses updates Mackinder.

In the vein of Strausz-Hupé, Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, and other European immigrants in the middle decades of the twentieth century, who brought realism to a country that had given them refuge but which they felt was dangerously naive, Spykman would have none of the idealism and sentimentalism that was a characteristic of much American thinking. Geography is everything, he argues. The United States was a great power less because of its ideas than because, with direct access to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it was “the most favored state in the world from the point of view of location.”
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With Spykman there is no respite from the heartlessness of the map and the consequent struggle for space. He writes, “International society is … a society without a central authority to preserve law and order.” It is in a state of anarchy, in other words. Thus, all states must struggle for self-preservation. Statesmen can strive for the universal values of justice, fairness, and tolerance, but only so far as they do not interfere with the quest for power, which to him is synonymous with survival. “The search for power is not made for the achievement of moral values; moral values are used to facilitate the attainment of power.” Such a statement could almost have been made by Karl Haushofer, and there is much tragedy in that realization. But that should not blind us to the fundamental difference between the two men. Spykman, like Mackinder and Strausz-Hupé, believes in the “safety” of “balanced power,” not in domination. From that difference flows all the others. For the “balance of power,” Spykman is careful to say, corresponds with the “law of nature and Christian ethics” because it preserves the peace.
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While Strausz-Hupé focuses down-and-in on Nazi geopolitical theory and in the process defends Mackinder, Spykman focuses up-and-out on the world map to assess the prospects of Nazi domination, as well as to outline the power configurations of a postwar world that he would not live to see. He begins with a geographical explanation about how the United States became a great power.

“History,” Spykman says, “is made in the temperate latitudes,” where moderate climates prevail, “and, because very little of the land mass of the Southern Hemisphere lies in this zone, history is made in the temperate latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.” It is not that sub-Saharan Africa and the Southern Cone of South America do not matter, for they matter much more in our day than in the past because of transport and communications technology that has allowed every place to affect every other; rather, it is that they still have less worldwide impact than do places in the Northern Hemisphere, and particularly those places in the northern temperate zone. James Fairgrieve, a near-contemporary of Mackinder, explains that because of the lack of solar energy compared to the tropics, human beings in the temperate zones must work harder to deal with greater varieties of weather, and with the differences in seasons that lead to definite times for sowing and harvest: thus, it is in the temperate zones where human beings “advance from strength to strength.” And whereas at the South Pole there is a great continent surrounded by an unbroken ring of ocean, around the North Pole there is an ocean surrounded by a near-unbroken ring of land—the land where human beings have been the most productive. Strausz-Hupé is even more specific in this regard, telling us that history is made between “twenty and sixty degrees north latitude.” This area includes North America, Europe, the Greater Middle East and North Africa, most of Russia, China, and the bulk of India. Mackinder’s “wilderness girdle” is roughly consistent with it, for it takes in the Heartland and adjacent marginal zones of Eurasia. The critical fact about the United States, according to this line of thinking, is that, located below the Canadian Arctic, it occupies the last great, relatively empty tract of the temperate zone that wasn’t settled by urban civilization until the time of the European Enlightenment. Furthermore, America initially prospered, Spykman writes, because the east coast, with its estuaries and indentations, provided “innumerable favorable locations for harbors.”
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Ultimately, in this view, geography was the early sustainer of American freedom.

America’s great power position exists because the United States is the regional hegemon in the Western Hemisphere, with, as Spykman says, “power to spare for activities outside the New World,” so that it can affect the balance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere.
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This is no mean feat, and something the United States should not take for granted, for it is rooted in the specifics of Latin American geography. No other nation in the world, not China or Russia, is a hegemon of hemispheric proportions. In explaining how this came about, Spykman brings South America—which Mackinder largely ignores—into the discussion of geopolitics. Because of Mackinder’s concentration on Eurasia, and particular its Heartland, Mackinder is vital to an understanding of Cold War geography; whereas Spykman has a more organic conception of the entire globe, and thus is more relevant than Mackinder in an age in which every place can affect every other place.