Inside the Geopolitical Imagination of the Great Powers

Three theories that have shaped how great powers perceive geopolitics

On the 24th of February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. This geopolitical move caught the majority of middle-class citizens in the West, and some Western leaders completely bewildered, even though there were clear indications that such an invasion would take place. The reason for this lies in the fact that the Western geopolitical mentality has reached the point of Fukuyama’s “End of History”.

This Western mentality was based on the assumption that today’s global borders are absolute and that under the guidance of the United States, we have entered into a new world order, where geopolitics is dead. In this new world, there was no need for strategic thinking, but only for international trade theory. It was a foolish and almost naive belief, but it was one rooted in the strong sense of the unipolar world, created and led by the United States. That world order is dead, and we have entered into the arena of a multipolar world and great power politics.

It is therefore necessary to understand how great powers think, how they see the world, and how they see their place in that world. Ultimately, all great powers have an intrinsic need to politically survive, and by default to expand their power to ensure that survival. Three theories have shaped the geopolitics of the modern era, and that can offer us a glimpse into the geopolitical imagination of great powers.

Photo by Ravi Kumar on Unsplash

Mackinder and the Heartland Theory

One of the reasons why geopolitics has become so popular in explaining why states go to war with each other is because of Halford John Mackinder. Mackinder was a British political geographer, who lived from 1861 to 1947 and during that time he tried to make geopolitics into a major intellectual framework, one that can offer us valuable explanations to why states go to war with each other. Ultimately, his goal was to develop a theory of global geographic power that would explain the hegemony of Great Britain. Mackinder saw the world divided into three zones of power.

The first zone was the outer crescent, which included the seas from the North Atlantic down to the Cape of Good Hope, eastward across the Indian Ocean into maritime Asia, and on to the Pacific. This is the zone where British forces had always been triumphant, owing to the power of its navy.

The second zone, which was less important, fell inside the first one. This area, which spanned Western Europe, South Asia, and mainland China, represented parts of the world where Britain exerted colonial power.

In the center of these two zones lay Mackinder’s third zone of power, which he called the “geographical pivot of history”. That third zone marked the vastness of interior Asia starting east of Europe, engulfing all of Siberia and inner Asia and including much of the Himalayas and western China. That area, Mackinder insisted, was impenetrable to British sea power. If it was controlled, crossed with railroad networks, and integrated into a unified economy, it could withstand invasion and be used to strike out for world domination.

Mackinder’s argument was called the “heartland” theory because it suggested that by controlling this heartland, you could ultimately command the world. The heartland theory is of interest because of the cartographic imagination that it required—the vision to read the power of nations in the configuration of a global map and set a strategy to control the world.

By looking at the map, one may come to understand why the Soviet Union was so “dangerous” for the West. In today’s terms, Russia has the best position on Mackinder’s map, and with strategic alliances with some of the “Stan” countries, as well as Iran and China, it is in a very good position to exert its influence on the global stage, and why the West sees it as a strategically dangerous country. Maybe this explains the rationale behind NATO’s decision not to incorporate Russia into its strategic structure.

The Great Game

Modern geopolitics developed from the concept that geographic configurations might be read for strategic theory. For example, there are a range of geopolitical theories that attest to the power of “buffer states.” Buffer states are autonomous or independent nations that sit at the boundaries of major powers and are controlled and supported to provide a nonmilitarized border between the major powers and any hostile neighbors. A strategic plan involving buffer states typically stresses the management of adjacent countries for defensive purposes.

As an example, beginning in the early 1800s, India became of paramount importance to the British Empire and its economy. At that time, British access to the subcontinent, and all its key trade goods and large markets, was by sea. At that same time, however, the Russian Empire was in a state of expansion, consolidating its control of Central Asia and Siberia and extending its influence southward. From the British perspective, a direct Russian border with India would constitute a threat.

The decision was made to advance a vast intelligence network into the border regions of India, especially Tibet and Afghanistan. This they called the “Great Game,” although it was followed by a full offensive to secure Afghanistan as a buffer state to forestall possible Russian aggression. The Great Game was anything but playful.

The three Afghan Wars fought by the British were notable for their brutality as well as their futility. The first war, between 1839 and 1842, began with a British victory but concluded with an uprising and defeat. The second war, from 1878 to 1880, went far better for the British and left Afghanistan as a puppet state for the empire in the late 19^th century. The third and final war in Afghanistan, in 1919, was fought to a standstill but resulted in ongoing tribal uprisings in border areas. These uprisings would plague the British for years.

Even though the British were victorious, they achieved very little in these conflicts. Their efforts in Afghanistan were driven by a Mackinder worldview, in which the geographical pivot of history lay in Central Asia.

In this sense, Afghanistan’s tragic location may not have had much actual geopolitical importance, but it had theoretical geopolitical importance. It had significance because of the way the great powers of the day imagined the world.

Despite the lessons of Central Asia, the allure of geopolitical thinking survived into the 20th century. The theory of buffer zones unquestionably held sway in Moscow during the time of the Soviet Union and accounts for the creation of the Warsaw Pact—a coercive military treaty to offset NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) that enrolled the Eastern European countries bordering the Soviet Union.

The strength and configuration of the Warsaw Pact was predicated on the major land invasion routes into Russia, across which armies had marched successfully in both the 19th and 20th centuries. However, maintaining this buffer system became politically and economically untenable for the Soviet Union. Geopolitical thinking may have undone Soviet power even as, at one point, it was deemed essential for Soviet survival.

From the point of view of the West, Ukraine’s position is that of a buffer state, whose allegiances might be lured away from an eastern center of gravity. But the view from Russia is that Ukraine is a geostrategic bottleneck, a political and economic chokepoint on Russia’s emergence as a global geopolitical and energy power.

The Domino Theory

On the other side of the Cold War, another key modern geopolitical theory with real-world consequences was the “domino theory.” In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower described the domino effect: “You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is a certainty that it will go over very quickly.”

The domino theory demonstrated large-scale geopolitical thinking with potentially enormous strategic implications. Eisenhower was concerned about the expansion of communist power in Asia, with countries adjacent to China coming at risk of collapsing to communism.

As France’s colonial power in Southeast Asia dwindled in 1954, moreover, this theory portended some serious issues for the United States. The degree to which the domino theory drove the United States into the Vietnam War is debatable, but this theory spelled out an imperative to contain Vietnam.

What is clear in both the case of the Warsaw Pact and the domino theory, 20th-century Cold War geopolitics, born of Mackinder’s way of thinking, operated on a global scale and encouraged strategy by powerful players.

Modern events such as the Arab Spring and the spread of ISIS illustrate a contemporary version of the domino effect. The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria showed how political instability and regime changes in one country can trigger similar movements in neighboring states. Likewise, the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria inspired jihadist movements and instability across the Middle East and beyond, demonstrating the interconnectedness and potential for cascading effects in regional geopolitics.

We can therefore understand better the strategic thinking of leaders from the oil-rich Middle-East countries, in particular from the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman. His strategic maneuvers in the region reflect the need of Saudi Arabia to address the issues of the crisis-prone region and to ensure political stability, thereby enabling a smooth economic transition of Saudi Arabia away from fossil fuel dependence. If the geopolitical instability continues in the Middle East, this can completely destabilize the entire region and endanger the ambitious plans of Saudi Arabia, and other oil-rich countries, which can in turn bring their survival into question.

It is not a surprise that China has seen this as a chance to expand its influence in the region by brokering a peace deal between Syria and Iran on one side, and other Arab countries on the other. This is one of the clearer indications that show us how great powers will continue to shape the world, based on their geopolitical imaginations. Subscribe to the newsletter if you haven’t already, as I will continue to analyze more of these events in the future.