The eurasian century, p.1
The Eurasian Century, page 1
The Eurasian Century
Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World
Hal Brands
To John Lewis Gaddis and Barton Bernstein
Contents
Introduction
1.Mackinder’s World
2.The Great Black Tornado
3.The Totalitarian Abyss
4.The Golden Age
5.The Second Eurasian Century
6.Lessons of the Past
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Introduction
It is January 1917, and the balance of power is breaking. A war that started with the assassination of an archduke in Sarajevo has gone global and will soon pull in nations from every inhabited continent. Germany is on the verge of defeating Russia in the east, which will allow it to plunder that dying empire’s resources and make itself the master of Europe from the North Sea to Ukraine. Germany’s armies are exhausting France on the western front; its submarines seek to starve Britain into surrender. If the U-boats don’t deal London and the allies it subsidizes a death-blow, bankruptcy might: The costs of war are bleeding the British Empire dry.
Germany is on course to dominate the Old World, which would give it a continental base to project power across the oceans and around the globe. “If Germany won it would change the course of our civilization,” the American president, Woodrow Wilson, has remarked; a world led by an ascendant autocracy is not one in which even distant democracies will be secure.1
It is December 1941, and humanity is slipping into an abyss. Hitler already rules Europe from Brest to the Balkans; with German tanks just outside Moscow, he believes he is close to defeating the Soviet Union and crushing all resistance between the Atlantic and the Urals. In the Far East, imperial Japan is completing the totalitarian pincer movement. For years, Tokyo has been violently expanding its own empire into mainland Asia. In the wake of its attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese military is now embarked on a breathtaking advance that will give it control of territories from the Indian frontier to the International Date Line, from Manchuria to Australia’s northern approaches.
Berlin and Tokyo are ruling their conquests with the homicidal cruelty one would expect from fascist states. Along with Italy, they have pledged to destroy the existing international system and build a dystopian “new order” atop its ruins. “The era of democracy is finished,” Japan’s foreign minister has declared. “Totalitarianism . . . will control the world.”2 In Washington, U.S. policymakers are terrified that the Axis powers will link up through the Indian Ocean and the Middle East, giving them command of the Eurasian landmass and the oceans around it. Should this occur, writes the brilliant strategist Nicholas Spykman, the Western Hemisphere will face “complete encirclement.” It will be “impossible for us to preserve our independence and security.”3
It is March 1947, and the world again hangs in the balance. World War II has destroyed two ruthless empires but empowered another. Soviet troops occupy territory deep within a prostrate Europe; Stalin and his allies are probing for advantage from Scandinavia and Greece to Iran and Korea. A bloody civil war will soon deliver the world’s most populous country, China, into Stalin’s camp; hunger and radicalism are creating ideal conditions for the spread of communist influence.
If hope, prosperity, and security cannot soon be restored in countries around the Soviet periphery, then Moscow—or its communist proxies—may sweep to power. If this happens, warn President Harry Truman’s advisers, then a tyrant no less murderous than Hitler will have the resources of two continents at his disposal; the free world’s prospects for survival will be slight.4
It is February 2022, and humanity is about to get a reminder that history rolls on. Vladimir Putin is preparing a quasi-genocidal war of conquest in Ukraine, a country that has figured centrally in every great-power contest for over a century. Putin’s plan is a haunting echo of the programs of atrocity and aggrandizement perpetrated during World War II. It is also the culmination of a generation-long effort to make Russia great again, by restoring its primacy over a space from Central Asia to Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile, another aspiring emperor-for-life, Xi Jinping, is crushing all opposition at home and mobilizing Chinese society for expansion abroad. His regime is conducting the largest naval buildup since World War II in hopes of subduing Taiwan and making the western Pacific a Chinese lake. Xi is simultaneously trying to use economic and technological influence—as well as old-fashioned military muscle—to build a sphere of influence reaching deep into China’s continental hinterland and beyond. Those who stand in China’s path, Xi has declared, “will have their heads bashed bloody against a Great Wall of steel.”5
A country that was, only decades ago, desperately poor is now seeking a hybrid hegemony on land and at sea. Xi and Putin have even sealed a new axis of authoritarians—an ambitious strategic partnership, with Iran as a third member, that aims to create a radically revised international order with an illiberal Asia at its core.
The struggle over the Eurasian landmass and the waters around it is the defining feature of global politics in the modern era. It is the crucible in which the contemporary world was forged. And that contest is raging, once again, today.
We often think of the modern era as the age of American power. In reality, we’re living in a long, violent Eurasian century. Since the early 1900s, Eurasia has been the cockpit of global rivalry. That isn’t surprising, given how vast and valuable it is.
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 as 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.6 This “world island,” as geographer Halford Mackinder called it, is a space unlike any other.7
Comprising steppes, mountains, plains, deserts, jungles, and nearly every other topography, Eurasia accounts for more than one-third of the land on Earth. It possesses some 70 percent of the world’s population as well as the bulk of its industrial might and military potential. It is the birthplace of all five of humanity’s major religions and the cradle of many of the civilizations that shaped the world. Its inner seas, from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea, are conveyor belts for commerce; Eurasia also touches all of the great oceans that carry goods, fleets, and armies around the globe. In short, Eurasia represents a prize without equal; it is the strategic center of the world.
To be sure, the Eurasian landscape has never been static. For much of the modern era, Eurasia’s powerhouse was Western Europe—until the post–World War II recovery of Japan, the breathtaking rise of China, and the development of Asia pulled the globe’s economic center of gravity to the east. When the concept of Eurasia emerged, statesmen were just starting to grasp the strategic implications of oil and air power; by the 2020s, Eurasia and the world were entering a long, messy transition to a new energy regime and confronting the possibility of conflict in the digital domain. Eurasia’s great maritime hot spot was once the North Sea, where Germany and Britain faced off; today, the most portentous waterways are the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, and other places where Chinese and U.S. power meet.
What hasn’t changed, amid all this evolution and revolution, is that Eurasia is where the action is: where the bulk of the world’s population lives and its economic activity occurs; where the globe’s most powerful countries, America excepted, are found; and whose key regions and seas are home to the most intense, geopolitically defining rivalries. This is why the world has been repeatedly roiled, reshaped, and nearly destroyed by fateful clashes over the Eurasian supercontinent and its watery approaches.
Ambitious autocracies, from imperial Germany to the Soviet Union, have reached for dominance by seizing a commanding position in the world’s strategic core. Offshore democracies, first the United Kingdom and later America, have partnered with onshore allies to preserve a world where freedom can flourish by keeping Eurasia divided. The greatest hot wars, cold wars, and proxy wars of the twentieth century were all part of this pattern. America’s rivalries with a new set of challengers—China chief among them—are the next round in this geopolitical game.
Admittedly, the word “Eurasia” may sound unfamiliar to Americans. But that’s only because they’ve had the luxury of forgetting about it in an anomalous age of post–Cold War peace. The term itself dates back to the late nineteenth century, when geographers and strategists began to think of the two neighboring continents as a single, unified theater. As the twentieth century came to be defined by confrontations over that mega-region, the phrase became commonplace among intellectuals, political leaders, and military planners alike.
During the run-up to World War II, figures as varied as an American president and Nazi intellectuals fixated on Eurasia as a fount of unparalleled resources and power. At the outset of the Cold War, top-secret U.S. planning documents were littered with references to the Eurasian landmass—the critical area Washington could not allow any rival to rule. The concept even pervaded the most famous political literature of the twentieth century. In 1984, the classic novel George Orwell published in 1949, Eurasia was a totalitarian behemoth engaged in perpetual war, a refere
For generations, everyone familiar with global affairs knew that Eurasia was the shatter-zone where empires collided. That concept is making a comeback, as Eurasia becomes the epicenter of competition and conflict anew.
What, though, distinguishes the Eurasian century from any other era? The physical features of the Earth didn’t change suddenly in 1900. The twentieth century was hardly the first time Eurasia was an object of vicious dispute. As historian John Darwin emphasizes, the likes of Attila, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane sought, long ago, to bring huge chunks of Eurasia under their sway.8 Even compared to more recent history, war and rivalry are nothing new. In Europe, the centuries prior to 1900 saw terrible conflicts, such as the Thirty Years’ War and the wars that followed the French Revolution. Contrary to contemporary Chinese propaganda, the history of Asia was scarcely more placid.
Yet the period following roughly 1900 was different; it was distinguished by the frequency, ferocity, and scope of its struggles. World War I and World War II were truly global conflicts, which featured combat from one end of Eurasia to the other and spread into lands and seas far beyond. They were two of the deadliest interstate wars in history (perhaps the two deadliest interstate wars in history, depending on how one counts) and played a starring role in what historian Matthew White has aptly called the hemoclysm, the unmatched torrent of bloodshed that characterized the twentieth century.9 The Cold War was less violent, at least for the superpowers. But it was plenty gruesome in the developing regions, where millions died in the “small” wars that stood in for another world war.10 And it was no less globally encompassing than the hot wars that preceded it; key battles occurred from Berlin to Sinai, from Angola to the Korean peninsula, from Southeast Asia to Central America.
These conflicts were fought for the highest stakes. They were what political scientists call hegemonic struggles, which determine who rules the international system and shapes the future of humanity. Not least, these clashes occurred rapid-fire, in historical terms: two world wars and the onset of a multi-generation Cold War in just over thirty years. The twentieth century saw desperate, repeated fights for global supremacy—fights that were often shocking in their intensity, global in their sprawl, epic in their stakes, and that all had Eurasia as their focal point.
Indeed, this Eurasian century was defined by epochal changes and outrageous extremes.11 It was a time when great-power wars and rivalries expanded uncontrollably, engulfing, like raging fires, everything they touched. It was an era in which new, terrible forms of tyranny perpetrated unprecedented crimes at home and abroad. It was an age in which technological breakthroughs, from railroads to nuclear weapons, upended global politics. It was a century shaped by America’s rise as a global superpower, which occurred largely in response to repeated crises of Eurasian security. Above all, it was a period whose unmatched carnage eventually produced—paradoxically—a modern system more peaceful, prosperous, and democratic than anything humanity had known before. The Eurasian century was unique in the destruction it sowed and the creation it spurred.
In many ways, Eurasian struggles made our modern world. To understand why this was the case—why a particular area became the engine of history at a particular moment—requires acquainting ourselves with the man whose life and work were at the center of this extraordinary age.
Sir Halford Mackinder isn’t a household name. A British polymath who lived from 1861 to 1947, Mackinder is remembered, not always fondly, by academics who study international relations. He has been forgotten by nearly everyone else.12 Though passionately committed to the British Empire, Mackinder was never fully part of its policymaking elite. His foray into high-level statecraft, as British High Commissioner for South Russia after World War I, ended with failure and a fair bit of humiliation. He served out the twilight of his career in meaningful if somewhat obscure posts, such as the chairmanship of the Imperial Shipping Committee.
Yet influence comes in many forms, and Mackinder left a shadow longer than those cast by many politicians, diplomats, and generals. Mackinder was one of the most interesting people of his era—at various times a mountaineer and an explorer, a member of Parliament, and a professor at prestigious academic institutions. He wrote prolifically, on a wider array of subjects than most intellectuals would now attempt to master. Mackinder was no dilettante, though; he largely founded geography as a proper academic discipline. He is also considered the father of its sister field, geopolitics—the study of how the physical features of the Earth interact with the struggle for influence and power. Beginning with a lecture delivered at the Royal Geographic Society in London in 1904, Mackinder provided as prescient a warning as any about what the next century would bring.
Mackinder’s talk, titled “The Geographic Pivot of History,” was a bracing work of analysis.13 Mackinder explained how the march of technology, particularly railroads, was shrinking Eurasia’s geography and potentially allowing a single power to control that vital landmass. The closing-off of the strategic safety valve provided by easy colonial expansion during the nineteenth century was now turning the great powers against one another in the twentieth. Politics and geopolitics were interacting in explosive ways; a theme that was mostly implicit in Mackinder’s original lecture, but loomed larger later, was that illiberal regimes now had modern industrial economies at their disposal, a factor that could only enable new programs of repression and conquest.14
All of this, Mackinder predicted, would precipitate titanic clashes. A country or coalition that marshaled the land power needed to control Eurasia would become a global menace, for it would then command the resources required to build sea power without rival. So the pattern of world politics would be one in which assertive continental states pushed for Eurasian—and perhaps global—primacy, while their enemies, both the sea powers located off Eurasia’s coasts and the vulnerable states situated at the edge of the landmass, labored to hem them in.
Mackinder got plenty wrong, which is why he spent the next four decades tinkering with his thesis. But he got the big themes of the young century right. His ideas became a touchstone for leaders who sought to overthrow the Eurasian balance and also for those who sought to preserve it—even when those leaders had never heard of Mackinder, let alone read his work. Some of the most important diplomats and strategists of the twentieth century, such as Eyre Crowe, the longtime British Foreign Office official who warned of a coming conflict with imperial Germany, and George Kennan, the American diplomat who authored his country’s approach to the Cold War, drew heavily on Mackinder’s thinking. It is a testament to Mackinder’s enduring influence that we can trace the history of the Eurasian century through analyses he composed in real time.
Mackinder wasn’t alone, of course. The Eurasian century spotlighted an international cohort of geopolitical thinkers who made intellectual waves by making sense of the emerging era. In the 1890s and early 1900s, the U.S. naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote incessantly about the role of sea power in a world of intensifying rivalry. His message was that the oceans were no longer moats protecting America but highways connecting it to a volatile world. Nicholas Spykman, the Dutch American sociologist-turned-strategist at Yale University, would challenge and adapt Mackinder’s concepts during World War II. Karl Haushofer, the most prominent German geopolitician of the interwar era, helped the Nazi Party put Mackinder’s ideas to awful purposes—a role Russian intellectuals close to the Kremlin have more recently reprised. They are exemplars of an authoritarian school of geopolitics that has both borrowed from, and threatened the very purposes of, its democratic counterpart. By revisiting the debates between these great (and not-so-great) intellectuals, we can better understand what happened in a tumultuous twentieth century and what is happening today.
Yet ideas don’t translate themselves into action; the course of the Eurasian century was charted by some of posterity’s most famous, and infamous, leaders. The protagonists included, on the one side, notorious tyrants who launched destructive grabs for greatness. Kaiser Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler, Tojo Hideki and his coterie of Japanese militarists, and Joseph Stalin fused repression at home with aggression abroad; Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are their most notable present-day successors. Opposing them were democratic statesmen who rallied coalitions to turn back these authoritarian challenges: among them, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt during the world wars, as well as Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, and their transatlantic contemporaries during the Cold War.
