The Outer Crescent vs. the Asian Rimland
Writing in Foreign Affairs, Tufts University Associate Professor Michael Beckley and Johns Hopkins Professor Hal Brands attempt to frame current global rivalries within a Mackinder-Spykman geographical setting of “Heartland vs. Rimland,” but in doing so they take liberties with the geographical setting and ignore the more relevant Nixonian approach that recognizes the fractured nature of both Mackinder’s Heartland and Spykman’s Rimland. Both scholars also promote a legacy Atlanticism that is ill-suited to the geopolitics of the 21st century. It is not Heartland vs. Rimland; instead, it is Outer Crescent vs. the Asian Rimland.
Mackinder’s concept of the Heartland was first publicized in his 1904 address to the Royal Geographical Society, which was subsequently printed in the Geographical Journal. Mackinder said that the heartland or “pivot area” was situated in the northern-central core of Eurasia; the inner or marginal crescent consisted of the Eurasian lands situated outside the heartland; and the outer or insular crescent included the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the islands of the western Pacific. Mackinder geographically modified the Heartland in 1919 in Democratic Ideals and Reality, and provided his final version of the Heartland in a 1943 essay in Foreign Affairs, which equated the Heartland with the territory of the Soviet Union minus the land east of the Lena River in northeast Siberia. In none of Mackinder’s three iterations of this geopolitical concept was China ever considered part of the Heartland. In 1904, Mackinder placed China in an “inner or marginal crescent”; in 1919, he placed it in the “Monsoon Coastland”; and in 1943, China and India were “monsoon lands” located outside the Heartland. Mackinder, who initially feared that control of the heartland and Eastern Europe could lead to a Eurasian-based world empire, envisioned a post-World War II world in which the heartland would be balanced by a North Atlantic alliance (the “Midland Ocean”) and the rise of the Monsoon powers of China and India.
Yet, Beckley and Brands in their essay repeatedly call China a Heartland power because, they write, there is a “new heartland” which is “anchored by China” and includes Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Others have referred to this group as the new “axis of evil,” and Beckley and Brands provide a geopolitical construct in which all of these powers are in the new heartland and are working together to “imperil rimland dominance.”
The Rimland is a geographical concept used by Nicholas Spykman in The Geography of the Peace (1944) to describe the crescent of lands in Eurasia that lie outside the heartland, many of which have ready access to the ocean. Spykman wrote that whoever controls the Rimland controls the destinies of the world. Spykman’s Rimland included China and North Korea. Beckley and Brands, however, situate them today with Russia and Iran in a “new heartland.” Spykman did not place the United States, Great Britain, Japan or Australia in the Rimland, yet Beckley and Brands call them Rimland powers. But they aren’t—they are situated in Mackinder’s outer or insular crescent.
Why does any of this matter? Isn’t this all just an academic exercise? It matters because the Beckley-Brands geopolitical construct is designed to persuade American leaders that very little has changed in geopolitical terms since the end of the Cold War, and we must therefore contain Russia in Europe, Iran in the Middle East, and China and North Korea in Asia in a crusade of democracies vs. autocracies. That is a recipe for imperial overstretch in which our commitments will outrun our resources; where our power—which is not unlimited—will be divided among peripheral conflicts instead of focused on the key center of gravity in the western Pacific; and where domestic political support in the United States will wane as it did during the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Beckley and Brands look forward to abandoning “America First” in favor of a new American empire:
Only the United States can anchor the defense of endangered rimland regions with the economic weight and technological primacy to underpin a system of collective resilience and pressure. Only the United States can backstop the confidence partners need to take a stand against heartland coercion. Only the United States can be the central node in the network of flexible partnerships that will enable the rimland to out innovate and outlast its foes. If Washington uses pressure and persuasion to catalyze collective action, as it did during the Cold War, it can fortify vital relationships.
It’s as if we have been transported back to 1950 with Paul Nitze and NSC-68 and the Sino-Soviet bloc threatening to transform Eurasia into the base of a global empire.
That is where the geopolitics of Richard Nixon should come into play, reminding us that some parts of Eurasia are more important than others to U.S. security. Nixon, recognizing that American power was not unlimited, skillfully used diplomacy backed by military power to triangulate between Russia and China, end the costly war in Vietnam, bring peace and some stability to the Middle East, and encourage burden-sharing by our allies per the so-called Nixon Doctrine. Nixon prudently adjusted our nation’s commitments to be more in line with our resources.
In the current geopolitical struggle between the United States and China, our most important allies are the other nations located in Mackinder’s “outer or insular crescent”—Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia, and Indonesia, and our most important ally on the Rimland is India. The Atlanticists and the neocons will shudder at the thought, but Europe and the Middle East just aren’t as important as they used to be. That is why Trump’s pivot to the Indo-Pacific must continue and expand, and our allies in Europe and the Middle East must assume more of the burden for their own defense. That is what America First is all about.
Francis P. Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century and America’s Global Role. He is a contributing editor to The American Spectator, a regular columnist for Real Clear Defense, and was recently named to the Defense Policy Board.