Halford Mackinder on Radio 3

[Paul Rigby]

American Diplomacy Vol. V, No. 4 Fall 2000 (Nov 30)

James Burnham: The First Cold Warrior by Francis P. Sempa

In Containment or Liberation? (1952), Burnham identified Eastern Europe as the crucial target of U.S. strategy. U.S. policy, he wrote, must shift its focus from protecting Western Europe to liberating Eastern Europe. “A strategy which had Eastern Europe as its geopolitical focus — Europe from the Iron Curtain to the Urals — would best serve the American objective,” he explained.29 Eastern Europe, he repeatedly asserted, was the key to the world struggle. Here again we see the influence of Mackinder. In his 1919 classic, Democratic Ideals and Reality, Mackinder, too, emphasized the importance of preventing a single power from controlling both Eastern Europe and the Heartland. In perhaps the book’s most famous passage, Mackinder recommended that an “airy cherub” should whisper to British statesmen the following warning:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island:
Who rules the World-Island commands the World.30

Here we see the most important tension within elite post-WWII US policy-makers - between adherents of rollback and those in favour of the maintenance of the division between Germany and Russia. The former offered the prospect of smashing Moscow's physical occupation of Eastern Europe, but carried with it a threat, to wit, that a deideologised Moscow would, in the medium to long term, at last combine with Germany, the natural resources of the one complimenting the technological accomplishments of the other.

It was for this reason that Beria's moves to retreat from Eastern Europe, junk communist ideology, and court, not only, but above all others, Germany, constituted such a threat in the spring and summer of 1953.