29-09-2009, 07:03 PM
Paul Rigby Wrote:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/...ign-policy
A very foreign policy: In cancelling the European missile shield, Obama is overturning a century of foreign policy based on a one-hour lecture by a Victorian geographer
By Tristram Hunt
Thursday, 24 September 2009, 19.30 BST
Print edition: Friday, 25 September 2009, p.36
Letters, The Guardian, Tuesday 29 September 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep...y-politics
Quote:Don't be too quick to discount Mackinder
I write in mild defence of the second director of the London School of Economics from the disapproval of Dr Tristram Hunt (A very foreign policy, 25 September). Understandably, for his rhetorical purposes Hunt over-dramatises his claims for Sir Halford Mackinder's views and influence. Both were less determinist and more subtle than he suggests. But Hunt is right on one thing. Unlike other LSE pioneers such as the Webbs, Mackinder grasped the threat from the USSR instantly.
His 1920 report as high commissioner for south Russia, in which he recommended that the west back General Denikin and the Whites swiftly and seriously, with force, or suffer geopolitical disadvantage and face 60 years of a Bolshevik enemy, turned out to be spot-on. The British cabinet of the day was too war-weary to contemplate his recommendations. Yes, the Nazis read Mackinder with closer attention; but Mackinder thereby carries no more guilt by association than would Hunt if Osama bin Laden happened to find his works helpful. The fault lay – then as now – with those in the liberal democracies who lacked the mental or moral force to grapple with inconvenient ideas and unwelcome evidence.
You do not have to be sulphurously on "the republican right" to worry that the Obama administration's decision to concede to Russian demands over the missile shield is unwise; you only need to recollect some history and Halford Mackinder's track record for correct geopolitical insights. Hunt's notion of "fair peace", as stated in your pages, begs too many questions to be useful.
Professor G Prins,
The Mackinder Programme for the Study of Long Wave Events, LSE
Don't miss the website for the latter - the Navy League lives on!
http://www.royalnavalmuseum.org/info_she...league.htm