Think-tank section

[Яромip]

I'd like to have a think-tank section where we can discuss issues without boring those not so inclined, but also without having discussions burried in a stream of articles.

It would have to be pretty heavily moderated to not allow any sort of personal attacks, but rather be a place of calm rational discussion.

We would discuss current situations, how it got here, how things should be structured and how to get there.

Who knows, maybe something useful could come out?

[yuri6]

Here is a passage from a book I am reading. Has anything changed:

The heartland, the crescent, and the nightmare of British geopolitics

The 'heartland' was a hypothetical area centered in Eurasia, which would be so situated and catered to by resources and manpower as to render it an unconquerable fortress and a fearsome power; and the 'crescent' was a virtual semi-arc encompassing an array of islands - America, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Japan - which, as 'Sea Powers,' watched over the Eurasian landmass to detect and eventually thwart any tendency toward a consolidation of power on the heartland

This lingo was coined by the pioneers of Geopolitics, a new-fangled discipline developed at the turn of the twentieth century: on the surface, it consisted of a systematic and semi-erudite compilation of geography, elementary logistics, economic lore, and Machiavellian mystagogy collated ad usum Delphini. But its ulterior motive was a transliteration of individual human conduct into the dynamics of social aggregates: a political likening of nations to organic, willed, living creatures. 14 Because of this, geopolitics was likely to reveal in clear terms what the political agenda of a certain power might have been at a given point in time. A revelatory and much influential testimony was drafted during these times of anti-German conspiracies by Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), a professor at the London School of Economics and one of Britain's founding fathers of geopolitics, in a piece entitled 'The Geopolitical Pivot of History,' which was published in the Geographical Journal of the Royal Society in 1904. This article illustrated in unequivocal terms the nature of the coming engagement.

Mackinder envisioned the alternatives and enumerated the stakes of the game. This was a public document, telling a simple story. Its drift was a fair exposition of the policy of the British Commonwealth, and subsequently of that of its spiritual heir, the American empire: indeed, up until the present time, the international policy of the US Administration has been aged seamlessly and coherently in the spirit of Mackinder's vision.
By 1900, the writing was on the wall.

The conception of Euro-Asia to which we thus attain is that of a continuous land, ice-girt in the north, water-girt elsewhere, measuring twenty-one million square miles, or more than three times the area of North America, whose center and north, measuring some nine million square miles, or more than twice the area of Europe, have no available water-ways to the ocean, but on the other hand, except in the subarctic forest, are very generally favorable to the mobility of horsemen and camelmen. To east, south and west for this heart-land are marginal regions, ranged in a vast cresecent, accessible to shipmen. According to physical conformation, these regions are four in number, and it is not a little remarkable that in a general way they respectively coincide with the spheres of the four great religions - Buddhism, Brahmanism, Mahometanism, and Christianity... Britain, Canada, the United States, South Africa, Australia, and Japan are now a ring of outer and insular bases for sea-power and commerce, inaccessible to the land-power of Europe... The spaces within the Russian empire and Mongolia are so vast, and their potentialities in population, wheat, cotton, fuel, and metals so incalculably great, that it is inevitable that a vast economic world, more or less apart, will develop inaccessible to oceanic commerce...In the world at large [Russia] occupied the central strategical position held by Germany in Europe. She can strike on all sides, save the north. The full development of her modern railway mobility is merely a matter of time... The oversetting of the balance of power in favor of the pivot state, resulting in its expansion over the marginal lands of Euro-Asia, would permit of the use of vast continental resource for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would then be in sight. this might happen if Germany were to ally herself with Russia. The threat of such an event should, therefore, throw France into alliance with the over-sea powers, and France Italy, Egypt, India and Korea would become so many bridgeheads where the outside navies would support armies to compel the pivot allies to deploy land forces and prevent them from concentrating their whole strength on fleets. 15

What this signified was that henceforth the modern struggle for the world power would come to be driven by the images of a British nightmare, And these were the dreaded insights:

1. Britain feared most of all the possible emergence of a 'heartland' of 'pivot' as the nave of a land-fastness, impregnable behind bastions of ice, moated by uninviting shores, and towering in the midst of a continental space traversed by an extensive network of transportation - a chilling dream of Cossacks at a gallop, bullet trains and shadowy Huns blazing the highways of Central Asia.Tthe earliest formulation of Mackinder's plan was the product of Britain's inveterate enmity towards Russia rather than a warning issued directly against Germany: it was in the plains of Russia that the heartland was initially identified.

After World War I, as Germany became the cynosure of international checkmating, Mackinder, in a successive version of the original 1904 article, updated his theory in keeping with British imperial designs by shifting the pivot along a southwestern trajectory, from the steppes of Siberia down to a nondescript midpoint along the great fault line that divides the West from the East, and which later came to coincide with the Churchillian 'iron curtain' separating Eastern from Western Europe. This virtual boundary many be imagined as a meridian issuing from the shores of the Red Sea, which meets the Black Sea by way of Palestine and shoots through the Balkans and the Baltic, all the way north to Murmansk in Russia (see Fig. 1.1). Conceptually, the 'fault line' is the great divide that roughly sets Muslim Arabs in the south and Orthodox Slavs in the North, apart from the Modern Europeans in the West.

The fault line ideally bisects the heartland, which is located within Eurasia. The heartland is the islands' island: Mackinder's motto thus intimated that 'whoever rules the heart-land, rules the world island; whoever rules the world island, rules the world'. 16 In the northwest this came to mean that if Germany would find ways of bridging the fault line by cementing the technological strength of the European West with the geographical immensity of the East via Russia, she would become the unconquerable head of the dreaded fortress looking over the Eurasian heartland.

2. The immediate revelation of such a nightmare was that no forces were to be spared to obstruct political let alone military coalitions of any form across the heartland, beginning with the plausible Russo-German alliance. And this Britain could best achieve by marshaling a league of sister islands, which she could dispose against Eurasia as a besieging crescent of Sea Powers. Excepting the Japanese trump, sea-power is Anglo-Saxon through and through; all the challenging isles listed by Mackinder are emanations of Britain herself: from America, with the addition of Canada, all the way round to Australia, including New Zealand - the empire's white dominions.

3. Should Europe, the Near East, and Central Asia have been capable of coalescing into a solid confederation, their combined mineral, hydric, and natural resources (oil, grain, steel, water, lumber, and so on) would have afforded this enormous Eurasion League a defensive advantage such as would have nullified any prolonged blockade of the Sea Powers. Eurasia could then sesist a British embargo á outrance.

4. From this it followed that such a wealth of resources on the heartland could have been naturally channeled, in the face of overt naval aggression, to the launch of a defensive Eurasian fleet. The combined shield of land and sea forces from the continent against he crescent of maritime foes would have not only repulsed easily the onslaught from the sea, but in all likelihood ended with the utter defeat of the Sea Powers and their concomitant subjugation to the hypothetical joint command of the heartland.

5. The sudden appearance of the Prussian Reich had turned this Eurasian chimera into a tangible eventuality: this time the menace was real; the great enemy could come into being through the genial amalgam of Russian vitality and German sophistication. The Eurasian Embrace is the consummation of a Russo-German political, military and spiritual fusion. Against such a fusion, Mackinder seemed to suggest, Britain would have found herself powerless in the long run.

6. Hence the strategy of Britain became crystal clear: in order to deter the emergence of this threatening rival on the heartland, she would have no alternative but to encircle the heartland in a permanent siege. this would be effected by driving wedges (the bridgeheads) in the vital nodes of the continental body. In such areas the land armies could be trapped in perennial warfare, and their generals would be so engrossed by the exertion as to deflect their attention from the keen urgency to arm a Eurasian fleet and drive out the foreign (seafaring) aggressor.

The remarkable character of this piece, aside from its fastidious prescience, was its openly aggressive tenor. Though it was written in the shade of a Russian menace, its reasoning seemed to suggest that Britain had to favor the line of least resistance, and single out Germany as the proximate adversary because: (1) the Reich was the dynamic half of the Russo-Geman threat, and, (2) it could be surrounded and blockaded by an entente of neighboring parties with somewhat greater ease, hence Britain's forthcoming rapprochement with Russia, her traditional antagonist.

Naturally, such warming of Anglo-Russian relations led to no permanent settlement of the Eurasian question, nor was its purpose to do so; the issue, overwhelming as it was from the British standpoint had to be tackled one bridgehead at a time; the détente with Russia served as a mere prelude to a general stratagem seeking the destruction of Germany. Britain could not, and possibly din not wish to foresee the unfathomable costs that she, and the world at large, would have to incur in order to accomplish this stratagem, but the empire took its chances nonetheless.

The evidence that the destruction of Germany became Britain's chief objective after 1900 is provided by the elaborate diplomatic activity that she would weave to provoke the world war, as will be recounted in the subsequent sections of this chapter.

(...)

Five years after the end of World War I, a US Senator, Robert Owen, would undertake a deep, dispassionate study of the war's origins and present his finding to the American people on December 28, 1923: the several claims of Allied propaganda, namely that the Entente had to fight (1) to thwart the Kaiser's plan to dominate the world by force, (2) to make the world safe for democracy, and (3) to defend American ideals, Owen construed respectively as 'false', 'ludicrous', and 'untrue'.19 He found that: Neither the Russian or the French government was really believed that the German government intended aggressive war on them but the military preparedness of Germany and the bombast of some of its chauvinists laid a convenient but false foundation for the French and British propaganda world... In 1914 Germany had no reason for war, no terra irredenta, no revenge and knew that a general European war might easily destroy its merchant marine, its commerce, both of which were rapidly expanding, and cause the loss of its colonies. 23

G.G. Preparata, Conjuring Hitler, pp 8-13