A New Anglo Union?

• Author: Lind, Michael

Over a century ago, at the Royal Geographic Society in London, Halford Mackinder delivered a paper entitled "The Geographical Pivot of History," in which he argued that the rise of railroads would diminish the influence of seapower and render control of the Eurasian heartland the key to world power. A generation later, the American international relations scholar Nicholas Spykman disagreed. He asserted that control of the "rimlands" around Eurasia, including Western Europe and East Asia, was more important than domination of the steppes of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Meanwhile, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, a close associate of Theodore Roosevelt, found enthusiastic followers in the United States and Europe for his influential theories of sea power.

Not all strategic theorists agreed that the basis of global power and influence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be determined by military and political control of this territory or that strait or sea lane. Present in the audience when Mackinder delivered his 1904 paper was a young journalist named Leo Amery, who became an influential policymaker in the British government in both world wars. Following Mackinder's presentation, Amery stood and argued in opposition to the Heartland thesis that where a great power in the future was located would be less important than its possession of a large and advanced industrial base. Amery suggested that

a great deal of this geographical distribution must lose its importance, and the successful powers will be those who have the greatest industrial basis. It will not matter whether they are in the centre of a continent or on an island; those people who have the industrial power and the power of invention and of science will be able to defeat all others.

Alas, neithet Amery not anyone else developed this early version of what the strategist Edward Luttwak has called "geoeconomics" as an alternative to map-based geopolitics. Nevertheless, the history of the last century of great power conflict vindicated Amery's view of the centrality of technological innovation and large-scale manufacturing. What tipped the balance of power in the world wars against Germany was America's superior manufacturing base and energy production, mobilized first in the form of aid to Getmany's opponents and then directly after the United States had joined both conflicts. The British historian Alan Milward observed in the case of World War II, "The war was decided by the weight of armaments production." Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, declared: "Winning the war is a matter of oil, bullets, and beans."

The Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to seek a truce in the Cold War because the Soviet command economy could not compete with the combined industrial forces of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. What Amery called "the power of invention and science" was essential as well, enabling the United States to keep ahead of Nazi Germany in atomic science and of the...