Mackinder’s Obsession, the Poisoning of Geography and Trumpism

26/01/2026

By William Mallinson
Fm. British Diplomat

I shall attempt to demonstrate and explain here why the crude term ‘geopolitics’ is leading the world into chaos, aided and abetted by President Trump. First, some background.

The fashionable term ‘geopolitics’ is used willy-nilly these days, and increasingly so, mainly by international relations academics, think-tankers, politicians and foreign affairs officials, in the belief that the term adds respectability to what they are propounding. Sometimes, they confuse the word with ‘geostrategy’. More than sometimes, they even tend to use it to explain and justify illegal military attacks. Certainly, the term has entered the hegemonolinguistic terminology of globalisation, along with such simplistic terms as ‘shared values’, ‘shoulder to shoulder’, ‘going forward’, and the like. Some speakers can often be likened to auto-brainwashed humans who no longer properly understand what they are saying: in Orwellian terms, the right noises come out of the larynx, but the speaker is in a reduced state of consciousness, which is of course favourable to political conformity.^[1] Many of those using the term have not studied its origins, let alone its meaning and implications. Once some of them do begin to try and understand it, they are attracted by world maps, simply because looking at maps is easier and less painstaking than reading words. As such, they remain trapped, albeit unknowingly, in a simplistic view of the world, a world where only the woods matter, while the trees become boring irrelevancies, let alone the branches and twigs. Geopolitics has – insidiously for many – been affecting the lives we lead to an increasing extent, aided by the so-called phenomenon of globalisation. Let us begin to define the term.

Origins of the Word

Although the term ‘geopolitics’ only came into fashion with the Swedish political scientist, Rudolf Kjellén, the founding father of geopolitical thinking is considered to be the German, Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904). Be that as it may, grabbing the resources of others has been an unfortunate human trait since time immemorial. It is only with 19^th century imperial doctrines that the crude term appeared, as an attempted justification of imperialism.

Unlike the German Haushofer, who used the term ‘Geopolitik’ to justify the Nazi’s eastward expansion, the Englishman Halford Mackinder called it ‘political geography’, thus poisoning, along with Haushofer, what had been a decent natural science. His obsession lay in keeping Russia divided from Germany, while according to Haushofer, ‘geopolitics demonstrates the dependence of all political developments on the permanent reality of the soil.[…] And H .J. Mackinder, in his “Geographical Pivot of History”, attempted to review the entire world geopolitically and to forecast in 1904 what would happen between 1914 and 1924.[…] We need the same thorough training in this discipline as developed by England – though not under that name – with one-sided purposefulness[…]. We must, moreover, study Geopolitik with a view to the present and future rather than to the past.[…] Germany must emerge out of the narrowness of her present living space into the freedom of the world.’[2]

The Russian View

Although the crude science of geopolitics had not been a subject of serious study in Russia or the Soviet Union (particularly since the vast nation has more than enough resources of its own, and did not feel or entertain the need to go around the world taking other people’s resources), by the heady emotional days of the fall of the Berlin Wall, serious Russians were looking closely at the ‘science’. One leading academic put the thinking world of Russia in the picture, with a seminal article, from which it is worth quoting, and then commenting on, as it reflects serious late-in-the-day Soviet thinking, and is valid today. The author (Igor Malashenko) begins by informing his – obviously educated – audience, that ‘Geopolitics, as the term suggests, is the politics of a country as determined by its geographical features.’ He then refers to Mackinder’s reference to Russia as occupying a central position on the world’s map, lying in its key region, the Heartland. He goes on to state, rather more thoughtfully than a typical mapmaniac, that the confrontation of the continental power which controls the heart of Eurasia and the coalition opposing it is by no means confined, geopolitically, to a contest between East and West, socialism and capitalism (or ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘liberal democracy’, in Western parlance, as it has quite often been made out over the last few decades, but is an element of genuinely global politics. Properly speaking, the very terms ‘East’ and ‘West’ also reflect in a way, if inadequately, the fact that it is not only ideological rivalry or even a clash of social-political systems but also a “deideologized” geopolitical confrontation. ‘For centuries’, he writes, ‘Russia was beating off the West’s numerous attempts at establishing control over Eastern Europe, as through the expansionism of Lithuania, Poland, France or Germany. There appeared to be only one way to assure the security of Russia and the key region belonging to it: it was by raising a well-defended geopolitical barrier around it, brick by brick, block by block. […] The creation of the Empire was a response to the geopolitical challenge of the West.’[3]

Malashenko also refers to ‘ethnopolitics’, in other words hostility towards the Russian people as a whole, rather than simply the government. This Darwinian racism continues to this day, at least if one considers the institutional atavism of the British Establishment. In this connexion, the intelligent but obsessed Mackinder wrote of Russia: ‘Wisely recognizing the fundamental limits of her power, her rulers have parted with Alaska; for it is as much a law of policy for Russia to own nothing over seas as for Britain to be supreme on the ocean.[4] For all that, Mackinder’s constant reference to Russia as occupying a central position in the ‘world heartland’ comes across as almost obsessive.

The World Island

International Relations theorists and most Western politicians seem to have accepted Mackinder’s obsession with what he termed the ‘World Island’, and his insistence that whoever controlled it, controlled the world: in 1919, he summarised his theory thus: ‘Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world. This simplistic view seems to have taken over Western thinking. It is no exaggeration is that when policy-makers took up this thinking, the obsession with trying to control/possess the ‘world island’ then became self-fulfilling prophecies. ‘All revealed the obsession of the times with a neo-Darwinian view of international relations of struggle and survival, which reached its nadir in fascism.’[5] Here, again, we perceive the incipient connexion with the realist school. Despite the horrors of the Second World War, it was Henry Kissinger who brought geopolitics back into fashion in the Seventies, using his theory of the balance of power as a cloak. In spite of the alleged end of the Cold War in 1989, the word ‘geopolitics’ is still on the lips of an enormous number of academics and politicians, particularly with the increasingly desperate struggle for the world’s resources, oil in particular. At an extreme, oil pipelines almost become geopolitical maps. Old-style borders, encompassing culturally and historically homogenous groups of people, become less relevant in the eyes of the ‘geopolitician’, or, as Hill writes: ‘The random way in which frontiers are superimposed on the world means that states vary enormously in size, mineral wealth, access to the sea, vulnerability, and cohesiveness.’[6]