Beijing doesn’t have to choose between land and sea predominance. It could have both.
By Francis P. Sempa
In his 1919 masterpiece, Democratic Ideals and Reality, the great British geographer Halford Mackinder identified the northern-central core of the Eurasian landmass as the “Heartland” – a geopolitical region from which a sufficiently populated, armed and organized great power could bid for a world empire. Mackinder’s Heartland stretched from central Europe east of the Black and Baltic Seas to eastern Siberia, Mongolia, a small part of northeastern China, and included all of Central Asia. A Heartland-based power could expand in all directions and was inaccessible to sea power. Mackinder warned that a land empire that controlled the Heartland could use its vast natural resources and central geographical position to dominate Eurasia and build a powerful navy to threaten the insular powers of England, Japan, and the United States.
Most of China occupied a portion of what Mackinder called the “inner crescent,” a semicircular territory bordering the Heartland, but which had access to the sea. Mackinder advised the strategists of his day to “no longer think of Europe apart from Asia and Africa.” “The Old World,” he wrote, “has become insular, or in other words a unit, incomparably the largest geographical unit on our globe.” He called that geographical unit the “World-Island” and “Great Continent,” and warned the insular powers that they must “reckon with the possibility that a large part of the Great Continent might some day be united under a single sway, and that an invincible sea-power might be based upon it.” When 31 years later the Soviet Union in control of Eastern Europe allied itself to China (the Sino-Soviet bloc), it was no wonder that the great French writer Raymond Aron in The Century of Total War worried that “Russia has in fact nearly achieved the ‘world island’ which Mackinder considered the necessary and almost sufficient condition for universal empire.”
Consciously or not, China today has embarked on policies that raise the specter of a Eurasian-based great power striving for predominance both on land and at sea. Landward, China is using financial and transportation resources to penetrate the resource-rich lands of southeastern Russia and Central Asia, effectively constructing a modern day Silk Road to extend its reach into Central Asia and beyond. Seaward, China is combining naval power with aggressive diplomacy in an effort to dominate the marginal seas along its lengthy eastern coast and become the predominant power in the Asia-Pacific region.
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