Problems with Mackinder’s Heartland Theory.
Draw a map that puts your anxieties at the center. Call it objective geography. Declare it universal truth. The map becomes the territory. Your fears become everyone’s strategic reality. Every empire does this. Rome divided the world into civilization and barbarians. China had the Middle Kingdom with tributary states radiating outward. The Islamic Caliphates mapped the world as Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb.
But Mackinder’s version in his essay “” had more power because Britain exported it through colonial education. Then America adopted it wholesale. Now it’s taught as geopolitical science instead of what it actually is: one country’s paranoia given academic credentials.
The Original Theory (1904)
Halford Mackinder argued that geography determines global power. Control the right land, control the world. He divided the globe into following regions:
The World Island: Europe, Asia, and Africa combined. The largest, most resource-rich landmass.
The Heartland: Central Eurasia. Specifically, the area east of the Volga River, south of the Arctic, west of the Yangtze River, and north of the Himalayas. Roughly modern Russia and Central Asia.
The Pivot Area: The strategic core that whoever controls it can dominate the rest.
His formula was simple:
- Control Eastern Europe, and you command the Heartland
- Control the Heartland, and you command the World Island
- Control the World Island, and you command the world
Why the Heartland mattered, according to Mackinder:
It was unreachable by sea power. Britain ruled the oceans, but naval dominance couldn’t touch the interior of Eurasia. Railways were connecting this region. Resources and population were concentrated there. Natural barriers protected it.
Mackinder warned Britain that the age of sea power was ending. Land power would dominate the 20th century. Russia, sitting at the Heartland’s core, posed the greatest threat to British global dominance.
Point-by-Point Criticism
1. The Theory Ignores 5,000 Years of History
Mackinder treats European expansion as the baseline for understanding global power. Everything before 1500 CE doesn’t register.
But power centers shifted for millennia without anyone needing to control Central Asia. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Rome, Byzantine, the Islamic Caliphates, Chinese dynasties – none of them followed Mackinder’s formula. They built empires, controlled trade, and shaped civilizations without British permission or geographical theories.
The Heartland only became “strategic” when European powers started competing for it. Before that, it was just where people lived and built their own power structures.
2. India Doesn’t Exist in This Framework
Mackinder’s map treats India as periphery. A colonial possession, not a civilization.
But India dominated Indian Ocean trade for centuries. Chola naval power. Gujarati merchant fleets. Kerala’s spice ports that bankrupted Rome trying to access them. Maritime networks connecting East Africa to Southeast Asia existed long before Britain could navigate past Gibraltar.
India sat at the crossroads of continental trade. Buddhist monks and Indian traders connected East and West. China got its name – Cina, Chini – from Sanskrit, not European cartographers.
Mackinder couldn’t acknowledge this. Admitting Indian centrality would undermine his premise that European geography and concerns are universal truths.
3. The Theory Works Backwards
Mackinder saw Russia as Britain’s main competitor. So he drew a circle around Russian territory and declared it the key to everything.
If he’d been Chinese, the Heartland would’ve been elsewhere. If he’d been Arab during the Abbasid Caliphate, ocean trade routes would’ve been the obvious center of power. If he’d been Mongol, the steppe would’ve needed no theory to justify its importance.
The Mongols actually DID control the Heartland. They conquered half the known world. But Mackinder’s theory doesn’t explain their rise or fall. It explains British anxiety about Russia in 1904. That’s all.
4. Geography Matters, But Which Geography?
Power doesn’t come from controlling specific regions. It comes from controlling whatever matters at that moment in history.
Sometimes maritime networks matter most. Sometimes river valleys. Sometimes mountain passes. Sometimes none of it matters as much as who invented better metallurgy or irrigation or gunpowder.
Japan and South Korea became economic powerhouses without any Heartland territory. Silicon Valley matters more than Siberia now. China’s real power comes from manufacturing and finance, not controlling Central Asian steppes.
Mackinder assumed land control determines dominance. But technology, trade networks, institutions, and ideas shift what counts as strategic.
5. The Theory is Intellectual Cover for Empire
Mackinder didn’t build this theory to explain the world. He built it to justify Britain’s position in it. This is how ideology works. Not through lies, but through selective attention. Make a map that centers your concerns. Call it objective geography. Suddenly your anxieties become timeless strategic wisdom.
Operation Sanskrit Mill – the British project to undermine Indian knowledge systems – worked the same way. Rewrite history to make everything start with Greece and Rome. Create Indians “English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,” as Macaulay put it.
Mackinder’s theory is the geographical version. Ignore millennia of Asian power dynamics. Treat European experience as universal. Call it science.
6. Air Power and Nuclear Weapons Destroyed the Premise
The theory assumed armies must march across land to project power. By 1945, that assumption was dead.
You don’t need to control the steppe when you can fly over it or annihilate it from submarines. Naval carriers project power globally. Intercontinental missiles make borders irrelevant. Economic sanctions cripple nations without firing a shot.
Land control still matters, but not the way Mackinder imagined. The US maintains bases worldwide precisely because controlling distant regions beats controlling contiguous territory.
7. The World Didn’t Need This Theory
For 5,000 years, empires rose and fell without Mackinder’s Heartland. They managed fine.
Trade routes, technology, disease, climate, leadership, ideas, and luck determined outcomes. Sometimes land control mattered. Sometimes maritime networks mattered more. Sometimes neither mattered as much as who had better steel or better ideas.
Mackinder gave us a theory that explains maybe 100 years of geopolitics if you’re generous. The other 4,900 years? It’s useless.
8. The United States Never Stopped Believing
The Cold War ended in 1991. The Heartland Theory should’ve died with it.
It didn’t.
American foreign policy still runs on Mackinder’s map. NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. Military bases ringing Russia and China. The obsession with controlling Central Asia.
Afghanistan? Twenty years of war in the Heartland’s southern edge. Ukraine? The gateway to the Heartland, exactly where Mackinder said the battle would be fought. The Quad alliance with India, Japan, and Australia? Containment strategy dressed in new language.
And now this: the US appointed one envoy for both India and Central Asia. India, a civilization of 1.4 billion people with its own sphere of influence. Central Asia is former Soviet republics thousands of miles away. Different cultures, different histories, different strategic interests.
Why bundle them together? Because Mackinder’s map says they’re both near the Heartland. One administrative convenience reveals the entire framework.
It’s insulting to India, but more than that, it’s lazy thinking. The appointment assumes geography matters more than history, culture, or agency. It treats sovereign nations as pieces on a board game centered in Washington.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative? Another Heartland play. Connecting Central Asia to Chinese ports, building the exact railways Mackinder warned about in 1904.
Russia’s invasions of Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine? Defending the Heartland’s borders.
The US response to both? Pure Mackinder. Contain the Heartland powers. Build alliances on the periphery. Control Eastern Europe. Nobody admits they’re following a 120-year-old British theory. They use modern language – “rules-based international order,” “great power competition,” “strategic partnership.” But the map underneath? Same one Mackinder drew.
This matters because the theory was wrong then and it’s wrong now. It ignores economic interdependence. It underestimates technology. It treats nations as fixed entities rather than evolving societies.
Worse, it turns policy into self-fulfilling prophecy. Russia feels encircled, so it acts aggressively. The US sees aggression, so it expands containment. China watches both and accelerates its own Heartland strategy. Everyone’s playing the same game because everyone learned from the same outdated playbook.
The envoy appointment isn’t just bureaucratic efficiency. It’s evidence that American strategy is still stuck in 1904, with minor updates for air power and nuclear weapons. The envoy, Sergio Gor was born Sergey Gorokhovsky on November 30, 1986, in Tashkent, Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Unio. He later shortened his last name from Gorokhovsky to Gor and grew up in Malta before moving to USA.
Here’s someone born in the Soviet Union, in the heart of Mackinder’s Heartland region, now being appointed to manage American relations with both India and Central Asia. The region of his birth is precisely what the theory says must be contained.
This makes the appointment even more absurd. The USA is using Mackinder’s framework – treating India and Central Asia as a single strategic unit to be managed together – and they’ve picked someone whose own life story demonstrates how artificial those geographical boundaries are.
He’s a Soviet-born American who grew up in Malta, now deciding policy for regions spanning thousands of miles with completely different histories and interests. His biography alone shows how people, trade, and influence cross the neat lines geopolitical theories draw on maps.
Mackinder built a theory to justify British anxiety about Russia. America adopted it wholesale and never questioned whether the world actually works that way. It doesn’t. But believing it does shapes policy, and policy shapes reality. That’s how bad theories survive. Not because they’re right, but because powerful countries act as if they are.
The world doesn’t need the Heartland Theory. Washington still thinks it does. That gap between theory and reality is where wars start.
Ukraine War
Ukraine sits exactly where Mackinder said the decisive battle would happen. Eastern Europe. The gateway to the Heartland.
Russia sees NATO expansion as encirclement. They’re not wrong. Every country that joins NATO is another piece of the containment strategy. Poland, the Baltics, Romania – the alliance crept closer to Russia’s borders for thirty years.
Ukraine was the line. Let it join NATO, and the Heartland is breached. Western military infrastructure reaches Russia’s industrial core. Everything Mackinder warned about happens in reverse.
So Russia invaded. Not because Putin read Mackinder, but because the logic is the same. Control Eastern Europe or lose the Heartland. Lose the Heartland, lose your position as a great power.
The West’s response? Classic Mackinder. Arm Ukraine. Sanction Russia. Strengthen the containment ring. Keep the Heartland power locked inside its borders.
Both sides are playing from the same 120-year-old playbook. Neither admits it. Both act like their position is about democracy or security or national interest. But strip away the rhetoric and you’re left with Narcissistic Cartography on both sides.
Russia thinks it’s defending its natural sphere of influence. America thinks it’s defending the rules-based order. Both are really just defending positions on Mackinder’s map.
Ukraine is the victim of a theory that treats countries as chess pieces. Ukrainians die while great powers fight over who controls the gateway to a region that only matters because someone drew it that way in 1904.
Mackinder died in 1947. His theory never did.
The Cold War was his theory in action. NATO expansion? Mackinder. Containment doctrine? Mackinder. Afghanistan, Ukraine, the entire architecture of American foreign policy in Eurasia? All Mackinder.
Russia absorbed the same logic. Defend the Heartland. Control the gateway. Never let the West breach Eastern Europe. Putin didn’t invent this paranoia, he inherited it.
So now we have two sides fighting a war designed by a British geographer who’s been dead for 78 years. Neither side questions whether the map is real. They just kill people over it.
The Real Legacy
The Heartland Theory seduces because maps make complex questions look simple. Politicians love it. Strategists reference it. Students memorize it.
But it’s Victorian narcissism dressed as geographical science. A grand theory built from one empire’s anxieties about one competitor at one moment in history.
Geography constrains and enables, but it doesn’t determine. Mackinder was wrong about that in 1904. He’s still wrong now. The theory survives not because it explains reality, but because it justified European dominance at precisely the moment when that dominance was being questioned. That’s not science. That’s propaganda with footnotes.
The war proves Narcissistic Cartography isn’t just wrong intellectually. It’s deadly operationally. When both sides believe the map is reality, the map becomes a kill zone.
Mackinder drew lines. People die on them. That’s the theory’s real legacy.
You don’t build theories to explain the world. You build them to justify your position in it.