7Æ
ILLUSTRATION BY KATE HAZELL
Liberation Army had command of
Taiwan, it would throw open China’s
strategic options.
Geopolitics has often been criti-
cised as deterministic, casting a cold,
Olympian eye across the planet and
sketching grand concepts on empty
maps, ignoring human complexity. In
a pre-echo of Mac A rthur, in 1943 one
geopolitical thinker called Britain a
“moated aerodrome” – reminiscent of
the re-designation of this island as A ir-
strip One in George Orwell’s 1949 novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four. But geopolitics
has also shown that it can influence
and prophesy, not least with regard to
the rise of China itself. Three leading
Anglophone geopolitical writers of thebe able to assert an influence
proportionate to their mass, and
to demand their shares in the
general advantage”.
Four years later, Britain’s
pioneering geopolitical thinker,
Sir Halford Mackinder – he of
the “moated aerodrome” – chal-
lenged Mahan’s veneration of sea
power. In a lecture titled ‘The
Geographical Pivot of History’ (1904),
Mackinder argued that, with the advent
of transcontinental railways, the
resources of the Eurasian ‘heartland’ –
roughly, Russia plus Central Asia –
could be marshalled to build a huge
fleet. This could sail out from a home
state that could not be attacked by sea.
But Mackinder also perceived
a threat dormant in China’s geography,
suggesting that it might expand west
into the heartland (albeit under Japanese
direction), adding “an oceanic frontage
to the resources of the great continent”.
Today, China is not proposing to
conquer Russia. However, through
both its Belt and Road Initiative – an
ambitious infrastructure project aiming
to connect A sia with A frica and Europe
by developing new land and sea routes- and its expanding naval presence,
China is making increasingly assertive
use of its combination of land power
and sea power.
These predictions cast a rising
China as a distant prospect. But in 1942
Nicholas Spykman, a Dutch-American
academic, argued in America’s Strategy
last age of great powers all looked at
the map, discerned something of where
we are now – decades in advance – and
grew anxious.
As the 19th century culminated in
naval rivalry between rising imperial
states, US sea captain Alfred Thayer
Mahan became a scholarly prophet of
the influence of sea power. His work
shaped the growth not only of the US
navy but also of Germany’s and Japan’s.
In 1890, as American ships projected
power west into the Pacific, Mahan
worried that eventually they would meet
Chinese power coming the other way.
This led him to support the establish-
ment of a US base in Hawaii. In The
Problem of Asia (1900), he warned of
a “great inevitable future”, if China
remained a single state, “when, aroused
to the consciousness of power, and
organised by the appropriation of
European methods”, the Chinese “shallThree geopolitical
writers of the last age
of great powers
looked at the
map, discerned
something of
where we are
now – and
grew anxious