Mackinder’s Strategic “Bible” Reconsidered

In 1997, Zbig Brzezinski, the “engine” behind transforming Afghanistan into a quagmire of “mud” into which Russia was to be dragged, wrote his famous book, “The Grand Chessboard". It is a work which has integrated “forever» the Mackinder doctrine according to which “he who controls the heart of Asia controls the world» in the American spirit.

Tellingly, its subtitle was “US primacy and its geostrategic imperatives". Brzezinski had already written in his book that without Ukraine, Russia would never become the country's heartland power; but with Ukraine, Russia can and will. Thus, Mackinder's doctrine, "The one who controls the heart of the country”, was codified in the “canon law» American – to never allow a united heart. And Ukraine became seen as the hinge around which central power revolved.

Brzezinski further ordered that this “big chess game» or a game of pure US primacy: “No, no one else is playing“, he insisted; it is a purely individual game. Once a chess piece is moved; “we» (the United States) let's just turn the chessboard the other way – and move the chess pieces to the other side (for "them"). There is nono other in this game“, warned Brzezinski.

This is today's dilemma: it has been so long since Brzezinski initially formulated Mackinder's notion that classical diplomacy has withered.

However, it was Henry Kissinger who gave Mackinder his famous twist: “He who controls money controls the world» would become the financialized hegemony of the dollar and the banking sector.

But Kissinger, in this, was wrong from the start. This has always been the case:The one who has the production capacity, raw materials, food, energy (human and fossil) and sound money can change the world". But Kissinger simply ignored these complementary conditions and instead based the United States on the creation of a "global spider web of armed dollars» (touch it, and the sanctions poison you). In addition, this system has been multiplied by Wall Street, which analyzed access to billions of newly created money only to people who complied.

Kissinger, however, evolved the doctrine of “triangulation” in a nod to Mackinder: the United States should seek to ally either with Russia against China or to be with China against Russia. But China and Russia must never be allowed to unite against the West. The heart of the country must still be fractured.

These “rules” are imprinted in Washington’s mental circuits. Yet the notions that underlie them have little validity today. Land mass, militarized states (the heart of Asia), and naval powers (the Atlanticists) hardly reflect today's more abstract instruments of power.

The dollar sphere, for example, has undoubtedly been a source of power of the United States of America (imposing on States the obligation to purchase and hold dollars) since the Bretton Woods Agreement and the oil- dollars. This created massive synthetic demand for the dollar, which initially worked well for Washington. But now that's not so much the case.

It was too good to be true – Print and be damned with the consequences. Debt ? Never mind ; print some more. Washington overdid it (the political appeal was too great).

Thus, the “hegemony” of the dollar went from being a power projection tool to being the main source of vulnerability for the United States. Simply put, Washington's massive oversupply of dollars and dollar debt has turned the "dollar" into a double-edged sword; This now goes against the West. Financially burdensome, the Western manufacturing base has atrophied and shrunk, unleashing a two-tier American society and enormous inequality.

The current conflict in Ukraine has exposed the deficiencies of hegemonic power that stem specifically from a neglected manufacturing base.

Mackinder, if he were here today, might need to adjust his model, distinguishing between countries that are "outside» of the single set of economic policies (the Asian, African and Global South bloc led by BRICS) and those which are “inside": that is to say in a consumerist paradigm "coastal» focused on debt.

Related to the above are the specific costs associated with this excessive militarization (i.e. the “war» financial «total"). The US Treasury used multiple variations:

• debt (to collapse first, Britain's post-war global position);
• interest rates were used as a weapon to “scale down” the Japanese economic miracle of the early 1980s.
• France and the West deployed the war to end Gaddafi's aspirations for a pan-African sphere using a gold dinar rather than the franc or dollar.
• And then there were the unprecedented sanctions against Russia which, paradoxically, gave rise to to renewed economic strength Russian, rather than a financial collapse (as expected).

But here again we see the incongruity of the double edge of "the sword of sanctions" : THE Wall Street Journal noted that Europeans are getting poorer – because of lockdowns, but more specifically by associating themselves with Biden’s financial reform “project”. War intended to bring Russia to its knees):

In 2008, the Eurozone and the United States had equivalent gross domestic products (GDP), the GDP gap is now 80%. The European Center for International Political Economy, a Brussels-based think tank, has published a ranking of GDP per capita of US states and European countries: Italy just ahead of Mississippi, the poorest of the 50 states, while France lies between Idaho and Arkansas, 48th and 49th, respectively. Germany does not save face: it is located between Oklahoma and Maine (38th and 39th). The American median salary is now one and a half times higher than that of France.

Was it worth European leaders mortgaging Europe's future in the name of White House solidarity? In any case, the sanctions ploy did not work.

Well…the US and EU are in the midst of a new twist in “the story» Mackinder's geostrategic plan on how to prevent the emergence of a unified core: this is a variation of the plan of "reduction in size» of Japanese technological prowess: The tool «Plaza Agreement” (1985) of rigging interest rates against a “defeated” and compliant Japan will not work for China.

On the contrary, China is subjected to a technological siege accompanied by a stigmatization campaign, in which its leader is trashed, while the Chinese economy is crushed by ever more technologies whose export or cooperation is prohibited. Every day, mainstream Western media celebrate the economic difficulties facing China:

«Its [China's] meteoric growth has slowed, a brief post-pandemic surge has fizzled, and analysts point to deep structural problems that undermine future prospects from China. Xi and the ruling clique (sic) are struggling to meet the new challenges posed by the maturing Chinese economy...The Chinese economy once seemed to be the new engine of the world [as Japan once did]...but a feeling of stagnation sets in».

It's true. Prolonged attrition of the Chinese economy by the United States has hampered growth. Chinese exports to the United States and Europe are declining, and youth unemployment is indeed a major concern for Chinese leaders.

But China understands well that this is a war: the “Mackinder strategic warfare". During a recent trip to Beijing, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has warned that the ambient uncertainty, also fueled by the severe measures taken by the Chinese government against foreign companies, made China "impossible to invest» in the eyes of American investors.

Stop ! Stop for a moment to absorb what the Secretary of Commerce is saying: Embrace our business model, or we'll shun you!

Secretary of State Yellen also recently delivered a speech on relations between the United States and China, suggesting that China had largely prospered thanks to this Anglo-Saxon market order of “free operation”, but that it was now moving towards a state-led posture – a posture “conflictual» towards the United States and its allies. The United States wants to cooperate with China, but entirely and exclusively on its own terms, she said.

The United States is looking for aconstructive engagement", but which must be subject to the guarantee of their own interests and security values: "We will clearly communicate to the PRC our concerns about its behavior… while engaging with the world to advance our vision of constructive engagement. An open, fair and rules-based global economic order". Yellen ended by saying that China must “respect today's international rules".

Unsurprisingly, China will have none of it.

This is an exact parallel to what happened in 2007 at the Munich Security Forum. The West insisted that Russia acquiesce to NATO's global security paradigm. President Putin challenged the West: “You do it: you continually attack Russia – but we will not give in". Ukraine is now the testing ground for this 2007 challenge.

Simply put, Yellen's speech demonstrates a complete failure to recognize that "revolution» Sino-Russian is not limited to the political sphere, but also extends to the economic sphere. This shows how “the other war» – the war aimed at getting out of the grip of “the order» global led by the West – is important for both Putin and Xi.

Already in 2013, in a speech on the lessons learned from the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Xi had identified the cause of this implosion in “the ruling layers» (with the pivot to the Western liberal market ideology of the Gorbachev-Yeltsin era): had led the Soviet Union to nihilism.

What Xi meant was that China had never made this disastrous detour to the Western liberal system.

Putin replied: «[China] succeeded in the best possible way, in my opinion, in using the levers of the central administration (for) the development of a market economy...The Soviet Union did no such thing, and the results of ineffective economic policy – ​​impacted on the political sphere».

Washington and Brussels simply don't understand. Simply put, Xi and Putin believe that the Soviet disaster was the result of an improvident turn toward Western liberalism; while on the other hand, “the collective West" consider that "the mistake» of China – for which it is pursuing a financialized technological war – is its distance from the global system “liberal».

This analytical inadequacy is simply burned into Washington's mental circuits. This also partly explains the West's absolute belief that Russia is so weak and fragile financially, due to the overarching mistake of avoiding the system.Anglo-Saxon».

The climax: Washington breaks (its own) Brzezinski rule number one: “imperative» to ensure that Russia and China do not unite against the West.

The big question today is whether weaponized technology as "geostrategic imperative" aimed at dividing the Heartland will be more effective in achieving this goal than the weaponized dollar has been.

Last week, Huawei launched its new smartphone powered by Huawei's in-house 9000s processor, manufactured by Chinese semiconductor company SMIC, using a 7nm-class manufacturing process. Less than a year ago, when the United States introduced a broad set of sanctions against China's semiconductor industry, the "experts» swore that this would kill the industry, or at least freeze its technological process to the 28nm standard. China can now obviously mass produce 7nm chips entirely domestically. The iPhone 14 Pro has 4nm chips, so China is almost on par, or maybe 1 or 2 years behind.

On the one hand, great opportunities lie in notes Arnaud Bertrand, China has demonstrated that American efforts to hinder Huawei and the Chinese semiconductor industry have been ineffective. What have the sanctions brought? They helped build an indigenous semiconductor ecosystem that did not exist before the sanctions. Other states1 “understand”: source your semiconductors from Western companies, and the United States will not hesitate to weaponize this industry for geopolitical purposes. Buy Chinese, says Bertrand.

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