Robert Morris: Our Globe Under Siege. Mantoloking: J & W Enterprises, 1986.
Originally published in The New York City Tribune, October 1986.
Sir Halford J. Mackinder (1861-1947) was a British geographer whose career spanned the zenith of the British Empire and the beginning of its decline. In 1887, he wrote an essay titled “On the Scope and Methods of Geography,” deploring the separation of the humanities from the sciences in the modern university curriculum—anticipating C. P. Snow’s lament on “the two cultures” by some seven decades. “It is the duty of geography,” he maintained, “to build one bridge over an abyss which I the opinion of many is upsetting the equilibrium of our culture.” The discipline of political geography or, as he later called it, “geopolitics,” would teach students both natural science and political science, each reinforcing the significance of the other.
Published in 1919, the book Democratic Ideals and Reality (a scornful glance at President Wilson, that) represented Mackinder’s attempt to show how the seafaring republic of Great Britain could defend itself against the great land powers, Germany and Soviet Russia. But Mackinder faced a grave problem in convincing his fellow Britons of the urgency of this enterprise. “Democracy refuses to think strategically unless and until compelled to do so for reasons of defense.” Unfortunately, tyrants who dream of world dominion love to think strategically.
Mackinder asked his readers to stop thinking of Europe, Asia, and Africa as separate continents. In fact they form “incomparably the largest geographical unit on our globe,” holding some 85% of its population. That a single tyranny might someday unite the “Great Continent” or “World Island” posed “the ultimate threat to the world’s liberty so far as strategy is concerned.” Winning the “Heartland” of the Great Continent—north-central Europe and Asia—could enable this tyranny to control the circulation of political and economic power throughout the world. In the twentieth century, Germany and Soviet Russia would vie for this power.
True to Mackinder’s teaching, the democracies ignored him. The Germans did not. Karl Haushofer established the discipline of geopolitics in Germany and, true to the regnant notion of ‘value-free’ social science, willingly advised anyone who listened—including Stalin in the 1920 and Hitler a few years later. Mackinder lived just long enough to see his countrymen interest themselves in his thesis—during the 1940s, too late to avert what Churchill called “the unnecessary war.”
With the invention of nuclear weapons, the democracies suffered another strategic shock. For some two decades, the prospect of thermonuclear war made Western strategists forget or denigrate the importance of geopolitics. But Stalin’s heirs continued to learn Haushofer’s lessons, and methodically acted to acquire military, political, and economic control over strategic pressure points on the World Island. After the Soviets achieved nuclear parity with the United States in the late 1960s, and the communists won Vietnam a few years later, some Western strategists began to remember their geography lessons.
Robert Morris needed no such instruction-by-disaster. Trained as an attorney, he served in U. S. Navy intelligence during World War II, and learned of Soviet intentions at that time in a series of conversations with a top Soviet official. As an aide to several U. S. Senate committees, and also as an educator and journalist, he has advanced Mackinder’s task of overcoming the compartmentalization our universities have imposed, bringing together the insights of several academic disciplines in order to provide a coherent picture of Soviet actions.
Morris sees that the geopolitical war “is the real war, and may be the only war fought” between the United States and the Soviet Union. International politics remains a struggle for sovereignty over territory, despite the increased sophistication of international finance, whose adepts lecture us on ‘global interdependence’ and imagine butter more powerful than guns. By keeping the overall geopolitical realities directly before them, Morris does readers the invaluable service of taking apparently unrelated current events and revealing the pattern they form. Morris helps to make sense of the morning newspaper and the evening news.
He reviews every part of “our globe,” remarking Soviet power on land and sea. On land, Soviet geopolitical designs now center on western Europe and southern Asia. The Soviets often pretend to fear American ‘encirclement’; obviously, the strategy is their own. From the Kola Peninsula (the most heavily militarized region on earth) to eastern Europe, to the economic chokepoints of the Middle East, to the Mediterranean and northern Africa, to several points in and along the Caribbean, the Soviets have constructed a system of bases and alliances capable of interdicting supplies and launching direct attacks on our European allies. In the Pacific, Soviet power bears down upon India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, countries Radio Moscow called (in 1969) “the nucleus of a security system that would eventually embrace all countries from the Middle East to Japan.” As with Europe, the means to this end coordinate land, sea, and air operations, some covert and some not.
These Atlantic and Pacific theaters are linked. Between the Kola Peninsula and the massively fortified Soviet Pacific coast lies the Arctic Ocean, where icebreakers and submarines extend power between East and West. In the southern hemisphere the route around southern Africa serves the same purpose; Morris devotes two full chapters to this key strategic region, which he knows firsthand. Indeed, Morris knows much of the world firsthand. Although he makes good use of news reports and journal articles, Our Globe Under Siege is no ‘cut-and-paste’ job; it is firmly based on the author’s more than forty years of extensive travel and observation.
Morris saves his most sobering facts for the final chapter. Since the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917, 1.727 billion human beings have come under the domination of communism. That is slightly more than 36 percent of the world’s population, an average of 70,000 per day. Communists rule 18.7 million square miles, 32.5 percent of the earth’s land area. Further, as Morris so vividly shows, mere numbers cannot convey the geostrategic character of these populations and territories. Even a small point can ground an instrument of unremitting pressure, if it is a fulcrum.
Soviet leverage increases yearly. Since the much-heralded heyday of ‘détente’ in the 1970s, sixteen countries have fallen to the communists, most of them close allies of the Soviet Union. And although the Reagan Administration proudly claims no countries lost under its stewardship of our interests, this isn’t quite so. Both Guyana and Suriname have become near-appendages of Soviet and Cuban policy, affording key inroads into South America. During this period the Soviets’ only loss has been the tiny island of Grenada.
The ultimate object of encirclement is of course the United States itself. Sophisticates in the West will dismiss the thought. The Kremlin deceives them by crudeness. Robert Morris is not deceived, and readers who prefer knowledge to sophistication will find this volume a beacon that warns as it illuminates.
2017 Afternote: Not long after this was written, the Soviet Union imploded, the victim of internal tensions. Its reach finally exceeded its grasp. But some thirty years later, one notices that China has adapted a similar strategy, now with Russia as a more-or-less junior partner. In particular, the strategy of linking Asia from east to west, from the Pacific to the Middle East, has been pursued with infrastructure projects, especially roads. For its part, Russia continues to work toward the breakup of European alliances, even as it did under the Soviet regime. Far from causing borders to disappear (as some utopians had supposed), computer networks have served to enhance the geopolitical goals of modern states.
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