Another Long Twilight Struggle

During the Cold War against the Soviet Union, some of the most perceptive strategic thinkers wrote books about that conflict with titles like The Struggle for the World, This War Called Peace, and The Real War. Those titles reflected the geopolitical realities of the second half of the twentieth century. The Cold War had both geopolitical and ideological aspects because our principal enemy — the Soviet Union — was both a great power and was led by a totalitarian Marxist–Leninist Communist Party. President John F. Kennedy once called the U.S.–Soviet rivalry the “long twilight struggle.” It is a phrase that accurately describes the current U.S.–China rivalry, too. 

At the beginning of the Cold War, the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, George F. Kennan, explained in his famous “X” article in Foreign Affairs that Soviet foreign and defense policies derived from Marxist–Leninist ideology and Russian history. Kennan also noted that Soviet policy was conditioned by geographical circumstances — ones that the great British geopolitical thinker Sir Halford Mackinder analyzed in his 1904 paper “The Geographical Pivot of History.” Russia, Mackinder wrote, like the Mongol Empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was geographically situated in the “heartland” of Eurasia, enabling expansion into Western Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. And Mackinder believed that a great power or alliance of powers that controlled the resources of Eurasia could forge a world empire.  

Mackinder remarkably foresaw in an essay in Foreign Affairs in 1943 the creation of an alliance of sea powers and coastal Eurasian powers that could counterbalance the threat from Soviet Russia. The Cold War played out as Mackinder thought it would in that 1943 essay, titled “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace.” He predicted that the rise of what he called the “Monsoon countries” of China and India, combined with North Atlantic sea powers, would produce a balanced globe.