In 1904, the greatest geo-politician of his age (or any other), Halford Mackinder, penned a seminal article, ‘The pivot of world history’. For him, the decisive event of the modern age had been the colonisation of the New World by western Europe and of the Siberian Steppes by Russia. While the Europeans had moved west across the Atlantic, the Russians had struck east across Eurasia. By 1904, West and East confronted each other across the Pacific. The 20th century, he concluded, would be determined by the conflict between the two.
This is the point about geopolitics. It tells a story. It involves a grand narrative. The problem is that we often misread the signs. Mackinder got it wrong in a number of essentials. The second half (not the first) of the 20th century was indeed determined by the conflict between what we then called East (the Soviet Bloc) and West. However, the main battlefield was not the Pacific, but western Europe. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Europe is no longer the fulcrum of the geopolitical imagination.
