The nazi distorsion

As heirs to land power, Germans and Russians have over the centuries
thought more in terms
of geography than Americans and Britons, heirs to sea power.
For Russians, mindful of the devastation wrought by the Golden Horde of
the Mongols, geography means simply that without expansion there is the
danger of being overrun. Enough territory is never enough. Russias
need for an empire of Eastern European satellites during the Cold War,
and its use of military power, subversion, and the configuration of its
energy pipeline routes all designed to gain back its near abroad, and thus
reconstitute in effect the former Soviet Union, are the wages of a deep
insecurity.
The shape of German-speaking territories on the map of Europe changed
constantly
from the Dark Ages through modern times, with the unification of a German
state occurring only in the 1860s under Otto von Bismarck. Germany stood
at the very heart of Europe, a land and sea
power both, and thus fully conscious of its ties to maritime Western Europe
and to the Heartland of RussiaEastern Europe.
Germanys abjuration of Bismarcks caution led to its loss in World War I,
which gave Germans a keener sense of their geographic vulnerability
and possibilities.
Historically changeable on the map, lying between sea to the north and
Alps to the south, with the plains to the west and east open to invasion and
expansion both, Germans have literally lived geography. It was they who
developed and elaborated upon geopolitics, or Geopolitik in German, which is
the concept of politically and militarily dominated space.
Fiedrich Ratzel, who influenced Hitler was a German Geographer and
ethnographer who coined the term living space, Ratzel himself a follower
of Charles Darwin, developed an organic and some what the biological
sense of geography basing upon expansion and creating space, which led
to the Nazism
Strausz-Hupe (an Austrian immigrant to the US) was a faculty member
at the University of Pennsylvania and a US ambassador to 4 countries
during the Cold War years.
o his book was a clear-cut attempt not only to explain the danger of
Nazi Geopolitik to the fellow citizens of his adopted country, but to
explain what geopolitics is and why it is important, so that the
forces of good can make use of it in a much different way than the
Nazis were doing.
o Even if Mackinder was obsessed with land power, he never actually
denigrated the importance of sea power ; but he was pessimistic
about the ability of british sea power to prevent a raid on the
Heartland by German land power.

o Sea power required a broader and deeper landward reach to take

advantage of industrialization => the Industrial Age meant a world
of big state, and the strong ate the weak
Haushofer fought in WWI as a brigade commander -> his aide was
Rudolf Hess
- Was the geoplolistician of Nazism perverted the ideas of
Mackinder and gave a new acrobatics on the ideological
trapeze under the title of a new German world order. It
presupposes a greater east Asia under Japanese hegemony, a
US dominated Pan America and a German Eurasia Heartland
with a Mediterranean North African sub region under the
shadow of Italy.
Mackinders book is dignified by a cool detachment and never loses sight
of the broad perspectives of history.
Strausz-Hupe + Mackinder believe in human agency, in the sanctity of
the individual , whereas the German Geopolitikers do not
Haushofer transmitted something the Adolf Hitler had failed to provide :
a coherent doctrine of empire
Mackinder- future in terms of a balance of power that would protect
freedom Haushofer determined to overthrow the balance of power
altogether : thus he perverted geopolitics
The nazi war machine the instrument of the conquest : Geopolitik- the
master plan designed to tell those who wield the instrument what to
conquer and how
Strausz-Hupe : aim to imbue Americans ( who live in isolation and are
bounded by 2 oceans) with a greater appreciation of the geographical
dispcipline US can assume its postwar role as a stabilizer and preserver
of the Eurasian balance of power, which the Nazis(helped by Haushofer)
attempted to overturn.
air power (commercial + military) may render it
meaningless
Industrial Age technology provided the advantage to big
states: large factories, railway lines, and tanks and aircraft
carriers are best taken advantage of by states with depth
of distance and territory.
The sovereign state is organized force. Its history begin in war . Hance
its frontiers (be they good or bad) are strategic frontiers.
The Author opines that the history of our times appears to reflect, with
malignant fatality, the trend towards empires and super states as
predicted by Ratzel and Mackinder.