Having identified Eurasia as the geopolitical prize, Mackinder divided the world into three regions:

The Heartland or Pivot area, which Mackinder identified as Eurasia’s vast interior. Initially, he identified it as the area east of the Volga, south of the Arctic, west of the Yangtze, and north of the Himalayas – although he subsequently extended it;

The Inner or Marginal Crescent (Rimland), which included the coastal fringe regions of Eurasia: Western Europe, Türkiye, the Middle East, India, East and Southeast Asia, Taiwan and Korea, etc. We prefer to use Nicholas Spykman’s term “Rimland” for this area; and

• The Outer or Insular Crescent (Offshore Islands), which included the maritime nations largely separated from the Eurasian continent, such as Britain, Japan, North America, South America and Australia. We prefer Spykman’s term “Offshore Islands” for this area.

The following quote is from the Reagan Administration’s “National Security Strategy of the United States”, published in January 1988. It is “pure Mackinder”:

The first historical dimension of our strategy is relatively simple, clear-cut, and immensely sensible. It is the conviction that the United States’ most basic national security interests would be endangered if a hostile state or group of states were to dominate the Eurasian land mass – that area of the globe often referred to as the world’s heartland.

Writing almost a decade later, the influential globalist and former US National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, argued in his famous 1997 book The Grand Chessboard:

Ever since the continents started interacting politically some 500 years ago, Eurasia has been the centre of world power… For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia – and America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.

Another key element in Mackinder’s theory was the competition between the major land powers and major sea powers. Through the lens of Mackinder’s theory, large landmasses bestow strategic depth, raw materials and efficiencies in transportation. Consequently, the control of large, contiguous interior territory creates strategic options which sea powers lack and cannot penetrate. The Heartland’s size, central location and invulnerability to sea power made it key to controlling the World Island – hence the “Geographical Pivot” – according to Mackinder.

Mackinder’s theory contradicted the idea that maritime supremacy was sufficient for Britain, the greatest sea power at the time, to safeguard its hegemony. Since Mackinder’s era, the US has obviously surpassed Britain as the leading sea power, with its 11 carrier strike groups and extensive network of ports and military bases in and around the periphery of Eurasia. Mackinder theorized that with new transportation routes, e.g. the Trans-Siberian railway, and technology, a land power controlling the center and resources of Eurasia could eventually repel the sea power’s colonies everywhere across the continent.

Mackinder argued in 1919 that World War I extended his original definition of the Heartland as far as the Baltic Sea to the northwest and the Black Sea in the southwest. This brought additional nations into the Heartland, including Poland, later to be the catalyst for World War II, and Ukraine. He argued the case for preventing a convergence of interests between Russia and what he saw as the new “pivot” states of Eastern Europe, i.e. Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. He summarized this in his famous dictum:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;

who rules the Heartland commands the World Island;

who rules the World Island commands the world.

Gold as the Monetary “Heartland”

A gap exists in classical geopolitical literature, since money and finance were never integrated as strategic elements of geography. Mackinder acknowledged resources, industrial bases, and transport networks, but not:

• the dominant currency in pricing international trade;
• cross-border payment systems;
• reserve currencies;
• neutral collateral assets;
• the geography of gold production and storage; and
• systemic consequences of weaponized finance.

This absence was less problematic in Mackinder’s era, when gold anchored the monetary system and financial globalization was limited. But in the contemporary age, where financial flows exceed physical trade by orders of magnitude, geopolitics cannot be disentangled from the architecture of international money.

Mackinder viewed his geopolitical Heartland as land power possessing natural barriers and immunity from sea power, which made it a unique “fortress”.

If we asked the question, what asset is the monetary equivalent of the Heartland and has acted as the monetary pivot of history, we would argue that there is only one answer and that is gold – even if it has temporarily been confined to a lesser role since Nixon took the world off the gold exchange standard in 1971.

Why is gold the monetary Heartland?

The Heartland’s power derived from its centrality and difficulty of encroachment. Gold has been used as money in coin form for at least 2,500 years and is believed to have been used in trade and as a store of value in Ancient Egypt as long ago as 3,000 BC. It possesses unique attributes with which to function as money and a store of wealth:

• It is geopolitically unaligned and therefore neutral;
• Its supply is geologically constrained and it cannot be printed, created by fiat, or devalued;
• Its value is universally recognized;
• It is the only financial asset with no counterparty risk, i.e. it is nobody’s liability; and
• It has a high stock-to-flow ratio which gives stability – all the gold ever mined exists as above-ground supply, so annual changes in gold production are almost immaterial.^[2]

In a Mackinder monetary analogue, we see gold as metaphorically representing land power:

• Once gold is mined it tends to be stationary and remains stored in vaults;
• The movement of physical gold tends to be relatively small in the context of the total amount of gold stored in vaults and traded on the world’s exchanges; and
• Gold is the ultimate reserve asset and avoids the need to settle every trade in gold – net positions can be settled periodically between countries or banks.

We should remind ourselves that historically, currency in the form of coins that are not “specie”, i.e. not made out of gold or silver, and until recently also banknotes, were viewed as nothing more than derivative instruments corresponding to gold or silver in vaults. British banknotes still say, “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of…” which historically was understood to mean that they could be converted into the equivalent amount of gold at the Bank of England.

The Geopolitical Importance of the Rimland

Mackinder believed that a land power like Russia could use its base in the Heartland to control the World Island by taking over the coasts and warm water ports that made global commerce possible, i.e. the Inner or Marginal Crescent on the periphery of Eurasia. In 1919, Mackinder’s focus was on Eastern Europe as a gateway to the major coastal nations of Western Europe.

We believe that Mackinder’s theory benefits from integration with another geopolitical theory, namely Spykman’s “Rimland theory”. Nicholas J. Spykman was Professor of International Relations at Yale University, and the book establishing his theory, The Geography of the Peace, was published in 1944. Spykman also focused on controlling Eurasia as the geopolitical prize and adopted Mackinder’s divisions of the world, although he renamed two of them:

• Heartland – the same as Mackinder;
• Rimland – equivalent to Mackinder’s “Inner or Marginal Crescent”; and
• Offshore Islands & Continents – equivalent to Mackinder’s “Outer or Insular Crescent”.

Spykman agreed with Mackinder that the Heartland offers a uniquely defensive position – something which was self-evident at the time from Germany’s unsuccessful invasion of Russia in 1941. However, Spykman argued that exerting control on the maritime edges of Eurasia to the west, south and east, i.e. what he called the Rimland, was more important than the Heartland. This was due to the Rimland being:

• more densely populated;
• more industrialised; and
• containing more resources.

The key regions and countries in Spykman’s Rimland were:

• Western European coastal nations, from Scandinavia to Southern Europe;
• Middle East/Near East, including Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan;
• Southern Asia – India and the Indian Ocean littoral; and
• East Asia and South Asia – China and the coastal nations along the Pacific Rim.

The countries in the Rimland are in a kind of “amphibian belt”, or “buffer zone”, between the Heartland and the oceans. They can be influenced by both the major land powers and the major sea powers. The Heartland has the potential to act as an impregnable base for a land power to take control of the Rimland. From the standpoint of a major sea power, like the US, the Rimland was the area where sea power could pressure the land-locked Heartland and where it was crucial for land power to be contained. In contrast to Mackinder, Spykman’s dictum was: “Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.”

This idea of containing the land powers of Eurasia has been a long-term strategy of Britain, the US and NATO. While most people remain unfamiliar with Mackinder’s and Spykman’s theories, they explain much of the geopolitical tension during the 20th century:

• Britain’s containment of Russia in the early part of the century;
• the Cold War from 1945–89; and
• NATO’s eastward expansion following the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989.

The strategy was highlighted by the US Naval War College in 2023 in the context of Ukraine. The paper “Confining the Enemy – Halford Mackinder’s Theory of Containment and the Conflict in Ukraine” stated:

Mackinderite analysis rests on an imperative of checking the territorial power — either alone or in alliance — occupying the heartland. The elements of Mackinderite maritime geostrategic perspective endure, and they are as follows: onshore bridgeheads, offshore (island) aerodromes and military bases, maritime denial of threatened seas, and the United States reestablished as a thalassocracy (i.e. deriving power and wealth from maritime supremacy).

While the validity of much of Mackinder’s theory has stood the test of time – including the central tenet about controlling Eurasia and the balance between land power and sea power – some aspects have evolved since his era.

While Mackinder identified nations in East Europe as being the “pivot” states in the struggle for geopolitical dominance of Eurasia, as we discussed, we believe that the pivot areas evolve over time. This is due to multiple factors including:

• economic growth;
• military strength;
• industrial development and technology;
• access to key resources;
• monetary architecture; and
• geopolitical alignments.

In our opinion, three pivot areas have come to the fore in recent decades:

• Middle East;
• Central Asia and the Trans-Caucasus; and
• South China Sea.

The oil-producing nations of the Middle East, notably Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait, took on greater importance as the world became increasingly dependent on crude oil and, latterly, natural gas.

More recently, several nations in Central Asia and the Trans-Caucasus, including Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, have risen in geopolitical significance. In part, this is due to their substantial energy resources and/or pipelines.

The next quote is another from B rzezinski’s book The Grand Chessboard regarding the Central Asian Republics, or “Eurasian Balkans”, as he describes them. Interestingly, he also mentions gold:

They are of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most important and more powerful neighbours, namely Russia, Türkiye and Iran, with China also signalling an increasing political interest in the region. But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize; an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals including gold.

Arguably, Brzezinski’s thinking provides insight into the US-supported “color revolutions” in the region, including Ukraine (Orange, 2004), Georgia (Rose, 2003) and Kyrgyzstan (Tulip, 2005), and its support in overthrowing the pro-Russian government in Ukraine in 2014’s Maidan Revolution. Ukraine is clearly a critical bridge between Western Europe and the Heartland – losing Ukraine constrains Russia’s Heartland power while gaining Ukraine expands it.

In our opinion, the East China Sea and the South China Sea in particular are becoming important “pivot areas”. The South China Sea stretches from Singapore and the Strait of Malacca at its southern end to the Strait of Taiwan in the northeast. It is the world’s second busiest sea lane.