With Senate Republicans voting down the Ukraine aid package last week, supposedly because they were outraged that it did not include unrelated and brutally cold-hearted provisions eviscerating the U.S. asylum system, we are drawing ever closer to a nightmare scenario in which MAGA politicians effectively throw the victory in Eastern Europe to Putin. And since Trump is already hinting he might pull the U.S. out of NATO, or otherwise refuse to honor our treaty commitments to our European allies under this instrument, then it seems we are likewise ever closer to enabling Vladimir Putin to simply march across Europe, in an effort to establish a world-spanning union of the far-right fascist republics. A UFFR to replace the USSR whose passing Putin mourns.
I have to confess that this was not the scenario I spent most of the last year-and-a-half preparing for. Back when Putin first invaded, I did warn that "America First" isolationist types would effectively take the Russian autocrat's side. At that point in history, though, it was much less clear that the MAGA contingent would still ultimately be so ascendant in the Republican Party. I was more worried, at that point, that the typical belligerence of U.S. foreign policy might hurl so many weapons into the conflict that it prolonged the fighting beyond the point at which a negotiated peace was possible.
I never once, let me make clear--and my earlier posts on this subject will back me up on this-- took seriously the claim from the pro-Putin contingent that the Russian dictator had some legitimate claim to Ukraine's eastern provinces. I have never been duped by his propaganda, which all along has just been nothing more than an updated version of the same arguments Hitler used in the 1930s to justify annexing the Sudetenland and invading Poland.
(Hitler too, after all, claimed at first that he was merely trying to unite and deliver "self-determination" to German-speaking lands and reclaim territory lost during the Treaty of Versailles, as a smokescreen to cover his much larger ambitions. Putin is plainly doing the same here, except replace "German-speaking" with "Russian-speaking," and "Versailles" with the collapse of the Soviet Union).
But I was enough of a residual pacifist and anti-interventionist to think that, even recognizing the family resemblance between Hitler's rhetoric and Putin's; even while refusing to swallow Putin's patently false line that he would seize only the eastern provinces and go no further; even while recognizing that Putin is an autocrat, gangster, and megalomaniac--still, even with all that acknowledged, I thought that it was worth caving on a few points of principle and justice for the sake of a hastily-settled peace. Not because injustice is not a bad thing--it is indeed a terrible thing. But simply because war is often even worse.
I'm done, though, with trying to make an extra-clever argument for more appeasement, or to try to find some superfine means of preserving my opposition to military aid alongside my loathing of Putin. I will no longer try to split the baby. I withdraw my opposition to military aid for the present, because excessive U.S. belligerence is plainly no longer the greatest danger we need to worry about. To be sure, the ascendant far-right forces in American politics are hardly pacifists; they will be belligerent against their own chosen enemies, most of them internal. But they will meanwhile oppose further U.S. military aid to our allies, not out of any conscientious scruple against bloodshed and weapons, but rather out of a fundamental ideological affinity with Putin.
It is now, therefore, a much greater danger that the U.S. will withdraw aid to Ukraine too soon, than that it will keep it flowing for too long. A reelection victory for Trump will almost certainly mean the end of any further U.S. support for the Ukrainian defense. Putin himself is plainly banking on this. The victory he couldn't gain on the battlefield in Eastern Europe, he will instead achieve by poisoning the hearts and minds of Americans against our democratic allies. In this effort, he is already being helped along by the relentless pro-Moscow propaganda from various MAGA influencers (Trump, Ramaswamy, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, etc.).
Many Republicans in Congress still support Ukraine aid, to be sure; but they are not the ascendant faction in the party, and even the GOP senators supposedly most in favor of supporting our Ukrainian allies are refusing to approve any more aid to them unless Congress also slashes rights for asylum seekers. It is disgraceful to make the fight for democracy in Eastern Europe depend on the U.S. backtracking on its international commitments under global refugee law to some of the planet's most vulnerable people. That would be taking back with one hand the victory for international democratic norms that the other hand had just given.
Plus, the House GOP is saying that it wouldn't even support the type of agreement the Senate Republican leadership is currently hammering out, because it doesn't go far enough in restricting the rights of people seeking protection at our borders. So it's not clear that anything the Republican senators are currently negotiating will even matter. Ukraine aid is probably already dead, and Trump is not even back in the White House yet. That means that Putin will face few obstructions in marching straight back to Kiev, just as he tried to do at the outset of this invasion. And after Kiev, who knows? Maybe he would next strike our Eastern European NATO allies, especially since Trump is signaling he would do nothing to defend them.
In thinking about the danger of world-spanning domination that Putin poses (he already has a number of allies in the far-right fascist parties of Continental Europe; if the U.S. elects a pro-Putin autocrat of our own, one can easily imagine them all forming a neo-authoritarian bloc devoted to stamping out liberal democracy and suppressing the rights of refugees and religious minorities); in thinking about this danger, I say, I picked up one of the foundational texts in the study of geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder's Democratic Ideals and Reality (which expands upon the ideas of the famous essay often published alongside it, "The Geographical Pivot of History"). Mackinder famously sees the regions of Siberia and Central Asia now controlled by or within the orbit of Russia as central to global history, arguing that whoever controls this Eurasian "Heartland," as he calls it, controls the world.
In many ways, the book is the work of a crank. I was largely disappointed. Mackinder is taken very seriously by students of strategy and geopolitics, and perhaps this just goes to underline the current inadequacies of strategic thought as a field. After all, Mackinder's argument seems to hinge on little more than loose historical analogies. He points out that throughout premodern history, Central Asia provided a convenient and ready staging ground for various invasions of Western Europe and China. Because it stands in the middle of what he calls the main "world-island" (the Eurasian super-continent), and its grasslands support a large population of grazing horses and nomadic herdsmen, then one group of horseback-riding invaders from the steppes after another has been able to ride out of the Central Asian "Heartland" and attack the coastal settlements of Western Europe and East Asia.
This is all certainly true as a matter of premodern history. If warfare was still primarily waged on horseback, it would give us reason to be concerned today. But it's not clear, now that wars are fought by tanks and missiles, why the grasslands of Central Asia provide any special advantage today to an invading army. Mackinder is somewhat vague on this point. He suggests (without providing many examples), that this vast terrain of the "Heartland" could have an untold wealth of natural resources waiting to be exploited. This hasn't exactly proven to be the case. Russia has emerged as a major petrostate, to be sure, but not an otherwise especially prosperous one, despite its vast size.
Mackinder also argues that this enormous stretch of country could be covered in railroads, facilitating rapid troop movements. This is surely true as well: it could be made easier to move people across Russia than it is at present. But the vast distances to cover surely make this even more time-consuming than it would be in a small country that didn't need to put people on trains in the first place in order to rapidly reach the border.
I guess what we're left with is that the Heartland is in fact in the middle of the Eurasian continent, and therefore could be used as a starting point to strike in any other direction. This is true enough; but the same fact about this region creates precisely as many vulnerabilities as it does opportunities for outward attack. And really, stepping back from the details, if we are looking at the modern world, does anyone think of Siberia and Central Asia as the most historically significant regions?
Mackinder also faced the problem that the main geopolitical adversary of his era was in fact Germany, not Russia; and Germany does not, and never has, possessed the "Heartland" that is supposedly so geopolitically vital to every conflict. Mackinder therefore needs to do some hand-waving. He says that the czarist government of Russia was "half-Prussianized" anyway, because it had supposedly modeled itself on the Junkers.
There are only a handful of passages in which Mackinder starts to seem prescient at all--but they are significant ones. In his otherwise incompatible fulminations about the threat posed both by Germany and by whoever owns the Heartland, he manages to make the case for the need for a series of "buffer states" in Eastern Europe precisely in order to ensure that Germany cannot seize and occupy the Heartland. Since such states were in fact eventually established, and this was in fact precisely the direction in which Hitler first struck, just two decades after Mackinder published Democratic Ideals and Reality, it does sound like here he may have been on to something. And while Hitler was eventually foiled in his effort to conquer Soviet Russia, might he not have succeeded if there had been no wall of states intervening between the two? If his first blitzkrieg had been to strike straight toward Stalingrad, rather than Poland, might he not have succeeded?
There is also a significant passage in which Mackinder seems to implicitly acknowledge that the Heartland has played a relatively insignificant role in the history of modern warfare, in large part because it is so sparsely populated. But, he then adds, modern Russia may alter this calculus, because, he writes, it is the first state to control the Heartland territory while adding to it significant reserves of "manpower" (a term Mackinder claims to have popularized). And indeed, Russia's primary advantage in every modern war seems to have been a numerical one: namely, its ability to mobilize and fling vast numbers of human bodies at its enemies--recruited and drilled as cannon fodder for first the Soviet leadership's and now Putin's meaningless imperial wars against their neighbors. The Russian state's willingness to sacrifice countless of its own young citizens, against their will, gives it a strategic advantage in any conflict (though hardly a moral one).
With Putin now striking Eastern Europe from the Heartland, and indeed mobilizing vast reserves of manpower in seeming indifference to how many of his own country's young men are cut down, it is perhaps time to give Mackinder a second look. And with congressional debate stalling out on Ukraine aid, and a surging MAGA faction trying to actually cut our Ukrainian allies loose and throw the whole contest to Putin, perhaps our leaders ought to give some added thought to Mackinder's point about "buffer states" between the Heartland and Western Europe.
Much of the current thinking among the MAGA-heads and so-called "America First" isolationists, after all, seems to be that Ukraine can be sacrificed, and that Putin's march would then halt there (classic appeasement thinking, in short). But the fall of Kiev would bring the sphere of Putin's effective control right up to NATO's borders. There would be no buffer stopping him from making yet another lighting strike straight into treaty-protected territory.
Maybe he would then stop there; maybe he would respect this line; or maybe he wouldn't. It seems to me his willingness to respect NATO boundaries would probably depend a great deal on whether it seemed likely the U.S. would actually intervene to protect our allies and honor our treaty commitments if he crossed these boundaries. And with Trump signaling he would not defend our allies and might even pull us out of NATO, what would hold Putin back from striking Western Europe if Trump returns to the White House?
This, then, would mean either World War III with a nuclear-armed power, or-- if a re-installed Trump refuses to come to our treaty allies' aid, as he is hinting he would--a rapid conquest by Putin of most of Western Europe.
But maybe this is precisely what the MAGA politicians want. Maybe some of them at least would rather see us form a globe-spanning anti-democratic bloc with Putin, Orban, and Western Europe's resurgent fascist parties. (Maybe they'd even add Xi in there too, since, for all Trump's xenophobic fear-mongering about China, he also says he admires the PRC's dictator and wants to emulate him in his use of the death penalty against drug offenders. No doubt Xi's persecution of his country's own Muslim minority also endears him to sections of MAGA.)
It would be perfectly consistent with their current rhetoric about democracy at home for MAGA to form such an authoritarian bloc, after all. It would also square with their opposition to supporting our democratic allies abroad. I hope this is paranoia; I hope my warnings here will one day sound as crankish and absurd as parts of Mackinder do now to our ears. But perhaps they won't. Perhaps someone should be whispering in the ears of our leaders on Capitol Hill, as Mackinder urged that some "airy cherub" might do for the leaders of the European alliance in his era:
"Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island:
Who rules the World-Island commands the World."
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