The Revenge of Geography Read Free Page B

as well as the Channel ports along the French coast, and the Baltic provinces of Russia, Ukraine, Asia Minor, and Mesopotamia (to be connected to Berlin by a great railway). Employing Ratzel’s ideas, Kjellén categorized human societies in racial, biological terms, conceiving of the state in terms of the
Volk
, which, if sufficiently virile and dynamic, would require an especially large amount of living space. It is the very glibness and windiness inhabiting the thought of Ratzel and Kjellén that a later generation of murderers would make use of to justify their acts. Ideas matter, for good and for bad, and hazy ideas can be especially dangerous. Whereas legitimate geography shows us what we are up against in the challenges we face around the world, Ratzel’s and Kjellén’s is an illegitimate geography that annihilates the individual and replaces him with the vast racial multitude.
    This is all but prologue to the life of Karl Haushofer, the geopolitician of Nazism and steadfast admirer of Mackinder. The tragic perversion of Mackinder’s work by Haushofer, as well as the dangerposed by Nazi
Geopolitik
, is elegantly told in a largely forgotten but classic work of political science,
Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power
by Robert Strausz-Hupé, published in 1942. Strausz-Hupé, an Austrian immigrant to the United States, was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and a U.S. ambassador to four countries (including Turkey) during the Cold War years. In 1955 in Philadelphia, he founded the Foreign Policy Research Institute, with which I have been loosely affiliated for two decades. Strausz-Hupé’s book, written before the tide turned in the Allies’ favor in World War II, 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. Strausz-Hupé thus rescues the reputation of Mackinder and the discipline itself, while performing an act of individual agency in doing his intellectual part to win the war.
    Major General Professor Doktor Karl Haushofer was born in 1869 in Munich. His grandfather, uncle, and father all wrote about cartography and travel. Thus was his life marked. Haushofer joined the Bavarian army and in 1909 was appointed artillery instructor to the Japanese army. He became infatuated with the military rise of Japan, with which he advocated a German alliance. Haushofer fought in World War I as a brigade commander, and had as his aide the Nazi Rudolf Hess, to whom he would later dedicate several books. After the war Haushofer was appointed to the chair of geography and military science at the University of Munich, where Hess followed him as a disciple. It was through Hess that Haushofer met the “rising agitator” Adolf Hitler, whom Haushofer would visit and provide academic briefings on geopolitics while Hitler was imprisoned at Landsberg fortress, following the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Hitler was writing
Mein Kampf
at the time, and as a partially educated man, he needed, despite his intuition, to know more about the real world. And here was this university professor who could fillsome of the gaps in his knowledge. Chapter 14 of
Mein Kampf
, which defines Nazi foreign policy and the Nazi ideal of
Lebensraum
, was possibly influenced by Haushofer, who was in turn influenced by, among others, Ratzel, Kjellén, and especially Mackinder. For Mackinder had written that world history has always been made by the great outward thrusts of landlocked peoples located near Eastern Europe and the Heartland of Eurasia. 1
    Strausz-Hupé takes us on a journey along the line of thought by which Haushofer came to be mesmerized by his contemporary Mackinder. Mackinder, though obsessed with land power, never actually denigrated the importance of sea power. But he was