School of War - Ep 174: Hal Brands on the Long Struggle for Eurasia

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

Hal Brands, Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and author of The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World, joins the show to discuss the continued relevance of geopolitics. ▪️ Times      •      01:29 Introduction     •      01:54 Twentieth century     •     03:29 Advent of geopolitical theory     •      07:08 Land versus sea      •      13:09 Authoritarianism        •      17:40 Struggle for power     •      20:30 Burdens of defense      •      23:25 Eurasia        •      27:50 Different politics     •      36:09 “…a kind of American realism”  Follow along on Instagram or YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

It has been a dream on and off for many Americans over the years to stay clear of troubles overseas. My guest today, Hal Brands, returning to the show, makes the case, however, that the struggle for Eurasia is, whether we like it or not, the struggle for the control of the world. And so America has an enduring interest in the outcomes of such competitions. We'll talk about the history of this idea and how it applies today. Let's get into it. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in history. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the grave situation in grand.

We'll fight on the beaches, we'll fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter, and feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. MacLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War.

I am delighted to welcome back to the show today. Hal Brands, the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins Seis. He's a columnist from Bloomberg. He's a senior fellow at AEI. He's the author most recently of the Eurasian century, Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the making of the modern world. How the heck are you? I'm doing great, Aaron. Thank you for having. it's always good to have you on the show. You've been on the show actually to discuss the subject of this most recent book before.

We had a whole episode, I want to say, at least most of an episode, about McKinder. And I have to say, Halford McKinder's so hot right now. Like, you see a lot of McKinder out there. What's up with that? Did you do that? It's a Eurasian moment, you know, and so people are going back to the grades on this. I think, you know, I've been writing about McKinder sort of on and off in the past three or four years. So that might have a tiny bit to do with it.

But candidly, I think it's just the state of world politics where wherever you look, you've got bad guys that are trying to upset the balance in crucial Eurasian regions. They're working together in creating this league of Eurasian autocracies, which is sort of kind of what McKendor was warning about 120 years ago. And so it's one of those things where history has come back around in a way that makes it more relevant than ever. I want to get into that. Maybe we should start with just a quick reminder.

about the basic facts of McKinder for those who have missed your your previous episode. I also did an episode with Aaron O'Connell called Geopolitics 101, where we talked about McKinder. He's been a sort of theme of the show and the school of thought that he gives birth to, or at least heavily catalyzes a theme of the show from its inception. It's something, it's an argument that runs throughout your book that I want to get into today as well, which I thought was really interesting and sort of obvious in retrospect, but I'd never really thought of it in these terms for myself before, which is that there are really two schools of geopolitical thought.

There's a democracy-oriented school that is, say, geopolitical thinkers who live in democracies and who are advocating for the cause of democracies one way or the other, even though they're perceived, usually within those democracies as hard-edged realists.

And then there's an authoritarian school with House Hoffer and others. So I'd like to get to that, too. But maybe we just start real quick for those new to the conversation, Halford McKinder, seems like kind of a funny name. What's his deal?

Yeah, if you haven't heard of him, don't feel bad. He's not a household name in the U.S. these days. I like to tell people he's the most important strategist they've never heard of. He was a British intellectual and politician who lived basically during the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. He really helped found geography as an academic discipline. And from there was one of the progenitors, what we would call geopolitics. He called it something different, but basically the study of how the physical features of the Earth

relate to the struggle for global power. And he's most famous for a lecture that he gave in 1904 called the Geographical Pivot of History, in which he essentially argued that the future of world politics was going to be defined by big titanic clashes between aggressive powers pushing out, from the heart of Eurasia toward the margins and the oceans beyond.

And then the endangered countries along the edge of Eurasia, which would fight back and which would work with offshore powers with Britain, later with the United States to try to hold the balance. And McKender got a fair amount wrong in that lecture. He was mostly worried about Russia, whereas for the first half of the 20th century, it was really Germany that was doing most of the nasty work in terms of disturbing the European and the Eurasian balance. But you got the big picture right when it came to the 20th century. And World War I, World War II, and the Cold War are all really struggles McKimder could have understood and did understand that he died and the Cold War was just getting

started because they featured groups of Eurasian aggressors, Eurasian autocracies that were basically trying to conquer Eurasia or large swaths of it and use it as a platform for global dominance. And he is in some ways, though not really explicitly, I guess, reacting to a conversation that's, if not dominated by a man named Alfred Thayer, Mahan, certainly heavily shaped by him. I guess Mahan is an older contemporary of McKinder and writes his big books, sort of as McKinder is coming on to the scene. And Mahan, of course, is the sea power guy. He's the guy who he is a geopolitician of source or geopolitical analyst. And he makes the case that, you know, just to heavily bulbarize. It's all about sea power. Sea power states have big advantages. Here's how it works. Here's, here's, here's how to do it.

And I always took McKinder. I guess it's in the lecture, but it's especially in his big book, Democratic ideals in reality where it's really quite explicit. Part of McIndor's argument is you guys all think that see power is the future. Sea power. Sea powers are just dominant. And that's making you complacent and you also all happen to be democracies for the most part the sea powers happen to be democracies and i'm here to tell you that you have some political disadvantages when it comes to you know the Kaiser and other authoritarian types but you also are underestimating the potency of land power with the evolution of technology rail which you you talk about a lot in your book how and then air mckinder interestingly makes air power an extension of land power which i think it's one of those

things where he's riffing on things that aren't quite clear yet it's a really interesting idea and it's not totally correct. But, you know, maybe that's where I'll turn it over to you is, you know, where does this shake out, this debate between what's what's the stronger form of geopolitical power, sea power or land power? There are really two related debates or conversations that are happening. And one is the argument about whether land power or sea power is dominant. And you're right. Mahana actually comes along before McKendor with some of his big works. Then he's later reacting to McKinder and all these guys had read each other and we're familiar with each other's ideas and you know, Mahana's right that you need sea power to have global mobility. And certainly

if you are the United States and you're worried about emerging imbalances of power within Eurasia, well, you're not going to get there without sea power. I think what McKinder was pointing out was that the possibilities for the projection of land power were more interesting and bigger than they had been really since the time of Genghis Khan, for the time you get to the early 20th century, because once the Trans-Siberian Network Railroad is completed, you have the possibility of projecting power rapidly from one side of the landmass to the other. And Germany, Prussia, had already demonstrated in the 1860s how a disciplined,

sort of well-oiled military machine could use railways to achieve concentrations of force at a decisive moment and to inflict a shocking defeat on its adversary, Austria in that case. And so, you know, they were both right in a sense. What's interesting, though,

and where this connects to the second conversation is that it is, it's a third guy, Nicholas Speakman, and it basically comes along and says, well, you're both wrong. These fights for dominance are amphibious fights because you can't get to the battlefields of Eurasia if you're the United States. And that Spigman was originally Dutch, but he ended up in the U.S. and really made his name as an American strategist.

You can't get to Eurasia without sea power and air power, but you can't win the war on land without land power. And that connected to the second conversation, which was what parts of Eurasia mattered most. And so for McKinder, it was the pivot area, or what he would later call the heartland, which is basically Russia and Central Asia. And he was thinking about sort of, you know, this Russian steamroller that would draw on the resources of this vast swath of Eurasia and push outward to the margins. Spigman writing in the 1940s said, well, yeah, but if you look at the history of the last half century,

it's actually the Rimland power, powers along the margins of Eurasia, where there is, There's more economic dynamism. There's more industrialization. Those are the folks you really have to watch out for because they can harness big, powerful economies to military machines. And they're better at developing both land power and sea power, which is what Japan and Germany tried to do, particularly in World War II. And so those are the two big debates that are going on.

But they all agree that Eurasia is the key theater of international politics. And they all agree that you need decisive interventions from the offshore powers if you're going to hold the balance within your Asia. I have an embarrassing confession, which is, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm an American. I was a Marine, so the Department of the Navy is kind of my thing. And I actively prefer reading McKinder to reading Mahan. I think McKinder is the better writer. I actually enjoy reading McKinder.

It's like it's something that I would and have done for fun. I cannot say that about Mahan and I regret, maybe it's just a, maybe it's just me. Maybe it's just a foible. I find his prose. kind of pretentious, and you have a sort of summary of his very interesting, in terms of its substance, very interesting long essay, short book has a series of magazine pieces that are collected in the book called The Problem of Asia. And your summary is so much clearer, in my view, in my personal humble opinion, than his own presentation of his ideas, which I wouldn't,

not that your summary of McKinder isn't good. I just think McKinder does a fantastic job of explaining McKinder. And not clear to me that's always the case with Mahindor. Mekindra wrote a few things over the course of his career, and they were very powerful and very concise. I mean, he's really known for three lecture slash article length things he did, and then one very short. Maham wrote faster than most people can read. He wrote for money, and so he was constantly writing more and more and more. he wasn't a particularly elegant writer or particularly concise writer either. And so if you're trying to put together the essence of his thought, you're basically

trying to pluck bits and pieces of it from a bunch of different books and articles. And it's not always the easiest task. So you just charted out very concisely yourself in the last 10 minutes or so, this school of thought that with, you know, important variation. and disagreements, but nevertheless, it's a cohesive school of thought that, you know, sort of kind of starts with Mahan through McKinder to Speakman, with Speakman being the, you know, unfortunately, his great long book, you know, it's, it's not a bad book at all. It's just it's largely about, you know, what the mechanics of defending South America would be, which I don't know,

maybe that's more relevant today in 2025 all of a sudden. But it, you know, it's a long argument that's very set in its time in the 1940s about why hemispheric defense with technology that they won't work. the principles of it, as you point out, seem to basically solve the problems of McKinder and bring McKinder into an American context in a way that is true, like is actually strategically true. That's the one school of thought. And then you, I think very clearly in the book, make a case that that's running in parallel with a second geopolitical school of thought beginning in the 19th century and then going right to the Nazis, which really renders geopolitics as a discipline, kind of anathema in polite company. Tell us about the authoritarian geopolitical analysts.

So there was always this separate thread of folks, most of, many of whom were from continental Europe. So they didn't think about geopolitics through the sea power lens. In some cases, they didn't think of it through the lens of what we would now call liberal democracy and the way that folks out of the Anglo-American tradition did. And they created a geopolitical tradition. that was much more wrapped up in notions of territorial aggrandizement and conquest. It was frequently related to sort of a blood and soil conception of nationalism, and it was ultimately discredited because it got picked up by German conservatives,

notably Karl Haushofer, who were then sort of used. used by the Nazis and used the Nazis as a way of tying geopolitical ideas to programs of German expansion in the 1930s and 1940s and giving those programs of expansion sort of a pseudo-scientific rationale. And so in some ways, House Huffer is actually like the bizarro world version of McKinner. And so what McKinder had warned was that if a single state or group of states got together and dominated Eurasia, that would be really bad news for everybody who liked freedom around the world. And Househopper said, that's a great idea. Let's give that one to go. And so he articulates a school of geopolitics that is basically about Germany and a number of other

revisionist powers carving up Eurasia and Africa and then using them to take on the British Empire. Now, needless to say, this school of thought, for good reasons, came into disrepute during and after the Second World War. The upshot of that, though, was that it also cast McKinder and Speakman and some of the work they had done into disrepute as well. And so there was a sense that if you were into geopolitics, you were into this very bloody-minded school of thought that had served as a proxy for programs of expansion. I think the defense that McKinder and Mahan and Speeastern and Speeastern and.

all would have given. They wouldn't have put it in exactly this terms. They would have said, yeah, look, geopolitics is a rough business because anytime you're handling great power relations, there's a certain tough-mindedness that is required. But what we are ultimately trying to do is create a balance of power that permits the survival and flourishing of liberal societies, of freedom, whether that's in the UK and the British Empire, that was the political entity. that McKinder was interested in defending, or in the United States. I was really worried about in the run up to World War II. Yeah, and I always took them to be the two of them together,

to sort of position themselves as friends of liberalism who were trying to explain truths with which liberalism was just congenitally never going to be comfortable with because it sort of gives the lie to some basic principles of liberalism. Like, no, this is how the world actually works. And by the way, if you don't, if you don't appreciate that, you're going to get your lunch money taken. In the same way, I've always thought the military service is sort of healthy for a liberal democracy because it cycles a certain portion of the population in theory through a world where, you know,

the things that we hold dear in a liberal democratic society, equality, you know, all these sorts of things. Well, they're just not that applicable on the battlefield and some other things are. And you have to realize that that's part of the fabric of human life. And if you actually like a sort of rule of law-based society that's basically fair, it's basically compassionate, you know, it's a nice place to live where anyone can succeed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, well, you got to have some awareness of the alternatives and some awareness of the basics of power. And that makes you potentially into a kind of villain.

But as you point out, it's all sort of in, in, in, in, of the broader liberal project? Yeah, I think these things have to go together. So there is no effective defense of democracy or liberal values without an understanding of geopolitics. But if geopolitics becomes unmoored from democratic values and liberal norms, then it can easily go in a very, very dark direction. And I think what, what Speakman in particular was trying to do was think about the

relationship between these two things at a time when when the world was quite literally on the fire right it was it was hardly inconceivable in 1940 41 when he was drafting his big book america strategy world world politics or 1942 when it was eventually published that you know the bad guys were going to run the world and so he was really focusing on motivating americans to take stroke take seriously the fact that sort of the struggle for power as he called it, was ongoing. It was going to persist even after World War II ended. And they had to take it seriously if their values were to survive.

And one of the things he proposed in this book is he basically said, hey, you know, we're using the Soviets against the Nazis right now. Like, we might have to use the Germans against the Soviets after this war is over. And to a lot of people, that probably sounded kind of insane in the context of 1942. And of course, it's exactly what happened. And he predicts the rise of change. China, right? Any posits, I think, the same thing about Japan. We're going to have to use Japan, which was, I mean, I think that the reviews at the time, many of them were shocked and kind of

horrified. Yeah, including, I mean, we're getting deep into the intellectual history here, but this guy, Edward Meade Earl, who was the editor of Makers of Modern Strategy, this classic strategic studies, the founding studies text that was published in 1943, who knew Spiekman quite well and wrote a really nasty review of his book, basically accusing him of trying to import Prussianism, intellectual Prussianism into the United States. And it just gives you a sense that even people who were not at all appalled by the notion that you needed to take military affairs and diplomacy seriously thought that there was a really hard edge to some of the stuff that the Speakman and the other advocates of a geopolitical school of thinking were talking about.

One of the themes that we've touched on a couple times and it's important in your book is this link between sea power and democracy, not just in the 20th century. There seems to be the correlation is high. Sea powers seem to be more democratic than not. Land-based great powers less likely to be democracies, more likely to be something else. Why? What's going on there? Well, there's a lot of scholarship that has been produced on this. And some people who you've probably had on the show have, I'm sure, talked about this in the past.

But one of the sort of the classical arguments for why this is the case is that the burdens of defense are different for sea powers than they are for land powers. And so if you are a country with long exposed land borders and powerful enemies on the side of those land borders, you have to develop big armies to defend yourself. And big armies tend to promote the emergence of sort of a military caste within society. They have sort of a troubled record of trying to overthrow democratic systems. they can be used as tools of oppression against the people. And so big armies in general are thought to be, if not inimical, then unfriendly to traditions of liberty. Sea power is a little bit different, right?

Sea power can be used to facilitate a nation's trade by securing the trade route onto with trade routes on which it happens. That's generally good for the expansion of a merchant class and a middle class and other things that are sort of politically supportive of democracy. It's also just a lot harder to turn ships against the people than it is to turn tanks, for instance, against the people. And so that's one of the arguments. The other sort of related argument is just that there's long been a sense of a strain of thinking,

you know, among America's founders, among a number of other sort of key advocates of republicanism and democracy, that you need a certain security, a certain immunity from exterior threats if democracies are to survive, because otherwise you get overgrown military establishments and intelligence establishments and all the things that are hostile to liberty. That's a more contested idea, but there's probably something to it in the American case. So you have these really interesting discussions of, as you put it, the intellectual history of these ideas and of the geopolitical, geopolitical debate or debate amongst analysts in the book. But you also kind of run through the major events of the 20th century,

which is that as the title of the book makes clear, is, is, it, you do make the point, it is the American century, that there's a way in which that, that title makes sense. But the American century is also at the same time, the Eurasian century, that Eurasia was and in the 21st century remains,

in your argument, the center of gravity, the main stage, you know, call it what you want of human, human destiny. Why? Why, why, why, why, why conceive of things and of all the ways in which you might conceive,

of global events, why is Eurasia at the center of things? And like, tell us how that plays out, for example, and say World War I or World War II. So Eurasia is at the center of things, because it is where most of the world's people and most of its economic resources and thus most of its military potential has traditionally been found. And so, you know, as we've talked about, the great nightmare of the 20th century was that an aggressor, a group of aggressors would manage to grab hold of a big chunk of Eurasia, and then they would use that as a platform to harass and intimidate and perhaps conquer other countries around the world. That sort of thing plays out in World War I, World War II in the Cold War.

And what those conflicts make clear is that there is no combination of purely Eurasian powers or even Eurasian plus nearby offshore powers that can hold the balance when these groups of aggressors get up ahead of steam. The British and the French were on their way to losing World War I before the United States comes in, right? Germany conquers most of Europe between 1939 and 1941 and so on and so forth.

And so it's only the United States that can maintain a balance of power within Eurasia. It's only this great power that's located, on the other side of the world that can make the difference. And these things are actually related. The fact that the United States is so far from the other great powers

gives it a degree of security in its neighborhood that allows it to, you know, send its army to fight in France as opposed to sending its army to patrol the southern border with Mexico. And so in each of these conflicts, it is ultimately the United States

that anchors the coalition that beats back these groups of Eurasian challengers. And what the United States does during the third come, so during the Cold War, and it says, look, we've seen this movie twice before where the Eurasian balance of power collapses and we have to come in and reset it. Wouldn't it be cheaper over time

if we just stay here and prevent the balance of power from collapsing again? And that's the genesis of all of the commitments that the United States makes, during the early Cold War, particularly the alliance structures that basically spring up in the rimlands of Eurasia and are meant to deny the Soviet Union access to those regions while also tamping down historical tensions within them. And all of those things basically constitute the foundation of the liberal international order as we know it today. And so you had a Eurasian century

that also became an American century because it was only the United States. that could play this critical role. So let's work through what's changed in the 21st century, but also what, you know, sort of the heart of your argument, what hasn't, what about the logic continues? I mean, one thing, well, one thing that changes in 1945, and this is an ongoing intellectual project of mine,

is to think through the implications of this. It's obviously the introduction of nuclear weapons, which is something new under the sun in strategic terms, in terms of their destructive power. And then as was observed immediately, at the time, the simultaneous development of rocket technology, and so the ability to deliver them anywhere in the world within minutes really does change everything. And so that's sort of theme one or question one for you is with the evolution of technology, with nuclear being the

first item on the list, but we could add all sorts of other things that just make the world a smaller place in all sorts of important ways. How much can any of this old logic really continue to apply. Why do these things still matter? Why are we sitting here talking about sea power, et cetera, when it's really air power and you can cross the Pacific Ocean in a couple of hours? So that's question one. And question two, of course, is, you know, they're all the gone. The Kaiser, the Nazis, the Imperial Japanese, the Soviet Union, they're gone. Yeah, we have the CCP now. That seems to be an issue. There are some other issues. But the politics are at least different from what they used to be.

So one, technology is different in the world's a smaller place, which seems to suggest that we need a new paradigm, or at least a freshening of the geopolitical paradigm. And two, the politics are different. Can you kind of walk us through what you think is meaningfully different and why you argue that actually a lot of things remain the same? Let me start with the second one. And I would say that the reason the politics are different, at least the reason that they look different is that the bad guys are still constraints.

by American power and by the strictures of the liberal order. We don't have a sense of what Chinese behavior or Russian behavior, internal or external, would look like in a world where American power was broken because the United States and its allies still exert checks on what China and Russia can do on the international scene. I think, unfortunately, we're getting a preview of what they might do on the international scene if the American order were broken. Just look at what Putin is doing to Ukraine. And so just because, you know, Russia has not invaded all of Europe or something like that, it doesn't mean that there will never again be a program of radical revisionism of the sort that we saw, you know, in 1914 or in 1939. It just means that those programs of

radical revisionism have so far been contained and suppressed and prevented from emerging in full form by the United States. And I'd like to keep it. On the second or on this first question, I guess, you can take this one in a lot of different directions. I guess the way I'll try to tackle this is by pointing out that technology always changes the meaning of geography, right? Whether though that's the way that railroads shrink distances across big land masses, whether that's the United States or Russia, you know,

in the 19th century or in the way the nuclear weapons do that you refer to. But they typically get integrated into existing patterns of competition. And so if we look at the Cold War, the

U.S. chooses to deploy nuclear weapons in a way that, that will sustain the Eurasian balance of power that it is trying to uphold. And it does so by basically harnessing those nuclear weapons to U.S. alliance structures in ways that allow it to threaten the Soviet Union and its allies

with catastrophic devastation if they use force, even in areas where the U.S. and its allies were conventionally inferior. And so the U.S. basically uses nuclear weapons as part of a scheme of extended deterrence that is meant to lock in stability around the margins of Eurasia. And this brings me to sort of a larger intellectual point, which is that you will often hear people refer to the experience of the Cold War as evidence that nuclear weapons are

stabilizing. And I don't think that's right. I think what the Cold War shows is that nuclear weapons can be stabilizing when used within a certain geopolitical context by a certain state. During the Cold War, a state that was interested in preserving the status quo and deterring aggression used nuclear weapons as means of doing that. There is no guarantee that nuclear weapons would have been used in the same way, had the Soviet Union or Mao's China or some other radical regime been the first nuclear state or the dominant nuclear state. And so technology does have an impact, obviously, on global affairs,

but that impact is not independent of prior patterns of geopolitics and is not independent of the intent that states have on the international scene. Yeah. Your colleagues, Dan Blumenthal and Kyle Balser were just on the show, make a very strong case that follows from what you just said, that the Chinese nuclear buildup that we are watching today has a very clear geopolitical goal. That is to say it is designed to break China out of the first island chain by making clear to the states that are in that chain, the states that China sees as encircling it as functions of American power.

The American security umbrella can no longer protect them in the way that it could, say, a generation ago or before Chinese nuclear weapons got to the point where they are going to be soon. And it's just it's an illustration of exactly what you're saying, I think. Yeah, I think that's right. And I mean, we're getting a sense of the way that nuclear coercion can be used in the service of revisionist objective, right? And we're seeing that in China's case. We're seeing in Ukraine as well, where, you know, I think Vladimir Putin has successfully used the threat of nuclear escalation to keep the United States and other Western powers from intervening more directly in that war, which is meant to bring about the destruction of Ukrainian state. And so, So they, you know, nuclear weapons haven't permitted the U.S. and its friends from giving Ukraine lots of weapons and other sorts of support. But my hunch is that if we live in a world where Russia did not have nuclear weapons, the U.S. and NATO already would have intervened militarily in Ukraine. You know, a point that I've never made explicitly in any of the times we've discussed

geopolitics on this show, but which I think is worth making is that, you know, I came to this kind of thinking and these authors as an adult, really only after coming to Washington, sort of in the middle of my career. I've received no education in these books. And I studied a little bit of international politics as a student, but, you know, no one ever, I wouldn't have known, I wouldn't have recognized any of these names. Maybe Mahan. I was aware that Mahan had existed, but nobody ever told me to actually read them. And coming to Washington and sort of being in Republican foreign policy circles, these books are kind of, I don't want to say they're passed around like Samzadat because it's not actually something you have to hide, but it's sort of like

here, you should, you know, have you read McKinder? You should probably read McKinner. You should probably read McKinder. Like, that's a thing that actually happened to me when I got to the Senate. And it's like, oh, look at this. This actually makes sense. For the first time, here's a, here's an account of international politics that is neither a kind of hopeful utopian vision of what the world ought to be, if only we could get everyone to obey international law, the sort of liberal vision, nor is it a kind of weird, highly theoretical, overly reductive vision of states where the question of government just doesn't matter because everyone just wants power and everyone's pursuing power. And there's nothing else really to think about. This school of geopolitical thought, particularly the articulations

of these three authors, and I would say, McKinder, your formulation is great, it's McKinder, who actually gets to the heart of the matter, even if he gets a bunch of details wrong. This this articulation of international politics as a world of power, but with real content and structure where regimes do matter. I had Nick Eberstadt, sorry, this is all AEI references with you here on the show, but Nick Eberstadt in the show recently made the point that, you know, the borders of Germany have varied wildly, substantially over the course of, you know, 150 years of a unified Germany. And there's some pretty good correlation between government type and border movement. And it's sort of hard to rule that factor out. And, you know, McKinder just takes that

in stride. It just sort of seems to be like these guys are right. This school of thought is like basically accurate and like kind of the correct position. And if we we wandered over into, you know, the world of political philosophy, you know, I think there's real coherence and sort of echoes there as well, this position of being a kind of conservative reminder, a lover of liberal society trying to remind liberals. This is great. I'm all for the rule of law. I'm all for these things. I want my children to be raised in the land where, you know, there's all these good things, but you got to remember this stuff. You got it, you got to remember how things actually work out there on the mean streets. And I'm, I just, I, I, I, I, this is my theory.

This is my pet theory that in these writers, there is the substance of a kind of American realism to borrow Walter Mead's phrase for it. That is actually the correct platform that we should use to reason about current events. I think that's right. And I think it's the combination of attention to power and attention to regime type or ideology or political values that makes this stuff so useful. And so, you know, these guys sort of bring the best of what we would now call realism in the sense that they are not naive about power realities. They are not naive about where international power comes from and how it is often rooted in things that you or I cannot control, like the physical features of the earth.

But they're also aware of the fact that the way power is wielded and the ends to which it is wielded can vary dramatically, depending on what sort of society you live in. And they were all arguing for what you might think of as sort of an aggressive use of power by the societies in which they lived, right? McKinder was a devoted supporter of the British Empire, right? Mahan and Speakman were, you know, good page. patriotic Americans. But I think the reason they were all comfortable with that is they believed that societies rooted in liberal values would wield power more responsible on the international stage than autocratic or totalitarian systems would. And I think the history of the last 120 years bears them out in that. Howe Brands, author of the Eurasian century, Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the

modern world. I think, is this, is this your fourth episode? It's something like that. I think so. I think this is number four. You may be the first to get to five here soon. We're going to finally have to break out the steak knives. I better start writing again. Hal, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.