Page 2 of 2 The rise of Rimland?
By Robert M Cutler
The names of its representatives are well known: Algeria's Ahmed Ben Bella,
Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, Indonesia's Sukarno, and others. Iraq's Saddam was the
last.
So this half-century mark seems indicative, but of what? One reason it begins
to stand out so clearly is that other things begun about 50 years ago are also
coming full circle. Although the Sino-Soviet split can be traced to Joseph
Stalin's wrong-headed revolutionary strategy in China between the two world
wars, nevertheless it was in the early 1960s, following Nikita Khrushchev's
1956 denunciation of Stalin, that the split became public and undeniable to all
but a few.
The Sino-Soviet split in turn made possible the US-China rapprochement
inaugurated by president Richard Nixon; and while in the early 1970s a commonly
used phrase was Nixon, by going
to Beijing in 1972, had "played the China card [against Russia]", China is
today increasingly able to play the Russian card against the US as well as the
American card against Russia. Within the past decade, China signed its first
treaty with Russia in the last half-century, and one that includes the classic
phrase "Good-Neighborly Relations" in the title.
Today, in one of those impossible-to-invent scenarios, China finds itself
perfectly positioned to take advantage of the synergy between (1) Russia's need
for export markets for hydrocarbon energy, where Europe is slow-growth and East
Asia is accelerating; and (2) its own surplus of US dollars with which to
purchase and invest in a discount shopping mart of world-economic
crisis-depressed industries.
So what has this to do with Iraq? And who was Nicolas Spykman? Spykman
(1893-1943) was a Dutch-born American professor of international relations at
Yale University who took English geographer Sir Halford John Mackinder's idea
of the Heartland being surrounded by an Inner Crescent (comprising Europe,
Arabia, the wider Middle East and Asia), criticized and internally
differentiated the crescent, distinguishing in Asia, for example, between the
spaces occupied by Indian and by Chinese civilizations. He renamed it the
Rimland, and turned Mackinder on his head by asserting that "who controls the
Rimland rules Eurasia ... [and consequently] the destinies of the world".
On a map, the Rimland outside Europe looked at the time as if it were unified
by little other than the British Empire. Yet it is not for nothing that Spykman
is sometimes called the "godfather" of (George F Kennan's) "containment
theory". His Rimland is meant to contain Mackinder's Heartland. And that is
where the before-our-very-eyes shift in Iraqi energy and foreign commercial
policy achieves its world-historical significance.
The Iraqi energy contracts would be impossible without the political security
of the Turkish-Iraqi rapprochement. (Some have even suggested the word
"integration".) That rapprochement mends a broken link in the Rimland.
The main winners in this shift are the corporate descendents of the British and
American companies that were part of the TPC 80 years ago (but not only them).
The main losers are the others: France and Russia; although the latter was not
a player early last century, it become one during the 1960s in concert with the
French.
Although industrial trusts these days dictate states' foreign policy more than
the other way around, it is possible to see, in the co-opting of Chinese and
other Asian energy companies to these projects, a pattern whereby the North
Atlantic powers and the North Pacific powers cooperate against the powers of
Mackinder's Eurasian Heartland.
It bears mentioning that the North Atlantic powers are not limited to the US
and the United Kingdom, but also include Norway (by way of StatOilHydro), Italy
(by way of Eni), and other smaller European state companies, just as smaller
Asian state companies are also included: Japan, Indonesia and South Korea, for
example; not to mention (once again) China.
These are companies that were not players when the "game" began a century ago
because they did not have the educated technicians, industrial plant and access
to capital that a century of social and economic evolution has now brought
them.
Those North Atlantic powers even include Germany, which is not present in the
region's oil patch but whose national champion RWE is the moving force (along
with Austria's OMV) in promoting the Nabucco pipeline: which, recall from
above, the new Turkish-Iraqi cooperation is helping to fill with gas from Iraqi
Kurdistan.
Such is the emerging macro-structure that will govern international relations
for the next decade and a half, until it becomes clear what is the outcome of
the ongoing turmoil in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and (sooner or later)
Uzbekistan. For those countries represent a geographical wedge that could
divide the Rimland in two.
But even Russia surely knows that their eruption in mass social unrest would
not necessarily be to the advantage of any Eurasian land power; such an
eruption would constitute itself a new Eurasian land power, transnational and
trans-societal in scope. Such changes have already made inroads among the
Muslim peoples of Russia's North Caucasus. This does not stop Russia today from
preventing concerted action against Iran in the UN Security Council (even
though one of the best ways to understand present-day Iran is to study the
history of the Safavid Empire of the 16th and 17th centuries).
This is not any anti-French or even anti-Russian plot. According to George
Liska, the European-born American theorist of international relations, the
"structure of international relations" comports ever-changing triangles,
spanning the centuries, among land and sea powers whose strategies are
determined as much by geography as by anything else.
Any seafaring North Atlantic and the North Pacific powers would have common
interests vis-a-vis any Eurasian land power. It is Spykman's Rimland against
Mackinder's Heartland, although in the details it is much more complicated than
that.
It will take until the early 2020s before we will have a better idea about the
resolution or irresolution of the social eruption in the "wedge" identified
above. That outcome will in turn condition the evolution of the first post-Cold
War international system's third phase (we now live on the cusp of the second),
until a crisis in the early 2040s may lead to a system-wide transformation that
we cannot yet well imagine.
Dr Robert M Cutler (http://www.robertcutler.org), educated at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The University of Michigan, has
researched and taught at universities in the United States, Canada, France,
Switzerland, and Russia. Now senior research fellow in the Institute of
European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Carleton University, Canada, he also
consults privately in a variety of fields.
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about
sales, syndication and
republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
