HYBRID WARS 4. IN THE GREATER HEARTLAND (II)

(Please read Part I prior to this article)

“The Eurasian Balkans”

As promising of a potential that the Greater Heartland has in fulfilling what seems to be the world’s inevitable multipolar destiny, it runs the risk of being held back by the adroit manipulation of its “Eurasian Balkan” socio-political vulnerabilities. To bring the reader up to speed real quick, this is the idea first espoused by Zbigniew Brzezinski that the mass of territory spanning from North Africa to Central Asia is riskily threatened by large-scale fragmentation along identity-based lines (ethnic, religious, historical, etc.), mirroring on a much larger scale the demographic “irregularities” that intensified the fratricidal Balkan Wars of the early 1990s.

HYBRID WARS 4. IN THE GREATER HEARTLAND (I)

(Please read Parts I, II, and III prior to this article)

The Crossroads Of The Multipolar World

Halford Mackinder

Redefining The Heartland:

The “Greater Heartland” acquires its premier strategic and economic importance due to being the supercontinental fulcrum of multipolar integration. As was mentioned at the end of Part III, there’s a direct overlap between Russia’s Eurasian Union and China’s New Silk Road, and the countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan presently fall under both connective umbrellas. To those attuned with geopolitical theory, these three states noticeably correlate with the broad territory that early 20^th-century British strategist Halford Mackinder termed the “Heartland”, which he defined as the geopolitical pivot of Eurasia. More contemporary strategists narrowed the region down to the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, but the author feels that this is presently insufficient to accommodate for the changing dynamics of the evolving world order, and thus proposes a modification of the concept to include Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan as well. This redefined version of Mackinder’s original thesis moves the center of geopolitical gravity in a more southwards direction (by contrast, Mackinder’s broad contours included all of Siberia and most of the Russian Far East) in order to reflect more relevant areas of geopolitical competition between the unipolar and multipolar worlds in the context of the New Cold War.