The Meaning of the Atlantic : 69 



that the country that controlled this area, to which he gave the 

 highly colored designation "Heartland," could expect to control the 

 great central land mass of the Eurasian continent and finally to domi- 

 nate the world. 



MacKinder's ideas were seized upon by a German general named 

 Haushofer just before World War II. Haushofer appropriated them 

 and embellished them with Nazi philosophy and expounded them 

 under the title "Geopolitik" which he claimed constituted a new sci- 

 ence. The theory was so simple that Hitler could understand it and 

 so biased that he could accept it as part of his deluded system. 



Despite its obvious errors and the fact that it was discredited along 

 with many other elements of Nazi philosophy, the MacKinder-Haus- 

 hofer view has probably had some influence on our thinking. There 

 is a point at which the MacKinder view looks quite impressive, but 

 on examination the concept of the so-called "Heartland" turns out to 

 have many difficulties. In the first place the territory is so far re- 

 moved from the shores of the ocean and the general centers of popu- 

 lation that transportation to and from the area is a distinct problem. 

 In the second place land transportation is many times more expen- 

 sive than water transportation and probably always will be. In the 

 third place only a fraction of the so-called "Heartland" is endowed 

 with natural resources; some of it, in addition to being inaccessible, 

 is arid; a great part of it is subject to the extreme climate character- 

 istic of the interior of a continent. 



Reduced to its simplest terms, the Mackinder idea can be recog- 

 nized as the extreme of landlubber thinking. It advances the opinion 

 that any area of land must be more valuable than an equal area of 

 water. Actually, as far as our present position is concerned, as long 

 as we and our allies and natural associates preserve the integrity of 

 the Atlantic and the access by all forms of travel from the seacoasts 

 into the interior of the various countries, we will be secure. We will 

 retain our access to the oceans and through the oceans with the 

 world. Even though some portion of central Asia may become devel- 

 oped as a mining and industrial area, the territory as a whole will 

 probably remain what it has always been — backward, remote, difficult 

 of access, rural, primitive, uneducated, superstitious and emotionally 

 erratic, the serf of the cities nearer the seaboard, the victim of 

 tyranny. The nation or nations that control the Atlantic and the 

 lands adjacent control the future. 



It is plain today that the Atlantic is the world's most important 

 ocean; a newer and larger Mediterranean for all the continents; the 



