Importance of Heartland
Mackinder attached greater importance to the heartland than either to the inner or the outer crescent.
According to him heartland was a vast area of Arctic and interior drainage, surrounded by physical barriers on
all sides except on the west which provided it the essential security from outside attack.
Vast size
Source
of power ;self-sufficiency in
food and raw materials
Importance of
Heartland
Central
location
The chances of defense
Inaccessibility
Mackinder hoped that the heartland would soon be covered with a rail-road network which would
replace the horse and camel as means of transport.
The predictions
Mackinder believed that a great land power would emerge in the heartland
and expand towards the
marginal lands of Eurasia and from there to the rest of the world. In 1904 he did not anticipate that the fear of
world domination would come from the pivot state, Russia, but visualized instead that Germany might attempt
to control the heartland and become the ruler of world island and eventually of the world.
He pointed out that it
was through the north European plain that the heartland could be penetrated by any outside power.
But by 1943 he found it necessary to revise his original idea. In the Second World War both the U.S.A.
and the U.S.S.R. demonstrated their increasing military strength and political significance. This made
Mackinder to realize that the threat of world domination might come from the pivot state itself, namely, the
Soviet Union. Before that Germany had made unsuccessful attempts to invade and conquer Russia.
While Great Britain and her allies paid little or no attention to the heartland theory between the two
world wars, Germany found in it an argument for its policy of expansion towards the east and its attack on,
Russia in the early years of the World War II. It may be noted that on its publication in 1919 the heartland
theory was ignored by all except a handful of people in the universities. But on its republication in 1944, it was
read
carefully by many people, especially in Britain and America, who offered a critical evaluation of the
theory.
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