06/09/15 – Alfred McCoy – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest today is Alfred W. McCoy.
He holds the Harrington Chair in History at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
He's the editor of Endless Empire, Spain's Retreat, Europe's Eclipse, America's Decline, and author of Policing America's Empire, the U.S., the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, as well as The Politics of Heroin, A Question of Torture, and quite a few more, I believe, certainly at least one more on torture.
Welcome back to the show, Alfred.
How are you, sir?
Fine, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
Very happy to have you back on the show here, and very pleased to read this very interesting and very important article here.
It ran at tomdispatch.com, of course, originally, and rerun at antiwar.com slash Engelhardt.
And it's called Washington's Great Game and Why It's Failing.
And so I guess maybe this sounds silly to you, Professor, but the first thing that I learned in reading this thing was the actual definition of geopolitics.
I thought that that was just a word that obnoxious people used when they were talking about global politics, international politics.
But no, it's all about geography.
Who rules the steppes?
Who rules the river?
Who rules the seas?
Who rules this, that, and the pathway of trade between this part of which continent and the other and all these kinds of things.
That's what it really means, and it's at the center of so much of American policy, unbeknownst to me and a whole lot of other people as well.
Is that right?
That'd be correct.
Yes.
Back in 1904, a man who was then head of the London School of Economics, a guy named Sir Halford Mackinder, on a cold, dark London night, gave a two-hour lecture full of recondite grammar and obscure classical references to a small audience of experts in the Royal Geographical Society, then located on Seville Row.
And he articulated not only a kind of an understanding of the contemporary geopolitics of the time and, indeed, the subsequent century that would follow, but also, in that single lecture, he invented, if you will, the science of geopolitics.
And everybody who practices it, whether it's Adolf Hitler, who attempted his own crude version of geopolitical dominion, or Zygmunt Brzezinski, who was National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, and I would argue a very adept player in the science of geopolitics there, they're all students of Halford Mackinder.
So he not only invented geopolitics, but he also, if you will, delineated the parameters of its practice.
And it's that geopolitics that I argue in the essay in Time Dispatch, and I was stunned and surprised to apply Halford Mackinder's model to, if you will, the shards of evidence, the dim pieces that seem to be shaping our future, and come to what, for me, was a stunning and, thank you, a bit unwelcome conclusion.
And that is basically, as you're saying there, that Brzezinski and the current American post-Cold War policy is simply a continuation of that same British imperial theory?
Well, it's the same imperial theory that's, if you will, decided the fate of all empires since the 14th century, for the better part of a thousand years.
And it's what Halford Mackinder said, it was very simple, he said, and in that article I've actually got his map that he had redrawn, he not only redrew the map of the world, but he reconceptualized the world.
And what he did was he shifted, he turned the globe, okay, away from where we usually look at it with North and South America at the center, he turned the globe so the Eurasian landmass was at the center, and then he tilted it slightly northward, and he thus conceptualized something that he called the World Island.
And he said the World Island is not three separate continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa, it's in fact a contiguous, coherent landmass.
And he said, furthermore, he said that whoever controls the pivot area, or the heartland of the World Island, which is basically the great steppes that stretch between Russia and China, he said, he who rules the pivot area rules the World Island, and he who rules the World Island rules the world.
And in this vision, this world island, this great landmass, that's much of the landmass of the entire planet, is the key to global power.
And this then renders the rest of the world vast oceans and a few essentially insignificant outlying islands that we know by the names of Australia, North America, and South America.
And everybody, so he said that the way the British, and indeed, since the start of the modern imperial era, which I date to 1702, when the Dutch East India Company was established and their fleets began sailing to Asia, he said the way that the Europe and the seamen, the navigators, have dominated the World Island is they controlled it from the maritime margin that encircled the World Island.
This was the British theory, they rimmed the World Island with a sequence of 30 naval bastions and 300 capital ships that stretched from Scapa Flow in the North Sea in Scotland, through Gibraltar, Malta, and Suez, and then Bombay, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
So they rimmed the World Island, and in the Cold War, we proclaimed, well, we proclaimed anti-communist containment, and we built ever-growing layers of heavy metal military power to encircle the World Island.
We created the Great American Fleets, the Sixth Fleet for the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, the Seventh Fleet, basically, for the coast of Asia, and more recently, in the 1990s, the Fifth Fleet for the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea.
And then we created a series of bilateral, multilateral military alliances, starting with 1949 and NATO, and going through the Middle East Pact, and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, and the Japan-U.S. Security Alliance.
Really, in the early to mid-1950s, we built this ring of military alliances.
And then we arrayed, throughout the Cold War, great armadas of fighters and strategic bombers and nuclear submarines to surround the World Island.
And the latest addition has been, since about 2011, the U.S. Air Force and the CIA have rimmed the World Island with a string of 60 drone bases for the Reaper, the Predator, and the Global Hawk drone.
And they stretch all the way, again, very similar to the ROA, British Naval Bases, from Sicily all the way to Guam.
And since the Global Hawk has about a 35-hour flying time and nearly 9,000-mile range, you know, that's sufficient from that ring of 60 bases to virtually patrol and, in our view, control the World Island.
And what China has done is they've done the classical strategy of the landed power.
They're now doing what Halford Mackinder predicted would happen back in 1904.
He said that when one of these landed power manages to exploit the great resources of this heartland in the World Island, this vast, sprawling steppes, rich in minerals and fuels, when this happens, he said, then the empire of the world would come into view.
And it was stunning speed in less than 10 years.
And this is extraordinary.
China has begun doing this in collaboration with the European rail networks.
They've, well, first of all, internally within China, China has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in building an elaborate network of high-speed rail connections that will link every city in China by 2030.
And they're also extending their freight lines all the way across the Eurasian land mass are now trains that go from Madrid all the way to western China.
There are there's regular freight lines that now stretch from Duisburg, Germany, all the way to western China.
And then in the last few years, China has begun building crisscrossing the Asian land mass with a cat's cradle of oil pipelines.
Right.
All right.
I'm sorry, Alfred, I got to interrupt you here.
We got to stop and take this break.
But we'll be right back, everybody, with the great American historian Alfred McCoy on Halford Mackinder and the American empire right after this.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the line with Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the author of a great many books, including two on torture.
And we're talking about how right around what, a little more than 100 years ago, I think it is, this guy, Halford Mackinder, came up with the idea of the World Island and how to dominate it.
And of course, he was a British imperialist and Britain's an island with a navy.
And how are they supposed to rule the heartland?
It was funny to me when you're explaining all this.
I'm sure it's not lost on you, but it seems that it's completely lost on all of the various practitioners of this theory of geopolitics since Mackinder is that it's complete nonsense that here America has ruled all the Rim territories unquestionably since the end of World War II.
But that didn't give us control over all the center of Eurasia and especially the land between Russia and China.
And when Russia and China got along great and even when they had the Soviet Union and their alliance, that didn't give them control over all of the Rim, not by a long shot.
And in fact, when containment finally ended, as John Mueller likes to point out, because Americans got, thankfully, finally, that Vietnam syndrome and they actually, Brzezinski himself, actually encouraged Soviet expansionism because that's what helped to break their bank, to become more of an empire and try to expand.
And Afghanistan, hey, that's right there in their territory, in the Soviet Union, as part of the Soviet alliance and all of that.
And that was enough to break them.
And so it just seems absolutely absurd to me that we're talking about the theory by which the middle part of North America attempts to rule all of the old world from outside of it.
And at the same time, worrying and pretending that Moscow is going to take over all of everything else once them and the Chinese get their rail lines together and their gas pipelines together.
Scott, it's actually, you mentioned Brzezinski.
Brzezinski is one of the few American leaders that's understood this.
And you can fault him and people, many people do.
But he played the great game with considerable finesse.
And his whole idea was that from our rim, we would send a wedge deep into the heart of the Soviet pivot region.
And we would do two things.
We'd smash the Red Army in Afghanistan and geopolitically, we'd shear away Eastern Europe from Russia's control.
In other words, that thrust in Afghanistan, something called Operation Red Army, that thrust in Afghanistan, something called Operation Cyclone, which cost a peak of $500 million a year by the late 1980s was the idea of using radical Islam to drive a knife, a wedge right into the heart of the Russian heartland in the middle of the world island, and then smash the Red Army and shear away Eastern Europe.
Now, you can say it's a long way from Afghanistan to Eastern Europe.
What does one have to do with the other?
When you're playing geopolitics, the two are intimately related.
And China is also now...
Brzezinski was clever.
He's, of course, a de classe Polish aristocrat.
He was born in Poland.
He's uniquely attuned among American leaders to the dynamics of the world island.
Later foreign policy advisors are bozo billionaires.
They have no idea what's going on with all this.
Let me explain China's two-part strategy for basically breaking America's control over the world island.
We've exercised, you could say, successfully for the past 70 years.
It's very simple.
First of all, knit the vast Eurasian landmass together.
They're not only building these high-speed rails that will eventually...
We've got a project out to have a two-day high-speed rail between Beijing and Moscow.
They have high-speed rails all over China.
They've got long-distance freight lines that are now going right into the heart of Europe, all the way to Hamburg in Germany.
And then they're knitting a cat's cradle of pipelines that are in the north, bringing Siberian, Russian oil and gas into north China.
Oil and gas, particularly from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan into central China.
And then Middle Eastern oil and Burmese gas via pipeline across Myanmar into the southwest of China.
So that's knitting the heartland together economically and shifting, if you will, the locus of power from the periphery to the heart of the world island.
But then what is China's strategy?
And they've been challenging us.
It's been in the news, but nobody's made sense of it.
Their challenge is, their strategy, I think, is to slice through this heavy metal periphery the United States has maintained for 70 years, rimming the world island at two strategic points, okay?
Recently, just a couple weeks ago, the president of China announced a $46 billion program to build an integrated railroad and pipeline corridor from western China to the port of Gwadar, Pakistan that China has built.
It was basically a dusty fishing port.
They've turned it into a modern port facility.
China's spent $200 billion in building that port on the Arabian Sea, just a day's sail from the Persian Gulf, okay?
And they're going to slice through the Fifth Fleet's control over the Persian Gulf and the strategic oil lines out of Gwadar, Pakistan.
The other thing they're doing is, as we all know, they're challenging U.S. power in the South China Sea, and they're laying claim.
That's their other point of cutting this encirclement that the United States has around the world island and rendering our massive military armada geopolitically redundant, absolutely irrelevant.
And not only have the Chinese built, they've dredged these three kind of atolls or islands in the Spratlys in the South China Sea, but something that the press has not reported on is that they've greatly expanded the Long Po nuclear submarine facility on Hainan Island, which is China's southeasternmost province, which is at the northern end of the South China Sea.
So the combination of these nuclear subs that are going to be sailing the South China Sea, its surface fleet, and these bases, China, between cutting us at Gwadar on the Arabian Sea and cutting the U.S. rim in the South China Sea, is going to basically slice through and cut our encirclement of the world island and thus render U.S. global military power essentially redundant and irrelevant.
It's a bold strategy.
But isn't it redundant and irrelevant anyway?
It seems like all we're losing is the opportunity to pour endless printed dollars into bases in Kyrgyzstan.
Look, I sympathize with your views here, okay?
I mean, I'm opposed to everything you're opposed to probably.
Yeah, no, no, no.
I'm just trying to understand this all.
We're playing risk here, Scott.
We're playing risk.
This is cold-blooded geopolitics.
Check your ideology at the door, Scott.
I'm not asking an ideological question.
I'm asking, it seems to me like what you're saying is the American government has power and influence to lose, but I don't see where American society has anything to lose by others getting rich in the old world, others expanding their, right?
Like you're saying the Navy will have less influence, but so what?
So what?
Okay, I'll tell you so what.
Do you realize the invisible bonus that every American gets every day because the dollar is the global reserve currency?
That's on China's agenda.
They're going to knock us off.
They want to use the yuan or the euro, something, anything other than the dollar.
Of course, it's the price of the empire that's destroyed the dollar and opened up the opportunity for them to try to replace it, right?
Scholar, Scott, look, we're paying four times as much as we are now for food and we can't afford to buy cars and all the rest of it.
I'll tell you, it's not going to be pleasant.
We have all been, whether we like it or not, the invisible beneficiaries of America's global dominion.
We've gotten a kind of bonus, all right?
And that bonus is about to end, and we're going to all pay the price.
It's not going to be pleasant, all right?
I'm not looking forward to this, all right?
But that's the way the world is shaking.
And you might say, what are the leaders in Washington doing about this?
Are they thinking about this?
They're doing nothing.
Are the country's leaders, our billionaires, the people that have the vast resources of society to set the collective agenda of this society, maybe renew our infrastructure, improve our education, improve our global competitiveness, realizing that we're playing for keeps, that this is serious, that the free ride is over?
Do you hear that from anybody?
No, okay?
This is completely irresponsible.
And when the history of the decline and fall of the American empire is written, people will point the finger at our corrupt, lazy, affluent, spoiled elites, just as they did the Romans, and they will point, I think, justifiably so, all right?
Don't say I didn't tell you.
It's coming.
It's real.
It's not going to be pleasant, but it's very real.
It's geopolitics, Scott.
Huh.
You sound just like Ron Paul in 2008.
Well, maybe he was right.
But, yeah, no, I'm with you, although I'm not so sure that it's just the threat of the Imperial Navy that keeps all these foreign countries in the dollar all this time.
It seemed like they had their own reasons, and it seems like the cost of the empire is really, it's all very counterproductive, self-defeating the empire, because it's the cost of the empire that debases the currency and destabilizes all our rim territories and turns all our friends against us and et cetera like that, right?
No?
Empires are complex ecosystems that operate at the highest level of human society, and they are beyond, if you will, ready analysis, almost beyond the ken of any single individual.
It's a complex ecology, and just as it's taken us centuries to understand natural ecology, and we're just beginning to do so, all right?
This is one aspect of, kind of, if you will, geopolitics, political ecology that we're only just beginning to understand.
Empires are complex, and that's why they're so fascinating.
That's why they're so fragile, you know?
They're mighty, they dominate, but they're very fragile, because they're the sum of all these complex interrelated parts that the people that are running them don't quite understand at the time, and it's usually retrospectively, once they've fallen, you can do a kind of diagnostic and figure out an autopsy, if you will, on the corpse of a dead empire.
They're much easier to understand when they're dead and gone than when they're living and vital and expanding or declining.
Well, you know, one thing that's different about this era is that the subjects of the empire can fight back.
There's a funny Onion headline from 1902 or something, where the Zulus hold the queen at spear point, because they've invaded England and taken over London.
But that kind of thing is not literally possible in that sense now, but you can see, you know, less than two dozen basically terrorist special forces guys can seize planes, cause major havoc, and throw the empire itself into disarray and into self-defeating policies.
Scott, I would argue that's not the main event.
The main event would be the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank by China last year, and the stampede by our closest allies, like Australia and Britain, to join the bank, even though Washington was trying to stop it, because it's an alternative to the World Bank and the IMF, which are the keystones of America's global financial position, the position that's kept the dollar as the world's global reserve currency.
That's where the shift is occurring.
China is mobilizing the massive capital, the trillions and trillions of dollars, to knit the world island, the vast Eurasian landmass, into this integrated economic zone that will become the locus of world power.
That's the main event.
And so much of what we focus on in our news, these terrorist events, ISIS, ISIS is irrelevant.
The Middle East is sinking into global irrelevance, okay?
Too many people, not enough water, oil wells are pumping out, oil supplies are shifting elsewhere, and they're engaged in the tragic winnowing of population that happens when societies implode.
So it's an imploding, dying region of the world, and it's tragic in its way, but it's not the main event, okay?
We're obsessively focused on ISIS.
It's a footnote to history.
But the main event is these geopolitical shifts of power, and that's what nobody's paying attention to.
And we need to pay attention.
We need to get serious.
All right, Sheldon.
That is Alfred McCoy, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, author of The Politics of Heroin and a Question of Torture, and this great piece at tomdispatch.com, Tom Engelhardt's site, and also it's at antiwar.com.
It was the spotlight yesterday.
Washington's great game and why it's failing.
Thanks very much for your time.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
Bye-bye.
Hey, y'all.
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