The real reason ...

Excellent video on why China's getting up close and personal with Russia and it's not just about oil. In hindsight, this clip indirectly relates to a "wonderful" BRT blurb titled The World Island, where historian Alford McKoy details not only the decline of US power in the 21st century but also about the visionary view regarding Eurasia and how it applies to The Great Game by Sir Halford Mackinder in 1905. 

 Halford John Mackinder

To whit.

On a cold London evening in January 1904, Sir Halford Mackinder, the director of the London School of Economics, “entranced” an audience at the Royal Geographical Society on Savile Row with a paper boldly titled “The Geographical Pivot of History.” This presentation evinced, said the society’s president, “a brilliancy of description... we have seldom had equaled in this room.”

Mackinder argued that the future of global power lay not, as most British then imagined, in controlling the global sea lanes, but in controlling a vast land mass he called “Euro-Asia.”  By turning the globe away from America to place central Asia at the planet’s epicenter, and then tilting the Earth’s axis northward just a bit beyond Mercator’s equatorial projection, Mackinder redrew and thus reconceptualized the world map.

His new map showed Africa, Asia, and Europe not as three separate continents, but as a unitary land mass, a veritable “world island.”  Its broad, deep “heartland” -- 4,000 miles from the Persian Gulf to the Siberian Sea -- was so enormous that it could only be controlled from its “rimlands” in Eastern Europe or what he called its maritime “marginal” in the surrounding seas.

Yet the “heartland” of this vast landmass, a “pivot area” stretching from the Persian Gulf to China’s Yangtze River, remained nothing less than the Archimedean fulcrum for future world power. “Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island,” went Mackinder’s later summary of the situation. “Who rules the World-Island commands the world.” Beyond the vast mass of that world island, which made up nearly 60% of the Earth’s land area, lay a less consequential hemisphere covered with broad oceans and a few outlying “smaller islands.”  He meant, of course, Australia and the Americas.

The World Island

Now let's think about this. Starting in 1953 with the house arrest of Iran's democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh by the CIA in order for England to gain access to Iran's oil, US foreign policy has been a disaster, first culminating with the fubars of Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Israel and Ukraine as Washington, thinking it's the center of the world and owned by the MIC, looks short term and financial gain at the expense of long term and world power. Will China succeed in taking over Siberia, well, not so fast as innate Russian distrust of China looms large while climate change promises to alter how the world functions without question.

The Great Game

1885 British map of Western Asia during the Great Game, with the Russian and Turkish Empires, Qajar Persia, the southern fringes of Russian Turkestan, Afghanistan and western British India