The Rotten Theory of Eurasianism: From Mackinder to Dugin

1,409 words

Hal Brands
The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World
W.W. Norton & Company, 2025

Sir Halford Mackinder (1861 – 1947) was a British Member of Parliament and senior civil servant who had a solid career, but never achieved the fame or recognition in his lifetime that he probably should have. His most prophetic work came from a talk given on January 25, 1904 at the Royal Geographic Society which was called “The Geographic Pivot of History.”

Mackinder’s ideas presented in that talk ran along the same lines of thought as those found in Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis but opposite to the concepts of Alfred Thayer Mahan, who believed that sea power was a critical asset for a particular nation to have in order to successfully compete against other nations. Mackinder, like Turner, believed that the frontiers of the various empires had recently closed, so the energy which had been diverted outwards towards the various colonial frontiers would be directed back – into direct tensions between the respective governments of the various imperial homelands in Europe. Unlike Mahan, however, Mackinder believed that land power, through control of Central Asia, was the key to global power.

Sir Halford Mackinder viewed the control of Central Asia as the key to global power.

Control of Central Asia

In the past, armed horsemen emerging from Central Asia were a major player in global events. It is possible that the Angles and Saxons went to Roman Britain because of raids by Central Asians into Europe. It is certain that the Franks, Goths, and Romans were compelled to become the French at Chalons, where they repulsed the Central Asian Hunnish invaders. Turks from Central Asia were a factor in the wars between Rome and Persia in late antiquity, and the Turks eventually overthrew the Byzantine Empire. The Asiatic Hoards became a distant memory after the Europeans took to the sea in 1492 and created glittering empires abroad.

It was the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1904 which made Central Asia’s “Pivot Area” critical again. Mackinder wrote that,

The Russian railways have a clear run of 6000 miles from Wirballen in the west to Vladivostok in the east. The Russian army in Manchuria is as significant evidence of mobile land-power as the British army in South Africa was of sea-power. True, that the Trans-Siberian railway is still a single and precarious line of communication, but the century will not be old before all Asia is covered with railways. The spaces within the Russian Empire and Mongolia are so vast, and their potentialities in population, wheat, cotton, fuel, and metals so incalculably great, that it is inevitable that a vast economic world, more or less apart, will there develop inaccessible to oceanic commerce.

Therefore, Russian control of the Pivot Area of Central Asia meant that Russia was on the way to being a world power. Should Russia and Germany unite in some way they would form a globally dominant Eurasian power. Mackinder’s views influenced those of Karl Haushofer, who developed the philosophy of geopolitics. Mackinder has also influenced the Russian Alexander Dugin’s Erasianist Ideology.

The World Wars and Eurasianist Ideology

Hal Brands revisits Mackinder’s Eurasianist ideas and shoehorns the standard, Germany-as-villain narrative of the twentieth century’s World Wars into the Mackinder’s theory of Eurasianism. To put it simply, had Germany conquered Russia in one or the other World Wars, either the Kaiser or the National Socialists would have been a globe-spanning Eurasianist power. Hitler’s declaration of war on America in the days following Pearl Harbor was not an epic mistake, but the natural result of Hitler’s understanding of what has become Eurasianist ideology.

Eurasianist ideology is now a big international challenge. It’s embrace by Russia’s leader has underpinned the ongoing Ukraine War. Brands rejects the idea that the eastern expansion of NATO threatened Russia enough to cause the Ukraine War writing,

No Kremlin leader ever seriously alleged that NATO, then racing to reduce its military capabilities, was going to conquer Russia. Nor was there any chance of America invading China; if anything, the US presence in Asia made Beijing safer by precluding an unconstrained, remilitarized Japan. In some ways, Beijing and Moscow were actually the biggest beneficiaries of US strategy. China grew rich and powerful in a world pacified by Washington. NATO expansion, much as Russia hated it, kept Germany contained and Eastern Europe – long the pathway for marauding armies – tranquilized.

Yes, Moscow had lost its empire. But it had gained greater safety – more than in 1914 or 1941, certainly – from external attack. The real problem was that safety from external attack isn’t the only thing rulers want. They want glory, greatness, and empire; they want security not just for their nations but for themselves. This is where the conflict emerged. (p. 179)

A way to counter Eurasianism is to keep Germany and Russia separate. This could be achieved through an Intermarium addendum to NATO. Another way is to go along the darker route – stop providing security in the non-critical parts of mainland Asia. Let the two Koreas fight it out, this will destabilize China, Manchuria, and the Russian Far East. Let India and Pakistan fight it out also. Amplify the plight of the Uyghurs.

The Entire Eurasianist Thesis is Wrong

Eurasianism as an ethnographic study of Russia, Belarus, Siberia, and the “Stans” of Central Asia works in the big picture sense. There is a genuine Eurasian civilization made up of Russians, Tartars, Finnic people and others who are deeply influenced by Eastern Orthodox Christianity as well as Marxism and Bolshevism. But this is like saying large parts of North America is influenced by Virginiaism, which is an ethnographic description of the English-speaking settlers of the Chesapeake Bay region who are ethnically a mix of Normans and Anglo-Saxons alongside Scots-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch pioneers in Virginia’s western mountains all of whom are inspired by Anglican-leaning Protestantism. It works for the big picture but is short in the particulars.

Otherwise, the idea that Eurasianism is the wave of the future is totally wrong. In fact, it’s already been tried. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Soviet Union, China, half of Germany and most of Central Europe formed a Eurasian Bloc which was united by the theology of Communist dogma. None of it worked.

The Soviet Union was subsidized by the Americans from the USSR’s beginning to end. Soviet industrialization in the 1930s took place by purchasing American technical know-how with money previously stolen by the Bolsheviks. Every large tractor factory, industrial village, and machine tool that popped up in Stalin’s USSR was designed in or purchased from someone the United States. Even the T-34 tank sat upon a chassis designed by an American.

The Soviet Union required American grain every minute of its existence and that is after the Commissars seized the grain of the Ukrainian Kulaks and set up big collective farms which were supposed to mass-produce food. During World War II, the Soviets were entirely dependent upon Lend-Lease supplies. The Lend-Lease program was also subsidized by the Japanese, who didn’t attack American Lend-Lease convoys traveling to the Soviet Union’s Pacific ports.

As far as the agricultural paradise in Central Asia – it has failed to materialize. In the 1930s, Communist schemes led to starvation in Kazakhstan. Since the 1950s, ill-governed agricultural programs have caused the Aral Sea to dry up. It’s been an ecological disaster. Hal Brands goes easy on Eurasianist Ideology in this book.

Alexandar Dugin’s Eurasianism is not very different from the flummery that was prominent in the two dismal terms of George W. Bush. In 2003, Thomas P.M. Barnett pushed a big picture idea that the world was divided between an integrated core and a non-integrated gap. In The Core, the rule of law existed and there were “rules-based norms” and global trade. In The Gap, the people were disconnected by tyrannical governments and lawlessness. Iraq was in the center of The Gap. According to Barnett, Russia was in The Core.

This theory didn’t even work in a big picture ethnographic and civilizational sense. Instead, it was a sweeping generalization which merely served the interests of the Neoconservatives – destroy Iraq to subsidize the so-called State of Israel, support mass immigration, and throw in some support for oil drilling (called “flows of hydrocarbons” in the book) to placate Bush’s petro-cronies. As the Pentagon’s New Map was a wrongheaded globe-spanning theory which only served to justify the invasion of Iraq, so too does Eurasianism merely serve to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.