Hal Brands Distorts Mackinder to Bash Trump – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Foreign Affairs magazine continues its establishment anti-Trump ethos with a feature article by Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the American Enterprise Institute titled “The Renegade Order,” which parrots his new book The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World.

In the article, Brands faintly praises Trump for recognizing geopolitical shifts in the global order, but concludes that Trump’s “illiberal,” and “insurrectionist,” and “anti-democratic” tendencies have only gotten worse in his second term, and warns that “Trump’s world could become a very dark place.”

And in the process of bashing Trump — which has become a ritual with most of those who write for Foreign Affairs — Brands distorts the classical geopolitical analyses of Halford Mackinder. To be sure, Mackinder and other classical geopolitical analysts are worth reading today, but the devil is in the details. (RELATED: Mackinder’s ‘Pivot Paper’ Still Relevant 120 Years Later)

Eurasia is still the world’s dominant landmass, and hostile control of its geography and resources would endanger the security of the United States. The geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia is still a vital national security interest of the United States. Trump clearly recognizes that — his foreign policy approach is to attempt to drive a wedge between China and Russia, the two greatest powers on the Eurasian continent, while avoiding peripheral wars that sap our resources and undermine our ability to meet existential threats.

Brands, however, urges Trump to “exploit escalation rather than avoid it” in Ukraine, and claims that Europe won’t be secure without a “decent peace” in Ukraine.

Brands was and is a proponent of NATO enlargement who refuses to acknowledge that expanding NATO further towards Russia’s borders had anything to do with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In fact, Brands wrote an article in May 2019 titled “If NATO Expansion Was a Mistake, Why Hasn’t Putin Invaded?,” perhaps forgetting that Putin took back the Crimea five years earlier (after the U.S. sponsored a “color revolution” in Ukraine that deposed a pro-Russian Ukrainian leader) and three years later invaded Ukraine again. (RELATED: Europe Is No Longer Worth Defending)

Trump’s efforts to end the Ukraine War on imperfect terms meet with cries of “Putin apologist” and promoter of “autocracy,” views with which Brands obviously sympathizes. The growing number of foreign policy establishment thinkers who dismiss the possibility of a Sino-Russian rift resembles those in the 1950s and early 1960s who ridiculed the George Kennans of the world who appreciated the possibilities of a Sino-Soviet split long before it manifested itself on the global scene. (RELATED: Why Trump Is Pissed Off at Putin)

Brands is an avowed Atlanticist who longs for a return of the mythical “rules-based international order,” which he believes Trump is endangering by encouraging autocrats like Putin to revise that order. Brands envisions the specter of an “autocratic alliance” (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) presumably dominating Mackinder’s “heartland” and endangering American security.

Brands in his book repeatedly cites Mackinder’s 1904 pivot paper and 1919 book Democratic Ideals and Reality, but he neglects to factor in Mackinder’s last word on the subject in, of all places, Foreign Affairs titled “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace.” Mackinder wrote this article in the midst of the Second World War, and he envisioned a “balanced globe of human beings” where Eurasia was divided by Russia, Western Europe (with British and American offshore support), a rising China, and a rising India (“Monsoon lands”).

Mackinder said nothing about promoting democracy or expanding a rules-based international order. The statesman he admired most was Bismarck, the consummate realist. Not democratic ideals, but the balance of power and spheres of influence, would produce order and stability, according to Mackinder. NATO enlargement — championed by Brands and many others — would likely have appalled Mackinder, just as it would have appalled another hero of democracy, Winston Churchill.

Churchill, Brands may recall, offered Josef Stalin the “percentages deal” near the end of World War II, recognizing that spheres of influence and the balance of power were more important than spreading democracy. Churchill was also willing to negotiate spheres of influence in Europe with Stalin in the early 1950s. The key to understanding Russia, Churchill said, was Russian national interests. Trump understands that. Hal Brands does not.

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