Misleading Use of Geopolitical Concepts

The article published in Foreign Affairs on 23 June 2026, written by Michael Beckley and Hal Brands under the title of “Heartland vs. Rimland: The Battle Lines in the War for the Next Global Order”, is an interesting, but problematic piece. This is an interesting argument in the sense that Beckley and Brands link the division between Western democracies represented by the United States and its allies and non-Western autocracies represented by China, Russia, Iran and North Korea to the geopolitical concepts of “Rimland” and “Heartland”. It is problematic, however, because their use of the concepts of “Rimland” and “Heartland” is misleading and because it departs from the established use of these concepts in geopolitical theory.

Beckley and Brands label the non-Western autocracies as continental powers in the Eurasian Continent and therefore as “Heartland” powers. They also describe the United States and its allies, “a great arc of coastal and maritime countries across North America, Europe, and East Asia”, as “Rimland” powers. While this dichotomy is a well-known version of the Biden-style worldview of the confrontation between autocracies and democracies, it has little to do with geopolitics as an analysis of political affairs with considerations of geographical conditions. While Russia is the country of “Heartland”, which means the area at the center of the Eurasian Continent, neither China, Iran, nor North Korea can be called “Heartland” countries. The latter countries are located on the periphery of the Eurasian continent.

Halford Mackinder, the British geographer and the originator of the concept of the “Heartland”, which first introduced in his epoch-making article in 1904 entitled “Geographical Pivot of History”, called the periphery of the Eurasian Continent “Inner Crescent”. China, North Korea and most of Iran belong to this area of the “Inner Crescent”. The “Heartland” is a special area, not just because it is located in the Eurasian Continent, but because it consists largely of vast plains, no strategic threat from the rear due to the Arctic, and few navigable rivers flowing toward the open oceans. These geographical conditions make the “Heartland” a very special area in the world. Countries in the “Inner Crescent” like China, North Korea and Iran do not have such characteristics of the “Heartland”, as in the case of many of the US allies like most of NATO member countries and South Korea located also in the “Inner Crescent”.

During the Second World War, Nicholas Spykman, a leading geopolitical theorist, built upon Mackinder's framework by introducing some adjustments in Mackinder’s concepts. The “Inner Crescent” was not renamed by Spykman as the “Rimland”, while it still continued to refer to the same geographical area of the periphery of the Eurasian Continent. The reason why Spykman introduced the new term seems to be his intention to emphasize the importance of “Rimland” as a distinctive geographical area. Mackinder overemphasized the importance of Eastern Europe, naturally because of the degree of industrialization of Europe at the beginning of the 20th century relative to other regions in the “Inner Crescent”. It is also true that he wrote Democratic Ideals and Reality in 1919 when the bitter experience of the First World War was so vivid. The War was the fighting between the great power in the middle of Europe, Germany, which sought to dominate the “Heartland”, against Russia now aligned with France and Great Britain, which sought to contain Germany. It was evident that Eastern Europe was at the very core of major battlegrounds of geopolitical struggles. But Spykman recognized the need to adjust Mackinder’s excessively Euro-centric standpoint. By taking into consideration the importance of East Asia, for instance, which was at war with the United States, Spykman introduced the concept of “Rimland” in order to highlight his standpoint that other regions in the “Rimland” are all important and the United States needs to develop strategies for engaging with various regions in the “Rimland”, not just Eastern Europe.

During the Cold War, which could be described as the world-wide confrontation between the US as maritime superpower and the USSR as Heartland superpower, the Rimland remained the hotbed of intensive tensions. Over the so-called “bridgeheads”, namely peninsulas, in particular, the US and USSR continued to confront each other seriously, ranging from the Korean War and the Vietnam War in which the United States even dispatched its own combat forces to the theaters. In addition, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, and the other parts in the Middle East experienced serious proxy wars between the US-backed and the Soviet-backed forces in the “Rimland”. High tensions in the “Rimland” were due to the widely shared recognition of its strategic importance. Exceptionally, Eastern Europe was comparatively calm during the Cold War due to the established mechanism of the balance of power between NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and WTO (Warsaw Treaty Organization). With the end of the Cold War, Eastern Europe became a fragile area due to the difficulty of reconfiguration of power structures. The Korean War, the US/USSR confrontation as well as reconciliation with China, the US alliance with and antagonization toward Iran during the history of the Cold War period, and the debacles of USSR and US in Afghanistan, all suggest that the “Rimland” is not a single sphere of influence under the influence of Continental powers, but a complex set of battlefields of geopolitical struggles.

It may appear attractive to link the perception of the confrontation between autocracies and democracies with the geopolitical concepts of “Heartland” and “Rimland”. But ignoring not only the original insights of classical geopolitical theorists, but also the geographical meaning of the concepts, would deteriorate the level of theoretical discussions about contemporary international affairs and thus eventually undermine the quality of policy prescriptions too.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Statecraft Institute.