UK-manufactured Storm Shadow cruise missiles being used to implement "Mackinder's strategic bible"

Editor's note: The proxy war against Russia is the pirate City of London's commercial war on Russia. This is what it has come down to: A fight over resources and wealth. Russia with its vast land mass has access to enormous amounts of natural resources and explains why Russia is at full industrial military production. Those in the west envious of this industrial capacity want access to these resources and they have destroyed Ukraine to do this including their "economic sanctions" that have benefited Russia. Who planned that out? When it comes to the pirate City of London's commercial war on Russia, it is UK-manufactured Storm Shadow cruise missiles being used to implement "Mackinder's strategic bible." What are the British (the pirate City of London has nothing to do with Britain and the British people) going to do next? Drop Storm Shadow cruise missiles on the Russian city of Vladivostok? 

In Vladivostok, the Russian Far East rises
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Source: The Unz Review

The Mackinder Strategic 'Bible' Reconsidered

BY Alastair Crooke | September 11, 2023 | 70 Comments

In 1997, Zbig Brzezinski, the original 'driver' behind the making of Afghanistan as a quagmire of ‘mud’ into which Russia was to be dragged, wrote his celebrated book, The Grand Chessboard. It was a work that 'forever' embedded the Mackinder doctrine of 'he who controls the Asian heartland controls the world' into the U.S. zeitgeist.

Tellingly, its subtitle was American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. Brzezinski had already written in his book that absent Ukraine, Russia would never become the heartland power; but with Ukraine, Russia can and would. Thus, Mackinder's doctrine, 'He who controls the heartland' dictum, was codified into U.S. 'cannon law' – never to permit a united heartland. And Ukraine became seen as the hinge around which heartland power revolved.

Brzezinski further ordained that this 'Grand Game of Chess' was to be one of pure U.S. primacy: "No, no one else plays", he insisted; it is a game purely for one. Once a chess piece is moved; 'we' (the U.S.) simply turn the board the other way around – and move the other side's chess pieces (for 'them'). There is 'no other' in this game", Brzezinski warned.

This is today's dilemma – It is so long since Brzezinski originally formulated the Mackinder notion, that classical diplomacy has become etiolated.

It was Henry Kissinger however, that gave Mackinder its celebrated twist: 'He who controls money controls the world' was to become the dollar and banking financialised hegemony.

But, Kissinger, in this, was wrong from the 'get go'. It always has been: 'He who has manufacturing capacity, raw materials, food, energy (human as well as fossil) and sound money can change the world'. But Kissinger simply ignored those adjunct conditions, and based the U.S. instead in the creation of a global 'spider's web of weaponised dollars (touch it, and the sanctions gossamer poisons you). Additionally, this system was multiplied through Wall Street parsing out access to trillions in newly created money only to the compliant.

Kissinger did, however, evolve the doctrine of 'triangulation' in a nod to Mackinder: The U.S. should seek to ally with either Russia versus China, or be with China, in opposition to Russia. But never to let China and Russia conjoin against the West. The heartland must always be fractured.

These 'rules' are imprinted on Washington's mental circuits. Yet the notions that underpin them have little validity today. Land mass, militarised states (heartland Asia) versus the naval powers (the Atlanticists) hardly reflects today’s more abstract instruments of power.

The dollar-sphere, for one, undoubtedly has been a source of U.S. power (imposing on states the compulsion to buy and hold dollars) ever since the Bretton Woods Accord and the Petro-dollar agreements. It created a massive synthetic demand for the dollar, which initially worked well for Washington. But now, not so much.

It was too good to be true – Print and be damned with the consequences. Debt? No matter; print a little more. Washington overdid it (the political enticement was too great).

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