Heartland vs. Rimland |
At first glance, today’s strategic map seems familiar. A bloc of land-based powers, clustered around the center of Eurasia, is challenging a liberal, maritime order headed by an offshore superpower. China and Russia, reinforced by Iran and North Korea and ringed by autocracies from Belarus to Myanmar, now occupy the role that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and the Soviet Union each once held—continental empires seeking to dominate Eurasia and project power globally. The United States, like the United Kingdom before it, remains the only actor capable of anchoring a great arc of coastal and maritime countries across North America, Europe, and East Asia that hem in the Eurasian supercontinent. The rhythm of geopolitics repeats itself: an autocratic axis, emerging from the continental heartland, seeks to rupture rimland barriers that buffer the wider world.
The heartland of today, however, is not a mere replica of its predecessors. It isn’t a single empire marching across Eurasia but a loose league of revisionists motivated by a shared loathing of liberal ideals and American power. These countries cannot steamroll vast regions as Napoleon and Hitler once did. Instead, they wield modern tools—cyberattacks and digital disinformation campaigns, precision-guided arms and nuclear-tipped missiles—that afford them the power to weaken opposing rimland alliances and even to strike the United States itself. Most critically, these Eurasian autocracies are connected. They expand by laying cables and signing contracts as much as by deploying columns of tanks; they weaponize global interdependence to weaken the rimland order from within. China anchors this new heartland, seeking global power on land, through its Belt and Road Initiative; at sea, in a record-busting military buildup; and in the digital cloud, through telecommunications networks, payment platforms, and surveillance systems. Together, these offensives imperil rimland dominance by linking China’s growing virtual empire to old-fashioned terrestrial designs.
Yet this heartland has a built-in contradiction: it is at once fierce and feeble. Its core—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—can wield powerful coercive leverage, generating acute crises through cyberattacks, nuclear brinkmanship, and opportunistic military probes. But it still lacks the economic and technological strengths to prevail in a generational rivalry over a countervailing, U.S.-led coalition.
The rimland coalition is unmatched in power but dangerously fractured in purpose. The United States sits atop a patchwork of regional security webs, economic and technology clubs, and values clusters. This distributed empire is open and adaptive but also vulnerable to drift and division. Adversaries have been able to exploit the openness of Western markets, institutions, and technologies, and globalization has weakened the domestic consensus that underpinned rimland cohesion. Allies sheltered by American power have become dependents rather than force multipliers, with some now viewing U.S. unilateralism as a greater threat than the heartland aggressors themselves. The United States has become an ambivalent protector, prone to protectionist and sometimes predatory impulses. Tensions over the war in Iran have reflected this breakdown, as several allies withheld support or openly distanced themselves from U.S. action rather than rallying behind it. The result is a rimland beset by internal discord, while heartland autocracies remain united by their desire to revise the status quo.
The challenge for Washington is to rebuild a rimland order that is suited to an age when power runs through both networks and territory. This means not only keeping hostile armies behind their borders but also keeping heartland autocracies from hijacking globalization. A modern rimland strategy must fuse the loose web of coalitions into a system that governs interdependence, strengthens free societies, and protects against coercion. Only the United States can lead this new order, but to do so, it must resist its own inward, illiberal reflexes. Otherwise, the heartland will rewire the world for its own ends.
HEARTLAND OF DARKNESS
For centuries, autocratic states have sought to consolidate the world’s largest landmass against maritime coalitions that try to keep Eurasian power fractured and contained. The most recent of these clashes, the Cold War, was the purest version of this pattern. The Soviet Union was a hulking land power with an empire that stretched from Germany to the Pacific. Soviet armies and subversion were constant threats to the Eurasian margins. The United States answered by forging ocean-bridging alliances to secure Eurasia’s dynamic peripheries, especially Western Europe, East Asia, and, later, the Middle East. It isolated Moscow’s heartland empire militarily, politically, and technologically and integrated friendly countries into a free-world economy with trade routes and supply lines secured by American power. This rimland coalition contained the hostile heartland until it crumbled. It created a new global architecture of power dominated by democracies, and it is again under threat.
A new team of Eurasian autocracies is now vying for primacy. A neoimperial China aims for supremacy across Asia and beyond. A vengeful Russia seeks to overturn the European security order and reclaim its role as a heartland superpower. A weakened but still ambitious Iran clashes violently with Washington and its allies in the Middle East. A provocative North Korea bolsters its ambitions in Northeast Asia with far-reaching military capabilities. Collectively, these revisionists occupy huge swaths of the Eurasian supercontinent. They are all driven by intense hostility to the power and democratic purpose of the rimland world. As they cooperate more closely, they revive the nightmare of a Eurasian axis that colludes against its foes.
The Eurasian heartland is at once fierce and feeble.
These autocracies are deepening their economic, financial, and technological ties. Chinese microchips and machine tools now underpin the Russian economy, and Chinese money and technology are helping Russia develop the Arctic. Russian companies raise money in Hong Kong, and Russian oil flows to Beijing. The regimes in Moscow and Tehran have cooperated to expand the International North–South Transport Corridor, which connects Russia to Asia via the Caspian Sea and Iran.
This autocratic power combination extends to the military realm. Iranian drones, North Korean missiles and troops, and Chinese dual-use goods (which can be used for both military and civilian purposes) have sustained Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. Russia sells advanced military tools, including high-end air and missile defenses and lethal submarine-quieting technology, which turbocharge the dangers posed by Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang. Their coordinated production of drones, missiles, helicopters, and other capabilities is creating an increasingly integrated military-industrial bloc committed to shattering the rimland order. Tehran used a Chinese-built spy satellite and Beijing-based satellite stations to surveil and strike U.S. bases in the Middle East during its war with Washington. Chinese networks supplied Iran with missile-fuel precursors, and Russian targeting data aided Iranian attacks.
The political geographer Halford Mackinder warned at the turn of the twentieth century that heartland aggressors would use mastery over Eurasia to embark on global offensives. Amid the vicious combat of World War II, the political scientist Nicholas Spykman argued that the United States must hold the globe in balance by keeping Eurasia’s vital, amphibious rimlands secure. Both thinkers would recognize today’s contours of conflict. Yet the present challenge is more nuanced and pernicious than those that came before.
The Eurasian axis is not a unitary empire of the sort the Soviets aspired to run, nor is it a full-fledged alliance. It is a syndicate of sanctioned regimes bound mostly by shared grievance. The Leninist party-state in Beijing, the neofascist regime in Moscow, the family racket in Pyongyang, and the militant theocracy in Tehran share little ideology beyond a common hatred for their rimland rivals. They are not pursuing one collective global revolution but distinct and ultimately divergent imperial projects rooted in each country’s history and traditions. Today, China and Russia are strategic partners that, in Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s words, fight “back to back” against the liberal, U.S.-led world. But they may soon discover that they both cannot dominate the Arctic, Central Asia, and other places where their visions of greatness collide.
This limits heartland solidarity. China’s and Russia’s responses to the Iran war showed the pattern clearly: they were willing to help Tehran with intelligence and military-technological aid but not willing to risk a wider clash by coming directly to Iran’s defense. Likewise, when U.S. commandos seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, Beijing and Moscow sent little more than hopes and prayers. These are transactional partners, not allies committed to a common defense.
Yet this dynamic also minimizes the risk of an ideological meltdown. Rather than bicker over questions of orthodoxy and heresy, revisionist powers can focus on the strategic transactionalism—trade, sanctions proofing, military-technological........