The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars and the Making of the Modern World
By Hal Brands.
W.W. Norton, 2025.
Hardcover, 320 pages, $29.99.
Reviewed by John P. Rossi.
Hal Brands, author of a handful of books on foreign policy and a professor at Johns Hopkins (as well as the son of the distinguished historian H.W. Brands), has undertaken a study of the role that geopolitics—the blend of history, political science, and geography—has played in the twentieth century. It is built around the ideas of the founder of the discipline, the English scholar Sir Halford Mackinder.
In a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society in 1904, Mackinder argued, among other things, that whoever rules the ‘Heartland’, which he defined as the European-Asian landmass, Eurasia, rules the World Island; whoever rules the World Island commands the World. What was about to take place and had already started, he argued, was nothing less than the end of the Columbian epoch—the four centuries of history dominated by the European conquest of the world led by Great Britain.
This was the kind of big idea that could capture both big and small minds; a grand concept that explained the “why” behind the sweep of history. The American Admiral, Alfred Thayer Mahan, had actually preceded Mackinder in formulating his own law of geo-political history, the more influential study, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (1890), which argued just the opposite of Mackinder’s position. Nations with long coastlines, good harbors, a large population, and plentiful natural resources, like Great Britain and the United States, dominated in the past and will continue to do so.
Neither man recognized the coming of air power (interestingly, the Wright Brothers flight took place just a year before Mackinder’s talk) which challenged both their theories and, in the process, created its own grand philosophers, men like Douhet, Hugh Trenchard, and Billy Mitchell who over sold the idea that air power will win wars and what is even better, win them on the cheap. Any study of World War II and its saturation bombing of Germany and Japan reveals just how deadly strategic bombing was.
Mahan believed that societies built around naval power would also be freer and richer ones because they would not need large standing armies. Mackinder and Mahan were, as they say, “on to something” (Great Britain and the United States were freer societies than the great land powers, Imperial and Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union). However, ideas can become fetishes, and this was particularly true of Mackinder’s influence on Germany, where Karl Haushofer’s student Rudolf Hess introduced his ideas to Adolf Hitler with horrible consequences.
Against the background of the thinking of these “geopoliticians” that Brands gives us is a potted history of the twentieth century, in effect a short and well-written version of the major decisions that shaped the events of World War I and II and the Cold War.
Brands sprinkles interesting insights on how Mackinder captured attention with his insights into history. Explaining, for example, why the British and French prevailed in the Crimean War, Mackinder noted that despite being a thousand miles from the battlefield, France and Great Britain could move troops by ship. At the same time, Russia, lacking a railroad south of Moscow, couldn’t concentrate its forces a few hundred miles away at the Crimean Peninsula and lost the war.
Bismarck, he believes, was a great statesman because he saw German unification as an endpoint. Meanwhile, his successors, William II and Hitler, regarded it as the beginning of a dominant Weltpolitik with disastrous consequences for Germany and the world. Bismarck’s wisdom wasn’t limited to geopolitical thinking. Once when asked what he thought would be the key to the twentieth century, he simply observed that the Americans speak English. Language played a key role in why the United States came to the rescue of Great Britain twice in less than a quarter-century. European statesmen often underestimated the United States. And yet, as Brands notes, it was precisely America’s intervention in the two world wars that turned the tide.
Does Brands have a hero? He thinks highly of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s conduct of American policy leading up to and in World War II. He has a soft spot for President Reagan’s handling of the Cold War, arguing that he broke the Cold War stalemate without aggressively humiliating the Soviets, especially Mikhail Gorbachev. Brands is also a great admirer of George Kennan, crediting him for devising the strategy of containment that was based on a realistic rather than ideological understanding of the Soviet situation. NATO expansion in the early 2000s, Brands believes, was a major mistake because it was seen as a direct provocation by the Soviets, particularly Vladimir Putin, with consequences we are dealing with in Ukraine today. He is also sharply dismissive of some of the intellectual thinking that led the United States into the tragic conflicts in the Middle East.
Brands regards China’s growing political, economic, and military power as the greatest threat the world faces in the near future because it combines a loyalty to Leninist principles of party control alongside a powerfully focused state-driven capitalism. Also, China has mastered what Brands labels “the fourth industrial revolution”—AI, advanced robotics, quantum synthetic biology—and is thus a greater threat to the democratic West than the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors.
The Eurasian Century does not have a bibliography, but Brands provides the interested reader with 37 pages of single-spaced footnotes, which show an amazing breadth of reading and research. Brands’s book is easy to read and especially good on the events up to the Cold War and its resolution. The last sections on events in more recent times read like the political columns on foreign policy that are so common today and also so wrong.
Brands’s book should find a ready audience among those interested in developments in the international scene over the last century. It is particularly effective in dealing with the threat that China’s emerging power and influence pose to the West today and for the foreseeable future by providing the kind of historical context often missing in studies of international relations.
John P. Rossi is Professor Emeritus of History at LaSalle University in Philadelphia.
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