Hal Brands and Michael Beckley write in Foreign Affairs about important geopolitical shifts.
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.
