Be Still My Heartland

 

Mackinder's Heartland (which is still a real thing) is being surrounded and sabotaged. This piece claims that Washington is engineering it successfully except the China–Iran–Türkiye axis, leaving Beijing with only one viable land route to Europe.

Here's the list: the Northern Corridor (Russia) is dead due to sanctions and Europe's Russophobia. The Middle Corridor (Caucasus) has been destabilized by U.S./NATO influence in Armenia, Azerbaijan–Iran tensions, and Turkish opportunism.  The Caspian / Black Sea routes have been undermine likewise by U.S. pressure, instability, and China abandoning the Georgian deep‑water port. The North–South Corridor (Russia–Iran–India) is collapsing because India is drifting into the U.S.–Israel orbit. The Arctic / Baltic routes are militarized and increasingly blocked by NATO. The Maritime routes are disrupted by U.S. naval actions and the “Malacca toll booth” threat.

These are the core claims. The article concludes that Iran is now the indispensable hinge of the joint Russo-Sinic Eurasian integration, and the U.S. is deliberately spreading chaos to prevent any coherent Eurasian bloc from forming. To sum up, Washington cannot build a new order, but it can prevent anyone else from building one.  

Ideologically (rather than structurally) this article is insightful but analytically incomplete. It overstates U.S. omnipotence and understates the internal contradictions within the Eurasian project itself. Sabotage is indeed cheaper than construction (to paraphrase Mr. Spock). It's a classical asymmetry. Building corridors requires stability, capital, and long time horizons. On the other hand, disrupting such corridors requires merely targeted chaos, sanctions, or proxy leverage. The U.S. excels at the latter.

But the article underplays the internal Eurasian contradictions. Even without U.S. interference, Russia and China have incompatible long-range vision for Central Asia. Türkiye (from my handy-dandy copy-paste) wants to be a neo‑Ottoman gatekeeper, not a neutral corridor. Everybody gotz their dreams. India (a new civ that sprang up in what used to be called the Buffer Zone) has always been ambivalent about Eurasian integration.  The erstwhile Aryans want to keep the door they used closed ere another of invaders (like the Moguls) bust in. Meanwhile the Central Asian states fear being swallowed by either China or Russia. Iran (formerly known as Aryania, earlier Persia) is strategically vital but economically brittle. It's putting up a good fight, however, due to clever use of techniques observed in Ukraine. Ample precedent for this sort of military education. It's a nascent new civ in its own right as soon as it can get its instrumentality of prosperity (dependent on investment of its surplus into constructive activities) under its Maslovian hierarchy of needs. This leads to the important civilizational insight that the Eurasian project is not failing only because of Washington — it is failing because it is a coalition of states with conflicting civilizational ambitions. This was Mackinder's warning. This in turn leads the most important insight of all, which is not spelled out in the article but unstated.

The real story is not “U.S. chaos vs. Eurasian unity.” The real story is China is discovering that multipolarity is far more chaotic than it expected. Multipolarity is not a stable alternative to U.S. hegemony — it is a competitive arena where every regional power tries to become a pole.

Instead of using a Sharpie to draw a line around the Persianate–Turko‑Mo[n]gol-Arab Continuum to define a cross‑cutting band between Global South polities and the coming imperium terminans, I'll frame a zone caught between the Global South and the Anglo‑American imperium’s terminal hardening. There's been no integrative or even functioning civilization in this part of the world since the fall of the Ottoman Empire (the Islamic imperium terminans), but one wants to be born. The Arab Spring was aborted by the West, but now that Iran is moving ahead I feel like stealing from Spengler and name it the Neo-Magian Transverse or Interstice since it is more of a crack between hegemonic plates rmphasizing hybridity, frontier‑logic, and the shared Persianate–Iberian histories of empire, syncretism, and mercantile cosmopolitanism than a unified bloc. It's a sovereignty‑liminal frontier where empires project power but do not fully consolidate it. Afghanistan is the best example, and there is a very good reason for this sort of tissue rejection: the residents refuse to pledge allegiance to anything higher than their kinship links. Alas, no rooma for the Prophet's umma!

It also pairs well with "Ibero‑American" because both are hybrid, frontier‑forged cultural spheres.

But wait, there's more!

While disagreeing with everything else Spengler wrote about his Magian Kultur, there's a stage in his theory of evolution that is followed unimaginatively by all societies in history. I had put it down to a path of least resistance in human nature. The psychohistorian speaking his obscure allegorical pidgin has added modern details to the Money Power and likens it to a free-floating crap game that busted out of the Anglosphere. The Mad Arab has assigned a malign teleology to it (or to wit): the U.S. is not acting as a nation‑state. The U.S. is acting as the military arm of the Power of Money. The goal is not “American interests” but preserving the global financialized order. Eurasian integration threatens that order by creating alternative circuits of capital. Can't have that!

The sabotage of Eurasian corridors is not geopolitics — it is the defense of a financial empire. (Stay back, Jew-baiters; this doesn't concern you.) The chaos strategy is deliberate and structural. The Money Power prefers fragmentation over integration, instability over sovereignty, and corridor disruption over corridor competition. This article could be a case study in how the crap game prevents strictly regional supply chains, alternative payment systems (like BRICS),  non‑Western capital flows, and autonomous industrial policies (namely those of nation-states which can put a serious hitch in the banksters' get-along).

In this paradigm the U.S. is not “spreading chaos”; it is maintaining monopoly control over global circulation.

OCD is good medicine for sufferers of ADHD. So let's focus on Iran's role. Iran is one of the few states not subordinated to global finance. Instead it is a civilizational pole outside the Money Power’s architecture - a threat because it enables non‑dollarized trade routes. Interpret the article’s conclusion — “everything now depends on Iran” — as confirmation that Iran is the last major obstacle to total financialized hegemony. Also note that the Israel strikes on the China–Iran railway are not “Israeli policy” but supra-national enforcement actions. Spengler’s idea is that money becomes a quasi‑state. Most recently an "ultra-realist" criminologist named Steve Hall has reached the same conclusion. No economist himself, Hall observed that this friction dates back to the beginning of civilization. So what else can one expect when the vital impulse dies and becomes a crazy mixed-up zombie? Domination by the counting house, the pre‑Caesarian rulers before the strongman arrives.

Two (now three) civilizations have appeared in the Buffer Zone between the Heartland and the rest of the world. So far, these have resisted the global creditor class's High Clerisy of Credit and its unsceptered sway. But for how long?

Professor Jiang would disagree with the article on one key point. The article frames Eurasian integration as a benign project. China’s Eurasian vision is still elite‑driven neoliberalism, just without Western elites. It is not a liberation project; it is a competing managerial empire. The people of Eurasia are not the beneficiaries — the elites are. This is not a struggle between good and evil, but between two elite blocs competing for control of global circulation. This is why Jiang has not characterized the CCP as a Toynbeean creative minority. It is more like the result of Veblen's status emulation.