Spykman's Rimland and Containment

Nicholas John Spykman (1893-1943), a Dutch-American professor of international relations at Yale University, revised Mackinder's Heartland thesis in his final book, The Geography of the Peace, published posthumously in 1944 after Spykman's death from cancer. Spykman argued that Mackinder had misidentified the decisive zone of Eurasian geopolitics: rather than the interior Heartland, he contended that the "Rimland" — the densely populated coastal periphery of Eurasia, encompassing Western Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia — held the greater share of the world's population, industrial capacity, and resources, and therefore constituted the true prize of global strategic competition. Spykman reformulated Mackinder's dictum accordingly into his own maxim: "Who controls the rimland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world."