The Game Continues

...Meanwhile, the only remaining superpower possesses no territory whatever on the World-Island...

...The Tournament of Shadows, a wonderfully entertaining new book by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac (Counterpoint, 646 pp., S35.00), tells the story of the struggle between Russia and Britain to dominate this supposed heartland—a struggle the authors pursue in the offices of ministers and generals, in the studies of geographers and historians, and on the ground...

...Central Asia, though, remained under local Muslim rulers until the mid-19th century, when railroads and the telegraph gave the Tsars the ability to project power there...

...As the authors repeatedly note, no country formally recognized the independence of Tibet, but the Russians and the British competed for influence there by vaguely encouraging the Dalai Lama, who wished to assert the country's sovereignty...

...To be sure, the Raj had its own native collaborators, the "pundits" (Indians who mapped its northern borders), but fewer of them reached Lhasa, and as non-Lamaists they never penetrated the inner circle...

...Adherents of this theory, the geographic determinists, believed that he who ruled the center of Eurasia ruled Eurasia itself and thus the world...

...But soon it reconstituted itself as the Soviet Union under the leadership of Lenin, one of whose grandfathers was a Kalmuck (a Buddhist people living on the northwestern shores of the Caspian Sea), and then of Stalin, a Georgian from Russia's southern colonial fringe...

...While the geographic determinists, notably the British geographer Haiford J. Mackinder, thought Russia would emerge as the world's leading country because of its bicontinental position, the naval theorists, led by our own Alfred Thayer Mahan, believed Britain and the United States would be pre-eminent because they controlled the waves...

...Yet the Chinese were the real danger in Tibet, for they alone had a huge surplus population capable of changing demographic realities there and in Chinese Turkestan...

...Again the British were outdone by the Russians, who in the mid-19th century had conquered a number of groups, particularly the Buriat Mongols, that practiced Tibetan Buddhism...

...These ties soon ended, and after Portugal discovered a sea route to China in the early 16th century, the Celestial Empire tried to isolate itself...

...As Mackinder put it: Who rides East Europe commands the Heartland Who rides the Heartland commands the World-Island Who rides the World-Island commands the World...

...In fact, not once but twice in this century Russia commanded a huge Eurasian empire that its rivals contemplated with dread and suspicion...

...A generation later, when China fell to Mao, geographic déterministe such as James Burnham feared that the contest was almost over: Mastery over the center of Eurasia had given the Communists mastery over its eastern fringe...

...Unlike Russia—the classic land power—its rival Britain depended on its Navy and commercial fleet...

...At present, on the contrary, it seems inevitable that China will consolidate its position in Tibet and Chinese Turkestan, and not unlikely that it will eventually threaten Russian control over parts of Siberia, as well as the Soviet Union's Central Asian successor states...

...Today, in the regions once caught up in the Great Game, it is China that wields the population weapon...

...All those lands made up what an influential school of geopolitics regarded as the "Heartland" of Eurasia, the great "World-Island" that gave rise to the earth's most influential cultures and settled the Western Hemisphere...

...But it was Genghis Khan and his successors, in the 13th century, who briefly united most of this gigantic landmass and made possible the first direct relations between its eastern and western fringes...

...It now seemed that this despotic power would be able to exploit the economic resources of the whole Heartland and to deploy armies on the borders both of China and Central Europe whenever it wished...

...Heartless though it may be to say so, the United States cannot halt the flow of Chinese colonists into Tibet and Xinjiang...

...No significant geographic barriers divide European Russia from Siberia, so in the middle of the 17th century the Russians reached the Pacific...

...The British won North America, at least against the French, by virtue of being an emigrating people and thus founding far more populous colonies...

...Meyer and Brysac actually followed the footsteps of British explorers in Nepal, India and Pakistan up to the Khyber Pass, where Afghanistan begins...

...My most serious complaint against The Tournament of Shadows (the term is the Russian equivalent of the Great Game) is the authors' failure to stress sufficiently both the advantages and the greater success of the Russians...

...On both sides they appealed chiefly to young men burning for fame and advancement, who usually acted without or (even against) instructions but were rewarded when successful...

...there was a tendency as well to think that the Soviet bloc had better real estate: Poland, western Russia, Ukraine...

...Who knows...

...Considering the assets of China in the coming struggle for the Heartland, the authors (except in Tibet) pay too little attention to its involvement in the Great Game...

...In Britain and Russia alike, "Forward Schools" demanded aggressive imperial policies...

...However, in India, with its very long coastline, naval supremacy permitted the British to dominate the Mogul Empire from the mid-18th century...

...The Chinese edge was hardly clear at the start of the 20th century, when the completion of the railroad and telegraph network across the Russian Empire brought geographic determinism to its highpoint...

...A wave of "Buddhophilia" swept over government circles bent on mobilizing the Lamaists of the steppe and thereby securing influence in Tibet...

...After the conquest of Central Asia by the Russians and of the Punjab (1849) by the British, only Tibet and ever recalcitrant Afghanistan remained unclaimed territory...

...In the late 1970s the Soviets even took over Afghanistan, the very cockpit of the Great Game...

...Pro-Russian Buddhists were sent to Lhasa as agents of influence...

...But in Rudyard Kipling's "Great Game"— the competition between the two empires for Afghanistan, the Punjab, Central Asia, and Tibet—sea power was unimportant...

...Here was Mackinder's nightmare, fully realized," the authors note, "an empire spamiing from East Berlin to North Korea, embracing most of the supposed Heartland...

...Nonetheless, Britain became the most important foreign power in Tibet simply by occupying the capital in 1904 and stationing a resident official on the scene...

...Thereafter they had to defend it, and since the subcontinent had repeatedly been invaded from the northwest, the British acquired an interest in Central Asia and in Afghanistan, where they were actually defeated by a tribal society in the First Afghan War (183 9-42...

...Will the Chinese Imperium fall apart shortly after reaching its apogee, as did the two Russian Empires and Britain's North American one...

...Mere geographic centrality did not confer any special importance on the Heartland, any more than it had made the Mississippi River the key to dominating North America, as 18thcentury French geographic determinists had maintained...

...the khanates of Turkestan, including the fabled cities of Bukhara, Samarkand and Tashkent, fell mostly in the 1860s and 1870s...

...One of them, a remarkable Buriat named Agvan Dorzhiev, managed to become the tutor of the 13th Dalai Lama(1876-1933), the current incarnation's predecessor, in the 18 80s and his chief political adviser in the 1890s...

...The future may well show that population is...

...Politically, the Forward School was stronger in Russia than in Britain, which scored many fewer triumphs in this competition and was often governed by Liberals opposed, at least in principle, to imperialism...

...At the other (eastern) end of northern India, the need to protect the frontier led Britain into contact with Tibet, where it competed not only with Russia but also with China, Tibet's overlord for the past several centuries...

...Their aim is to discredit geographic determinism...

...And for a second time it collapsed not long after attaining its zenith, for in reality, control over non-Russian peoples made it more unstable, and Afghanistan, as the British had found out in the previous century, is much easier to win than to hold...

...Russian governments, much more imbued with adventurist thinking, pursued the Tournament of Shadows more doggedly than the British did the Great Game...

...The Tibetans now started looking to Britain for support of their national aspirations, but Westminster and New Delhi hung on to the formula that the Land of Snows was an autonomous region of China...

...It was not simply that many people overrated the intrinsic strength of dictatorships...

...contacts between Central Asia and Western Europe languished as well...

...Siberia, and Central Asia...

...Alexander the Great, who campaigned in Central Asia and in Afghanistan and Pakistan from 330 to 325 BCE, was the first man to dream of an empire embracing two continents...

...The last, otherwise known as Turkestan, comprised China's Xinjiang province, the strip of Afghanistan on the far side of the Hindu Kush, and the Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan...

...Within a few years, of course, the Russian Empire collapsed ignominiously...

...By now, the Siberian epigones of the Mongols were steadily losing ground to the Russians, their former vassals, who expanded to the east with what the authors rightly describe as an American sense of "manifest destiny...

...Would an expanding China be more of a threat than Russia proved to be...

...A century ago, Russia's Finance Minister, Sergei Witte, told Tsar Nicholas II, "Given our enormous frontier with China and our exceptionally favorable situation, the absorption by Russia of a considerable part of the Chinese Empire is only a matter of time...

...surely the west too would fall...

...His rival, the Panchen Lama, was pro-Chinese...

...But Meyer and Brysac do demonstrate that geography isn't destiny...

...Acknowledging the claims of that dying polity seemed harmless...