Geopolitics general

Land power or Sea power?

Rimland or Heartland?

Which would you rather control and why?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean_trade
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Seapower because colonies are game breakers
Rimland because I like rimjobs

By colonies you mean specifically foreign territories separated by and accessible by sea?

Why are they game breakers?
Access to a larger variety of resources due to more efficient, naval access to a wider range of climate zones?

Rimland = Prosperity
Heartland = Security and long term stability

If you're a sea power all it takes is for someone else to create a more powerful navy than you and you could lose everything.

Well, the British Empire managed to develop and maintain a military policy and doctrine that was designed to preclude the possibility of that ever happening (the 2:1 principle, I think it was called).
And yet it still happened, due to other reasons other than just navy-related factors.
The US simply got more powerful and Europe much weaker after WW1.

Perhaps the Outer Crescent is the true pivot here?
Latin America, Oceania, North America and Africa?

>If you're a sea power all it takes is for someone else to create a more powerful navy than you and you could lose everything.

So then just don't let anybody else build a larger navy.

Seapower will always trump land power, due to the fact that we trade by sea. Rimlands for sure.

Seafaring and trade by sea existed for millennia, yet the Silk Road was the most important trade route in the world until sea trade expanded to the Outer crescent.
Trade happens by sea, yet the majority of resources that are the object of trade, come from land, right?
What's the point of trading if there's nothing to trade in?

>yet the Silk Road was the most important trade route in the world

No. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean_trade

Whether sea power or land power is more important dependents entirely on your geographic location. If you have potentially hostile neighbors that you share a land border with, then you're pretty much forced to prioritize land power.

>No.

I don't see anything in that article which hints that the Indian Ocean route was more important than the Silk Road.

It just says that it existed, which I also said.

Actually, in many cases the Indian Ocean trade was a natural auxiliary to the Silk Road itself. Some routes of the Silk road led down to the sea in India, the East Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula and then simply continued along parts of the Ocean trade routes.
One was a natural extension/auxiliary of the other.

> If you have potentially hostile neighbors
>potentially hostile neighbours

which in geopolitics means "everyone"

>Except nations which are your de-facto vassal states

Fixed it.

You ever read The Revenge of Geography?

No.

Can I be a cheeky cunt and say both?

Russia disagrees.
>Britain has lost essentially all of its colonies
>Russia is practically the same size as the Russian Empire

>Falling for Great Game memes

What is your counter-meme?

The Silk Road was barely in comparison to the tonnage of supplies and goods that travelled through the Mediterranean and Indian oceans for millennia. The Silk road wasn't all that important to the Romans until Byzantine times.

I am a lazy bastard; are there any specific sources for thoroughfare estimates and comparisons between land and ocean trade routes in antiquity?

>Russia sucks ass
>UK doesn't

Sea power is obviously better, but there is a corollary to that. Maintain a powerful navy is an extremely expensive undertaking. If you don't have a strong economic base, you can easily bankrupt yourself in process of building your navy. And a 2nd rate navy can be more a liability than an asset because you have all the expense of related to maintaining a navy, but without the vast benefits of actually dominating the ocean.

For examples, see:

>Germany WW1
>Japan WW2

Although, Japan's Navy technically was the largest in the world in 1941. They had a first-rate navy, not a second-rate. They just couldn't build new ships fast enough to replace losses incurred during the war. I guess the really lesson is:

Economic Power > Everything Else

Trade and fertile land > Inaccessible wasteland.

Russia knows that all the mineral wealth in the world would be worthless without a way to move it, and they've thus been consumed with an autistic drive to gain access to major seaways and trade routes for centuries.

>St. Petersburg
>Kaliningrad
>Port Arthur
>Crimea
etc, etc.

economic power is the decider of all things
WW1 Britain had the worlds largest and most powerful navy
pre-1941 Japan took that honor
then Japan decided to wake the beast and the USA built ~5 times more cargo tonnage in 4 years than the Japanese had built in the last 20
the USA left WW2 controlling over 50% of the WORLDS navy by tonnage

>they've thus been consumed with an autistic drive to gain access to major seaways and trade routes for centuries.

And the sea powers have been obsessed with acquiring control over Russian resources ever since the end of the 19th century, when the rest of the world and its hitherto undiscovered territories were more or less partitioned.

So how do the factors affecting acquisition of economic power differ depending on whether you are a land or sea power?