The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World

The 20th century's titanic struggle for supremacy in Eurasia--Earth's largest landmass--created the world of the 21st century and continues to rage, according to global affairs expert Hal Brands in his brilliant history The Eurasian Century. The Eurasian supercontinent and the oceans surrounding it were "the crucible in which the contemporary world was forged," and they remain "the cockpit of global rivalry," Brands contends.

Holding 70% of the world's population, boundless resources, and industrial might, Eurasia has always been "a prize without equal," the stage on which the drama of two "hot wars" (World Wars I and II) and one cold war played out. Brands unpacks the geopolitical factors that led to these conflicts through the percipient work of now-obscure English polymath Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), whose sharp and prophetic insights posited the nightmare scenario of "a world with a tyrannical Eurasia at its center." As "the march of technology shrank Eurasia's epic geography," Mackinder foresaw "the emergence of totalitarian states with industrial economies" that easily "fueled aggression and conquest" outward. But it was the alliance of liberal superpowers that allowed a "flanking free-world community" to contain bad Eurasian actors.

In the book's sobering second half, Brands draws chilling parallels between the past and the 21st-century authoritarian regimes of China, Iran, and Russia. "Geography shapes but strategy decides," he writes, and The Eurasian Century is Brands's cogent appeal to "learn the lessons of the first Eurasian century" to avoid the "return of history's horrors" in the second. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver

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