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#1 Even the greatest empires have been shaped by geography. America's political, national security, and foreign policy elites continue to ignore the basics of geopolitics that have shaped the fate of world empires for the past five hundred years.

#2 In 1904, Halford Mackinder, the director of the London School of Economics, presented a paper at the Royal Geographical Society titled The Geographical Pivot of History. He argued that the future of global power lay not in controlling the sea lanes, but in a vast landmass he called Euro-Asia.

#3 Mackinder's lecture was a foundational moment in the history of geography, and the field of geopolitics. His theory of how geography shapes global power has been proven correct time and time again, and his words still offer a prism of precision when it comes to understanding the geopolitics driving the world's major conflicts.

#4 The age of sea power, which lasted just over four hundred years, was characterized by the great powers competing to control the Eurasian world island via the sea lanes that stretched for 15,000 miles from London to Tokyo.