Mackinder and the “Strategical mentality”

It is common to hear complaints about how our political leadership in both parties isn’t thinking strategically in the way that they should and that we would prefer. As an alternative we often imagine an ideal situation where policy and strategy are more appropriately matched, but we rarely seem to have ever reached that ideal (the closest perhaps was during WW2 and the beginning of the Cold War.) But what would happen if instead of a political elite lacking knowledge and competence at strategy we had the opposite? What would it be like to have a governing elite schooled in strategy and governing with strategy in mind?

I started thinking about this recently while reading Halford Mackinder’s “Democratic Ideals and Reality.” Mackinder, writing about the democratic countries, says that “Democracy refuses to think strategically unless and until compelled to do so for purposes of defense.” He contrasts this characteristic of the western democracies with Prussia/Germany of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

According to Mackinder, following the defeat at Jena in 1806, Prussia set off on a path creating a close relationship between the government bureaucracy, the education establishment, and the army, with the University of Berlin set up as a ‘sister’ organization to the General Staff. This would result in 19th century Prussia being governed by an “oligarchy of intellectual ‘Experts’ — staff officers, bureaucrats, professors.” The German ‘Kultur,’ which Mackinder describes as “that philosophy and education which imbued a whole race with the ‘ways and means’ mind,” would seem at first to have a positive impact:

“The rapid German growth was a triumph of organization, or, in other words, of the strategical, the ‘ways and means’ mentality.”

But Mackinder, writing in the immediate shadow of WW1, did not think that this turned out very well:

“Judged from the standpoint of Berlin, it was a wonderful thing to have impressed Kultur, or ‘Strategical mentality’, on the educated class of a whole people, but from the standpoint of civilization at large it was a fatal momentum to have given to a nation — fatal, that is to say, in the long run, either to civilization or that nation.”

Reading this spurred me to think differently, not so much about the specific historical circumstances Mackinder was writing about, but how even if it is possible to correct the lack of strategic acumen among our political leaders, there are perils in having a governing elite indoctrinated in the “strategical, the ‘ways and means’ mentality.” We haven’t really thought about that. How can that go wrong? We need to be careful about contrasting today’s reality with an ideal without considering that that ideal can go wrong as well. What would happen if we had a governing elite that valued strategic considerations above all else and ignored other, perhaps more important, concerns for a liberal democracy? Sometimes the choice is between which kind of ‘wrong’ we prefer.