The headline news story of 1904 was the Battle of Port Arthur, a surprise Japanese naval attack on Port Arthur (Lüshun) in Manchuria that started the Russo-Japanese War. Both nations had ambitions in Manchuria and the Korean Empire. Russia wanted a warm-water port on the Pacific Ocean both for its navy and for maritime trade. Japan wanted Russia to recognize the Korean Empire as being within the Japanese sphere of influence.
There were many other notable events in 1904. The US had pushed for the separation of Panama from Colombia in 1903 and once Panama was recognized as a separate sovereign state, for $10 million, the US gained control of the Panama Canal Zone. On May 6, 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed the chief engineer of the Panama Canal Project.
Polytechnic University of the Philippines was founded as Manila Business School, under the superintendence of American C. A. O’Reilley. The first underground line of the New York City Subway was opened. Electric refrigerators and washing machines first became available. The Great Western Railway of England started a new age in rail travel with the first railway locomotive to exceed 100 miles per hour.
But the world was still years away from Henry Ford debuting the first production Model T Ford in 1908 and the first scheduled commercial radio broadcast in 1920. The talking motion picture did not come until 1910, the ladies bra in 1913, and David Jung, founder of the Hong Kong Noodle Company of Los Angeles, claimed that he invented the cookie in 1918, since legally determined (in 1983) to be false.
As now, social issues were important. In 1904, New Zealand was the only “developed” country that gave females the right to vote. The US would follow in 1920 after the UK in 1918. The social engineering concept of “eugenics”—the purpose of which is to improve the quality of the human race by encouraging the reproduction of humans with desirable traits and discouraging those with weaker traits—was being seriously discussed.
Theodore Roosevelt announced his “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, stating that the US would intervene in the Western Hemisphere should Latin American governments prove incapable or unstable. That should sound contemporary.
Halford Mackinder presented a paper in 1904 on “The Geographical Pivot of History” in which he formulated the Heartland Theory and the study of geopolitics. That theory was later simplistically summarized as Who rules Eastern Europe (the Heartland) commands the Pivot Area (Russia); who rules the Pivot Area commands the World-Island (Europe, Asia, and Africa); who rules the World-Island commands the world.
Mackinder’s premise was that once the World-Island was under one power, then the Americas and every place else would quickly fall under that one power. In 1904, American wealth and military was not acknowledged. Yet unlike not allowing women to vote and the supremacy hierarchy of the races has vanished into the dust of history, the Heartland Theory has dominated geopolitics to this day.
The Soviet Union controlled the “Heartland” until the fall of the USSR in 1991. But even late 20th century Russia understood that in an age of ICBMs that can reach any point on the planet, the 1,600-kilometer distance between Moscow and Berlin, or 7,800-km to Washington D.C. did not require marching troops through the Heartland countries. But then again, no nation wants a potentially hostile military at its border.
However, even as Nato was created “to guard their [member states] freedom—all of this in the context of countering the threat posed at the time by the Soviet Union,” which disappeared in 1991, controlling the “Heartland” became a core Western purpose. Every Heartland state except for Ukraine—Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland (all in 1999), Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia (all in 2004), Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia—is now a part of (controlled?) by the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Is there any chance that the US government thinks about the Asean region as the new Heartland that needs controlling?
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