India and Pakistan in Mackinder's arc of crises

Key Markets report for Thursday, 8 May 2025

On 22 April, a terrorist attack took place in Pahalagam, in India's territory of Jammu and Kashmir. The attack was attributed to Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its military. It left 25 Indian tourists and one Nepali individual dead. The attack provoked outrage in India and vows of retribution, which finally happened during the night of 6 May as India launched an air attack against Pakistan. The airstrikes left several people dead and over a dozen injured. In turn, Pakistan promised to retaliate and has apparently started with artillery shelling of targets in India.

If the conflict continues to escalate it could turn into a war of catastrophic proportions, both nations being nuclear powers. Why is this happening, and what prompted the Pakistani terrorists to attack and execute, point blank, a group of Indian tourists? What would they gain by killing civilians? This is not clear, but whoever issued their orders likely had it in mind to provoke a conflict between India and Pakistan. Those orders likely didn't come from Pakistan's government but from the deep state networks working in coordination with Western deep state and intelligence agencies like the CIA and MI6.

The unfolding pivot of history

Two days after the attacks took place, Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Asif spoke about the presence of terrorist networks in Pakistan and said that, “We have been doing this dirty work for the U.S.A. for about three decades, and for the West, including Britain. That was a mistake and we suffered for that...” Among other things, Pakistani military and intelligence helped the CIA fight the Soviets in Afghanistan and also contributed to recruiting, arming and training of the Jihadi terror networks after 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Part of their agenda has also been antagonizing and provoking India. That conflict goes back decades and its rationale stems from British geopolitics, as formulated by Halford Mackinder in his seminal, 1904 work titled, “The Geographical Pivot of History.”

At that time, Britain was increasingly feeling the strain of maintaining the "empire upon which the sun never set" and the imperial guard felt that they needed to address its vulnerabilities and formulate contingency plans. Mackinder believed that in the long term, British Empire's chief vulnerability was its focus on sea power and that it could ultimately be eclipsed by a land power that could emerge in what he called the Pivot Area: a large expanse roughly encompassing Russia, the Caucasus region, Kazakhstan, Iran, and Afghanistan. In Mackinder’s framework, the Pivot Area is surrounded by the Inner or Marginal Crescent which includes Europe, Northern Africa, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula, India, China and Japan, while the lands of the Outer, or Insular Crescent included the rest of the world.

The Pivot Area had critical strategic importance for the British because it was capable of emerging as an independently viable economic power and a powerful rival empire which would become an existential threat to the British empire. It therefore had to be neutralized and destroyed.

Mackinder’s cunning plan

Mackinder came up with a cunning plan…

“It appears to me that in the present decade we are for the first time in a position to attempt… a correlation between the larger geographical and the larger historical generalizations… and may seek a formula which shall express certain aspects, at any rate, of geographical causation in universal history… setting into perspective some of the competing forces in current international politics.”

What formula was Mackinder referring to, and what did he mean by “setting into perspective some of the competing forces in current international politics?” The barely intelligible prose in fact foreshadowed the century of British geopolitics. He explained further that,

“The threat of such an event [emergence of a Pivot power] should, therefore, throw France into alliance with the over-sea powers, and France, Italy, Egypt, India and Korea would become so many bridgeheads where the outside navies would support armies to compel the pivot allies to deploy land forces and prevent them from concentrating their whole strength on fleets.”

In other words, Mackinder's cunning plan was to surround the Pivot Area with a crescent of crisis flashpoints and induce nations like France, Italy, Egypt, India and Korea to bait the pivot powers (which they presumed would be Russia with any of her regional allies) into a continuous sequence of destabilizing, exhausting wars. The empire that ruled the waves could supply these nations with arms and ammunition (and loans) needed to keep the wars going. This general approach to geopolitics has defined the Western empire's geopolitics ever since. We have even seen that at critical junctures, France somehow always gravitates "into alliance with the over-sea powers." Curious, that.

Changing geography, multiplying arson opportunities

Over the decades, the geography of these designated flashpoints shifted with the changing geopolitical opportunities. Many of those changes were deliberately engineered to rig the whole inner crescent around the Pivot Area, from the Baltic states down to the Black Sea and the Middle East and across to the Koreas, with multiple crisis flashpoints where regional conflicts could readily be detonated. For example, when the British were forced to abandon India, the "pearl" of their empire in 1947, they made sure to leave it partitioned with predominantly Muslim Pakistan in the West and predominantly Hindu India in the Asian sub-continent. That set the stage for decades of tensions and conflict.

Today, the Pivot Power Mackinder was fearing is actually a reality and it is forming alliances in a way that really does threaten the Western empire's primacy, not to mention its hegemony in Eurasia. This is why Mackinder's multiple "beachheads" are now as handy as a means of derailing any alternative developments in the global system of governance. Present tensions between India and Pakistan may seem unrelated to other global crises, but they're part of the same conflict between two systems of governance; not between democracy vs. autocracy as advertised, but between the Western empire vs. pretty much the rest of the world. This context provides a coherent understanding of the way past, present and future conflicts which may seem unrelated stem from the same ultimate source: the cunning plans to dominate the world by fomenting chaos everywhere as needed.

The Soviet Union was destabilized by drawing it into a war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. During the 1990s and early 2000s, Russia was forced to fight a war against Islamist insurgencies in Chechnya and Dagestan. Next came war in Georgia after which Syria flared up, and then we had unprovoked war in Ukraine. Another front opened the same year in Nagorno Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan and then October 7, 2023 Hamas triggered a new war in the Eastern Mediterranean.

If you are a Zionist or evangelical Christian, you might think that this last one is completely different; that it’s a righteous, biblical-scale stuff, until you consider that the very creation of Hamas was Benjamin Netanyahu’s handywork and that part of its leadership was being coddled in Qatar living a high life while their Qatari handlers closely coordinated their foreign and ‘security’ policy with their British counterparts. Last year Syria was overrun by jihadi terrorists and now different jihadi terrorists staged an attack against Indian tourists which was clearly aimed at provoking a broader conflict.

The gift that keeps on giving…

But the deep state arsonists aren't resting on those laurels: they're setting the stage for much more of the same, planning further unprovoked conflicts between the Baltic States and Finland against Russia; another unprovoked war between Russia and Moldova; a separatist movement in Balochistan to break Pakistan apartt; destabilization of Myanmar by Bangladeshi terror groups, and more. Farther East they are orchestrating an unprovoked invasion of China against Taiwan and doing their best to restart a war between the two Koreas.

Western intelligence agencies like the CIA, MI6 and the Mossad, along with the British and American special forces (SAS and JSOC) are involved up to their eyeballs in every single one of these conflicts in the role of instigators and arsonists. At that level of analysis, current developments in Kashmir are part of the same conflict as Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, and others: a clash of two systems of governance.

In one of my recent articles I mentioned Henry Carey's characterization of the two systems, not from the geopolitical, but from economic viewpoint. Recall, he wrote that, "One [system] looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system…" I believe that this system's arson attacks against peace will continue unrelentingly until it is fully and completely uprooted, dismantled and replaced. When that happens, humanity could truly transcend centuries of universal war to embrace and cultivate a future of universal peace.

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Today’s trading signals

With yesterday’s closing prices we have the following changes for the Key Markets portfolio: