Grand Strategy Meets Reality: When Heartland Strategists Forget About the Heart


For more than a decade, Western strategic discourse has focused on the “Pacific pivot” as a means of rebalancing military and geopolitical power. However, this discourse often overlooks a structural contradiction: the West’s total reliance on a concentrated cluster of industrial organs in East Asia. This paper argues that the Western AI and digital infrastructure is not merely a commercial asset but a circulatory system whose heart resides on a single island. Without acknowledging these physical and industrial constraints, the Pacific pivot remains a geographically confident but materially hollow strategy.

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