meltwater and lakes in Tibet and Kashmir are crucial sources of water for vast swathes of humanity in South and Southeast Asia, while there are considerable hydrocarbon and mineral reserves throughout Central Asia. Mahan believed that the clash between the Russian land power from the North, pushing down toward warm water port, and the opposing coalition of sea powers from pushing upward from the South (including Britain, the U.S., Japan, and Germany), would play out their conflict in the Debated and Debatable zone. This zone featured areas of political vacuum, underdevelopment, and internecine conflicts which made it both unstable and ripe for conquest. Even today, Central Asia is politically weak or unstable, and riven by separatism, ethnic, or religious conflict. The Heartland Halford J. Mackinder, a British geographer and geopolitician, would describe this region of the world as the Heartland in a 1904 speech The Geographical Pivot of History to the Royal Geographical Society. This idea would become the foundation of his contribution to geostrategy. Geographically, the Pivot encompasses all of Central Asia, with the addition of large parts of Iran, and Russia as well. "Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the world." The Geographic Pivot is an area on the continent of Eurasia which is either landlocked, or whose rivers and littoral fed into inland seas or the ice-locked Arctic Ocean. The Volga, Oxus and Jaxartes drain into lakes, and the Ob, Yenisei and Lena drain into the Arctic. The Tarim and Helmund rivers also fail to drain into the ocean. Most of the region Mackinder defines is steppe land, mottled with patches of desert or mountains. Because of the rapid mobility that the steppe lands allow, Mackinder points to the historical tendency of nomadic horseback or camel-riding invaders coming from the east into the west. The Pivot's projection into Central Asia is defined on one side by the Caspian Sea and Caucasus, and on the other side by a mountain range running from Pakistan northeast up to Mongolia and southern Russia. This triangular projection south into Central Asia was part of an area inaccessible to the sea powers (Britain, the U.S., Japan, and France primarily). As such, it was a strategically important area from which land power could be projected into the rest of the Eurasian landmass, virtually unimpeded by the sea powers. Soviet collapse The dissolution of the Soviet Union in