Discussion Resources· The World Factbook (httpswww.cia.gov

Discussion Resources
· The World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/the-world-
factbook/)
· US Bilateral Relations Fact Sheet (https://www.state.gov/u-s-
bilateral-relations-fact-sheets/)
· Congressional Research Service Reports on the Middle East
and the Arab World (https://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/)
·
Geopolitics and the Cold War
THE TOTAL VANQUISHING OF THE THIRD REICH AND
IMPERIAL
Japan set the stage for the next phase of geopolitical thought
and discourse—this time to account for, and to game-plan, the
new US role internationally. This phase was grafted onto the
older challenge of the “heartland” power, in the shape of a
Soviet Union of unprecedented power and geographical range,
the situation predicted by Mackinder in 1943. There were also
the practical and theoretical questions of how far newer
technology, in the form of long-range bombers, missiles and
nuclear weapons vitiated the older heartland and oceanic
geopolitical theses. Indeed, during the Cold War, newer types of
core-periphery geopolitical formulations surfaced in the form of
containment, the “Domino Theory,” and multipolarity. George
Kennan and Henry Kissinger were the most prominent examples
of geopoliticians in action. However, aside from the
significance of traditional mental maps, US geopolitical
propositions were not left unchallenged, most conspicuously by
Soviet commentators, and by Western radicals, such as the
French thinker Yves Lacoste, who claimed that post-1945

geopolitical theory was in practice a justification for military
aggression. A different challenge to geopolitical accounts came
from the rise of environmentalism and an appreciation of the
constraints that human interaction with the physical
environment could place upon geopolitical theorizing and
action. Less conspicuously, official and popular views within
the West frequently did not match those of the United States.1
COLD WAR RIVALRY
The Cold War was presented in geopolitical terms, both for
analysis and for rhetoric. As during World War II, a sense of
geopolitical challenge was used to encourage support for a
posture of readiness, indeed of immediate readiness. The sense
of threat was expressed in map form, with both the United
States and the Soviet Union depicting themselves as surrounded
and threatened by the alliance systems, military plans and
subversive activities of their opponents. These themes could be
seen clearly not only in government publications, but also in
those of other organizations. The dominant role of the state
helps to explain this close alignment in the case of the Soviet
Union and its Communist allies. In the United States, there was
also a close correspondence between governmental views and
those propagated in the private sector, not least in the print
media.
News magazines offered an important illustration of the
situation and, in the United States, served actively to propagate
such governmental themes as the need for the containment of
Communism. Thus, in the April 1, 1946, issue of Time, the
leading US news magazine, R. M. Chapin produced a map,
entitled “Communist Contagion,” which emphasized the nature
of the threat and the strength of the Soviet Union. The latter
was enhanced by a split-spherical presentation of Europe and
Asia, making the Soviet Union more potent as a result of the
break in the center of the map. Communist expansion was
emphasized in the map by presenting the Soviet Union as a
vivid red, the color of danger, and by categorizing neighboring
states with regard to the risk of contagion employing the

language of disease: states were referred to as quarantined,
infected, or exposed. Such terminology underlines the
politicized nature of some of the use of geography during the
Cold War.
A sense of threat was also apparent in the standard map
projection employed in the United States. The Van der Grinten
projection, invented in 1898, continued the Mercator
projection’s practice of exaggerating the size of the latitudes at
a distance from the equator. Thus, Greenland, Alaska, Canada,
and the Soviet Union appeared larger than they were in reality.
This projection was used by the National Geographic Society
from 1922 to 1988, and their maps were the staple of
educational institutions, the basis of maps used by newspapers
and television and the acme of public cartography. In this
projection, a large Soviet Union appeared menacing, a threat to
the whole of Eurasia, and a dominant presence that required
containment.
However, before employing these examples simply to decry US
views then, it is necessary to point out that Soviet expansionism
was indeed a serious threat and that the geopolitical challenge
from the Soviet Union was particularly acute due to its being
both a European and an Asian power. The situation was
captured by the standard Western depiction of the Soviet Union.
In turn, the Soviets employed cartographic imagery and
language different to that of the West, a difference which
reflected the expression of contrasting, as well as rival,
worldviews.
A sense of menace was repeatedly presented. Carrying forward
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s use of maps to support his fireside
chats over the radio, President John F. Kennedy, in a press
conference on March 23, 1961, employed maps when he focused
on the situation in Laos, a French colony until 1954, where the
Soviet- and North Vietnamese-backed Pathet Lao were
advancing against the forces of the conservative government:
“These three maps show the area of effective Communist
domination as it was last August, with the colored portions up

on the right-hand corner being the areas held and dominated by
the Communists at that time. And now next, in December of
1960, three months ago, the red area having expanded—and now
from December 20 to the present date, near the end of March,
the Communists control a much wider section of the country.”
The use of the color red dramatized the threat, as did the
depiction on the map of Laos’s neighbors: Thailand, Cambodia,
South Vietnam, and Burma. Thus, the Domino Theory was in
play, predicting a Communist advance in stages, and this theory
was employed to support the deployment of 10,000 US marines
who were based in Okinawa. In early 1961, Kennedy ordered
marines into border areas of Thailand in order to send a
message to the Communist Pathet Lao not to take over
Vientiane, the Laotian capital. This strategy was an aspect of
the new geopolitics that followed World War II. The threat of a
graver regional conflict encouraged the negotiation of a
ceasefire agreement for Laos ten months after the press
conference.2
The Domino Theory was an instance of the degree to which,
compared to the classical European geopolitics of the 1900s, a
relatively vague, less theoretically grounded, and more generic
sense of geopolitics helped to shape the mental maps of US
leaders and the American public during both World War II and
the Cold War. In those years, this approach focused on whose
camp other states were placed in: the West, the Axis, or the
Communist bloc. This added ideological dimension, certainly
compared to the 1900s, ensured that geopolitical perceptions
differed greatly from traditional concepts of spheres of
influence. US officials and political scientists came to use the
terminology of the Domino Theory with special reference to
Southeast Asia in the 1960s: If South Vietnam falls, then Laos
and Cambodia, and then Thailand. Eugene Rostow (1913–2002),
a foreign policy guru for the Johnson Administration when he
served as undersecretary of state for political affairs (1966 –
1969), pushed this belief, dutifully picked up and trumpeted by
the secretary of state from 1961 to 1969, Dean Rusk, a former

professor of political science. Underlying this construction was
a tacit admission of US military weakness insofar as the
Americans could neither defend nor fight on all fronts. In that
respect, the Domino Theory certainly differed from earlier,
more orthodox, formulations of geopolitical doctrine.
There were more dramatic departures from classical geopolitics,
suggesting very different measures of power. For example, the
cover of Time on May 15, 1950, provided an image very much
of a US counter to the Soviet Union in other than conventional
military terms. The cover depicted a globe with facial features
eagerly drinking from a bottle of Coca-Cola being offered from
behind the Earth by an animated planet that was Coca-Cola. The
perspective was instructive. The image of the Earth was
Atlanticist, with the nose on the face appearing between Brazil
and West Africa and a bead of perspiration on the brow sliding
down from Greenland. The Soviet Union was only partly seen
and, at that, on the edge of the map, while newly Communist
China and war-torn Korea were not seen on this perspective.
The title “World and Friend. Love that piaster, that lira, that
tickey, and that American way of life,” captured a particular
account of geopolitics.
Without such animation, there was a publication of geographical
works in which the contents were in effect highly political. This
carried forward a tendency seen during World War II. Thus, the
publisher’s note for the fifth (1942) edition of Albert
Hart’s American History Atlas declared: “The students in our
schools today are the citizens of tomorrow. On them will fall
the burden of conducting the affairs of the nation. They must,
therefore, be educated for citizenship in a democracy. To carry
on intelligently, the electorate must be well informed. In
addition to love of country, Americans must ‘know’ their
country.”3
Praise increased during the early stages of the Cold War.
Thus, The March of Civilization in Maps and Pictures (1950)
referred to the United States as “a land populated by every race,
creed, and color, and a haven of refuge for the oppressed[;] its

phenomenal growth has never been equaled. Far removed from
the traditions and hampering fetters of the Old World, it has
charted a new course in government. Its freedom-loving people
have devoted their energies to developing the riches that Nature
has so lavishly supplied.”4
There was also support for US foreign policy and American
companies, as with the treatment, in atlases and other works, of
the United Fruit Company and the Alliance for Progress in Latin
America.5 There were similar accounts from other powers.
The Atlas of South West Africa (1983), a work sponsored by the
Administrator General of South West Africa and published in
South Africa, emphasized the government’s care for the welfare
of the population, which scarcely described the situation in this
South African colony.6
Turning from the use of geographical works to advance political
views, the more formal nature of geopolitical discussion during
the Cold War faced a number of serious problems that can be
regarded as objective. It was unclear how best to assess the
likely impact of strategic nuclear power and, subsequently, of
rocketry. The high-spectrum military technology was never
used, and therefore it was difficult to gauge its probable
effectiveness. This point, which did not exhaust the
imponderables of possible conflict between the great powers,
meant that it was very unclear how to measure strength and,
therefore, respective capability. In terms of geopolitics, and
more specifically of the likely equations of power that might
lead to the discussion of posture and policy as aggressive or
defensive, this situation created serious difficulties.
These equations were not restricted to the high-spectrum end of
the capability of the great powers. There were also conceptual
and methodological issues arising from the processes of anti -
imperialism and decolonization. These processes involved the
shifting meaning of control, influence and effectiveness. More
particularly, the nature and frontier of control in anti -
insurgency struggles were difficult to assess as a result of a
reliance on air power, which proved less effective than its

exponents had hoped and had initially seemed the case.
THE DECLINE OF GEOPOLITICS AS AN ACADEMIC
SUBJECT
Meanwhile, to a certain extent, the very idea and practice of
geopolitics appeared redundant. Indeed, the rise of nuclear
power with the United States in 1945 followed by the Soviet
Union in 1949, in conjunction with the later development of
intercontinental ballistic missiles, apparently made conventional
geopolitical assumptions obsolete as the entire world could be
actualized as a target. Moreover, the target could be rapidly hit.
As such, the world had become an isotropic surface, one that
was equal in every point. A different form of simplification was
provided by clear-cut ideological readings of the world in terms
of West or East.
Neither account appeared to leave much room for geopolitics.
Further, its reputation as a subject declined in the postwar
years. To a considerable extent, this decline was because
geopolitics was associated with the Nazis and was differentiated
from the US discussion of the spatial aspects of power, a
discussion described as political geography. The latter was
presented as different from geopolitics in both content and
method because it was American and allegedly objective, and
the term geopolitics was avoided. Moreover, the
conceptualization of the subject was not pursued.
Indeed, geography was in decline in US education. Harvard
University, a key institutional model and opinion leader,
dismantled its Department of Geography in 1948, in large part
to get rid of Derwent Whittlesey, a homosexual who headed the
program.7 Appointed in 1928 and made a full professor in 1943,
Whittlesey continued to be listed as professor of geography, but
there was no longer a department, and he was the sole
geography professor still on the staff. Whittlesey
published Environmental Foundations of European
History (1949); he died of a heart attack in 1956.
Harvard’s example was followed by other prominent
institutions, such as Stanford. The elderly, but still influential

Bowman was much involved in the fall of Whittlesey. With such
a lead, it was not surprising that many US state and local
education systems also dropped a subject now held to be
irrelevant. The teaching of geography was largely relegated to
the elementary level, and this was greatly to affect geopolitical
understanding.
Political and intellectual currents interacted. Political
geography no longer seemed acceptable in the United
States,8 and was anyway largely separated from geopolitics by
scholars such as Jean Gottmann, Richard Hartshorne and
Stephen Jones.9 Geopolitics was discredited as a pseudo-science
and by being linked to special pleading and, more specifically,
Nazi Germany.10 This theme was continued by Tete Tetens, a
German émigré who argued that geopolitics was being kept
alive “for a new German approach to divide and conquer the
world.”11 Tetens, a German journalist who fled for political
reasons to Switzerland in 1933, moved to the United States after
living in Argentina from 1936 to 1938. From 1939, Tetens
produced research reports for Bernard Baruch (1870–1965), an
important advisor to President Roosevelt, and for the Office of
Strategic Services. Tetens focused on Nazi sympathizers in the
United States and on German geopolitical plans. In 1941, Tetens
reported on Haushofer’s plan for world conquest and on Hitler’s
plan for an iron ring around the United States.12
After the war, Tetens presented Haushofer’s disciples as playing
a key role in directing German foreign policy13 toward a new
alignment in which Germany shed US shackles and dominated
Europe anew. Tetens quoted neo-Nazi circles, not least the Geo-
Political Centre in Madrid, and its ambition that Germany
have Ausweichmoeglichkeiten im geopolitischen Raum (the
necessary geopolitical space for strategic
maneuverings).14 Tetens argued that geopolitical naivety on the
part of the Pentagon had ensured that Germany was not purged
of its pro-Nazi sympathizers and that this provided the
possibility for Germany to pursue the geopolitical fundamentals
that had governed German–Russian relations in the

past.15 European unification was traced back by Tetens to the
pan-German School under Emperor Wilhelm II (r. 1888–1918)
and to Haushofer’s ideas.16
Some geopolitical work continued in the United States, in part
by being presented as a different subject.17 However,
geography as a subject, and thus the potential for a geopolitics
grounded in geographical research, was also affected by
criticism of environmental determinism. The attacks on the
mono-causal character of environmentalism by the
anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) influenced Carl Sauer
(1889–1975), a geographer interested in anthropology. Sauer
criticized US geographers, notably Semple (who drew on
Ratzel) and, instead, advanced a possibilist interpretation of the
role of environment.18
In Britain, political geography was distinguished from
geopolitics. The former aspired to impartiality and generality:
the nationality or ethnicity of a political geographer, it was
argued, should be no more deducible from his writings than that
of a paleontologist or quantum physicist. As developed in
Britain, political geography worked mainly by
classification.19 Meanwhile, despite the example of Mackinder,
geopolitics as an academic subject lost impetus in Britain and
largely died out in about 1970. In Germany, geopolitics ceased
to be a major subject. After a gap beginning in 1945, when
Germany lay devastated by war, the publication of
the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik resumed in 1951, only to end
again in 1968.
Thanks to their connotations of Nazi thought and practice,
formalized theories of the interrelationship or
underdetermination of geography and politics, let alone explicit
geopolitics, had limited purchase in the Soviet Union.20 Soviet
historical geography has also been presented as
underdeveloped,21 although it could be quite sophisticated, in
preuniversity textbooks, university textbooks, and post
university historical literature. Once the obligatory ideological
cant in Russian-language Soviet journals and books was cut

through, the authors so often implied geopolitical formulations
that even relatively astute readers could pick them up.
Moreover, there were parallels between Marxist thought and
classical geopolitics. These included laying claim to a spurious
analytical objectivity, even precision, asserting the importance
of materialist factors, and proclaiming, or at least suggesting, a
determinist route to the future. In both Marxist thought and
classical geopolitics, agency poses a key problem, notably the
tendency to downplay the role of the human perception of the
situation and the extent of choice.
CONTAINMENT
An intellectual pursuit of geopolitics from the perspective of
the academic conceptions of the time can only go so far,
however, because whatever the attitude of universities, the
contemporary pressure of the Cold War was in many respects
acutely spatial. Indeed, the possibility of nuclear conflict
initially played out very much in a territorial fashion as the
early atomic weapons were free-fall bombs to be dropped from
aircraft. Thus, as part, in particular, of a range of power based
on aviation,22 the geography of power-projection, of bases and
range, took on considerable weight. The United States rapidly
sought to develop air bases able to take on the tasks of strategic
warfare with the Soviet Union. A new geography led to new
base requirements, including Iceland and Greenland.23 In the
event of World War III breaking out, it was assumed that, with
its far greater numbers of troops and tanks, the Soviet army
would be able to invade continental Europe. The Soviet Union,
in turn, could be struck by British and US bombers from East
Anglia, as well as from air bases in the British colony of Cyprus
and in northern Iraq. Iraq was part of the British alliance system
until 1958. For example, intermediate-range Canberra bombers
could fly from Cyprus, over Turkey, a NATO ally, and the
Black Sea to attack industrial cities in Ukraine, which was then
part of the Soviet Union.
In turn, to protect the United States from Soviet attacks across
the Arctic, major efforts were put into the construction of early-

warning stations in Canada. As a significant aspect of the
system, and providing a new geopolitical facility, the Semi -
Automatic-Ground Environment Air Defense System, launched
in 1958, enabled the predicting of the trajectory of aircraft and
missiles. The largest computers ever built were developed at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology for this system. Once a
new nuclear geography of ground- and submarine-based
intercontinental missiles gradually supplanted long-range
bomber doctrine during the late 1950s and 1960s, strategic and
geopolitical considerations that focused on aircraft ceased to be
pertinent when considering large-scale nuclear conflict. As a
separate issue, there was the question of the strategic viability
of carriers, particularly for Britain.24 The significance of
nuclear weaponry ensured a separate geopolitics focused on the
availability of the raw materials. Thus, US policy in the Congo
crisis in the early 1960s was affected by a determination to
protect access to the Shinkolobwe mine, a source of uranium.
Separately, however, a strongly spatial sense of international
politics had arisen in the development and application of Cold
War ideas of containment. The perception of threats and
opportunities shaped these ideas,25 as did the views of specific
military interests and their planners.26 More was involved than
the prospect of Soviet advances into particular areas, for the
effort to avoid any large-scale conflict in the late 1940s
combined with the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weaponry in
1949 to induce a rethinking of US strategy. This need was
driven by a sense of Soviet expansionism, but also by a belief
that periods of peace and war alike served Soviet interests, and
that the Western powers needed to plan throughout to oppose
these interests. Indeed, as far as Joseph Stalin, the Soviet
dictator from 1924 to 1953, was concerned, geostrategic and
geopolitical issues shaped both foreign policy and internal
political developments. These issues included incipient East–
West antagonisms and the ambition for territorial expansion
into, or political control over Eastern Europe, a region seen by
the Soviets as an ideological bridgehead, strategic glacis

(protection) and economic resource. This list underlines the
difficulty of handling geopolitical concepts with precision. In
practice, each territory represented a range of interests,
commitments, and perceptions.
The concept of legitimacy in international relations had become
more important, or at least newly institutionalized, with the
establishment of the United Nations in 1945; but, at the same
time, the Cold War led to a geopolitics based on rivalry and the
threat of war. Containment, certainly as a concept that was to be
applied in US political and military strategy, received its
intellectual rationale in 1947 from George Kennan, an American
diplomat and intellectual. His article in Foreign Affairs in April
1947 made much use of the word containment. This concept was
followed by the Truman government advancing the idea of
America’s perimeter of vital interests. Moreover, this perimeter
was to be consolidated by the creation of regional security
pacts, foremost of which was to be the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), created in 1949. NATO was a product of
America’s global concern and Western Europe’s acute feeling of
vulnerability. In 1950, the National Security Council’s NSC-68
document reflected the strong geopolitical sense of US strategy.
The outbreak of the Korean War mightily drove the formulation
of NSC-68 and also put US rearmament into motion.27
The call to defend Western Europe and related waters accorded
with the geopolitical stress by Spykman on the “rimland,”
notably Western Europe and Southeast Asia. However, other
areas could be pushed into prominence by the application of the
essentially malleable concept of containment. Europe could be
taken to mean Western Europe but could also be extended to
comprehend the eastern approaches to the Mediterranean. Thus,
in the late 1940s Soviet pressure on Greece and Turkey
constituted key occasions for American engagement, as the
United States, from 1947, took over geopolitical roles hitherto
associated with Britain. Greece and Turkey were, from 1952,
members of NATO, despite an Anglo-Canadian preference for a
focus for NATO on Western Europe and the North Atlantic.

Defensive pacts were also organized in South and Southeast
Asia: the Baghdad Pact (1955), which in 1959 became CENTO,
and SEATO (1955).
The US emphasis was on a global struggle because, for those
concerned with opposition to Communism, individual states
whichever bloc they were in, such as Belgium (the West) or
Poland (the Communist bloc), took on meaning in these terms,
rather than having important issues of their own, including
specific geographical and political concerns and characters.
This approach indeed captured a key aspect of the international
situation. However, the approach also seriously underplayed the
role of separate interests within blocs and, particularly, the
extent to which allies and supporters had (and have) agency as,
for example, with the roles of North and South Korea in the run-
up to the Korean War,28 or the independence toward the United
States displayed by Israel, and still displayed, notably over
settlements in the occupied West Bank. The failure to
appreciate the role of these interests caused repeated problems
for US foreign policy.
At the same time, the primacy of geostrategic concerns during
the Cold War meant that the geopolitics of containment was
more concerned with territory and strength than with
values.29 Linked to this, the United States and NATO were
ready to ally with autocratic states such as in Turkey, Spain,
Greece, Pakistan and others in Latin America, rather than focus
on populist counterparts. For example, the United States and
Franco’s Spain signed an agreement in 1953 giving the
Americans the right to establish air bases. This geostrategic
approach was to lead to a failure to appreciate the difference
between Communism and Third World populist nationalism, a
failure that repeatedly led to problems for US foreign policy.
A number of writers developed the idea of containment, but did
so in a context different from geopolitics because
German Geopolitik had not only discredited the subject and
language of geopolitics at the university level,30 but also
affected its more general public profile. In the United States,

there was the attempt to define and apply what was, in effect, a
geopolitics based on containment, with “defense intellectuals”
playing a prominent role—of which the diminished community
of academic geographers fought shy.
A key figure was Robert Strausz-Hupé (1903–2002), the
Viennese-born US political scientist who, in his Geopolitics:
The Struggle for Space and Power (1942), had criticized
Haushofer.31 Strausz-Hupé argued the need for a geopolitics
directed against the Soviet Union, which he correctly saw as
combining the expansionism of Imperial Russia with the
revolutionary threat of Marxist-Leninism.32 Strausz-Hupé
supported a European federalism anchored in an Atlantic
Alliance as a crucial bar to Soviet expansion, and he very much
backed NATO. His The Estrangement of Western Man (1952)
presented a robust Western civilization, now headed by the
United States, as a key component in the geopolitical equation,
one that must limit Communism. Strausz-Hupé argued that the
crisis he had lived through reflected more than short-term
problems and, instead, focused on larger issues in Western
culture, specifically an absence of social values that rested on
philosophical and moral confusion and failure. Thus, the
geopolitical response he advocated—Britain and France joining
in the cause of European unity, which he saw as likely to
cooperate with the United States in bearing the burden of
Western defense—could, to Strausz-Hupé, only be part of the
remedy.
In his thesis, cultural and intellectual clarity, coherence, and
values—in short metaphysical rearmament—were crucial to the
defense of the West. Five years later, in 1957, Strausz-Hupé
followed with “The Balance of Tomorrow,” an essay published
in the first issue of Orbis, a quarterly he founded (still
published in 2015): “The issue before the United States is the
unification of the globe under its leadership within this
generation. . . . The mission of the American people is to bury
the nation-states, lead their bereaved peoples into larger unions
and overcome with its might the would-be saboteurs of the new

order who have nothing to offer mankind but putrefying
ideology and brute force.”
In Protracted Conflict (1959), Strausz-Hupé, and the others who
helped him write his book, argued that the Soviet Union was
waging such a war, one that employed the Islamic idea of a bloc
that was immune to democratic influence and opposed to
another that was to be worn down, the West. Convinced that the
Soviets were out to sap the West through means short of large-
scale conflict, Strausz-Hupé argued, as George Kennan had
done in 1947, that détentes would simply be short-term periods
in which the Soviets would pursue their interests by different
goals. In short, Protracted Conflict was a call both to vigilance
and to a more robust approach to containment. It was therefore
a warning of the need for caution in the face of the thaw in the
Soviet Union after the death of Stalin in 1953, notably under
Nikita Khrushchev.
As with other geopolitical works, those by Strausz-Hupé were
very much located in terms of the politics of the age or, more
specifically, in terms of the foreign policy and domestic politics
of the state in question. His books reflected debates over US
foreign and military policy, as well as the character of the
literature. Classic geopolitics might be binary, but it was rarely
bilateral; in other words, the national perspective on
international relations encouraged views of the international
situation in terms of binary divides. Criticizing the containment
practiced by the Eisenhower administration (1953–1961) for
passively waiting to respond to Soviet attacks, and therefore
failing to be pro-active, Strausz-Hupé was, in part, responding
to the concern that Eisenhower’s strategy, both military and
diplomatic, was lessening US options as well as posing a
cultural threat. In order to reduce the costs of a military buildup
and to prevent the deleterious political consequences that he
assumed would follow from such a buildup, Eisenhower had put
the emphasis on nuclear strength, arguing that the threat of
nuclear destruction would prevent Soviet attack. Thus, limited
wars, for example, “rolling back” Communism, were not to be

an option, both because they would likely lead to total war and
because the United States would not be prepared for them. A
cautious stance was taken in response to the Hungarian rising in
1956, an affirmation of aspirations for national independence.
Eisenhower’s approach was challenged by writers and
politicians who favored the creation of a force structure and
doctrine able to fight limited wars as an alternative to (and as
well as) those designed for a nuclear total war. In some
respects, geopolitical arguments were an aspect of this pressure
for a limited-war capability, as writers such as Strausz-Hupé
and Henry Kissinger sought not only to press for a more robust
containment, but also to define goals and parameters that made
sense of limited war. Limited nuclear war was part of the
equation, and the apparent possibility of this outcome underlay
John Kennedy’s successful presidential campaign against
Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, in 1960, especially
his critique of Eisenhower for supposedly allowing a “missile
gap” to develop. This was not, in fact, the case. However, in
office, faced with the Berlin (1961) and Cuban (1962) crises,
Kennedy found that limited war strategies ran the risk of a full -
scale nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. In short, the
apparent precision of geopolitical commitment and strategic
planning proved unstable under the pressure of international
crises and in the face of the difficulties of nuclear planning and
command and control.33 In the Vietnam War, a limited war in
which, despite failing to win, the United States did not resort to
nuclear attack, the Americans found that the concept of
graduated response proved difficult to operate, not least in
affecting the views of the North Vietnamese.
Strausz-Hupé’s Protracted Conflict was endorsed by Kissinger,
a Harvard historian of nineteenth-century international relations
who became a leading “defense intellectual,”
publishing Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957).
Kissinger was a member of Strausz-Hupé’s Foreign Policy
Research Institute, and also played a role in the Council on
Foreign Relations. Protracted Conflict was taken further by

Strausz-Hupé in A Forward Strategy for America (1961), which
pressed for a solidification of the West so as to thwart any
Soviet advance, and for applying pressure on the Soviet bloc.
Thus, containment was to be made a problem for the Soviet
Union.
In his Building the Atlantic World (1963), Strausz-Hupé saw a
transformed and robust NATO as the basis for a powerful West
able to prevail over the Soviets in the international balance -of-
power arena. Strausz-Hupé regarded US military superiority
over the Soviets as fundamental to containment, and he treated
the Vietnam War as an unnecessary entanglement.34 This
emphasis, itself, can be given a geopolitical slant by drawing
attention to his European origins and East Coast career, both of
which he shared with the German-born Kissinger; and that at a
time when the East Coast was becoming less significant in US
politics in relative terms, not least with respect to the growing
importance of the West Coast. More generally, Strausz-Hupé
argued that geography provided a basic understanding of
geopolitics, and that geographical influences were sometimes
negated, and at other times confirmed, by technological change.
He was also convinced that geopolitics would be abused in both
the political sphere and the academy (the academic world) by
being pushed beyond what the geopolitical means of analysis
could really explain.
Meanwhile, Whittlesey pupil Saul Cohen broke with the
unwillingness of most academic geographers in the world’s
leading superpower to discuss international power politics and,
in his Geography and Politics in a Divided World (1963)
provided a wider Eurasian scope than did Strausz-Hupé’s focus
on NATO, albeit a scope that largely reprised Mackinder by
discerning two geostrategic regions. Focusing on what he
termed the shatterbelts between these regions, Cohen saw them
as crucial zones of confrontation and conflict between the major
powers, zones moreover whose instability was likely to draw in
these powers. Cohen was subsequently to revise his account in
1991, 2002, and 2009 in order to take note of changes in power

politics.35
Although much Cold War thinki ng focused on Europe, it was in
East Asia that geopolitical ideas and US strategy were placed
under particular pressure as a consequence of concern about
Communist expansionism. Whereas the Soviet Union appeared
to threaten such a course in Europe, Communist expansionism
actually seemed to be in progress in East Asia. There, a theme
of continued threat could be used to link China’s large-scale
direct intervention in the Korean War in 1950–1953, Chinese
pressure on Taiwan from 1949, China’s rapid victory in a border
conflict with India in 1962, and Chinese and Soviet support for
North Vietnam. These anxieties conflated US concern about the
ideological challenge from Communism with the long-standing
instability of the East Asian region, notably in the face of
expansionism by the great powers, an instability that looked
back to the defeat and instability of China in the 1890s and
beyond that to the beginning of successful Western pressure on
China in the 1830s and on Japan in the 1850s.
The Domino Theory of incremental Communist advances
appeared to require the vigorous containment seen in the
Vietnam War, to which the United States committed large
numbers of troops from 1965. The Domino Theory was a
geopolitical concept that enjoyed powerful traction in the
United States in the 1960s, not least because it could be readily
explained in public. This theory was designed to secure the goal
outlined by President Lyndon B. Johnson in his address at Johns
Hopkins University on April 7, 1965, on the theme of “Peace
without Conquest.” However, at the same time, the stress in
Vietnam for the United States, as earlier with the Korean War,
was on intervention in a secondary theater and, in part thereby,
on the avoidance of full-scale, main-force conflict with the
Soviet Union and China. This secondary character was (and is)
not always appreciated by those who pressed for more extensive
military action against North Vietnam.
America was to lose in Vietnam. However, the subordination of
the operational military level to the strategic geopolitical level

was indicated by the wider success in benefiting, by the end of
the Vietnam War, from the Sino–Soviet rift and in developing a
form of strategic partnership with China. In a 1962 article
in Orbis, “The Sino-Soviet Tangle and U.S. Policy,” Strausz-
Hupé had argued that Marxist–Leninism was weakened by its
failure to rate nationalism, and that this nationalism led to
tensions in Sino–Soviet relations. This situation was seen as an
opportunity for the United States which, he argued, should put
aside ideological preferences and seek to ally with China as the
weaker power of the two, an approach that was later to be taken
by Kissinger. With his focus on Europe, Strausz-Hupé also
regarded the Soviet Union, not China, as the key threat to the
United States.
NIXON AND KISSINGER
Richard Nixon, then a failed Republican politician, was
interested in the argument, and he drew on it in his article “Asia
after Vietnam,” published in Foreign Affairs in October 1967.
Nixon saw the possibility of China taking a role independent
from the Soviet Union as useful to the United States. After his
defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial contest, Nixon had
practiced law in New York City. He reflected, read more,
opened himself up more to academics, including Kissinger,
became less rigid, and grew strategically. Nixon took into
account the different tone in US–Soviet relations after the 1962
Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as the increase in Soviet
conventional and nuclear strength, growing Sino–Soviet
animosity, mounting civil tension within China as a
consequence of the Cultural Revolution, and conclusions to be
drawn along the way as the Vietnam War persisted. All of this
melded Nixon’s evolving thinking on the relative decline of US
conventional and nuclear strength vis à vis the Soviet Union and
on the possible and necessary employment of China as a
counterweight to the Soviet Union. As he was aware of the shift
in US–Soviet military strength, so Nixon was aware that China
was evolving a different kind of geopolitical thinking that was

not averse to US inclusion in it. This underlay Nixon’s approach
to China. The difference between the Nixon of the late 1950s
and the Nixon of the late 1960s was one of historical -
mindedness, and in that regard his intellectual and statesmanlike
posture had grown markedly.
Winning the 1968 presidential election, Nixon moved self-
proclaimed pragmatic geopoliticians to the fore. A campaign
adviser, Kissinger became National Security Advisor, and
Strausz-Hupé, who had wanted that job, began a diplomatic
career as an ambassador, first to Sri Lanka, then successively to
Belgium, Sweden, NATO, and Turkey. Kissinger found
geopolitics a pertinent term in trying to conceptualize his view
of international relations. This view was one in which the
emphasis was on national interests, rather than ideological
drives. These national interests were traced to long-term
geographical commitments within a multipolar and competitive
international system. Thus, geopolitics was linked
to Realpolitik: indeed, becoming in part the assessment of the
international consequences of the latter.
For Kissinger, such a view was important to the understanding
both of US policy and of that of the other great powers. In
supporting, and subsequently negotiating, disengagement from
Southeast Asia within a context of continued adherence to a
robust containment of the Soviet Union, Kissinger had to
provide a defense of what appeared militarily necessary. This
defense was made more difficult in light of pressures on US
interests elsewhere, particularly the Middle East, as well as of
the consequences of serious economic and fiscal problems.
Alongside these realist pressures came the crucial matter of
political location. The Republican charge in the late 1940s, one
then stated vociferously by Nixon, elected to the House of
Representatives in 1946 and the Senate in 1950, had been that
the Truman administration had “lost” China to Communism, and
this charge had proved a way, then and subsequently, to berate
the Democrats. Similarly, Kennedy had run for president in
1960 in part on the claim that the Eisenhower administration, in

which Nixon was vice president for both terms, had failed to be
sufficiently robust, not least in maintaining US defenses.
Although, as president (1969–1974) Nixon was greatly helped
by Democrat divisions and the leftward move of the Democratic
Party, he also had to consider potential criticism from within
the Republican Party and from elsewhere on the Right, not least
George Wallace, who ran for president in 1968 as the leader of
the newly established American Independent Party, winning
over ten million votes, mostly in the South. As a consequence,
Kissinger’s rationalization of US policy has to be understood at
least in part as a political defense for Nixon; a point more
generally true of other rationalizations of policy, whether or not
expressed in geopolitical terms. In producing this defense—a
defense that sought to pour the cold water of realism over the
idealism of American exceptionalism—Kissinger had to argue
not only that the United States could align with a Communist
power but also that such an alignment could be regarded as a
worthwhile means to further stability (rather than as a form of
Communist deception of a duped United States) because China
and the Soviet Union had clashing geopolitical interests.
This approach built on Kissinger’s own background as a
Harvard scholar of European international relations in the
nineteenth century, when powers with similar political systems
had nevertheless been rivals. Far more intellectually self-
conscious than most politicians, Kissinger naturally looked for
similarities between past and present. He found them in the
concepts and language of national interests, balance of power,
geopolitics, and the pressure of Russian expansionism. Indeed,
Kissinger provided a key instance of the historicized nature of
geopolitics, as opposed to the tendency of ideologies to treat the
world in terms of a gradient of ideological congruence or
rivalry. Thus, irrespective of ideological drives, the United
States reaching out to China, a policy advocated by both Nixon
and Kissinger, had a geopolitical logic directed against the
Soviet Union; rather as Britain had allied with Japan in 1902 as
a response to Russian expansionism while, as a response in a

different context, Turkey (also threatened by Russia) had
aligned with Germany.
Seeing himself as a classical realist determined to limit chaos,
Kissinger had a theme: Realpolitik. He sought to use Sino–
American co-operation to isolate and put pressure on the Soviet
Union in order to get the latter to persuade North Vietnam, seen
as a Soviet client, to reach an accommodation with South
Vietnam. In turn, Nixon and Kissinger reminded China that the
US alliance with Japan would enable the United States to
restrain Japan if its rapidly growing economy were to lead it
back to expansionism. As a reminder of changing
circumstances, the extent of, and prospects for, economic
growth in the 1960s and 1970s were such that a powerful Japan
seemed a likely source of expansionism and geopolitical
instability, rather than the powerful China that is a major issue
in the 2010s.
To Kissinger, mutual interests were essentially variable, but the
pursuit of interest was fixed. He advised Nixon accordingly i n
February 1972: “I think in 20 years your successor, if he’s as
wise as you, will wind up leaning toward the Russians against
the Chinese. For the next 15 years we have to lean toward the
Chinese against the Russians. We have to play the balance of
power game totally unemotionally. Right now, we need the
Chinese to correct the Russians and to discipline the
Russians.”36
As far as the Chinese were concerned, they had started from a
separate, but comparable, tradition of geopolitics. However,
from the fall of the Manchu empire in 1911–1912 and the
subsequent rise, in the 1920s, of the Nationalists and in the late
1940s of the Communists, this tradition has been affected by
various modern strategies, while also drawing on past Chinese
precedent—for example, in the use of tributary states, which has
been an attitude and policy attempted toward neighbors such as
North Korea and North Vietnam. This policy proved
unsuccessful in the case of North Vietnam, not least because it
could look for support to the more distant Soviet Union. In

1979, China launched an attack on Vietnam. This helped to
deepen the Sino–Soviet split, and thus to maintain good
relations between China and the United States.37 However, the
unpredictable nature of the North Korean regime even more
clearly emphasized the degree to which blocs have to be seen in
terms of the independent agency of the powers within them.
Kissinger also appealed beyond ideological rivalries when
trying to ease relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
These relations were of considerable international importance,
not least because of the close relationship between this regional
conflict and superpower tensions, notably from the Six Days’
War of 1967. Again, the independent agency of the powers
within blocs was at the fore. The Middle East was of rising
significance because the Arab response to defeat by Israel in the
Yom Kippur War in 1973 was an embargo that led to a major
increase in the price of oil. The consequences of the OPEC
price hike spelled out the significance of the geopolitics of
resources. This had already encouraged strong US interest in the
Middle East from the 1940s, notably by the development of
links with Saudi Arabia and, from the 1950s, with Iran. This
process entailed a deliberate lessening of British influence. The
background to this US interest was an understanding of the
strategic importance of oil, one that World War II had
demonstrated, and an understanding that was encouraged by
fears about the future scale of US oil production. The declini ng
relative significance of US production ensured that OPEC was
able to gain considerable influence over price movements from
1973.38 A military dimension of this oil-based geopolitics was
provided by the deployment of the US navy in the Persian
Gulf.39
The general issue of oil availability was permeated with specific
political concerns and events, as is still the case today. The
price of oil per barrel rose from $3 in 1972 to over $30 in
March 1973. The prosperity, and thus politics, of the United
States ultimately depended on unfettered access to large
quantities of inexpensive oil. The price of oil was raised again

in 1979, from $10 to $25, as a consequence of the
successful Iranian revolution against the Shah. In 1971, in part
as a result of rising oil imports, the United States had run the
first trade deficit of the century. This deficit greatly affected
confidence in the dollar and in the architecture of the
international economic order. Presented differently, the
economic order was in fact the Western-conceived and
dominated order.
Kissinger’s approach to China, and his frequent use of
geopolitics as a term, helped revive interest both in the subject
and, more generally, in strategy as a flexible tool, rather than as
a fixed product of ideological rivalry. A personal engagement
with the outside world assisted in this process. Thus, after the
German-born Kissinger, who served as national security advisor
from 1969 to 1973 and as secretary of state from 1973 to 1977,
came Zbigniew Brzezinski. Polish-born and educated, he served
as President Carter’s National Security Adviser from 1977 to
1980, and later taught at Georgetown University, as did
Kissinger, who subsequently established Kissinger Associates, a
source of geopolitical advice that also acted as a network of
power, or at least influence.40
Brzezinski and others employed the term geopolitics in order to
present themselves as realists unswayed by emotional
considerations.41 This antithetical juxtaposition of geopolitics
and sentiment, one for which Kissinger was, and remained,
notable,42 was part of the self-image of those who saw
themselves as geopoliticians. It also demonstrated their need to
justify the commitments they deemed necessary. Geopolitics as
a self-conscious rhetoric as well as policy, thus became an
aspect of the reaction to US failure and weakness in the early
1970s and, indeed, part of the “culture wars” of that era. In
particular, geopolitical discourse could be seen as a way for
Kissinger to justify his stance in the face of critical i deologues
from both the Right and the Left, and also for Democrats in the
late 1970s to distance themselves from the liberalism of their
McGovern-era predecessors defeated by Nixon in the 1972

election. Consequently, it was unsurprising that Brzezinski was
a keen advocate of such thinking.
At the same time, Kissinger in his own way had tunnel vision.
He believed that the Concert of Europe atmosphere established
as a result of the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815 could be
replicated between the Soviet Union and the West. This was
questionable as the two sides had, at least theoretically,
diametrically opposed doctrines and visions of the international
order, which was not true for the powers that met at Vienna.
Kissinger persisted in his thinking and, once Nixon was out of
office, the new president, Gerald Ford (1974–1977), fell under
the sway of Kissinger’s thinking in a way that Nixon did not.
Kissinger tended to underestimate how heavily the
revolutionary paradigm (to employ the term of former Kremlin
ambassador, Anatolii Dobrynin) of Soviet foreign policy
influenced that policy under Brezhnev, the key Soviet figure
from 1964 to 1982. Thus, Kissinger had his intellectual
shortcomings, some of which were acted out in practice, and he
was not the guru his own prose implied.
Indeed, Kissinger, Carter, and détente with the Soviet Union in
the mid-1970s were criticized as weakening the West by a group
of conservative Democrats led by Henry (Scoop) Jackson, as
well as by key Republicans who were influential in the Ford
administration, especially his chief of staff, Richard Cheney,
and secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. They drew on
advice from commentators, such as Richard Pipes and Paul
Wolfowitz, who warned about Soviet intentions. The continuity
of this group, from 1990s opposition to Clintonian liberal
internationalism, and through the neoconservative activism of
the early 2000s, is significant. At the same time, the range of
American views makes it difficult to construct an agreed US
geopolitical doctrine or strategic culture in other than in the
broadest sense. Instead, and as more typically was the case, this
doctrine was presented and debated in explicitly political ways.
For example, in 2001, in Does America Need a Foreign Policy?,
Kissinger warned against attempts to build democratic nations,

as was to be attempted with Iraq in 2003.
THE LAST STAGES OF THE COLD WAR
Returning to the 1970s from an overlapping, yet different,
perspective, geopolitical discussion offered an alternative to
détente and was therefore part of the movement, toward the
close of the Carter presidency (1977–1981), to a firmer
response to the Soviet Union. This was a situation that
replicated that seen with the movement toward confrontation
with China and Russia in the early 2000s.43 The combination of
the overthrow of the pro-Western Shah in Iran in January 1979
and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that December suggested
a general deterioration in the US position, gave it a regional
focus, and seemed to call for action. The response included the
Carter Doctrine, the declaration that any attempt to gain control
of the Persian Gulf would be resisted as an attack on US
interests, and the establishment of the Rapid Deployment Task
Force, which was to become the basis of Central Command.
That Iran and Afghanistan were the points of concern helped
give the crisis a geopolitical resonance, one that drew on the old
heartland-rimland binary concept. Indeed, in 1907, Britain and
Russia had defined their spheres of influence in Persia (Iran), a
classic geopolitical scenario while, in 1941, they had
successfully invaded the country in order to overthrow German
influence. Among analysts, commentators and politicians in
1979–1980, there was talk of the Soviet Union seeking a warm-
water port, and of the possibility of the Soviets advancing from
Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean across the Baluchistan region
of Pakistan. The maps used on television and in newspapers,
maps that ignored physical obstacles and covered hundreds of
miles by the inch, appeared to demonstrate the feasibility of
such moves. There was a failure to consider their practicability,
although the development of Soviet air bases in southwest
Afghanistan did indeed bring a portion of the Indian Ocean
within the reach of Soviet power. More particularly, Pakistan,
aligned with the United States and China, felt itself under

greater pressure from the Soviet Union. In turn, the regional
tension between Pakistan and India (a Soviet ally) was given a
new dynamic as the future of Afghanistan was considered by the
two powers in that light.
The notion of the Soviet search for a warm-water port reflected
the determination to put realist considerations first, as well as
the historicized resonance that many of those who saw
themselves as geopoliticians liked and, indeed, required.
History, in this case Russian history, became a data-set that
apparently provided guidance to Soviet policy, not least a
correction to the ideological formulations of those who offered
alternative views. While laudable as an aspiration, and drawing
often-appropriate attention to long-term trends,44 such a
reading of history was somewhat simplistic. This was
particularly so because the reading generally underplayed
ministerial and governmental agency in favor, instead, of the
alleged environmental determinism of state interest.
There was a continuity in attitudes and policies from the later
Carter presidency to the Reagan years of 1981–1989. However,
the latter saw more risk-taking and a greater emphasis on a
more active, in fact bellicose, approach in international
relations. This policy was designed to roll back the Soviet
system, most obviously by firm opposition to Soviet allies in
Africa and Central America, particularly Angola and Nicaragua.
This approach frequently underplayed the complexity of the
relevant regional struggles by focusing on the global dimension.
There was also a robust commitment to the defense of NATO,
especially the deployment of new missiles in Europe, to further
enforce containment. Although elderly, Strausz-Hupé was
brought back during the Reagan years to serve as ambassador to
Turkey, an important regional power in the Middle East, as well
as highly significant in the containment of the Soviet Union,
Iran, and Iraq.
Geopolitics in this context was an aspect of a self-conscious
realism in international relations that focused on active US
confrontation with the Soviet Bloc. Great-power rivalries made

an understanding of this world in terms of long-term
geographical drives seem particularly appropriate. In turn, to
conventional geopoliticians victory in the Cold War in 1989–
1991 came because Soviet expansionism had been thwarted by
Western robustness and had also been weakened by the need to
cope with the opposition of China, which was still aligned with
the United States. The heartland had been divided. These views
did not preclude the argument that Soviet domestic weaknesses
were a key element in the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. However,
these weaknesses were linked by geopoliticians to the strains
arising from international competition, and these strains were
seen in geopolitical terms.
TYPES OF POWER
In 1989–1991, the autocratic Soviet empire and system
collapsed. The fall of the Soviet Union appeared to resolve the
theory of dual state types that had been so important to
Mackinder’s geopolitics and, indeed, had taken forward a long-
standing Western discourse, seen in the early-modern
Netherlands and Britain, and then in the United States and
Britain, directed against autocratic states and their large armie s.
In this discussion, navies, trade, and liberty had been joined in
what could be modishly referred to as a discourse of
power.45 In practice, navies indeed served as aspects of a
politics of force different from that of autocratic states and
large armies—one, moreover, in which assumptions about how
best to organize a state militarily were linked to an analysis of
relative capability on this basis.
Mackinder had suggested that what he termed the “Columbian
epoch,”46 that of maritime dominance, was over, because it had
been brought to an end by the new effectiveness of land routes
and powers. However, the conflicts of 1914–1918, 1939–1945,
and 1946–1989 indicated otherwise. Germany was defeated in
both world wars while, at great cost, Britain was among the
victorious. The United States played a key role in World War II,
and an important one in World War I. Of course, the defeat of

Japan in World War II, alongside the victory of the Soviet
Union, suggested that naval empires could fail, and land powers
be victorious. Moreover, the Soviet contribution was significant
to Anglo-American success in World War II. However, the
situation in the Cold War was very different. The Soviet Union
totally collapsed when the United States was not primarily
acting as a land power, not least with no conscription, and when
China had turned to capitalism.
This shift away from land power was given an arresting
military–technological perspective by Peter Hugill in 2005, in
an account that took forward Amery’s critique of Mackinder.
Hugill argued that precision bombing had become a reality by
the late twentieth century. He continued by seeing the relevant
technology, of GPS and computers, as a characteristic of
modern trading states. Hugill concluded: “As long as the trading
states have no desire to occupy territory, merely to control
flows and nodes, the air power developed in the trading states in
the late twentieth century and now being deployed has restored
the global geopolitical balance of power in favour of the trading
states. Just as sea power did at the height of the Columbian
epoch, aerospace power today allows weak control at great, now
planetary, distances.”47
This argument may appear less secure in the aftermath of the
wars of the 2000s: the US “surge” that is said to have made a
major difference in Iraq in 2007 was of ground troops,
especially infantry, and not of air power.48 There is also a more
general need to distinguish between output, or operational
success, and outcome, or successful end to a conflict, when
considering military capability. Nevertheless, Hugill took
forward Mackinder’s ability to discuss global politics in terms
of different types of motive, power, and the related military
system, and gave it a continuing technological resonance; even
if the extent to which technology and type of power were linked
in a causal fashion is more complex than was argued by
navalists and, by descent, by air power enthusiasts. Moreover,
the Iraq War supported Hugill’s thesis insofar as America’s

problems in Iraq arose from the determination to occupy
territory.
CRITICISMS OF GEOPOLITICS
The understanding of geopolitics in realist terms of national
self-interest and international competition was to be challenged
in the 1990s and 2000s by claims of redundancy in the
aftermath of the ending of the Cold War.49 This understanding
was also already being questioned by advocates of a global
order based on cooperation,50 and on a postcolonial rethinking
of North–South relations.51 Furthermore, geopolitics was
questioned, if not reconceptualized, as part of the postmodern
project. This provided a general left-wing critique to
intellectual analyses and strategies laying claim to objectivity.
Maps, for example, were re-examined, being presented either as
means for appropriation or as works that lacked objectivity. A
painterly approach to the latter was Jasper Johns’s Map (1963)
in which a map of the United States was strikingly remodeled as
a painting.
The drive for a critical approach to the spatial dimension of
power was well-developed in the 1980s, for example, in the
world-economy thesis of Immanuel Wallerstein, who went on to
write more explicitly about geopolitics.52 Moreover, a left-wing
geopolitics had been developed in France with the
journal Hérodote, which first appeared in January 1976. The
first number of what set out to be an analysis of current issues
from a radical geographical viewpoint, included an interview
with the major French iconoclastic philosopher, Michel
Foucault, and an article on the Vietnam War.53 The article’s
author, Yves Lacoste, a professor of geography at the
University of Vincennes, published a dictionary of geopolitics
in 1993.54 Lacoste argued that geography and geographers had
usually served the cause of war, which was seen in itself as a
cause for complaint. He attacked not only the Geopolitik of
Haushofer, but also the traditional and prestigious French
political geography, associated with Vidal de Blache, which was

presented as serving the cause of the state. Lacoste claimed
that, in treating geography as a science, modern academics were
apt to neglect the context of conflict within which territory was
defined and the first geographers operated. Hérodote engaged
with a different range of issues, including ecology, global
poverty and the attempt to advance values and groupings
different from those of the Cold War. All this was offered by
Lacoste as serving his goal of moving geography from being a
servile discipline, focused on the state, into, instead, an
engaged and objective science. However, the implications of the
serious tension between engagement and objectivity were not
fully addressed.
This French development, which drew on radical ideas about
meaning, representation, language, and
communication,55 played a key role in that of Anglo-American
“critical geopolitics,” but the latter had other sources as
well.56 One was the attention devoted to the map projection
devised by the German Marxist, Arno Peters, and deliberately
presented as a radical alternative in 1973. Peters portrayed the
world of maps as a choice between his equal-area projection—
which he presented as accurate and egalitarian—and the
traditional Mercator world view. Arguing that the end of
European colonialism and the advance of modern technology
made a new cartography necessary and possible, Peters pressed
for a clear, readily understood cartography that was not
constrained by Western perceptions or traditional cartographic
norms. The map was to be used for a redistribution of attention
to regions that Peters argued had hitherto lacked adequate
coverage. This thesis struck a chord with a receptive,
international audience that cared little about cartography but
sought maps to support its call for a new world order. Peters’s
emphasis on the tropics matched concern by, and about, the
developing world and became fashionable. The Peters world
map was praised in, and used for the cover of, North-South: A
Programme for Survival (1980): the “Brandt Report” of the
International Commission on International Development Issues.

Equal-area projections were deliberately adopted in radical
works.57 However, critics pointed out the weaknesses and,
indeed, derivative character of Peters’s projection and the
tendentious nature of many of his claims.58
Criticism among international relations theorists of neoreal ism,
notably as being positivist, was also significant among changing
attitudes, as was a reaction by geographers both against the
quantitative turn that had been so important to 1970s academic
geography and against positivism.59 The emphasis on
quantification was closely related to a presentation of humans
as economic beings primarily concerned with maximizing their
benefit, and to locate their activities accordingly; and that at a
time when locational analysis played a central role in the
academic discipline. The turn to a very different human
geography, one that engaged directly with political issues, was
part of a reaction against quantification. This turn was crucial
to the development of “critical geopolitics.”
Less clearly, there appeared to be a tendency to treat
commitment as a means of validating scholar, student, and
subject. This possibly reflected a somewhat delayed case of
1960s radicalism on the part of some geographers and, aside
from proving a means of assertion, maybe owed something to a
sense of guilt about the major role of geographers in supporting
Western imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. This potent mix resulted eventually in a situation in
which commitment apparently became, not so much a
concluding add-on, as a measure of quality and even a possible
definition of at least some of the work published as “critical
geopolitics.” The value of such an approach is problematic, not
least because it does not really admit of critical analysis except
within the parameter of “critical geopolitics.” Moreover,
because of the postmodern roots of “critical geopolitics,”60 it
risks, in one strand, finding it difficult to construct much for
fear of becoming akin to the “metanarratives” it spends its time
deconstructing. In practice, without a metanarrative, there is no
basis for a long-term view, and texts are criticized while being

abstracted from broader events. In turn, the broader events can
be seen in a hostile light, for example—in terms of an alleged
evil US plan, as with discussion of American Lebensraum and
wars for oil.61 These highly problematic examples reflect a
degree of difficulty in adopting a theoretical framework to
provide a grounded perspective.
BELOW THE GLOBAL LEVEL
Other approaches would be more fruitful. A more pertinent
development of the standard geopolitical approach would be an
emphasis on the geopolitics of states other than the great
powers,62 as well as of political movements that did not
correspond with Cold War alignments. These levels of
geopolitical interest, analysis, and rhetoric are commonly
neglected due to the understandable focus on the great powers,
as well as the misleading tendency to emphasize a systemic
perspective, a perspective that is often related to this focus. A
stress on the international system generally entails treating it as
an entity in its own right (and not as the derivative of its
members), and indeed regards its members, the states, as
dependents of the system.63 Such an approach encourages a
focus on the dynamics of the system, notably its interaction
with, and through, the great powers.
Unfortunately, this approach implies dependency and
subordination for the other powers, which is inaccurate. This
error arises in part from academic strategies with their stress on
salience, significance, and comprehension—which leads to the
situation of only so many words, and why spend any on
Denmark? This error also arises from the rhetorical identity of
geopolitics and its particular focus, almost obsession, with the
world scale and with alleged global threats. Indeed, this is a
subject that, from its outset as a defined subject, has had a
preference for hyperbole or, at least, for the world scale.
Britain is an instance of a state that has geopolitical interests
that are more than regional, but that cannot be simplified in
terms of a subordination, in a geopolitical bloc, to the United

States, however much critics might advance that analysis, not
least as a result of joint action in Iraq and Afghanistan. British
geopolitical interests spanned (and span) a number of traditional
concerns and commitments, many dating from the period of
imperial expansion, while also seeking to respond to
assumptions about relations within the US-dominated West and
in Europe.
France is in a similar position, although, compared to Britain in
the twentieth century, its political and strategic cultures place a
far greater weight on national independence, and conspicuously
as far as the United States is concerned. In 2013, France sought
to redefine its geopolitical concerns by putting a greater
emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa. The subsequent Defense White
Paper argued that the US “pivot,” or strategic balancing, toward
Asia meant that Europe was responsible for providing security
in its immediate neighborhood, especially in northern Africa.
Developing an overview of France’s traditional interest in North
and West Africa, this white paper offered a logic for
intervention in Libya (2011), Mali (2013) and the Central
African Republic (2013–2014), and also for pressure for
intervention in Syria.64
Another instance of traditional concern, and one that indicated
the variety concealed by that term, was that of the British
presence in Antarctica and the South Atlantic over the last
century, a presence that led in 1982 to Britain fighting a
conventional war without allies and against the wishes of the
United States. This presence was no mere footnote to empire,
but rather a manifestation of a continued desire to act as an
imperial power, and one that has attracted scholarly attention
from the geopolitical angle. The creation of the Falkland Islands
Dependencies Survey in 1945 signaled a determination to use
scientists to consolidate influence, and the battleship
HMS Nigeria was dispatched to Antarctic waters in 1948. The
mapping of the Antarctic Peninsula and nearby areas carried out
by the survey was designed to underline Britain’s title to the
area. Mapping was linked to naming: in 1932, the British had

established the Antarctic Place Names Committee in order to
ensure that British maps, at least, reflected official views. The
excluded categories encompassed names of existing territories,
towns or islands, names in any foreign language, names of
sledge dogs, “names in low taste,” and “names with obscure
origins.” British maps omitted names found on Argentine and
Chilean maps of the Antarctic Peninsula. Mapping and naming
were regarded as crucial to sovereignty claims, and thus to
justifying the costs of surveys. In addition, the Churchill
government (1951–1955) funded expeditions to consolidate
territorial claims, while the cost and time taken by ground
surveying led to greater support in the 1950s for aerial
photography, leading to the taking of ten thousand photographs
in parallel traverses in the summer seasons of 1955–1956 and
1956–1957. The 1959 Antarctic Treaty led to an increase in the
geopolitical profile of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia,
but the British government did not wish to provoke Argentina
by developing an airfield in Stanley, and this left the Falklands
vulnerable. The 1982 Argentinean invasion provoked a major
shift in the awareness of the South Atlantic empire within
Britain.65 At least in terms of military commitment, British
geopolitics was transformed in response to external action. In
large part, this reflected the political legacy of the war, notably
with regard to public concern and commitment.
The notion of geopolitical direction for British policy, while yet
also a degree of flexibility, was captured by Colin Gray in
2007: “[O]ur freedom of choice for broad policy and strategy is
really rather narrow[;] . . . compelled by the national
geography, Britain’s overall military strategy must be maritime
in the Corbettian sense, and the national security policy that the
strategy must serve has to remain within reach of, though not
always in lock-step with, that of Britain’s giant ally, the United
States. This blessedly likely-permanent geopolitical reality of
the British condition is not easy to explain domestically to a
nationally prideful public undereducated in strategic activities.
Necessity rules!” 66

Gray’s account suffered, however, from the overly convinced
character (and assertive tone) of most geopolitical writing. The
notion of permanence appears questionable given the possible
changes over the next half century, and still more next century,
in Britain itself, let alone the rest of the world, changes outlined
in successive national security reviews as well as in reports
from bodies such as the US National Intelligence Council, the
World Economic Forum and the British Development, Concepts
and Doctrine Centre. Possible changes included Scottish
separatism, which in 2014 led to a referendum on independence
as well as changes in Britain’s relations within the European
Union. Like many writers on geopolitics, Gray took his wishes
and endowed them with normative force. Yet, he also valuably
captured, in his phrase “not always in lock-step,” a degree of
autonomy that challenges the account in terms of blocs. In
2014, the Scots voted not to leave the United Kingdom but, had
they done so, there would have been key strategic and
geopolitical implications, notably in the loss of Britain’s
nuclear submarine base and the capacity that went with it.
Whereas British commerce and pretensions ensure a far-flung
range of interest, the geopolitics of most states were (and are)
regional in that global pressures and opportunities tended to
have regional consequences. Thus, the Cold War played out in
the Horn of Africa in terms of the geopolitics of the Somalia,
Ethiopia, and Eritrean separatists. This often-violent rivalry had
consequences in mapping. The National Atlas of
Ethiopia (1988) produced by the Ethiopian Mapping Authority
offered a work in accordance with the aggressive nationalist
Marxism of the regime, not least its opposition to imperialism
and to Somalia. Such relationships provided possibilities for
interventionism and thereby involved a degree of autonomy for
second-rank powers: for example, South Africa in Angola,
Israel in the Middle East, and France in Africa and, to a
considerable degree, in Europe.67
Geopolitical concepts played an explicit role for some of these
powers as well as for others. For example, in Latin America

from the 1920s to the 1980s classical European geopolitics was
a core component of right-wing authoritarian-nationalist
philosophy. The conduits ranged from Iberian Falangist
influences in the 1920s and 1930s to German and French
military missions in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. These
concepts were still influential in the 1980s, notably with
Augusto Pinochet’s book Geopolítica (1968), as well as with the
ideas underpinning the vicious Argentine “Dirty War” waged by
Pinochet’s military junta against radicals in 1976–1983.
Geopolitics was seen as a way to understand the development of
national power. The dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990,
Pinochet was a professor of geopolitics at the Chilean army war
college when he published Geopolítica.68
At the national level, the gain of independence by many states
between 1945 and 1975 was followed by the assertion of
national geographic identities and interests. For example,
national atlases were published, such as Atlas for the Republic
of Cameroon (1971), Atlas de la Haute-Volta (1975), Atlas de
Côte d’Ivoire (1975), Atlas de Burundi (1979) and Atlas for
Botswana (1988). These works proclaimed national
independence as a historical goal. The Atlas de
Madagascar (1969), prepared by the country’s association of
geographers, and with a foreword by Philibert Tsiranana, the
founding president, emphasized unification and unity, the
formation of a united people, a united state, and a “unité
morale.” The ideological dimension was at the fore here—
Madagascar was a socialist state. This dimension was seen more
clearly with the Atlas de Cuba (1978) produced to commemorate
the 20th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution.
To treat geopolitics solely from the perspective of the global
dimension, therefore, is misleading, not least because there is
no inherent reason why geopolitical elements at other levels
should be ignored or minimized. This challenge was to become
more apparent in the 2000s, as the narrative and analysis of
global strength based on great powers and, primarily, the great

power, the United States, was seriously qualified by military
limitations69 and by the resistance of a number of other
resilient worldviews. The latter had a strong spatial element,
notably in particular sites of opposition to US power, but also in
proposing large areas in which this power should be resisted
and displaced. The ability of the United States to devise a new
realist geopolitics to comprehend and counter this resistance
remains unclear, but in East Asia it is focused by concern about
the rise of China
ENVIRONMENTALISM
The notion of environmental determinism as a key to human
development, and thus to geopolitics, was challenged in the
mid-twentieth century by a stress on human activity. Combined
with technological advances, this emphasis led to a strong sense
that humanity could mold the environment and could transform
or transcend the limits of physical geography and environmental
influence. Human action, rather than natural features
(particularly rivers and mountains), came increasingly to locate
routes and boundaries, both in the mind and on maps. The world
appeared as a terrain to shape and a commodity to be used.
There was a focus on the pursuit of power and on its use for
ends, and in a fashion that assumed environmental
considerations were not a problem—and, indeed, that the
world’s resources could be readily commodi fied and consumed
without difficulty. Environmental determinism was thus denied
during the years of the long postwar boom that lasted until the
early 1970s.
These assumptions were pushed particularly hard in the
Communist bloc. In China, Mao Zedong, the chairman of the
Chinese Communist Party, president of the republic and, in
effect, dictator from 1949 until his death in 1976, rejected the
traditional Chinese notion of “Harmony between the Heavens
and Humankind” and, instead, proclaimed “Man Must Conquer

Nature.” This was an expression of orthodox Marxism, wherein
people can force nature to serve them rather than having nature
order and disorder human existence. This formulation expresses
one of the optimistic sides of Marxism as well as its messianic
character, a character linked to the authoritarianism and
brutality it showed when in power. In 1958, the year in which
he launched his “Great Leap Forward,” an attempt to improve
the economy by force, Mao declared: “Make the high mountain
bow its head; make the river yield the way”; soon after, in a
critique of an essay by Stalin stating that humanity could not
affect natural processes such as geology, Mao claimed, “This
argument is incorrect. Man’s ability to know and change Nature
is unlimited.” Indeed, for Mao, nature, like humankind, was
there to be forcibly mobilized in pursuit of an idea, an idea
pushed with scant regard for human cost, scientific knowledge,
rational analysis, or environmental damage. His “Great Leap
Forward” of 1958–1962 was a failure.
Although not generally stated so bluntly, nor always linked so
clearly to an authoritarian policy of modernization, these ideas
were widespread across the world. Major projects, such as the
building of dams—for example, in the Soviet Union and in
Egypt as well as in the United States—suggested that nature and
physical geography could be readily tamed, and that this was a
noble goal which was crucial to development and
modernization.70 These attitudes had general as well as specific
consequences. A key aspect of geopolitics was an emphasis on
the military and ideological struggles of the Cold War and on
individual states because, at that time, environmental
constraints and influences on human geography, specifically
political geography, appeared weak. Moreover, at the
environmental level, geopolitics became in part a matter of
human impact on the environment, rather than vice versa. The
end result of planned and unplanned expansion, however, was
seen to be particular drawbacks, such as dams compromising the
ability of rivers, including the Nile and the Columbia, to “flush
out” deltas and estuaries, so as to reduce salinity and also to

replenish them with soil.71
More generally, a pernicious assault on an interdependent
global environment was widely discerned and understood. Thus,
the environmental movement that became prominent in the
1960s and 1970s, for example, with books such as Rachel
Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), can be seen as a critique of what
were then recent and current geopolitics. This conclusion ser ves
as a reminder of the degree to which the idea of geopolitics
extends to cover a variety of spheres. Usage at the time,
as chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 suggest, is as significant as the formal
development of an explicit geopolitical.
Chapter 9
Black, Jeremy M.
Geopolitics since 1990
THE END OF THE COLD WAR POSED BOTH MAJOR
CONCEPTUAL issues focused on a total recasting of
geopolitics and also the question as to whether the subject itself
had outlived its usefulness and therefore deserved extinction or ,
rather, relegation to an outdated part of historical literature. In
the event, reports of the death of geopolitics proved totally
unfounded. Instead, the second surge of writing on
geopolitics—that linked to the Cold War—has been followed,
from 1990, with a third surge. Moreover, this surge has been of
considerable scale. From 1990 until 2014, over four hundred
academic books specifically devoted to geopolitical thought
have appeared, a number that does not include more narrowly
focused national studies. In addition, these books have appeared
in a plethora of languages, including Arabic, Bulgarian,

Chinese, Czech, English, Finnish, French, Greek, Italian,
Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and Spanish. To
write of a surge does not imply any necessary similarity in
approach, content or tone, but does capture the extent to which
geopolitical issues and language still play a major role. This can
be amplified if attention is devoted to references in periodical
and newspaper articles,1 and in popular fiction. For
example, geopolitics is a term frequently used in James Ellroy’s
2014 novel Perfidia. Dudley Smith refers to “recent geopolitical
events” in explaining why “Jimmy the Jap” would make an
appropriate scapegoat.2
There have certainly been major changes in the subject since
1990 and it is no longer centered on one clear topic, as was the
case during the Cold War. Those interested in the heartland idea
now tend to focus the heartland further east in Eurasia in order
to account for China’s post-Maoist rise in prosperity and power.
That, however, is not an approach that makes much sense in
terms of Mackinder’s 1904 paper. Moreover, as far as military
factors are concerned, there is no Chinese threat to Europe or
the Middle East.
As another key element of change, cities, Islam, and natural
resources have all now emerged as geopolitical actors, even
though they might not all possess the traditional geographical
centering of the actors in the older geopolitical scheme of
things.3 While received geopolitics therefore changed, the
subject itself endured, and unsurprisingly so given the survival
of state governments and their geographic concerns. At the same
time, “critical geopolitics” added a key dimension to the debate,
and, in turn, developed in different directions, including
feminism and Marxism.
Whatever the approach, the closer any scholar, not least a
historian, comes to the present, the greater the danger that the
benefits of long-term perspective and reflection will be lost.
This point is certainly true of the geopolitics of the 2000s and
2010s, as the struggle with radical Islam came dramatically to
the fore with the attacks on New York and Washington on

September 11, 2001.4 This focus on radical Islam led to the
subordination of other themes, such as growing US
estrangement from China and, subsequently, from post-
communist Russia as well. However, there were (and are)
difficulties in assessing the meaning and events of change. On
the one hand, the assessment of the relative importance of
developments within an agreed analytical structure was unclear,
with, for example, pronounced and persistent debate about the
respective significance, for the United States, of the Middle
East and the Far East. As a separate point, one that captured the
range of contexts within which geopolitics was considered, the
fracturing of geopolitical analysis with the prominence, from
the 1990s, of a self-conscious “critical geopolitics,” made it
harder to present the subject as objective or, at least, free from
its own politics.
Of course, geopolitics, like other disciplines, has generally not
displayed a consistent approach,5 nor an absence of political
commitment. Moreover, it is necessary to be cautious before
dividing the past into neat chronological periods with their own
themes and analysts, such that 1990, for example, becomes a
turning point. Instead, there was, and is, in practice,
considerable continuity in the literature as well as in
circumstances. For example, Mackinder spanned World War I,
publishing important works and holding major roles both before
and after and, indeed, lived on until 1947. In an essay,
published in 1943, that noted the significance of memories and
the extent of continuity, Mackinder referred to his earliest
memory of public affairs, that of the Prussian victory over the
French at Sedan in 1870. He linked his subsequent ideas with
concern about Russia in the 1870s, a concern that nearly led
Britain to war in 1878 in order to protect the Ottoman
Empire.6 Also, a figure active before World War I, Haushofer
died the year before Mackinder. Kissinger lived through World
War II and the Cold War, going on to publish a major work of
reflection in 2014. The first major work of Saul Cohen appeared
in 1963, but he published an important article forty years later,

with a second edition of his Geopolitics of the World
System following in 2009.
Alongside continuity by individuals, the end of the Cold War
encouraged a rethinking of geopolitics in some academic
circles. There was an interest in a new agenda of international
relations and anxieties. In Europe, this agenda included a
greater concern with the geopolitical significance of the
European Community, and markedly both its expansion and its
governmental character.7 With the end of the Cold War, East
versus West was replaced by Eastern and Western Europe. In
turn, the power of NATO and the European Union was exerted
in Eastern Europe and, subsequently, membership in both was
greatly extended, in return for acceptance of their
norms.8 Composed of six states when founded, the European
Economic Community of 1957 had by 2014 become the 28-
strong European Union.
In this case, and more generally, there was a degree of
optimism, if not naivety, in some of the literature. This was so
not only with the discussion of NATO and the European Union,
but also with the hope that geopolitics, like the longer-
established peace studies, could be a force for a more benign
world order as well as a description of it.9 In practice, the
expansion of NATO and the European Union created a
geopolitical issue in terms of the hostile response of Russia, a
response that was expressed in terms of control and influence
over territory, especially Ukraine. Whether or not this response
was inevitable and should have been anticipated, it became an
issue in 2014, one that also led to disagreements over the
viability of nonrealist accounts of international relations. In
turn, this analysis affected discussion of China.
From 1990 regional issues around the world were generally
discussed in terms of a highly specific context, that of US
hegemony. Moreover, in the 1990s and early 2000s, before the
situation changed from the mid-2000s, US hegemony, and the
apparent inception of a unipolar world system, posed an issue
not only for those offering an explicitly politicized geopolitical

analysis of the present, but also for scholars looking for long-
term patterns. Thus, William Thompson, a leading US political
scientist, having discerned a pattern over 13,000 years in which
“one state gained enough coercive advantage over its rivals—
based on relative endowment deriving from the organizational -
technological-political-economic-war co-evolutionary spiral—to
encourage an attempt at regional hegemony,” noted that the
United States had gone on from being the leading global sea
power to becoming also the leading global power, which led
him to wonder whether this was a temporary phenomenon or the
harbinger of a new era in world politics.10 The idea of a
transformation or paradigm shift in terms of such an era
attracted considerable attention.
THEORIES FOR THE 1990S
In the aftermath of the Cold War, a number of theories were
advanced by international relations specialists and political
geographers as they sought to conceptualize global power
politics and predict the future, the latter a goal that attracted
much geopolitical speculation. Some of these theories benefited
from considerable public attention. In turn, the content and
impact of this attention varied by group and country, creating a
form of geopolitics of geopolitical analysis. For example,
among left-wing commentators, the displacement of Cold War
containment theory at a time of apparently unipolar US power
encouraged an emphasis on political economy. This emphasis
provided a way to link a generally hostile account of the
US/capitalist structuring of the global economy with the often-
related competition at every scale over resources. Spatial issues
could be incorporated into this approach.
One continued theme in the literature was the preference, on the
part of those offering geopolitical analysis, to claim salience for
their own particular analysis, frequently with scant allowance
for other views. Indeed, a rush of world visions were on offer,
for the analyses presented by writers and commentators were as
much prospectuses for the future as understandings of the
present, and with the two shaped together. This situation was

very much the case for the two most prominent accounts
advanced in the 1990s: Francis Fukayama’s 1989 article “The
End of History,” published in The National Interest, a
prominent US neoconservative journal,11 and Samuel
Huntington’s article “The Clash of Civilizations?” published
four years later in Foreign Affairs, a leading US journal.12
Neither article put spatial considerations foremost nor offered
an equivalent response to an apparent spatial threat, which the
varied understandings of containment had done during the Cold
War. However, each account had important implications for the
operation of the international system and, therefore, for the
relationship between particular struggles and the wider
situation. Moreover, even if silent on specific geopolitical
points and, more generally, limited in their discussion of
political and (even more) economic geography, each account
had implications for the way in which geopolitics was
understood. Fukayama’s approach was influential, or at least
highly newsworthy, in the 1990s, and Huntington’s in the
2000s, particularly in the aftermath of the terror attacks of
2001.
In one sense, Fukayama—a former pupil of Huntington and the
deputy director of policy planning under George H. W. Bush,
Republican president from 1989 to 1993—proposed the end of
geopolitics when he wrote of “the universalization of Western
liberal democracy as the final form of human governme nt.”
Fukayama saw this process as specifically occurring thanks to
the acceptance of liberal economics by Asia, particularly China.
It tends, however, to be forgotten that, toward the end of his
article, he wrote, “clearly, the vast bulk of the Third World
remains very much mired in history, and will be a terrain of
conflict for many years to come,” and, later, that “terrorism and
wars of national liberation will continue to be an important item
on the national agenda.” Fukayama has been frequently
criticized by those who have not read him. Moreover, like
Mackinder, he was not always read with reference to the
nuances in his argument or allowing for his qualifications,

whether explicit or apparent. On the other hand, the tone of
neither man put qualifications to the fore.
Fukuyama went on to publish his work in book-length: The End
of History and the Last Man (1992). By then, his argument
seemed especially prescient, as the collapse of the Soviet state
in 1991 had followed that of communism in Eastern Europe in
1989, while China’s engagement with the Western economy was
becoming more pronounced. Adopting a commonplace approach,
for example, that of the Enlightenment stadial writers, such as
William Robertson and Adam Smith, Fukuyama’s account was
not only spatial but also teleological, with certain states
presented as more successful because they were progressive,
indeed post-historical in his terms. The Fukuyama thesis proved
highly conducive to American commentators arguing that US
norms and power now defined, or should define, the world. In a
continuation of the process by which British commentators in
the eighteenth and nineteenth century had seen Britain as a
Rome, America was presented as a “new Rome,” but a Rome on
a global scale,13 and one thereby able to advance and protect a
“global commons” of liberal norms.
This was an arresting form of geopolitics. A significant
cartographic change accompanied this move to US dominance.
The Soviet geopolitical menace was abruptly reduced in the
Robinson projection adopted by the National Geographic
Society in 1988. This offered a flatter, squatter world, and one
that was more accurate in terms of area. Compared to the Van
der Grinten projection, the Soviet Union in the Robinson
projection moved from being 223 percent larger than it really is
to being only 18 percent larger, and the United States from 68
percent larger to 3 percent smaller.14
Some critics presented Fukuyama as a triumphalist
neoconservative who failed to relativize his own position—
which was ironic, as in 2006 he was to repudiate “the
Neoconservative legacy,” going on to write works that were
more centrist in content and tone.15 There was also the problem
posed by Fukuyama’s relative optimism about the prospect for a

new world order; although his warning about the world of Islam
as resistant to this new order was to be noted by those writing
after September 11, 2001.16 Already, bitter conflict in the
former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, particularly in Bosnia and
Kosovo, had indicated the strength of ethnic, religious, and
regional animosities that had only just been contained there
during the Cold War by authoritarian communist rule.17
At the same time, a new form of geo-power was employed in
1995 in the successful attempt by the United States at Dayton,
Ohio, to broker a new order for Bosnia, part of the former
Yugoslavia, by agreeing to a new political system and a new
border between the warring communities. The use of high-tech
geographic information-processing systems speeded up the
process of negotiation. Ironically, Powerscene, the prime
system used, had been developed by the US Defense Mapping
Agency for military purposes, notably the US air attack on the
Bosnian Serbs in 1995. It is a computer-based terrain-
visualization system, in which digital cartographic data,
overlaid with remote sensing imagery, permits users to explore
the landscape as a three-dimensional reality.18
Samuel Huntington was considerably less optimistic than
Fukuyama. In “Clash,” which was expanded into a highly
successful and much-reprinted book, The Clash of Civilizations
and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Huntington rebutted
Fukuyama.19 Huntington predicted, not the triumph of Western
values but, rather, the rise of “challenger civilizations,”
especially China and Islam. The ideas of rise and decline,
strength and challenge, were key concepts in the dynamics of
geopolitics, often being unproblematic, in the sense of
undefined agents of change. These ideas were somewhat simple
in conception and application. According to Huntington, the rise
of “challenger civilizations” would be as part of a relative
decline of the West that, he argued, had to be addressed
carefully, a theme that was to be addressed, albeit in a very
different fashion, by Kissinger in World Order (2014).
Huntington provided not a book about the threat to the West

from a heartland but, instead, one that proposed a different
geopolitical shaping of the Eurasian question, with the rimland
far more problematic than the heartland, insofar as these
categories could be employed in this case.
Huntington also offered a new reading for the “declinist”
interpretation of America’s global position. This interpretation
owed much to Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great
Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to
2000 (1987). Based essentially on the interplay of resources and
strategy, Kennedy’s work had a great influence in 1988, only to
appear somewhat redundant as a result of the collapse of the
Cold War and US success in the 1991 Gulf War with Iraq.20 In
contrast to Kennedy, Huntington’s stress was on culture, not on
resources. Each has a geographical location, but a differing
dynamic.
Huntington’s analysis could be applied to consider geography at
a variety of scales and to incorporate a range of material . The
emphasis on ideology and an ideological challenge in the shape
of Islam, was one that put the inner-city immigrant communities
of major places within the West, such as Paris and London, in
the front-line of contention. Huntington drew on the analysis of
Islam by another influential US scholar, Bernard Lewis,
specifically his 1990 article “The Roots of Muslim
Rage.”21 Huntington argued that, in the light of the rise of what
he presented as “challenger civilizations,” the established and
rival concept of a global community of nation-states accepting a
shared rule of international law and a set of assumptions (a
community that had been the aspiration of Wilsonian and Cold
War US policies and that seemed achievable, indeed achieved,
in the 1990s) could, in fact, no longer be the answer to the
world’s problems and, thus, satisfy global political and social
demands.22 This represented a critique of the moral
universalism that had been central to US interventionism from
the 1910s.
Terrorism was to drive this lesson home, and Huntington’s
book, which had been over-shadowed during the triumphant

globalization and Clintonian liberalism of the late 1990s, now
appeared prescient after the attacks on September 11, 2001, and,
indeed, was to be translated into 33 languages. The focus was
on relations with Islam, and Huntington was generally regarded
as an exponent of the likelihood of conflict between
Christendom and Islam, and was praised or criticized
accordingly. To some, Huntington, who was in fact a lifelong
Democrat as well as a self-declared conservative, was, in
practice, a key neoconservative who had sketched out the
prospectus for the new ideological confrontation of the 2000s,
as well as for the assertive US policies that followed the
September 11 attacks.23
While the idea of a clash of civilizations is arresting, it also led
to criticism of Huntington on the grounds of misplaced
simplification. Thus, from the Left, Edward Said wrote an
article, “The Clash of Ignorance,” published in the Nation on
October 22, 2001, arguing that there was a danger that the
September 11 attacks would, as a consequence of Huntington’s
arguments, be misleadingly treated as an assault by a monolithic
Islam.24 Indeed, subsequent violence within Iraq after the
overthrow of its government by US-led conquest in 2003 was to
demonstrate the depths of animosity within Islam. In every half-
century of Islamic history, more Muslims have been killed by
other Muslims than by non-Muslims.
From the perspective of specialists in geopolitics, there w as
also skepticism, not least based on the highly problematic
nature of geography in Huntington’s work. In particular, there
was a unresolved tension in his use of geography, between a
realist understanding of it, as an objective and autonomous
element in the political process, and, on the other hand,
Huntington’s emphasis on the “primacy of subjective, non-
geographical factors of social psychology.”25
It was far from ironic that the idea of a clash of civilizations
was also pushed hard by Osama bin Laden and his supporters,
albeit to very different ends and with a very different
vocabulary. This clash was given particular geographical force

by al-Qaeda as it saw Islam as a civilization with a spatial sway,
and a converting and controlling faith, rather than as a religion
limited in its span to the devotion of the faithful and with that
group essentially static. Moreover, adopting a very long
timespan, al-Qaeda treated Islam as having been driven back
from spaces it should control, especially Palestine/Israel and al-
Andalus (southern Spain). In addition, the presence of US
troops in Saudi Arabia following the Gulf War of 1990–1991
was seen by them as another instance of cultural spatial
violation.26 This idea provided a degree of geopolitical
coherence as well as a basis for geopolitical expansion, and
ensured that different struggles could be linked. The
geopolitical imagination of al-Qaeda was one that offered no
prospect of peace nor of understanding of other cultures. This
imagination, which was to be seen anew with the aggressive and
expansionist Islamic State (ISIS) movement—suddenly pushing
to the fore in 2013—and its claim to a revived caliphate of great
scope, also served as a reminder of the political consequences
of psychological senses of space and alienation.
In addition to the world scale, Huntington addressed
developments within America although, again, in a somewhat
simplistic fashion and not open to the nuances of geographical
variations. In Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s
National Identity (2004), he warned about a change of
consciousness and a challenge to Americanness as a
consequence of large-scale immigration. This was
transnationalism seen as a threatening geopolitical force. In the
book, Huntington expressed concern about the applause from
Mexican-Americans for Mexican teams competing with
Americans. As with the Clash of Civilizations, he seemed to
find both multiple identities and interdependence unwelcome
concepts and, as a result, was reduced to the notion of
incompatible groups operating through rivalry. Such an attitude
is crucial to the habit of presenting geopolitics in binary terms.
Looked at differently, binary concepts lent themselves to
geopolitics and that, indeed, was an aspect of the problematic

character of the use of this approach.
Although drawn by some critics, the path from Huntington’s
clash of civilizations to the policies of the George W. Bush
administration of 2001–2009 was in fact at best indirect.
Huntington himself was critical of the neoconservatives and of
the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was particularly unimpressed with
the attempt to install a Western-style democracy, which he saw
as misplaced cultural superiority leading to a flawed
transference of ideas and structures, a view held across the
political spectrum. Huntington had little time for the
triumphalism about Western rule and civilization offered by
some commentators, who were applauded by neoconservatives,
such as the historian Niall Ferguson.27
Neoconservative geopolitics was linked more to the “Project for
a New American Century” (1997) than to Huntington’s thesis.
This project or, rather, prospectus, was the product of a
movement that arose from a reaction against the policies of
President Clinton (1993–2001). Linked to this was an attempt to
revive the essential elements of the Reagan administrations
(1981–1989) or, rather, what was presented, with some
considerable simplification, as these elements, and to reposition
them for the post-Cold War era. As with earlier generations of
US interventionists,28 this drive entailed a commitment to
Eurasia: “America has a vital role in maintaining peace and
security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East” declared the
“Project,” and these responsibilities were seen as fundamental
to US interests. The “Statement of Principles” issued on June 3,
1997, had 25 signatories, including Cheney,
Fukuyama, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, George H. W. Bush’s vice
president, Dan Quayle, Eliot Cohen, Donald Kagan, Norman
Podhoretz, and Stephen Rosen. It began: “American foreign and
defense policy is adrift” and blamed this not only on the
policies of the Clinton administration but also on a failure by
conservatives to advance “a strategic vision of America’s role
in the world.” The signatories aimed to change this.
Emphasizing the need to “shape circumstances,” they pressed

for a stronger military, the promotion of “political and
economic freedom abroad,” and the preservation and extension
of “an international order friendly to our security, our
prosperity, and our principles.”29
The specific policies that flowed from the assumptions of the
“Project” were, in many respects, traditional Cold War policies,
notably strong support for Israel and Taiwan. Indeed, in some
respects, the general suppositions can be seen as formulaic and
trite hyperbole that sought to provide rationale and structure for
a series of specific commitments.
That remark is not intended as a criticism specifically of the
neoconservatives, as it could be made, in addition, about most
attempts to offer a global geopolitics, including liberal and left-
wing attempts. Looked at differently, the deductive processes of
geopolitics at the global level are weak, and the specific goals
that arise can best be understood as individual and lacking a
general structure. Thus, geopolitics as a global analysis emerges
not only as a vital recovery of the spatial dimension, but also as
somewhat implausible as an inductive method, and as overly
weak as a deductive one. The global analysis is, perforce, weak
as it is difficult to provide coherence at that level, and, more
particularly, to link specific interests to a global account that
also works at a dynamic level—in other words, capable of
explaining change.
In the 1990s, while the fall of the Soviet Union, the anchoring
of East Asia to the US economy, and economic growth were all
leading to optimism among US commentators global politics
had also been reshaped in a more challenging fashion for the
United States.30 On the one hand, there were positive outcomes.
In particular, an imploding Soviet Union did not challenge US
hegemony and—unlike revolutionary France in 1789–1792 and,
to a lesser extent, Russia in 1917–1920—Russia in the 1990s
did not swing from revolution to dangerous expansionism. This
situation provided a background for the restateme nt of a
classic geopolitics in Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard:
American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997).

Across much of the world, however, identity and conflict in the
1990s were shaped and expressed in terms of an aggressive
ethnic politics that did not accord with US interests or with
Western views of geopolitics.
As a separate process, changes in values affected the position of
particular states, or at least debate within them. This was
clearly the case with China as it became more prosperous and
assertive and with Russia. In the Soviet Union, formalized
“theories” of the interrelationship, or interdetermination, of
geography and politics had had little purchase because of their
blood-and-soil connotations and, therefore, lack of ideological
acceptability. However, these ideas came to enjoy widespread
credence and popularity in post-Soviet Russia as a new
territoriality was developed, especially by Aleksandr Dugin, a
polemical commentator close to President Putin, with an
assertive account of national space and the supposed biological
imperatives of the nation. Indeed, Huntington’s thesis of a clash
of civilizations was echoed in the emergence of ethno-
geopolitics in post-Soviet Russia. However, unlike
Huntington’s, this ethno-geopolitics explicitly imbued the
civilizational entity with specific ethnic characteristics of its
own. Some of the Russian work, in contrast, has been better-
informed and not partisan.31
More generally, the results of expressing identity in terms of
ethnic suppositions were frequently very much defined in
spatial terms, not least as the goal of many activists were
ethnically homogenous territorial spaces. This process was seen,
for example, with Serbian ethnic and spatial ambitions, and
offered a restatement of earlier political themes and territorial
demands that had been superseded under communism.32
This emphasis on ethnic territoriality led to tension, if not
violence, and was not an approach that matched the ethos of US
leadership nor its attempt to reconcile change, globalization,
populism, and religion. Moreover, as a separate but related
issue, in some countries, particularly in the Middle East,
hostility to globalization, a hostility that could be expressed in

terms of pan-Islamism, meant opposition to modernism and
modernization, and thus could draw on powerful interests and
deep fears.
THE GEOPOLITICS OF THE 2000S AND 2010S
The September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington
led to regional hostility and ideological developments in the
Islamic world, becoming a key geopolitical issue for the United
States, with resulting geostrategic concerns in terms of the
possibilities for supporting force projection. These concerns
entailed different geopolitics, one initially focused on
Afghanistan, Central Asia and Pakistan, with Iraq rising in
prominence from 2002 as the 2003 invasion was prepared. This
was geopolitics different from that of the Cold War, when
forward operating capabilities sought to meet different
requirements, notably those of containment. The end of the Cold
War had led to a lessening of political support for America’s
overseas posture, which affected the geostrategic options facing
its forces and the military strength available.33
The “War on Terror,” in contrast, led to a revival of geopoli tics
at a number of levels. These included the focus on area
commands by the Pentagon (notably the wide-ranging Central
Command), the interest in power-projection, and also the extent
to which conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq obliged newspapers
and the television news to include maps. Most of these maps,
however, were flat maps, devoid of information on such factors
as terrain or religious affiliation.
The attacks on September 11 resulted in a dramatic
reconfiguration of US commitment. A determination not to be
restrained by the need for international agreement and not to
work through international bodies was made clear. Addressing a
joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, President
George W. Bush stated, “Either you are with us, or you are with
the terrorists.” In practice, the call for a “War on Terror” was
also a call for a more broad-based action to maintain order in
the world or, rather, a vision of order. Both the “War on Terror”

and this call were universal missions in which geographical
limits were regarded as an irrelevance that was to yield to will.
In short, there was an open-ended commitment in both time and
space, one that was emphasized by the US leadership. The “War
on Terror” thus served as a concept to structure the
complexities of world affairs and to help direct alliances.
The Cold War had offered the same, but with a far more
cautious, deterrence-based approach toward action. The
“rollback” of Soviet control had not been adopted as the policy
of the West. In opposition to the “War on Terror,” al-Qaeda
sought to use jihad as a call for action and an organizing
concept that could incorporate Islamic activism and disputes
across the world, as in 2009 when Osama bin-Laden pressed
for jihad over Gaza, where Hamas was in conflict with Israel. In
turn, autonomous Islamic groups across the world proclaimed a
degree of coherence with al-Qaeda.34
In September 2002, the National Security Strategy argued the
need for preemptive strikes by the United States. This was a key
policy innovation that was advocated in response to the dual
threats of terrorism and “rogue states,” notably Iran and North
Korea, developing weapons of mass destruction. These states
were seen as another variant on terrorism. The global extension
of American values was presented as the answer to the danger
posed by these threats: “The great struggles of the twentieth
century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a
decisive victory for the forces of freedom. . . . These values of
freedom are right and true for every person, in every society—
and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is
the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe
and across the ages. . . . We will extend the peace by
encouraging free and open societies on every continent.”
To that end, George W. Bush pressed for democracy in the
Middle East and China, a call that appeared to ignore any
suggestion of geographical limits. In many respects, and here
emphasizing the plasticity of the concept and placing of
geopolitics, this call—for not only democracy but also for

modernization—was a denial of the geopolitics
of Realpolitik advanced by Kissinger and others, including, in
this period, John Mearsheimer, in his The Tragedy of Great
Power Politics (New York, 2001). The assumption, under
George W. Bush, was that a change in the values of a society, as
well as of the operations of its domestic politics, would alter the
country’s position and activity in international relations.
Thus, building on the oft-repeated claim that democracies do
not declare war on democracies, the drive for democracy was a
move away from the argument that particular nations were
somehow fated to a malign political system. The latter approach
offered a form of political environmentalism that more readily
lent itself to classic geopolitics, and to the conventional
understanding of international relations as a realist structure.
Moreover, the call for democratization was an aspect of a
strategy seeking to maintain stability and prevent wars, as much
as to win them. Opposition to weapons proliferation was part of
the same policy.
Bush also argued, in a 2005 speech given at Tiblisi, the capital
of Georgia, that the peace settlement of 1945 at the end of
World War II had been flawed because it had left Eastern
Europe under Communist control. This remark, again,
underplayed the suggestion of geopolitical limits for the West,
while also offering a critical comment on the Democratic
administrations of the 1940s, on the Republican unwillingness
to promote “rollback” in the 1950s, and on the détente of the
1970s, particularly as supported by Jimmy Carter.
In practice, the US preference in the 2000s was for democracy
in the Middle East, rather than in China. The former appeared a
more practical goal, as well as one made more necessary by the
challenge apparently posed by Islamic fundamentalisms as well
as the threat to the security of Israel. Whether it is helpful to
view this prioritization in a geopolitical light is unclear unless
the latter is understood, as is so often the case, as a
rationalization of the obvious. For, in practice, despite the call
for universal freedom, there was, as ever, a “cartography,” or

geographical expression and limitation, of concern and action.
In this “cartography,” prudence and pragmatism about
introducing democracy played a greater role than ideological
rhetoric might suggest. This point is not intended as a criticism
of policy, but underlines the extent to which geopolitics can, in
part, be seen as an exercise in prudence, or rather in debating
strategies of prudence in terms of international concerns. This is
particularly so if the emphasis is on a realist geopolitics. As
such, there is a parallel with the early US republic in which the
call for universal rights enunciated in the Declaration of
Independence (1776) was very much compromised by the
exigencies of power politics in the new republic and the
Americas more generally, as well as by the racial politics of the
United States itself in the shape of the treatment of African
American slaves and of Native Americans. So also, at the
international level, with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which
did not amount in practice to its pledge to defend republican
independence across the New World.35
After 2001, the China issue was overshadowed for the United
States by the “War on Terror,” as the country was apparently
able to employ its military preponderance to ensure a freedom
of action in the Islamic world.36 The Bush doctrine, which was
reiterated in the version of the National Security Strategy iss ued
in March 2006, was the opposite of isolationism, a point
underlined in Bush’s address to the United Nations in
September 2005. At the same time, this was multilateralism in a
War on Terror very much on US terms. Donald Rumsfeld’s
argument, in an interview with Larry King on CNN on
December 5, 2001, that “The worst thing you can do is allow a
coalition to determine what your mission is”37 was, in one
perspective, a call to reject the political counterpart to
environmental determinism, and thus to impose one’s will. This
rejection was perceived by critics as a departure from the
existing constraints of the international order, a departure
reflecting the weaknesses of the latter and the gravity of the US
unilateral challenge. American unilateralism had a number of

sources, including a strong and lasting conviction of national
exceptionalism, as well as the consequences of the US 1947
National Security Act. Nixon, an admirer of Charles de Gaulle,
was also a source of unilateralism.
The strategic counterpart for the United States in the 2000s, a
counterpart driving such a challenge, was that deterrence, by the
Americans and/or others, no longer seemed effective when
confronted by terrorism or states governed by fanatical rulers.
The apparent ineffectiveness of deterrence was such that
preemption appeared necessary as a strategic means and goal.
Specific consequences resulted from this situation,
consequences in terms of the geopolitics constructed round
particular challenges. At one level, the promotion of democratic
governments appeared an aspect of this preemption. It was
linked to the idea of “draining the swamp,” or removing the
factors that made particular areas, such as Afghanistan, prone to
serving as bases or potential bases for terrorism. Looked at from
the other perspective, terrorists, like guerrilla groups, require
space as a base for operations. What were termed shatterbelts
provided this. These shatterbelts were the focus of US concerns
about the strength and stability of states;38 although strength
was, and is, difficult to define, and should be discussed with
reference to particular national and regional political structures.
In practice, under Bush the serious weaknesses of policy were
dramatically accentuated by the many fundamental deficiencies
in execution.39
Alongside the immediacy of the varied issues posed by the
Islamic world, China aroused growing US concern. As a
reminder that geopolitics does not determine force structure, the
Chinese abandoned the military ideology of asymmetry that had
been followed during the period of control by Mao Zedong
(1949–1976). Instead, in response to the American capability
displayed in the 1990s, the Chinese changed their military
ideology in pursuit of their own “revolution in military
affairs.”40
The US 2006 quadrennial Defense Review described China as

having “the greatest potential to compete militarily with the
United States and field disruptive military technologies that
could over time offset traditional US military
advantages.”41 This potential was as significant as China’s
ability to operate as a sea power as well as a land one; in the
Pacific and Indian oceans as well as in Asia.42 Confronting the
Chinese challenge entailed not only appropriate force structures
and doctrine, but also an understanding of the political
dimension, both from the Chinese perspective and from that of
other Asian powers.43 These needs were in a dynamic
relationship such that, for example, “a larger number of [US]
submarines could be warranted, depending on how the
geopolitical situation in the Pacific plays out.”44
At the global level, tensions over resources, especially oil,
water, food, and space, also played a major role in geopolitics,
both local struggles and international concerns.45 This role was
particularly sensitive in the Middle East and notably added a
key strand in relations with the United States. US oil imports—
close to 2 percent of GDP in 2005—led to a dangerous
dependence on the politics of the Middle East and the stability
of particular regimes, such as those of the Shah in Iran in the
1970s and the Saud dynasty in Saudi Arabia. In 2003, Saudi
Arabia held 25 percent of the world’s oil reserves and Iraq
another 10 percent, with the Middle Eastern OPEC states having
two-thirds of the world’s reserves. The geopolitics of oil supply
and the resulting strategic vulnerabilities ensured political
support in the United States for the expansion of drilling in
environmentally sensitive areas, notably offshore and in Alaska
and, by the 2010s, for fracking. Indeed, the latter attracted
geopolitical and strategic interest around the world.46
Although the role of oil in the US decision to attack Iraq in
2003 was exaggerated in what was a reflection of the more
general tendency to simplify motivation and causation, oil
certainly played a major role in the geopolitics of US strategy.
Indeed, this was an aspect of the cost that oil dependence forced
on the United States, and thus the burden placed on its economy

and consumers. In 2004, the United States imported 58 percent
of the oil it consumed, compared to 34 percent in 1973.
Fracking indicates a very different trajectory, with a move
toward oil self-sufficiency.
Natural gas was another key resource. The development of an
infrastructure to supply Soviet natural gas and oil to ener gy-
poor Western Europe had been a major issue in international
relations in the last decade of the Cold War, creating tension
between the United States and Western Europe. Thereafter,
Russian gas became a key weapon in Russian efforts to maintain
its influence. Disputes with Ukraine in 2006 and 2009 led
Russia to shut its pipelines, while a renewed crisis in 2014
raised the issue anew. By then, Russia provided about a quarter
of the gas used in the European Union, as well as nearly all the
gas used in the Baltic republics, Finland, and Bulgaria. As a
result, the arrival in the spring of 2014 of a floating gas
terminal in Lithuania’s port, Klaepėda (formerly Memel) was
described as “a weapon of geopolitics as important as any
warship.”47 This view was offered because Lithuania’s reliance
on Russian gas was thereby reduced. The routes of projected
pipelines became a key geopolitical issue, notably in the
Caucasus and the Balkans. This issue helped account for the
importance attached to particular states.
Population growth drives resource issues alongside economic
demands.48 At the global level, population changes are also an
important element in geopolitics. In particular, most of the
expansion in the world’s population is occurring, and will
continue to occur, in East and South Asia and Africa, with the
West only providing a declining minority of the world’s
population. Population rises ensure a concern with food
supplies—a concern that emphasizes the interdependence of
supplier and consumer. The consequences were readily apparent
in particular states, especially as the population increasingly
masses in sprawling cities that are under only limited
control.49 For example, political instability in Egypt in the
early 2010s owed much to rises in the price of bread. Resource

issues and access may demonstrate Mackinder’s point that the
great wars of history arise from the unequal growth of nations, a
point frequently made in literature about the causes of wars.
Certainly, instability linked to population growth will
complicate the conduct of “war amongst the people.”50 The
unequal nature of economic opportunity was also an issue for
those who adopted an approach to geopolitics in which
economic factors, notably capitalism, were at the fore.51
CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS
The geopolitics of, and attributed to, the George W. Bush
administrations (2001–2009), lent added force to the expression
of the self-styled “critical geopolitics.” “Critical geopolitics” is
itself a diverse project, as a 2013 collection ably displays, one
with multiple ideas, sites, and agents,52 but is better described
as radical geopolitics. This type of geopolitics deliberately sets
out to subvert the understanding of established categories and
geographical relationships by calling into question fundamental
distinctions as well as realist terminology: for example, the
state and society, military personnel versus civilians, and
national security. “Critical geopolitics” deconstructs and
challenges our common understandings of definitions,
categories, and relationships and, instead, suggests and applies
new perspectives and insights.
In a hostile reading, however, these understandings are, in some
cases, replaced by utopian wishful thinking, by political
commitment instead of an objective appreciation of the causes
of conflict, by foreshortened historical understandings and by a
loss of clarity in communicating ideas. “Critical geopolitics”
self-consciously stands as a form of postcolonial study, one
suspicious of the state, of the course of Western power and of
what were presented as their accompanying geographical
activities.53 Although not all postcolonial work adopts a
geopolitical stance, there is often an attack on US power,
portrayed as hegemony, power that is presented as the latest
version of Western colonialism. This attack frequently involves

calls for a different world order, one with a distinctive spatial
character,54 indeed a product of the “counter-space” created in
opposition to existing political structures.55
A prominent book in the field of “critical geopolitical” thought,
Neil Smith’s American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the
Prelude to Globalization (2003), provides a good example.
British-born, Smith was professor of anthropology and
geography at City University of New York when the book was
published. Although his book is large and complex, it is notable
that Smith displayed scant reluctance in offering judgments.
Thus, he wrote that the Cold War “was provoked amid a 1940s
battle by U.S. capital and the U.S. government for global
economic access to labor and commodity markets.”56 Such
simplistic, not to say misleading, arguments are an aspect of a
wider problem with a strand of geographical study—for
example, the critical approach adopted in much work on
mapping.57
Smith’s book appeared in the series California Studies in
Critical Human Geography.58 He referred in it to “deep sighs of
epochal relief from the Western ruling classes after
1989,”59 and to the United Nations as “the jewel in the crown
of the postwar American Lebensraum.”60 With its direct
reference to Nazi attitudes and expansionism, this was a term
presumably chosen to shock, but one that fails to capture
fundamental differences in intentionality and method. Smith
was highly critical of the United States, and this criticism can
be seen in the language he employed. Writing of Isaiah
Bowman, the prominent academic geographer who was an
advisor to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the State
Department during World War II, Smith noted of Bowman in the
year 1944: “Pushed to the political wall by the strength of the
Soviet come-back against Germany and by British colonialist
obstinacy, which he quietly admired, his Wilsonian moralism
became an ideological runt to an increasingly over-nourished
nationalism. Americanness increasingly dominated his postwar
vision of global Lebensraum.”61

Such a tone and approach was unfortunate because Smith’s
subject is important, and indeed he captured a central point,
even if it could have been phrased better: “By one account,
then, the American Century took us beyond geography; by
another, it was the geographic century. This contradiction
between a spaceless and a spatially constituted US globalism is
latent in the global history of the twentieth century
[and] . . . points to the powerful necessity of understanding the
preludes to globalization in a geographical register.”62
Smith responded to the attacks on September 11, 2001, by
arguing that they were a local and global event misrepresented
as a national tragedy: indeed, that the “need to nationali ze
September 11 arose from the need to justify war.”63 Smith’s
point that the attacks had local, national and global scales
worthy of consideration, especially how these scales interlink
with one another, is valid. However, his approach was in part
set by his clear hostility to the US government and its policies.
Furthermore, his point offered an example of how he wanted to
assert the overriding importance of a global scale, one that
overrode the local and the national. Therefore, to Smith,
September 11 was nationalized by the United States, despite, in
his view, the attacks being local but having a global meaning.
This approach, however, risked privileging the ideology of
globalization and the binary divides thereby identified, over the
nation. Moreover, the attack on the Pentagon was clearly an
attack on the United States, while the other plane brought down
by the passengers before it could reach Washington had
apparently also been intended for a major national target.64
In turn, Jennifer Hyndman offered a feminist analysis of
September 11 in ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical
Geographies (2003):
The events and aftermath of September 11th ineluctably ended
the already precarious distinction between domestic space, that
within a sovereign state, and more global space where
transnational networks, international relations, multilateral
institutions, and global corporations operate. . .. Feminists have

long argued that private–public distinctions serve to
depoliticize the private domestic spaces of “home” compared to
more public domains. . . . Terror in the US on September 11th
has been met with more terror in Afghanistan. . . . A feminist
geopolitics aims to trace the connections between geographical
and political locations, exposing investments in the dominant
geopolitical rhetoric, in the pursuit of a more accountable and
embodied geopolitics that contests the wisdom of violence
targeted at innocent civilians, wherever they may be.
Hyndman also argued the need to emphasize links between the
CIA and bin Laden, via Pakistan’s ISI, a proposition, however,
that did not explain the policies of either. Hyndman’s analysis
can be unpacked by noting the consequences of her treatment of
the 2001 attacks as supporting the feminist position on the
private/public distinction. Hyndman proposed no clear
definition of terror, leading the reader to suppose that terror
equals violence, and, moreover, as the distinction is denied by
feminist critical thinkers, equals violence in the home or by the
state. Insofar as the state was allegedly built on patriarchy and
violence, for radical feminists it is illegitimate anyway.
US power more generally appears to pose problems for some
academics who discuss geopolitics. In “Oil and Blood. The Way
to Take over the World,” a piece from World Watch
Magazine (2003) reprinted in the second edition of The
Geopolitics Reader, Michael Renner concluded: “By rejecting
U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol [to reduce climate
change, 1997] early in his tenure, George W. Bush sought to
throw a wrench into the international machinery set up to
address the threat of climate change. By securing the massive
flow of cheap oil, he may hope to kill Kyoto. In a perverse
sense, a war on Iraq reinforces the assault against the Earth’s
climate.”65
A focus on economies was also adopted in Pierre Grou’s Atlas
Mondial des Multinationales (1990). This proposed that
polarization was a product of the emergence of economic
space.66 The assault on US policy was intense. Derek Gregory,

in his The Colonial Present (2004), claimed that the use of the
“War on Terror” created geopolitical spaces where the United
States could use its massive firepower with impunity. Control
over space thus became a way of rethinking, or rather newly
expressing, standard political themes.
In his Geopolitics. A Very Short Introduction (2007), Klaus
Dodds made clear his views on US policy. For example: “In
November 2004, much to the disappointment of many US
voters, presidential candidate John Kerry was not able to deny
the George W. Bush administration a second term.”67 This is a
sentence that, while accurate, scarcely admitted that Bush’s re-
election reflected a democratic mandate reached by a significant
majority of voters, approximately five million more than those
who voted for Kerry. Alarm was expressed by Dodds about the
policies of the Bush administration,68 and Dodds announced
that “the Bush Doctrine based on pre-emption and highly
selective multilateralism is the single most important danger
confronting the current geopolitical architecture.”69 These
were, of course, frequently repeated assertions. However, such
repetition did, and does, not amount to demonstration.
Inevitably, there was also a “presentist” feel to the argument.
There could also be an explicit call to action, a call that
reflected heightened tension during the “War on Terror.” John
Agnew, professor of geography at UCLA, was a key figure in
the discipline. Co-editor of the journal Geopolitics from 1998 to
2009, he was president of the Association of American
Geographers for 2008–2009. Originally published in 1998, the
second edition of his Geopolitics: Re-visioning World
Politics (2003), a popular work (i.e., often set as a text)
reprinted three times in 2006 and again in 2007, concluded:
What is clear is that the state-territorial conception of power is
not a transcendental feature of modern human history but,
rather, a historically contingent feature of the relationship
between geographical scales in the definition and concentration
of political practices. . . . Political geographers and others must
finally choose whether to be agents of an imagination that has

imposed manifold disasters on humanity or to try to understand
geographical communalities and differences in their own right.
In other words, it is past time to choose sides. But first we need
to understand and overcome our own bad habits of thinking and
doing: vincit qui se vincit.70
Agnew’s argument captured the assumption that the world, as it
is, is illegitimate and must be changed. As such, these critical
thinkers differ in emphasis from realist or classical geopolitical
thinkers, such as Mackinder, Mahan, and Spykman—who sought
to appreciate the world as it is, and then to describe, prescribe,
and predict. The perspective of the latter group was/is that
power, conflict, and violence all exist and cannot be banished.
Temporary fixes are possible, and indeed desirable, and can be
obtained through a balance of power, or collective security, or
pre-emptive war, or some action taken within an appreciation
that all ends have costs and consequences, and that means can
overwhelm even the best intentioned of ends. Thus, realist
geopolitics tends to base itself on the argument that principles
and practices of strategic thought and action cannot be ignored
or wished away. More critically, Mackinder and Spykman and
others can be discussed in terms, not only of seeking to
appreciate the world as it was, but also of trying to defend it
accordingly. They certainly saw themselves as trying to defend
a set of values, values presented most clearly in the success of
particular states.
Developments in the 2010s, notably in East Asia, the Middle
East and over Ukraine, suggest that, as argued by Kissinger in
2014, realist-informed policy analysis is necessary in order to
understand the Realpolitik that characterizes inter-state
behavior.71 A contrast with the 2000s was readily apparent.
When the United States was not only the major power but also
the one launching wars, then critical geopolitics took on energy
and weight as an aspect of the political debate within the West
and, more specifically, as a means of discussing the United
States. As the context changed from the late 2000s toward a
more multipolar world,72 and notably in the 2010s, so the

relevance of this critique became less pertinent. However, US
military action, for example, air attacks against Islamic State
militants from September 2014, led to a revival of such
criticism in some quarters.
In discussing “critical geopolitics,” it would be foolish, as
noted above, to neglect the major role of commitment in
classical geopolitics, commitment in particular to the state and,
at least implicitly, a form of call to action accordingly. What is
notable about the self-styled “critical geopolitics” is that the
commitment is different in type, especially with an attempt to
reorient to “a geography for peace,”73 and is generally far more
overt. For example, commitment was a theme in Colin
Flint’s Introduction to Geopolitics: “Participation in geopolitics
is also a matter of questioning and challenging the ‘common
sense’ assumptions generated by the geopolitical structures in
general (difference, conflict, etc.) as well as by the
representations and actions of key geopolitical agents, the US
and British governments for example.”74
The critique here of the application of a binary conception of
power politics draws in part on concern about the conventional
discussion of imperialism and, indeed, of the role of
geographers in the process. This hostile discussion tends,
however, to underplay the extent to which imperialism was
practiced by non-Western powers as well75 and, moreover,
sometimes neglects historical work that emphasizes the
complexities of imperialism and the extent to which it entailed
compromise and negotiation, which are themes pursued
in chapters 2, 3, and 5. These complex “geographies of
power”76 cut across the crude strictures too often expressed by
those propounding a binary approach.
The explicitly political criticism that is offered draws on the
justification that geopolitical discourse is inherently
contestable, if not contested, and thereby political. This
argument has considerable value, but all too much of the
criticism is weakened, even vitiated, by resting on a fixed set of
preferences and antagonisms. In particular, difficulty in coming

to terms with imperialism in the past, or US power today, poses
significant issues. Adopting an inherently critical approach
toward such overlapping categories as American public culture,
consumerism, the West (an abstraction that somehow tends not
to include the critic in question), neoconservatism, imperialist
geopolitics and claims to objectivity, is not only repetitive,
discursive, and somewhat exhausting, but it also suffers from
the difficulties of coming to terms with these forces and
categories in subsequent analysis—other than in a somewhat
crude fashion that sometimes relies on problematic theory, scant
use of evidence and argument by assertion.
The New Imperialism (2003) by David Harvey provided an
instructive example. A former member of the Oxford School of
Geography who went on to teach at Johns Hopkins University
before becoming distinguished professor of anthropology at the
Graduate Center of City University of New York, Harvey (who
was much influenced by Marx’s priorities)77 based his book on
the Clarendon Lectures he delivered in Oxford in 2003. In the
preface, he acknowledged the help of Neil Smith in shaping his
insight. Seeking to expose “deeper currents” in US policy,
Harvey stressed “All About Oil,” the title of his first chapter; he
argued that Bush’s foreign policy was designed “to impose a
new sense of social order at home,” established a binary divide
between “accumulation by dispossession,” as a result of
neoliberal policies, and “an even rising tide of global
resistance,” and presented geopolitics as the product of
economic forces:
[T]he really big issue is what happens to surplus capitals
generated within subnational regional economies when they
cannot find profitable employment anywhere within the state.
This is, of course, the heart of the problem that generates
pressures for imperialist practices in the inter-state system. The
evident corollary of all this is that geopolitical conflicts would
almost certainly arise out of the molecular processes of capital
accumulation no matter what the state powers thought they were
about. . . . that the political state, in advanced capitalism, has to

spend a good deal of effort and consideration on how to manage
the molecular flows. . . . It will, in short, necessarily engage in
geopolitical struggle and resort, when it can, to imperialist
practices.78
While offering a dynamic account of the state that was different
from that of simple control over territory, such an approach to
US policy adopted the very Manichaeism for which the Bush
administration, and also neoconservative thought in general,
could with reason be heavily criticized. Indeed, aside from
marked differences between states, the 2000s and 2010s also
saw the continuing role of nongovernmental organizations, such
as Oxfam, which had their own geopolitics, as well as the
strength of other transnational movements and pressures.
“Critical geopolitics” is, in part, an aspect of this remolding and
representation of interests and spatiality but, notably in the
focus on America, some of the work can also fail to engage
adequately with the extent of this development.
More widely, the strident and partisan approach adopted by
some writers unfortunately ensures that the value of “critical
geopolitics” will be less than its undoubted potential as an
arresting call for a new departure in the subject. Alongside
Manichaeism, comes the problem of projecting one’s own
frames of reference onto others. A historical account of
geopolitical thought reveals a long tradition of doing so, one
that predates “critical geopolitics,” but it is a practice that
needs to be questioned, if not resisted. To do so is not, however,
to imply the possibility of objective perfection as an alternative.
Indeed, in their Historical Atlas of Louisiana (2003), Charles
Goins and John Caldwell commented on the tendency to
advance present-day values, notably in commenting on the
impact of technology. They proposed, instead, that change takes
place only within the context of its own time and space, which,
they urged, should be the basis of an analysis that moved away
from present-day values.79
It would be misleading to imply a coherence for all the

literature that could be referred to as “critical geopolitics.”
Moreover, the policies of the Bush government (and of its
British ally) were debated (and criticized) across the political
spectrum, including on the Right. For example, the supposed
nature of US policy as imperial (a long-standing theme given
new energy in the 2000s) was argued widely in a literature that
brought together politics, geography, and history, with some of
this literature critical, and part of it supportive. The extent to
which these works had a geopolitical aspect varied, as there was
often more of an interest in characterizing the central ethos and
thrust of policy than its spatial dynamic and manifestations, but
the attempt to move beyond the analytical confines of the Cold
War was valuable.80 In an important work, American Empire.
The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (2002),
Andrew Bacevich searched out themes and continuities that
moved him away from turning points predicated on the start and
end of the Cold War, and also looked at the relationship
between America’s global power and her domestic political
culture, a key geopolitical theme. He concluded: “The question
that urgently demands attention . . . is not whether the United
States has become an imperial power. The question is what sort
of empire they intend theirs to be. For policymakers to persist
in pretending otherwise . . . is to increase the likelihood that the
answers they come up with will be wrong. That way lies not just
the demise of the US empire but great danger for what used to
be known as the American republic.”81
Bacevich considered how American policy had developed with a
pursuit of morality increasingly linked to the furtherance of
what he saw as a potent imperium: “[T]he politicoeconomic
concept to which the United States adheres today has not
changed in a century: the familiar quest for an ‘open world,’ the
overriding imperative of commercial integration, confidence
that technology endows the United States with a privileged
position in that order, and the expectation that American
military might will preserve order and enforce the
rules. . . . Those policies reflect a single-minded determination

to extend and perpetuate American political, economic, and
cultural hegemony—usually referred to as ‘leadership’—on a
global scale.”82
Bacevich threw light on the extent to which the defenders of
liberal internationalism had offered a mythic rendition of
America’s ascent to global power, specifically what he termed
the myth of the reluctant superpower. Bacevich also showed
how, as the American imperium focused on globalization, so
those who resisted the latter were seen as opponents of the
United States. He argued that after 1945 US writers and
policymakers, inheriting British ideas from the nineteenth
century, focused on free trade and the unfettered movement of
money, as political as well as economic goods and goals, and
thus as central goods and goals for government. The state thus
became a protection system for an economic worldview that, in
turn, helped fund this US state. Rather than (mistakenly) seeing
this relationship as the product of an economic conspiracy and
class self-interest, Bacevich focused, instead, on the ideas that
played a crucial role, specifically on the pursuit of a benign and
mutually beneficial world order that reflected an imperium,
rather than an empire of control, constraint, and coercion. The
democratic objective at the heart of US capitalism was seen by
Bacevich as both cause and consequence of freedom.
Drawing attention to rival geopolitical understanding of the
West and the Anglosphere, Bacevich located the US
determination to overthrow the European colonial empires in
terms of the American hope that newly independent peoples
would support democratic capitalism and thus look to the
United States. This approach can be regarded as a foolish
aspiration, although the alternatives were not welcome, as any
consideration of the US dilemma at the time of the Anglo–
French intervention against Egypt in the Suez Crisis of 1956
would indicate. Bacevich underlined the degree to which this
US economic goal, seen at once as in America’s and the world’s
interest, and as conducive to liberty as well as prosperity,
provided a continuous theme that bridged the close of the Cold

War. Democratic capitalism had to be supported and, if
necessary, fought for. Yet, Bacevich argued that, in the 1990s, a
greater reliance on coercion as an instrument of US policy, and
the tendency of serving officers to displace civilians in
implementing foreign policy, were manifestations of the
increasing militarization of US statecraft after the Cold War:
“Before the 1990s ended, evidence of civil–military dysfunction
had become increasingly difficult to ignore. Meanwhile, events
had exposed the limitations of the proconsular system—and of
Americans’ reliance on gunboats and Gurkhas to police the
world.”83
That last was a phrase that looked back to earlier British policy,
although it was a less than adequate characterization of this
policy. Bacevich took his arguments forward in the Limits of
Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008). There was
also a particularly pronounced, persistent political preference
on the part of the officer corps, one toward the Republicans.
Moving from Bacevich back to “critical geopolitics,” the
critique of modern US power, its geopolitical imagination and
spatial manifestations, was matched by criticism of past
geopolitical arguments that were held to anticipate modern
neoconservative attitudes. Thus, Turner’s thesis of the frontier
was challenged in part for ignoring economic, social, political,
and ethnic divisions on the frontier, and also because it failed to
consider victims adequately, especially Native Americans. Both
charges were well-founded. The idea of the West as a site for
contest within US society, specifically over land and profit, was
advanced by Patricia Limerick in The Legacy of Conquest: The
Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1988). In the
striking Atlas of Native History (1981), Jack Forbes offered a
dramatic repudiation of the conventions of US historical
cartography. He employed the “names used by the native people
themselves” and sought to “present real political conditions,”
ignoring the claims of white governmental units, which, he
argued, had come to compose a “mythological map.” Forbes
also represented his atlas as part of an intellectual process that

the country had to go through, “discovering truth free of ethnic
bias and colonialist chauvinism.”84 In addition, the different
geopolitical visions and practices of Native American societies
attracted attention.85 In a reaction to Frederick Jackson Turner
(see chapter 6), the concept of frontiers, rather than the frontier,
has since been advanced as a more relevant concept.86
THE GEOPOLITICS OF TIME
The major role of continuity and memory in framing responses
to crises, not least highlighting perceptions of national interest
and, thus, the strategic nature and resonances (or memories) of
particular geographical (and chronological) spaces, is another
theme to emerge from recent scholarship. In Making War,
Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of
Force from Korea to Kosovo (2002), Jeffrey Record showed
how historical lessons, particularly Munich (1938) and Vietnam
(1963–1975), were misinterpreted in the United States, and he
suggested that “the tendency to regard violent nationalism in the
Third World as the product of a centrally-directed international
Communist conspiracy was a strategic error of the first
magnitude.”87 This tendency reflected, and helped ensure, a
difficulty in confronting events that were without obvious
parallel in the period being plundered for examples. Thus,
alongside the role of space, the geopolitics of time and memory
play a key role. This is an element, moreover, that is
emphasized if the stress is on the role of perception in
assessing, not only power but, more particularly, threats. Thus,
the linkage of history with geography is of major significance.
In part, the geopolitics of time and memory play a key role
because commentators and politicians frequently continue
writing and remain influential for many decades. Thus,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor under President
Carter in 1977–1980, and an academic who was a prominent
user of the term geopolitics, published The Choice: Global
Domination or Global Leadership in 2004. The previous winter,
in an article for The National Interest, he had employed the

concept as well as language of geopolitics in referring to “the
crucial swathe of Eurasia between Europe and the Far East” as
the “new ‘Global Balkans,’” a phrase intended “to draw
attention to the geopolitical similarity between the traditional
European Balkans of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and
the unstable region that currently extends from approximately
the Suez Canal to Xinjiang [northwest China]. In the case of
both areas, internal instability has served as a magnet for
external major power intervention and rivalry[;] . . . the ferment
within the Muslim world must be viewed primarily in a regional
rather than a global perspective, and through a geopolitical
rather than a theological prism.”88 Subsequently, Brzezinski
referred in the article to “the current geopolitical earthquake in
the Persian Gulf.”89
In practice, this language served Brzezinski as a call for
diplomatic action and, in particular, for an active strategic
partnership between a politically mobilized United States and a
determined and united EU, a situation that had not pertained at
the time of the Iraq Crisis of 2003. The extent, however, to
which the vocabulary of geopolitics really advanced the
argument in this or other cases is unclear. However, in terms of
rhetorical strategy, whether the vocabulary used advanced a
particular argument was a matter of the assumptions of the
likely audience and their likely perception of the use of this
vocabulary. As a reminder, moreover, of the malleability of
geopolitical perspectives, the power politics of this “crucial
swathe” were to be reexamined by Robert Kaplan, a prolific
American author who took geopolitics into a more popular
format, but this time from the very different perspective of
power centered on the Indian Ocean.90 This malleability is one
of the most striking features of geopolitics.
CURRENT GEOPOLITICS
Current geopolitics poses analytical problems, not least because
the long-term is more than a series of short-terms. It is
understandable that commentators frame questions and answers

in terms of immediate issues—the September-11-ization of US
policy or, for example, in 2013 the responses to the developing
crises in Syria and the East China Sea and, in 2015, those same
crises but also Iraq and Ukraine. These issues are then taken to
support particular arguments in international trends.
It is also necessary to consider issues in international relations
in the longer term. Internationalism challenges many traditional
assumptions (as it confirms others). The extraordinary growth
of the US national debt and of foreign borrowing under the
George W. Bush administrations (2001–2009), amply
demonstrated this, as it arose in part from the cost of the
Afghanistan and Iraq wars,91 combined with a failure to raise
taxes. Foreign borrowing also altered the geopolitics of
international finance, and especially the fiscal and political
relationships within the dollar world. Foreign ownership of US
debt created a new geopolitics of US international concern,
notably over the policies, stability, and security of debt-
holders.92 Thus, Taiwan emerged as of particular significance.
As a different point, for the imperial power, the United States,
the internationalism made necessary by global interdependence
posed, and poses, the difficulty of responding to the
expectations of allies and, more seriously, to those whose
alliance is sought, as well as the issue of how best to answer
calls for decision-making, judgment, and arbitration through
international bodies that the United States both distrusts and yet
finds it necessary to use.
Alongside these issues is the question of the concepts that can
be employed in discussing international relations. For example,
there are the ongoing problems of what geopolitics means, and
to whom, and of the degree of agency involved. When Charles
Kupchan wrote, “The North-South divide will become a
geopolitical fault line only if America turns it into
one,”93 there was the commonplace assumption that agency,
and therefore responsibility and blame, rested essentially with
the United States, or had done, or should do. This approach,
however, taken by many critics outside the United States, as

well as by most American commentators, underplays the role of
others, deliberate or unintentional, and its interaction with US
policy. More systematically, it is appropriate to ask to what
extent geopolitical argument at the international level is overly
dependent on the idea of a hegemonic power and on the
responses to that power; or, alternatively, on the idea of a
binary struggle between two potential hegemonies.
For other powers in the 2000s and 2010s there was the problem
of how best to protect and further national goals, whether or not
conceptualized as traditional while, at the same time, reacting to
the demands of the hegemonic power or powers at a time that it
or they appeared particularly assertive. This issue is a key
geopolitical quandary, but one that is generally underrated due
to the tendency to focus on the leading power, or on the leading
power and its principal rival. In practice, the global range and
application, and the regional implementation of US policy,
frequently competed, and compete, with the particular
geopolitical concerns of individual states. For example,
America sought to hamper Brazil’s interest in a hemispheric
security based on military build-up, including nuclear
capability.94 In a different context, notably with a pronounced
ideological clash at play, Venezuela under Hugo Chávez,
president from 1999 to 2013, had a distinct geopoli tics. This
conflated a traditional left-wing Latin American opposition to
the United States with the particular dynamics of Venezuela and
Latin America in the 2000s, especially Venezuela’s oil wealth
and competition with Colombia. Venezuela under Chávez also
sought to create a regional anti-US movement, notably with
Bolivia, Cuba, and Ecuador, as well as to adapt to changes at
the global level, not least in aligning with other opponents of
the United States such as Iran. There was a geopolitical
dimension to this politics, but it is unclear that it should be
analyzed in geopolitical terms.
As a recent instance of the interplay of geopolitics and politics,
Ukraine and Armenia in 2013 rejected, under Russian pressure,
the EU offer of signing up to the Eastern Partnership. Free trade

was to have been provided in return for democratic reforms. In
what was explicitly presented as a geopolitical competition,
Russia, instead, sponsored a Eurasian customs union that in part
represented a revival of the Soviet Union. The 2014 overthrow,
under popular pressure, of the Ukrainian government led to the
rejection of this relationship with Russia, only to be followed
by successful Russian military intervention, first in Crimea, and
then in favor of separatist groups in eastern Ukraine.
At a very different scale, geopolitics involves the formulating,
shaping and sustaining of distinct local identities as part of a
way in which local autonomies, possibilities, and claims are
advanced and given a geographic identity. An example is
provided by the Padania of the Lega Nord (Northern League) in
Italy. In 1996, Umberto Bossi, the president of this alliance of
northern Italian regional parties, proclaimed the Republic of
Padania, with the intention of establishing a state in Italy nor th
of the River Po. Although there was widespread dissatisfaction
with the redistribution of money to poorer southern Italy, the
idea of a separate republic did not gain traction. The spatial
politics of identity and grievance are important in the local
process of managing more complex and larger-scale pressures
and demands. A frequent, but not invariable, element of this
spatial politics is an opposition to what is presented as
globalization. Frequently, this opposition to globalization
entails a transfer and reconceptualization of earlier opposition
to imperial structures and demands. Thus, geopolitics serves as
a spatial envelope for changing political pressures, and for the
new expression of long-standing political tensions that have a
spatial character.
A consideration of such issues underlines the emotional and
symbolic as well as pragmatic, political, military, and economic
issues faced by an interventionist internationalism. Addressing
both goals and methods, geopolitics is a potentially valuable
analytical tool in considering these issues. At the same time, it
has weaknesses. For example, geopolitical discussion can as
much lead to an elision between goals and policies as it can

help maintain a rigorous distinction between the two. However,
what are presented by contemporaries as geopolitical means, or
operational policies, can become ends or strategic goals in
themselves by gaining symbolic and practical weight.
The extent to which classical geopolitical theory is still valid
for the post–Cold War period is problematic. On the one hand,
the concept of mobilizing a nation’s mass human resources to
protect the “organic state” from military or ideological conquest
by foreign aggressors seems better suited to periods when great
imperial systems were competing for global primacy, and
notably so if they were linked to rival ideologies, whether
liberal-democratic, fascist, or communist. On the other hand,
both real and perceived spatial considerations continue to play a
major role in power politics irrespective of the ideological
dimension. For example, definite consequences and issues arise
from the distribution of Kurds, Sunnis, Shia and other groups,
and this situation was made very clear in the Middle East from
2003, leading to repeated problems for states as they sought to
minimize or thwart the results of ethnic and religious
difference.
Spatial considerations play a role within a dynamic context that
is greatly affected by major changes in, for example, resource
availability, trade routes, and military capability. The last can
be seen with Israel’s military commitment to retaining land
conquered in 1967. Geopolitical factors focused on security
constituted a prominent Israeli argument against the demand
that Israel should return occupied land. For example, the
argument used to be that the Golan Heights gained in 1967 (as
opposed simply to the positions from which Israel was shelled
up to 1967) should be kept because from Mt. Hermon it was
possible to look deep into Syria and Lebanon and keep an eye
on Syrian preparations to attack; also, with the tank being the
backbone of the Israeli army, the Golan had to be retained to
provide space for concentrating forces and for maneuver. These
arguments are still made, but they are now less valid as it is
possible to look into Syria from space, while, with attack

helicopters, Israel does not to the same extent need the land for
maneuvering. Moreover, with the Israeli doctrine of warfare
becoming more similar to the US concept of “Rapid
Dominance,” and with firepower replacing concentration of
forces, land, while still significant, is less clearly important
than hitherto in military operations.
The same is the case with the West Bank. Immediately after its
conquest and occupation in 1967, the Israelis came up with the
Allon Plan (drafted in June 1967) to keep much of the West
Bank and to build settlements along the River Jordan in order to
stop a potential attack by an eastern bloc of Syria, Iraq and
Jordan. However, missiles do not really care much about such
buffer zones, and the strategic, operational and tactical
arguments for such a zone was challenged by the use of rocket
attacks on Israeli cities, a policy that began with Iraqi Scud
attacks in 1991. In turn, the arguments employed were qualified
by the Israeli use of the “Iron Dome” interception system to
block most attacks, notably during the Gaza crisis of 2014. As
far as the idea of a buffer is concerned, there were also
inconsistencies. One neighbor, Jordan, has peaceful relations
with Israel, while hostile Iran lacks a common border with her.
The changing validity of a military strategic rationale for
continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Golan
Heights throws attention back onto political debates within
Israel focused on the need for, and value of, Jewish settlements
in the occupied territories, and on the nature of peace that might
be possible, and the role of Israeli withdrawal in such a peace
settlement. These points serve as a reminder that the geopolitics
of a particular question has a number of often-clashing angles.
This can be seen, more generally, in the case of weapons
procurement and systems as, for example, with the discussion,
in the 2000s and 2010s, of whether there is a “geopolitical
niche” that requires a British nuclear deterrent separate to that
of US cover.95
THE MARITIME DIMENSION

Given the significance of the maritime dimension in the
geopolitical ideas of Mackinder, and his stress on the changes
affecting a navy’s strategic potency, it is instructive to revisit
the topic. In the face of air power and then rockets, the map
projections and perspectives, and linked assumptions associated
with the great age of naval power in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries (for which Mahan provided key
geopolitical ideas) came to appear as redundant as the global
transoceanic empires it had sustained and displayed. To survive,
navies apparently had to adapt. This was an argument pursued
over the following century, first with an emphasis on aircraft
carriers, notably from the 1940s, and subsequently with
submarine-based rocket launchers, especially from the 1960s.
Moreover, as a further erosion of naval distinctiveness,
“jointness” came to the fore in the military in the late twentieth
century, as both doctrine and, less successfully, practice.
Irrespective of this adaptability, the idea of aerial self-
sufficiency was taken forward further in the 1990s and early
2000s as a key aspect of what was termed by its US originators
and advocates the “Revolution in Military Affairs.”96 Air
power appeared best to provide the speed and responsiveness
that would give force to what was proclaimed to be a revolution
in information technology. Midair refueling apparently provided
a power-projection for aircraft that made carriers, however
dramatic a display of naval power, less relevant.
From a very different direction, the sea also appeared
geopolitically more marginal. Unprecedented and continuing
population growth, combined with the breakdown of pre-
existing patterns of social and political deference, increased the
complexity of government. This situation contributed to what
was termed, from the 1990s, “wars among the people.” These
wars, or at least serious unrest, led in conflict, and in planning
and procurement for conflict, to a focus both on major urban
centers and on marginal regions that were also difficult to
control. Again, this focus scarcely corresponded to an emphasis
on the sea. “War among the people”—a term that originated

with Rupert Smith, a British general who rose to be deputy
supreme commander of Allied Powers Europe, in 1998–2001—
was very much a doctrine that suited armies, which propounded
it.97 This doctrine left navies apparently redundant, their ships
as one with the heavy tanks now deemed superfluous. Air power
and rapidly deployed ground troops appeared to provide the
speed, precision and force required. The geopolitics of service
politics was clearly seen to be important in this debate, as in
other ones.
Moreover, this shift from naval power appeared demonstrated in
the 1990s by a series of developments. These included the
continued decline of the once-foremost naval power, Britain, as
well as the extent to which the United States and Russia, the
leading naval powers of the 1980s, no longer focused on this
branch of their military. In particular, there was a major
rundown in the US navy, which nevertheless was even more the
foremost navy, while much of its Russian counterpart literally
rusted away. The disastrous loss of the Russian
submarine Kursk in 2000 suggested that Russia lacked the
capacity to maintain its ships effectively. In addition, the
degree to which, in the 1990s, the navy and the oceans were not
then the prime commitment (militarily, politically and
culturally) of the rising economic powers, China and India,
appeared striking.
These indications however, were, and are, misleading; trends in
the 2010s pointed in other directions. In practice, naval power
remains both very important and with highly significant
potential for the future. In addition, any reading of the recent
past and of the present that minimizes the role of this power,
both neglects the place of naval power in power-projection and
risks extrapolating a misleading impression into the future.
Geography, as ever, is a key element. Here, the prime factor i s
the location of population growth and the related economic
activities of production and consumption. Most of this growth
has occurred in coastal and littoral regions and, more generally,
within 150 miles of the coast. There has been significant inland

expansion of the area of settlement in some countries, notably
Brazil, as well as population growth in already heavily settled
inland areas of the world, particularly in northern India.
Nevertheless, the growth of coastal and littoral regions is more
notable. In part, this growth has been linked to the move from
the land that has been so conspicuous as gasoline-powered
machinery became more common in agriculture from the mid-
twentieth century. As a result, rural areas lost people: in the
United States (particularly the Great Plains) and Western
Europe from midcentury, and in Eastern Europe and China from
the 1990s. The process is incomplete—especially, but not only,
in India and Japan—but it is an aspect of the greater
significance of cities, most of which are situated on navigable
waterways, principally on the coast or relevant estuaries.
Shanghai, not Beijing, is the center of Chinese economic
activity, and Mumbai, not Delhi, its Indian counterpart.
The economic growth of these cities is linked to their positions
in the global trading system. In this system maritime trade
remains foremost. The geopolitical implications of the economic
value of seaborne trade require emphasis. In large part, this
value is due to the flexibility of this trade and its related
transport and storage systems. Containerization from the 1950s
proved a key development, as it permitted the ready movement
and transshipment of large quantities of goods without high
labor needs or costs, and with a low rate of pilfering and
damage. Air transport lacked these characteristics, and the fuel
cost of bulk transport by air made it unviable other than for
high-value, perishable products, such as cut flowers. The
significance of container vessels was enhanced by the ability
and willingness of the shipbuilding industry to respond to, and
shape, the new opportunity.
As a result, qualifying assumptions about the centrality of land
routes, assumptions that were at the fore in Mackinder’s 1904
“Pivot” lecture, the character and infrastructure of global tr ade
by sea has been transformed since the 1950s. Moreover, this
transformation continues and is readily apparent round the

world. A good example is provided by the massed cranes in the
new container facilities at the docks of Colombo, as well as the
new harbor being built with Chinese help further along the Sri
Lankan coast, and the numerous container ships passing by off
the southern coast of the island.
Politics played a key role in this transformation. The
development of the global economy after the end of the Cold
War focused on integration into the Western-dominated
maritime trading system of states that had been, or still were,
communist: for example, China and Vietnam, or that had
adopted a communist- (or at least socialist-) influenced
preference for planning: for example, India. Furthermore, in the
1990s and 2000s, the general trend was toward free-market
liberalism, and against autarky, protectionism and barter or
controlled trading systems. This trend remains far from
complete, but it encouraged a major growth in trade, notably of
Chinese exports to the United States and Western Europe. This
trend remained significant in the 2000s and early 2010s, despite
political tensions, particularly between the United States and
China, as well as the consequences of the serious global
economic crisis that began in 2008. Crucially, that crisis did not
lead to a protectionism comparable to that of the 1930s. Both
prior to the crisis and during it, the focus on trade between East
Asia and the United States ensured that maritime trade
expanded greatly.
Speculation about developing trade from East Asia overland to
Western Europe has not been brought to fruition at any scale.
Only the Trans-Siberian Railway was in a position to provide a
link. To that extent, Mackinder’s analysis proved flawed. The
ambitious railway-construction plans of China notwithstanding,
there is no sign that this will change. The Chinese railway boom
has much to do with high-speed lines to carry passengers and
troops. It is driven by politics rather than economics, as with
the building of a line to Lhasa in Tibet. Overland trade from the
Far East to Europe has not prospered for economic as well as
political reasons. Railway transport costs remain stubbornly

higher than seaborne shipping; indeed, container ships have
widened the gap. Chinese railways, old and new, provide no
links to Europe.
The growth in trade after World War II, much of it maritime,
was linked to the enhanced specialization and integration of
production and supply networks that were a consequence of
economic liberalism, as well as of the economies of scale and
the attraction of locating particular parts of the networks near
raw-material sources, transshipment points, or the centers of
consumption. This growth was further fuelled by the
opportunities and needs linked to population increases. The
latter helped ensure that regions hitherto able to produce what
they required were obliged now to import goods, not only food
and fuel, but also manufactured products. Trade links that
would have caused amazement in the nineteenth century, or
even the 1950s—such as the export of food from Zambia to the
Middle East and from Canada to Japan, or of oil from Equatorial
Guinea to China—became significant. Most of the resulting
trade was by sea. According to the Financial Times of July 10,
2014, $5,300 billion worth of goods cross the South China Sea
by sea each year, which helps explain the sensitivity of threats
and developments there. The trade and these threats were the
active elements in a regional geopolitics of global economic
significance.
Naval power was the key guarantor of this trade and played the
role of providing security for what was termed the “global
commons.” This concept presented sea power in a far more
benign fashion than had been the case when it had been seen as
an expression of imperial power.98 Instead, there was an
emphasis on shared value. This emphasis was greatly enhanced
from the late 2000s in response to a major increase in piracy,
notably in the Indian Ocean. This increase exposed the broader
implications for maritime trade of specific sites of instability. It
was not only that pirates from Somalia proved capable of
operating at a considerable distance into the Indian Ocean, but
also that their range of operations affected shipping and

maritime trade from distant waters. This was not new. Muscat
raiders in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
had operated from Oman to the west coast of India and to the
Swahili coast of Africa, challenging European trade to India.
However, in the 2000s, the challenge appeared greater, both
because piracy had largely been stamped out in the nineteenth
century, and because the scale of international maritime trade
and the number of states directly involved were far larger.
If the operations against Somali piracy—operations that reduced
its extent and enabled states such as China and India to display
their naval power and train their crews—proved a clear
demonstration of the importance of naval power and its ability
to counter failure on land, its potential significance was further
demonstrated by the expansion of piracy elsewhere, notably off
Nigeria in the 2010s. This threat suggested a multilayered need
for naval power. For most of the twentieth century, naval power
had very much been a form of power dominated by the major
states, while most other states, instead, focused on their armies,
not least for internal control and policing. In the early twenty-
first century, however, such control and policing increasingly
also encompassed maritime tasks. Control over refugee flows,
the maintenance of fishing rights, and the prevention of drug
smuggling, proved prime instances. As a consequence, naval
power became as much a matter of the patrol boat as of the
guided-missile destroyer. Drug money is a threat to the stability
of Caribbean states which, however, have tiny navies. As a
result, it is the navies of major powers that have a Caribbean
presence: the United States, Britain and France, each of which
also has colonies there that play a key role, one that is greatly
facilitated by aerial surveillance and interception capabilities.
Naval action against pirates, drug smugglers and human
traffickers, the last a particularly major task for the navies of
Australia, Greece, Italy, and Spain, is reminiscent of the moral
agenda of nineteenth-century naval power. Such action is also
an implementation of sovereignty as well as of specific
governmental and political agendas.

Moreover, the utility of naval power in the early twenty-first
century in part reflected the extent to which the “end of history”
that had been signposted in 1989 with the close of the Cold War
proved a premature sighting. Instead, there was a recurrence of
international tension focused on traditional interests. Territorial
waters proved a significant source of dispute, not least when
linked to hopes over oil and other resources. Indeed, by 2014,
there were key disputes over competing claims in the East and
South China Seas, disputes that drove major regional naval
buildups, particularly between China and Japan, but also
involving the states of Southeast Asia, notably Vietnam and
Malaysia. These disputes were characterized by aggressive
Chinese steps, as in 2012 when China took over the
Scarborough Shoal west of the Philippines. Moreover, control of
the naval base of Sevastopol and over maritime and drilling
rights in the Black Sea were important in the crisis over Crimea
and, more generally, Ukraine in early 2014. Once the Russians
gained control over Crimea, they announced an expansion and
modernization of their Black Sea fleet, with new warships and
submarines.
Concern about coastal waters encouraged a drive to ensure the
necessary naval power. The disputes over the East and South
China Seas and the Black Sea, and the prospect of their
becoming more serious, or of other disputes following, led to a
determination on the part of regional powers to step up naval
strength and preparedness. In the case of Japan, there was, with
the National Security Strategy and Mid-Term Defense Program
formulated in 2013, a major strategic shift in focus from the
defense of Hokkaido—the northern island threatened, in any
war, by Russia—to concern about the southwest part of the
Japanese archipelago and in particular the offshore islands in
the East China Sea. This led to a greater emphasis on the navy
and air force, and on a more mobile, flexible and versatile
power-profile. Moreover, military exercises were increasingly
geared to maritime concerns and naval power. Regional disputes
in East Asian waters also directed attention to the situation as

far as other, nonregional, powers, principally the United States,
were concerned. These powers were troubled both about these
regions and about the possibility that disputes over sovereignty
would become more serious in other parts of the world, for
example, the Arctic.
As a result, the nature and effectiveness of naval power
increasingly came to the fore as a topic in the mid-2010s. So
also did the extent to which governments and societies
identified with this power. This was of particular significance in
East and South Asia as, with the exception of Japan, there was
little recent history of a regional naval power. Moreover, the
relevant Japanese history was complicated by the legacy of
World War II and the provisions of the subsequent peace treaty.
CHINA
However, the situation was transformed from the 2000s as a
result of changes in China. In part, as an important aspect of a
presentation of a geopolitical role, there was an emphasis on
past naval activity, notably the early fifteenth-century voyages
of Zheng He into the Indian Ocean. Indeed, the Zheng He is the
name of the Chinese officer-training ship. There was also a
presentation of Chinese naval strength as a product of
government initiative, an aspect of great-power status, and a
sign of modernity. These elements were seen in the treatment of
history, which thereby played a major role in geopolitics. In
particular, Da Guo Jue Qi (The Rise of Great Powers), a
Chinese government study finished in 2006, attempte d to
determine the reasons why Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands,
Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United States
became great powers. This study was apparently inspired by a
directive from Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, to determine
which factors enabled great powers to grow most rapidly. The
study drew together government and academic methods—as
many scholars were consulted, some reportedly briefing the
Politburo—and popular interest. In 2006 a twelve-part program
was twice broadcast on state-owned television channel, and an

eight-volume book series was produced, which sold rapidly. The
president of the television channel made the utilitarian purpose
of the series clear. The book project argued the value of naval
power, but also the need for a dynamic economy with
international trade linking the two, a factor seen as suggesting a
lesson about the value of international cooperation.
Chinese naval strategy, nevertheless, focuses not on the history
of other states, but on that of China. The traditional land-based
focus on “interior strategies”—the development of expanding
rings of security around a state’s territory—has been applied to
the maritime domain in a major expansion of geopolitical
concern. In part, this is in response to a reading of Chinese
history in which it is argued that, from the 1830s, the ability of
foreign powers to apply pressure from the sea has greatly
compromised Chinese interests and integrity. “Near China” has
therefore been extended as a concept to cover the nearby seas .
This provides both an enhancement of security and a sense of
historical validity, one that offers a mission and purpose to the
Communist Party.
However, the definition and implementation of the relevant
attitudes and policies ensure there are both considerable
problems and mission creep, as the security of what may seem
to be the near seas apparently requires regional hegemony and
an ability to repel any potential oceanic-based power, which at
present means the United States. The Chinese desire may be
motivated by security, but it challenges that of all others and,
crucially, does not adopt or advance a definition of security that
is readily capable of compromise or, indeed, negotiation. In
part, this is a reflection of the Chinese focus on “hard power,” a
power very much presented by naval strength as a support for
nonmilitarized coercion in the shape of maritime law
enforcement. The Chinese navy offers a force to support the
application of psychological and political pressure. However, a
real and apparent willingness to resort to force creates for
others a key element of uncertainty.99
The Chinese emphasis on naval strength as a key aspect of

national destiny, and the rapid buildup of the Chinese navy,
have helped drive the pace for other states, leading Japan and
India, in particular, to put greater emphasis on a naval buildup,
while also ensuring that the United States focuses more of its
attention on the region. In 2015, the Australians turned to Japan
in order to provide a new generation of submarines that are
clearly designed against China, while China, in turn, was
reported to be discussing buying Russia’s newest submarine, the
Amur-1650. Talk in 2014 that conflict over the East China Sea
might lead to a broader international struggle, with the United
States backing Japan, underlined the significance of maritime
issues and power. The previous year, the United States agreed
to base surveillance drones and reconnaissance planes in Japan
so as to patrol the region’s waters from the air. China’s
development of anti-ship missiles capable of challenging US
carriers (particularly the BF-21F intermediate-range ballistic
missile fitted with a maneuvering reentry head containing an
anti-ship seeker) poses a major problem. As a result, US
carriers may have to operate well to the east of Taiwan, beyond
the range of the US Navy’s F-35s jet aircraft. Chinese analysts
emphasized the geopolitical value of Taiwan to China’s
maritime perimeter.100
The ready willingness of Chinese Internet users to identify with
these issues reflected their salience in terms of national identity
and interests. Moreover, this willingness suggested a pattern
that would also be adopted in other conflicts over maritime
rights. They proved readily graspable. The Chinese government
is struggling to ride the tiger of popular xenophobia. In China,
as earlier with Tirpitz and the Flottenverein in Germany,
popular support for naval expansion has proved easier to arouse
than to calm.
Thus, the utility of naval strength was symbolic, ideological and
cultural, as much as it was based on “realist” criteria of
military, political and economic parity and power. It has been
ever thus, but became more so in an age of democratization
when ideas of national interest and identity had to be

reconceptualized for domestic and international publics. The
ability to deploy and demonstrate power was important in this
equation, and navies proved particularly well suited to it, not
least as they lacked the ambiguous record associated with
armies and air forces after the interventionist wars of the 2000s
and as a consequence of the role of some armies in civil control.
Therefore, 110 years after it was delivered, Mackinder’s lecture
appears not prescient but an instance of the weakness of theory
when confronted by economic, technological and military
realities. China, not Russia, is the key power in Mackinder’s
“heartland,” but this is a China with global trading interests and
oceanic power aspirations, and not, as Russia seemed to be, the
successor to the interior power controlling some supposed
“pivot,” centered in West Siberia.
NAVAL CAPABILITY
The likely future trajectory of Chinese naval ambitions and
power is currently a (if not the) foremost question for
commentators focused on naval power politics,101 and that
itself is a clear instance of the continuing relevance of naval
strength. China’s navy has proved far more successful than
either armies or air forces in combining the cutting-edge,
apocalyptic lethality of nuclear weaponry with the ability to
wield power successfully at the subnuclear level. Moreover, this
ability is underlined by the range, scale and persistence of naval
power, all of which provide, alongside tactical and operational
advantages, a strategic capability not matched by the other
branches. Despite aerial refueling, air power lacks the
continuous presence, and thus persistence and durability, that
warships can convey. Moreover, operating against coastal
targets, warships offer firepower and a visual presence that is
more impressive than that of many armies.
The significance of coastal regions underlines the value of
amphibious power-projection.102 In turn, the potential offered
is affected by technological change. In July 2014, in an exercise
in Hawaii, the US Marine Corps displayed the prototype of the

Ultra Heavy-lift Amphibious Connector, a vehicle designed to
cut through the waves in order to carry vehicles to the coast.
The tracks are made from captured-air foam blocks that stick
out like flippers. The full-size version is designed to be 84 ft.
long and 34 ft. high and should be able to transport at least four
vehicles. Also in 2014, the building by France for Russia of
Mistral-class warships intended to support amphibious
operations created a serious issue when an arms embargo of
Russia was proposed. Such warships were seen as a particular
threat in the Black Sea. In 2015, France refused to supply the
warships.
At the same time, the ability of land-based power to challenge
navies is much greater than was the situation when Mackinder
was writing. Indeed, his views, both of the relationship between
land and sea and of the capacity of technological change, did
not really comprehend this challenge. It had begun as soon as
cannon greatly enhanced the capacity of coastal defenses to
resist naval attack. The major improvement in artillery in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries considerably increased this
capacity, and the surviving sites of coastal defense—for
example, off Auckland designed against Japanese warships—
remain formidably impressive. In the twentieth century, the
range and nature of such defense was increased first by aircraft
and then by missiles. Both are now central to the equations of
naval power projection, and not least in the key choke-points,
such as the Taiwan Strait and the Strait of Hormuz. Moreover,
longer-range weapons allow ships to project power far inshore,
but at the same time they permit coastal defenses to project
power far offshore, and the limited number of naval targets and
the greater vulnerability of warships mean that this range factor
does not balance out capabilities.
Indeed, this capability has led to the suggestion that the very
nature of naval power has changed with consequent implications
for the ranking of the major powers. In particular, whereas air
power, especially at the cutting-edge, is dominated by the major
powers, and notably the United States, the possibility of lesser

powers using new technologies to counteract existing naval
advantages is significant. This reflects a longstanding aspiration
and practice, for example, as seen with the ideas of the
French Jeune École in the 1880s and of Soviet naval planners in
the 1920s.103 The extent to which small and/or unconventional
forces may be as effective in their chosen spheres as major
navies therefore raises the question whether this sphere can
extend in order to deny the latter advantage in large areas or,
more plausibly, to make that advantage very costly, not least at
a time of rising price tags for cutting-edge warships. That is the
doctrine that Iran, with its policy of, and procurement for,
asymmetrical swarm attacks, appears to be pursuing. Advanced
C-series Chinese-supplied missiles make the Strait of Hormuz a
choke point vulnerable to Iranian power, a risk exacerbated by
the availability of Russian Kilo-class submarines, as well as by
Iran’s mine-laying capability, speedboats, midget submarines,
and cruise missiles. The possible assertion of naval power in
this fashion complicates the traditional military hierarchy and
legacy.
In most states, navies have far less political clout than armies
and play a smaller role in national self-image. This is the case,
for example, of Turkey, Iran, India, Israel, and Pakistan. Yet,
issues of military need and power politics complicate such
situations, as with Iran. Another situation arises from India’s
quest for a regional political role judged commensurate to its
population size, economic development, resource concerns and
political pretensions, as well as acute concerns about China and
rivalry with Pakistan. This quest ensures that India will
continue to seek naval strength. Warships provide states with
the ability to act at a distance, notably in establishing
blockades, as with Israel and Sri Lanka.
There is, however, an important contrast between the extension
of national jurisdiction over the seas (which covered more than
a third of their extent in 2008) and the fact that many states
cannot ensure their own maritime security. This is the case for
Oceania, the Caribbean, and Indian Ocean states such as

Mauritius, the Maldives and the Seychelles. These weaknesses
encourage the major powers to maintain naval strength and
intervene, but have also led to initiatives for regional solutions,
such as that supported by India from 2007.
There are therefore a number of levels of naval asymmetry. The
possibility of making advantages in naval capability, notably,
but not only, those enjoyed by the leading naval powers, too
costly to use, or, indeed, maintain, is enhanced by the extent to
which the procurement structure of naval power has driven
leading navies toward fewer, more expensive vessels. For
example, each of the new British D class Type 45 destroyers,
the first of which was launched in 2006, has more firepower
than the combined fleet of eight Type 42 destroyers they
replaced, destroyers that came into service in 1978. This is
because the missile system of the D class can track and attack
multiple incoming aircraft and missiles. The successful
maintenance in service of each of such vessels thus becomes
more significant, and this enhances vulnerability, irrespective of
the specific weapons characteristics of these vessels and their
likely opponents. The availability of fewer, larger and more
expensive warships reduces their individual vulnerability, but
makes them more difficult to risk. A similar process has
affected aircraft.
The cost element helped drive US military retrenchment from
the 1990s. Having risen rapidly in the early and mid-2000s, US
military spending fell with the end of the commitment in Iraq
and its rundown in Afghanistan. The size of the accumulated
federal debt and of the annual budget deficit had an impact as
did the political preference, notably under the Obama
administration (2009–2017) for welfare expenditure and
economic priming. Whereas the US share of global military
expenditure peaked at about 42 percent in 2010, it fell to 37.9
percent in 2013, when the United States spent $582.4 billion.
While the army and marines were scheduled for significant cuts
in the 2010s, there were even more substantial cuts in the navy,
which is scheduled to be reduced to 280 vessels, of which only

about 90 would be at sea at any one time. Partly as a result, the
ability of the United States to inflict a rapid defeat on Iran was
called into question in 2013. Moreover, the reduction in US
naval strength created concern among regional allies, such as
Japan, worried about Chinese naval plans and
expansionism.104 The Japanese defense budget was increased in
2013.
The net effect is to introduce a volatility to naval power that is
greater than the situation during the Cold War, a volatility that
challenges maritime security at the level of state power. This
volatility is not indicated if the emphasis is on the strength of
the leading navy (the US) and its new weapons systems, for
example: the US Aegis BMD defense system that is intended to
engage missiles in flight and at a greater distance or the
projected electromagnetic railgun capable of launching
projectiles at six or seven times the speed of sound. Instead, it
is appropriate to think of naval power as complex, contested,
broad-ranging and multipurpose. This range will be enhanced by
competition over resources, as many untapped offshore oil and
gas fields are linked to territorial claims. At sea, therefore, we
are moving rapidly from the apparent unipolarity of the 1990s,
the supposed “end of history,” to a situation in which, for a
large number of powers and their rivals, the capacity to display,
use and contest strength is significant. That spread of capacity
does not automatically lead to conflict, for the processes of
international relations will be employed to seek to lessen
tension. However, insecurity, in the sense of an absence of
confidence that deterrence will be successfully employed, has
become more apparent, and this is a process that will continue.
Moreover, this insecurity will probably provide more
opportunities for nonstate actors keen to use the seas in order to
pursue particular interests that create another level of
insecurity. Insecurity itself conditions thinking about
geopolitics, about its need and its applicability.

CONCLUSION
A discussion of the maritime dimension today underlines the
extent to which there is only limited continuity in the
understanding or use of natural environments, irrespective of
the extent to which these environments themselves continue
essentially unchanged, allowing for a measure of degradation
through overuse. Similar points could be made about the land
environment. This demonstrates the extent to which the
strategic aspect of geopolitics changes in accordance with a
range of factors, including technology and tasking, and, in
changing, creates new challenges, opportunities, and
capabilities that affect the military value, understanding, and
use of territory.
Underlying the range of issues that can be approached today in
terms of geopolitics, there is the question of global information
systems, of US dominance and use of the Internet, of critical or
hostile responses, notably in China and Iran, and of the spatial
and political dimensions of these topics. The meanings of space
and control over space are particularly unsettled in this context.
In his 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,”
John Barlow wrote: “Governments of the industrial world, you
weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace. You
have no sovereignty where we gather. . . . We will create a
civilization of the mind in cyberspace. May it be more humane
and fair than the world your governments have made
before.”105 From a very different direction, another
presentation of geopolitics, that of the relationship between
geography and human destiny, has attracted attention with
popular works that stress the role of environmental factors,
rather than (or alongside) race and culture.106 More generally,
the current relevance of geopolitical issues and debates
provides, in the next chapter, a point of departure for looking at
the future, because much of the current discussion hinges on the
issue of future consequences.

Eastern Europe is more than just a geographic concept. We tend
to look at it from the cartographers point of view in terms of
geography. But it is more than just that because what goes along
with that is a distinct culture and also a distinct socio-economic
pattern. For the most part, when we've looked at Eastern
Europe, we've thought of it in terms not of geography, but
rather in terms of politics. And so the concept of Eastern
Europe was typically seen as the Communist party states
associated with the Warsaw Pact as allies of the Soviet Union.
And in that sense, Eastern Europe stretched all the way from
Poland, south, going as far as Albania and even Yugoslavia.
With the changes in Eastern Europe that were brought about
because of relationships with the Soviet Union, yugoslavia
cease to be seen as part of the Soviet Bloc. But it was still part
of Eastern Europe in political terms because it was a socialist
economic entity. Justice albania repudiated its ties with the
Soviet Union. In the early 1960s, continued to be more than
anything else, a rigid Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist state. All of
this then underscored the history of the region, its relationships
with the Byzantine Empire, with the Orthodox Church. Also
there was the influence of the Ottoman Turks. Probably the
best-known country in Eastern Europe to the, in the mind of the
average American is Romania. Romania is probably more
significant than any other of these nations because of its hostile
relationship with the Ottomans. And the most famous remaining
evolve time, of course, lad SEPIC better Normally it's Dracula
is somebody whose reputation hinges zone. His resistance to the
Turkish invaders and his use of psychological operations to
undermine their forces. The use of developed terrorist tactics
against the Turks that really were successful in stopping the
Turkish advance through Eastern Europe. And of course, where

it was initially focus known as its ultimate objective was
Western Europe. And so Eastern Europe was seen largely as a
political entity. With the collapse of the communist party states
in Eastern Europe. Though we're once again forced to make a
redefinition of what we mean by Eastern Europe. And we
recognize that Greece is just as much a part of eastern Europe
as Slovakia is a part of Eastern Europe. Something else, it also
has changed with the collapse of the Communist Party States
has been attitudes toward ethnicity. Ethnicity in the communist
party era was suppressed, at least in part because this was
nationalism. In nationalism is seen as the antithesis of class
consciousness. And so in an effort to promote an environment in
which people define themselves by their relationship to the
means of production rather than by their language or their
cultural heritage. There was an effort to suppress ethnicity. The
best and most violent example of this is Yugoslavia, where the
majority Serbs and Croatians effectively govern without
emphasizing their Serbian Croatian identity. In fact, the one
room in Yugoslav politics and later Serbian politics. I don't talk
about ethnicity. With the collapse of Tito or with the death of
Tito. In the 1990's, this situation changed. And finally,
Milosevic emerges is the Serbian later. And Milosevic is the
first prominent Yugoslavian politician to talk about ethnicity.
And his emphasis on ethnicity hastened the war in Yugoslavia,
which began in full measure in 990 one and spread to Kosovo
and involved eventually American and British involvement in
that war. One thing that has been important in our examination
of Eastern Europe, one theory is the Heartland theory. And it
does a lot to explain the important relationship between Eastern
Europe and Russia. The Heartland theory was based on the
notion that whoever controls the heart land of Europe, which
was Eastern Europe, would be in an advance, advantageous
position to dominate all of Europe. For decades. That was the
Soviet Union. For decades, people that tried to assess the
geopolitical future of the region focused on Russian control
over Eastern Europe. With the collapse of the East European

economies, with the deterioration of the Soviet economy. And
in 990 one, the collapse of the Soviet Union, East, East Europe
was finally able to assert itself completely from Russian
domination. In fact, most of that was accomplished during the
revolutions of 1989. This has had a tremendous impact on
Russia's geopolitical position as the Soviet Union. This was
truly a multinational state. And you could look at the different
regions of the Soviet Union. And you saw in all of this that the
Slavic regions really accounting for no more than 50 percent of
the population of the Soviet Union. And so, what this indicated
very early on was the deterioration of the dominant Russian
position. With the collapse of the Soviet Union. This brought a
humiliation of Russia in particular. And that ushered in the
Yeltsin administration. And Yeltsin was not regarded as a
serious figure. If you look at Russian diplomats today, people
who will talk about Russian politics with, without siders. The
one thing upon which they agree is that Yeltsin did not do
justice to Russia. The enthusiasm that exists for, for Putin is
based enlarge measure on the belief that Putin has been
responsible for the restoration of Russian dignity, if not the
Russian Empire. Those other regions it used to be part of the
Soviet Union. In varying degrees have fallen under a certain
amount of Russian influence. Central Asia, for example,
independent, ethnically distinct, broke away from Russia in the
years after the collapse of Soviet Union, Uzbekistan played a
very important role in US policy. In 2001, when the United
States responded to the Al-Qaeda attacks, the United States use
the same basis in his back withstand that the Russians had used
to invade Afghanistan a decade or so before that. That close
relationship between the United States in Uzbekistan did a lot to
help keep the Russians out. And the Uzbeks, for their part,
wanted to do this. In the interest of human rights concerns.
Early in the Bush administration, relations between Uzbekistan
in the United States deteriorated. And with that, Russia has
been able to reassert itself and its Pakistan, along with the
Chinese. This has had an important geopolitical impact in that it

weakens American leverage, but it's also had a negative impact
on the human rights situation. With all of this, what we see is
Russia's geopolitical situation is under pressure today because
of ethnic considerations. In particular, the fact that this country
is becoming increasingly Islamic. And you can look at this in
many ways. If you see the number of mosques which exist in the
Soviet Union collapsed. There were about 300. Today, there's
about 10 thousand, and the number is increasing at the popular
level today, there's a great deal of prejudice against Muslims.
And there's a general perception that you can express that
hostility without any repercussions. But it is a reminder of the
fact that Russia is still sensitive about its security situation and
recognizes that they face that challenge from radical islam. Just
is the European nations and the United States face a similar
challenge. Thank you.
Search the World Factbook website in order to discuss the
information on the NATO country you have chosen in the
previous Discussion.
Once you go to the CIA World Factbook, look to the top right of
the link above and then select “Please select a country to view.”
In order to better understand geopolitical resources in a country,
discuss the following information regarding the NATO country
you chose:
1. Geography
1. Border countries
2. Maritime claims
3. Coastline
4. Natural resources
5. Land use
6. Environment- current issues
2. Economy
1. Overview
2. Agriculture- products
3. Industries
4. Exports- commodities

5. Imports- commodities
6. Exports- partners
7. Imports - partners
3. Military - manpower fit for military service
4. Energy
1. Crude oil production
2. Natural gas production
5. Transnational issues
1. Disputes – international
2. Refugees and internally displaced persons
Note: You can pick one major point and one subpoint for a more
in-depth analysis, or one major point and multiple subpoints for
a more concise analysis.
You need to summarize what you learned from the US Bilateral
Relations Fact Sheet for the country you are representing in the
NATO simulation. If you are representing a country in the
Middle East, you might also want to look at the Congressional
Research Service Reports document below.

Discussion Resources· The World Factbook (httpswww.cia.gov

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Discussion Resources· The World Factbook (httpswww.cia.gov