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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 thinking 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 in 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 declining 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 ideologues 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 armies. 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 neorealism, 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 commodified 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 serves 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.