DB063

SEVEN

Nazi Geopolitics and World War II, 1933–1945

NAZI GEOPOLITICS

The contrast between German policy, and the presentation of policy, in the two world wars made the role of ideological suppositions in geopolitics (or to be modish in the construction of space), readily apparent—thus indicating the overriding significance of politics and public culture for the content and tone of geopolitics. There was, it is true, a German treatment of Eastern Europe in World War I as uncivilized.1 German successes, especially in 1915, led to the development of new categories when viewing Eastern Europe, and to the attempt to create a new-model society under military direction. Moreover, the German military administration in Eastern Europe became interested in 1917 in clearing away the local population and in bringing in soldier-farmers who would realize the agricultural potential of the land. However, although frequently harsh, this treatment lacked the genocidal character and objectives of German policy in World War II.2 Indeed, the Nazi propagation during that conflict of a racist geopolitics organized round the notion of racial purity was a highly distinctive form of geopolitics. It had later echoes, in “ethnic cleansing” in Eastern Europe, South Asia, and much of Africa after World War II but, until Rwanda in 1994, these episodes lacked the genocidal ambition and commitment of the Nazis. Moreover, this policy was scarcely extraneous to the geopolitics and strategy of Nazi international relations. Instead, there was an intensely racist inflection to the latter, one that led directly to the genocidal anti-Semitism that was central to German policy. Rather than seeing this situation as a marked contrast to Kjellén’s argument about the primacy of the state, the state was conceptualized by the Nazis as a necessarily racial space and purpose, with governance a matter of enforcing and extending this character internally and of extending it externally.

Nazi geopolitics is a prominent and highly significant, and often difficult, topic for those who work on geopolitics, because Karl Haushofer, one of the leading geopoliticians, was closely associated with the regime. In practice, this association, notably in the latter years of World War II, was more ambiguous than was to be suggested and, after the war, he was to argue that the links were not close. However, earlier, there were indeed strong links between German expansionism, Nazi propaganda and many German geographers. In supporting expansionism and Nazi themes, these geographers acted as geopoliticians. These links with geographers were as much the result of widespread compliance with Nazi thinking, a compliance seen across German academe,3 as of a coherent propaganda offensive involving the geographers. German geographers who were unsympathetic tended to focus on physical geography.

Nevertheless, there was such propaganda, and a geographical approach that clearly accorded with it. The major theme was ethnographical—pressing hard the alleged cause of the German people, many of them under foreign rule, for example, until the 1938 Munich settlement, the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia—and this theme drew on the development of right-wing German geopolitics in the 1920s. It was argued that the territorial losses under the 1919 Versailles peace settlement—for example, the Polish Corridor near Danzig (Gdansk)—should be rationally (and radically) revised in light of the distribution of peoples in Eastern Europe. This idea was both taken further and, in part, contradicted by its advocacy by those who, propounding a racial stadial theory of human development, thought the Slavs inferior and, therefore, unsuited to the lands where they were a majority.

German ethnographical discussion and mapping were part of a more general use of such themes and evidence. Thus, in 1923, Pàl Teleki, a geographer who had been a Hungarian delegate to the post World War I peace conference at Trianon (1920) that had deprived Hungary of much of its territory, published an ethnographical map of Hungary designed to support its territorial claims.

German geopolitics was adversarial, both as far as other peoples were concerned and with reference to other scholars. For example, German geopoliticians strongly criticized Isaiah Bowman (1878–1950), the leading US political geographer of the age. Indeed, with reference in part to Bowman, Haushofer claimed that the science of geopolitics had been perverted by the Anglo-Saxons. Director of the American Geographical Society from 1915 and Chief Territorial Specialist of the American Commission to Negotiate the Peace at the close of World War I, Bowman had gained fame as President Woodrow Wilson’s geographical advisor and, indeed, was a Wilsonian idealist. Bowman relished behaving as a kind of Wilsonian arbiter when dissecting the national claims of Europeans. In addition, as a cartographer of ethnicity, Bowman played a key role in charting postwar territorial losses by Germany and Austria as part of the Versailles peace settlement. Other states sent geographical experts to the peace conference; from Poland, for example, came Eugeniusz Romer, the author of the 1916 Geograficzo-statystyczny atlas Polski (Geographical-Statistical Atlas of Poland); Mackinder, however, was not consulted by the British government. Due to his role, Bowman became the academic nemesis against whom the concepts of German geopolitics were fashioned. Ironically, from the German perspective, Bowman, who was offered the executive secretaryship of the League of Nations in 1919, was himself very depressed by the failure of Wilson, Versailles, and the League to bring order out of chaos, and indeed reflected: “The whole world has fallen into disorder.”4

Influential in the decades prior to World War I as Germans debated how best to exercise their power and pursue status and advantage, geopolitics became more important as a self-conscious discourse in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Nazi ideas were influenced by German geopolitics from early in the party’s history and, in turn, came greatly to influence the latter. However, the racist trend in geopolitics preceded the Nazi rise to power in 1933. Indeed, objective geographic standards and values were abandoned in favor of tendentious presentation, in response to the aggressive and racist conservatism of German geopolitical circles in this period.5 This process gathered fresh impetus and encouragement under Nazi rule. New research centers, notably the Northeast German Research Community at Berlin founded in 1933, produced research that matched these criteria.6 In 1935, Heinrich Himmler founded the Ahnenerbe as a form of SS think-tank to support his racist and other beliefs, including searching for the alleged origins of the Aryan master race in the Himalayas.7

Cartography presented these developments. For example, skin, hair, and eye color in Mitteleuropa (itself very much a German concept) were mapped in Hans Günther’s Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (1935), reflecting Nazi concerns with racial characteristics. The blondish character of the Sudetenlanders in Czechoslovakia would have underlined its German character to the map’s German readers. Mitteleuropa in this map was defined as encompassing Alsace and Lorraine, although these regions had been returned to France after World War I. It also incorporated the territories lost to Poland under the Versailles settlement, including the Polish Corridor, and the South Tyrol, which had been transferred from Austria to Italy after that war. Maps drew attention to past episodes of German eastward expansion.8 In 1938, however, as a reflection of the care taken not to risk offending Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy, Hitler ordered the withdrawal of a map of German culture showing the German ethnic areas in the South Tyrol. The Nazis encouraged maps in public displays. These emphasized areas where Germans lived under foreign rule. In 1933 a cartographic play on this theme was staged in Berlin. Maps were also used in German films. A map displayed at the 1938 Nazi Party convention depicted the danger of a Soviet attack on Germany by indicating the routes that could be used. The polemics of the Nazi use of space were matched in Fascist Italy.

Similar features such as the display of maps were also more generally a characteristic of the propagandist stance of the new ideologies of the period, of Communism as well as Fascism. The result was very much a geopolitics of commitment, with the assumption that the control over space was inherently political. For example, the British writer J. F. (James Francis) Horrabin (1884–1962) employed maps to advance his markedly left-wing agenda, as in “The New Map of Europe” published in his The Plebs Atlas (1926), a work designed for use by working-class students at the National Council of Labour Colleges. This map presented Europe as subject to imperialism, with nominally independent states in fact “colonies” of the major powers. Thus, Portugal, Greece, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and the Baltic states were all depicted as British colonies, a depiction which exaggerated the extent and impact of British economic influence. Horrabin’s Atlas of Empire (1937), published by the left-wing British company of Victor Gollancz, showed on its cover a picture of the globe encircled by a chain that included the symbols of the US dollar, the British pound and the French franc.

The primacy of militarization in the Soviet state owed much to a sense of spatial threat arising from anxiety about just such imperialism. Stalin’s often-paranoid perceptions of encirclement, capitalist crisis and inevitable, imminent war generated his policies of breakneck modernization as well as the brutal and bloody internal repressions, although his chosen course also had to do with domestic political struggles. During the Stalin era, Soviet schoolchildren frequently were shown maps of “capitalist encirclement” to drum into their heads that their country was living in a siege environment. Maps, indeed, are a key element in geopolitics which, notably in this respect, constitute a way of seeing and representing the world, and rendering places and areas strategic accordingly.9

German geopolitics was to affect Nazi foreign policy.10 There were, however, tensions in the relationship. These focused on the contrast between the Nazi desire for a geopolitics of untrammeled expansion (with space a measure of the stages or impact of expansion), and, on the other hand, the attempt by geopoliticians to advance a consistent rationale of what would be an extensive, but limited, expansion. This rationale was notably provided in terms of the distribution of German populations outside Germany, a distribution that, albeit within a context of propaganda, could be assessed and presented in objective terms.11 There was also a tension in understanding the dynamic forces: between the standard geopolitical emphasis on the formative role of the environment, and that of the Nazis on such a role for the German people. However, the geopoliticians were also committed to the latter.

The German geopoliticians, notably Otto Maull, Ewald Banse, and Karl Haushofer, looked to the theories advanced by Ratzel and Kjellén, seeing German identity and interest very much in geographical terms, and supporting expansionism accordingly. They argued that an understanding of Germany’s geographical position and context was necessary in order to enable the state to realize its potential. A variety of forces and arguments came into play including the recent attainment of German political unity after victory over France in 1870–1871 and a linked sense of destiny, as well as a parallel belief in the country’s own recently acquired material superiority thanks to recent industrialization, various doctrines tumbling out of social Darwinism, a feeling of being outnumbered by the Slavs, and fury at the result of World War I.12

The key figure was Haushofer (1869–1946), who had been a general during the conflict, directing the artillery against the British attack on the Somme in 1916. Retired after the war, and like many right-wingers angry at Germany’s defeat, he gave a particular political slant to the political geography he lectured on at Munich. From 1924, Haushofer was editor of the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik (Journal of Geopolitics), which he founded as the mouthpiece for the Geopolitik he advocated. Haushofer was the most active contributor, just as he was a most industrious writer of books.13 Influenced by Kjellén’s writings on the state, and by Mackinder’s paper of 1904, Haushofer sought to adapt the latter to German interests. He did so by defining a German sphere of influence in terms of his own ideas on pan-regions. Subsequently, Haushofer extended this idea to the benefit of Germany’s allies in the Pact of Steel, Italy and Japan, which were pursuing expansionist geopolitical ambitions of their own.14

Haushofer had visited Japan from 1908 to 1910 as a military advisor and was much impressed by the culture of the society and its strong militarism. He gained his doctorate from the University of Munich with a thesis on the political and military geography of Japan in the 1900s. In turn, Haushofer took part in negotiations between Germany and Japan and was influential in the move in Japan to a greater endorsement of geopolitics from the mid-1930s. Aside from his books on Japan, some of which were translated into Japanese, Haushofer wrote extensively about the country in the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik. His work was much applauded in Japan.15 This was a period of rising militarism in Japanese government and politics, and geopolitics provided both a means to expound policy and a way to make expansionism appear modern and rational. In 1931, Japan occupied Manchuria, the most economically advanced part of China. This was seen as a vital support for the Japanese economy, notably with the provision of coal, and for Japanese society, particularly by providing land for settlement, and thus reducing population pressure.16 In 1937, Japan began a large-scale war of expansion in China. In turn, Japanese planners and commentators became concerned about the routes by which China was supplied, which led to interest in further expansion.

Founding the Institute of Geopolitics, Haushofer developed and led a group of geopoliticians at Munich. They argued in favor of great powers, powers defined by control of large spaces, which, in turn, provided these powers with security and resources. Such control and self-sufficiency were regarded as the necessary basis for the expansionism that served the interests of the struggle by states to secure an independent future. Laying claim to what was presented as an appropriately committed objectivity, geopolitics was seen by Haushofer as an applied science that permitted the pursuit of national policy. As a variant on Mackinder, whose 1904 essay he greatly praised, Haushofer presented the leading pan-regions as PanEuropa, PanAsien, and PanAmerika. Each of these had an extension into the southern hemisphere. PanAsien was designated for Germany’s ally, Japan, while, in a definition of the relationship between Europe and Asia, Germany’s region, PanEuropa, a region based on the idea of “Middle Europe,” was to include expansion into Russia. This would entail taking into control the pivotal capacity of Mackinder’s “pivot” and subordinating it to a region controlled by Germany. Haushofer’s thesis was one that assumed expansion and struggle, themes to the fore in the many maps in the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik. Lebensraum (living space), a term employed by Ratzel, was much deployed. So also were ideas of Wehr-geopolitik (Geo-Strategy) and total war that incorporated all the energies of society. A member of Haushofer’s circle, Ewald Banse, caused consternation in 1934 when his Raum und Volk im Weltkriege (1933) appeared in an English edition, under the title Germany, Prepare for War!

Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s personal assistant, was Haushofer’s favorite pupil. Haushofer visited Hess in Landsberg prison after Hitler’s failed putsch in 1923, and Hitler took up some of Haushofer’s ideas. In power from 1933 as Hitler’s deputy, Hess, in 1934, appointed the recently promoted Haushofer as president of a council for those of German origin living outside Germany, while the sales of the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik shot up, and the institute greatly expanded. Haushofer was president for a while of the Arbeitgemeinschaft für Geopolitik (Association of Workers in Geopolitics). Based at the University of Heidelberg, this group acted as a powerful lobby at the university level, and one that helped in the politicization of geography as a subject and, in turn, reflected this politicization. Within the Ministry of Propaganda, there were two study groups to ensure that teachers offered appropriate geopolitical education at school level. In 1939, Haushofer was to receive the Order of the Eagle of the German Reich from Hitler in recognition of his services to geopolitics. Haushofer also had good links to the army general staff. His ideas, moreover, circulated widely outside Germany.

Haushofer’s geopolitics were strongly attacked by French political geographers, not least because of the tendency in German geopolitics to adopt a determinism of space and earth (the Nazis emphasized race as well), and thus to diminish the role of human society and free will. Moreover, Albert Demangeon, a key French human geographer of the interwar period, explicitly criticized German Geopolitik, not least for lacking academic rigor and for placing geography very much at the service of the state.17 Ironically, if the last phrase is altered to “at the service of criticism of the state,” similar points can be made today about some of the recent literature on critical geopolitics. As Jacques Ancel, a much-decorated French veteran, pointed out, Geopolitik was prescriptive rather than analytical.18 In addition, although there was possibly Polish interest in an agreement with Germany aimed at making gains from the Soviet Union, Polish political geography focused on defending the status quo established by the Treaty of Versailles, a status quo threatened by Germany and the Soviet Union. Polish geographers were highly critical of what was regarded as the propagandist nature of geopolitics, which was identified with Germany.19

By the end of 1939, with Poland totally defeated, Haushofer’s earlier calls for the revision of Germany’s loss of territory and prestige in the 1919 Versailles peace settlement had been fully realized, and Germany was in the ascendant. By the end of 1939, it was allied with Japan, the Soviet Union, and Italy, and by the end of June 1940, France and much of Western Europe had been conquered and British forces driven from Continental Europe, while the United States remained neutral. Haushofer had pressed the case for geopolitics as a striving for survival and primacy between competing powers. This vision now appeared to have been implemented in full. Haushofer admired Mackinder’s 1904 observation that an alliance between Germany and Russia would be very potent,20 and he strongly supported the August 1939 Nazi–Soviet (Ribbentrop–Molotov) Pact. In 1919, a report from the British general staff had argued that “taking the long view, it is unquestionable that what the British Empire has most reason to fear in the future is a Russo-German combination.”21

Yet, Hitler, with his construction of politics in terms of races, not states, and of races supposedly engaged in an existential struggle,22 had no time for any limitation of German expansion on other than a short-term, tactical basis motivated by opportunism. Redressing the 1919 Versailles peace settlement was at best a tactic for Hitler, as was cooperation with Poland in 1935–1938, or Russia in 1939–1941. Hitler’s refusal to consider limits, other than for tactical reasons, as in 1938, a refusal that arose from his ideological drive, was linked to a very separate, but central, flaw in much geopolitical thought, then and since. This flaw was the inability to understand the inner workings of other states and societies, an inability frequently linked to a misplaced instrumentalism in explaining and seeking to affect their policies. Thus, the Nazis did not appreciate the strength of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Similarly, the United States failed to understand German and Japanese motivations, or at least to incorporate such an understanding into its prewar military planning.

Global war from 1941, as Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22 and, on December 11 declared war on the United States after the latter had been attacked by Japan, brought forward the millenarian strain in Nazism and encouraged Hitler to give deadly effect to his aspirations and fears. The removal of Jews from a German-dominated Europe became a key aspect of German geopolitics. This was an extreme instance of the extent to which, across history, space was, at least in part, often an expression of racial or ethnic interest. From the outset, the Nazis had presented German nationalism very much in terms of the Volk (people), treating Jews as a threat to the organic, ethnic concept of Germanness, and as automatically antithetical to the Volksgemeinschaft (people’s, or national, community), that was the Nazi goal. In one respect, this ideology was a perverted consequence of the advent of Western-style nation-states in multiethnic Central Europe in 1918–1919. The Nazis were convinced of the elemental characteristics of race and overlooked the extent to which their definitions of race were, in practice, an aspect of racial construction. The dissection and mapping of race were also issues for allies, such as Hungary. Emerico Lukinich questioned the Romanian character of Transylvania.23

A stress on the Volk also challenged alternative readings of the internal geopolitics of Germany. Aside from denying a role for individualism, the focus on the Aryans ensured that serious regional, political, religious, social, and economic distinctions and divisions within Germany, both prior to 1938 and after its expansion that year,24 were deliberately downplayed. This process was an extreme accentuation of that by which the German empire—created in 1871, the Second Reich—overlaid earlier identities and loyalties. There was an attempt to nationalize the concept of Heimat (Homeland). The process was also a crucial aspect of the internal de-politicization and external repoliticization associated with dictatorships. This dual process was a political goal central to much geopolitics. The external approach tends to attract attention but should frequently be seen alongside the internal one.

WORLD WAR II AND THE HOLOCAUST

The Nazi leadership planned a “New Order,” with an enlarged Germany central to a new European system, and with the Germans at the top of a racial hierarchy. The economy of Europe, both conquered and allied, was to be made subservient to German interests. The rest of Europe was to provide Germany with forced labor (both in situ and in Germany), raw materials and food, and, in turn, to receive German industrial products on German terms. Industrial plants in occupied areas were to be taken over.25 Japanese plans for the “Co-Prosperity Sphere” they planned to create in conquered areas were similar, though not always as well developed.

New rail and, in particular, road routes and bridges were to provide the transport links in a German-dominated Europe and were an expression of the new geopolitics. Goals and needs both played major roles. The unusually harsh winter of 1941–1942 revealed the inadequacies of the existing road system in the western Soviet Union, which the Germans had recently conquered. These inadequacies led the Germans in the spring of 1942 to decide to build a series of strategic roads to supply their forces and link their territories. DG IV, designed to link L’vov and Stalino, was the most important highway, and Heinrich Himmler’s personal involvement led to the road being called the “Highway of the SS.” Such roads were regarded, moreover, as a way to kill Jews through very cruel forced labor. Mass graves marked the route. The road was also seen as a setting for new model towns. A spur of the DG IV was to cross Crimea and bridge the Straits of Kerch to its east, a span of 4.5 kilometers. From there, the road would continue into the Caucasus, to serve German strategic interests in the area, notably gaining control of oil production in the region, and also acquiring the possibility of both deploying forces near the Turkish border and of advancing against the British in the Middle East. Hitler took a personal interest in the Kerch bridge, which would be seen as a symbol of German control and engineering prowess.

The DG IV and the bridge were never completed, as the Red Army advanced back into Ukraine in 1943. Instead, the bridge sections stockpiled at Kerch enabled the Soviets to complete the bridge as a railway bridge, and, from October 1944 to February 1945 (when it broke up under the pressure of ice), the bridge supported the Soviet advance, providing a transport route into Crimea.26 In March 2014, during the Ukraine crisis, the Strait of Kerch took on great significance as the direct route from Russia to Crimea. On March 3, Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian prime minister, announced that Russia would press ahead with plans to build a £2 billion bridge across the strait.

Crimea was referred to by the Nazis as a German Gibraltar, a German Riveria, or, for Hitler, with his interest in a supposed racial provenance, a Gotengau, the land of the ancient Goths. In Crimea, South Tyroleans, displaced to satisfy Mussolini, were to replace the native population. Ukraine was to be devoted to SS latifundia (estates) supported by subjugated peasants. A settler colony of ethnic Germans in Ukraine was planned by Himmler under the name of Hegewald.

Much of the former Soviet Union was designated for German occupation, with small sections for some of Germany’s allies, notably Romania. To the east, Siberia was to be maintained as a rump state to which those deemed undesirables, appropriate neither for Germanization nor for extermination, were to be forcibly transferred. What was presented as a spatial purification was a key aspect of Nazi population policy.27 The latter, as so often with geopolitics, was a theme in state policy and ideology, as well as a product of control over territory. The slaughter of Jews and the killing of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians, by the Germans drew on a determination to restructure totally both peoples and space.28 The earlier Nazi discussion, in 1940, of sending Jews to Vichy France–ruled Madagascar, where it was presumed that they would die in the hostile environment, also drew on an ethnic geopolitics. Hitler wished to remove the Jews from the Axis sphere.29

The Holocaust was a distinctly geopolitical process. This was so at the strategic level, in terms of ensuring the “biological eradication of the entire Jewry of Europe,” which Alfred Rosenberg, the minister of the Eastern Territories, promised in a press briefing on November 18, 1941. Indeed, Germany was declared judenfrei (free of Jews) in June 1943. The geopolitical nature of the Holocaust was also apparent at the operational and tactical levels. The former involved the large-scale movements necessary to ensure a concentration of Jews, first in Poland, and then in the extermination camps. The tactical level related to the organization of killing in the camps.30 Detailed research has indicated that this situation was made more complex by the relationship between central direction and local initiatives,31 but the movement of Jews was fundamental to the Holocaust, and this movement reflected spatial assumptions, including where best to slaughter and from where first to deport Jews. At the Wannsee meeting on January 20, 1942, it was reported that all Europe’s Jews were to be deported to Eastern Europe in order to prepare for what was intended as a Final Solution.32 “Evacuation to the East” was employed by the Germans as a euphemism for slaughter, and communication routes, in the shape of railways and the cattle-cars in which the Jews were transported in very harsh circumstances, were crucial to the process. Thus, the rail spur constructed to ensure that trains could go directly to Auschwitz II helped reflect, and also ensure, the preponderant role of this camp in the killing.33 German commanders in the field complained about supply shortages at a time when railway rolling stock was being used to take Jews to the camps.

Meanwhile, as elsewhere, the war had its transformative effect on geopoliticians and geopolitics. In 1934, Haushofer’s son, Albrecht, became a personal adviser to Hess. However, having angered Joachim Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, in 1938, by arguing that any attack on Czechoslovakia would only unite Britain against Germany, Albrecht, even more than Karl, wished to end war with Britain in 1940. Professor of Geopolitics at the Hochschule für Politik in Berlin, Albrecht was closely linked to Hess’s probably unsanctioned and certainly unsuccessful peace overture in 1941, and Hess’s secret flight to Britain led to the disgracing of the Haushofers, although they were kept in play as possible intermediaries in any future negotiations with Britain. Relations with Britain were not the sole reason for a breach between the Haushofers and the Nazi regime. In addition, as far as Karl was concerned, Germany had succeeded with the overthrow of the balance of power in 1940, and the dictates of geopolitics did not require further expansion. To him, the invasion of the Soviet Union was seriously mistaken, a perceptive analysis. Haushofer became a marginal figure.

During the war, the presentation of geopolitics was brought more under Nazi control and made more racialist in intent. Going into hiding in 1944 after the unsuccessful July Bomb Plot against Hitler, Albrecht was captured, imprisoned and, finally, shot the following spring in the clearing out of political opponents just before the fall of the Third Reich. His unfinished work on political geography and geopolitics was to be published posthumously in 1951. Karl was imprisoned in the concentration camp at Dachau, but survived the war. Haushofer argued then that his works had been misunderstood by the Nazis. Dismayed by Germany’s defeat, his own failure, and the death of Albrecht, Karl and his wife took poison and died in March 1946.34

GEOPOLITICS AND THE GERMAN–US RIVALRY

In November 1939 Life magazine, the major US illustrated monthly, devoted an article to the Haushofers, presenting Karl as the “philosopher of Nazism” and the “inexhaustible Ideas Man for Hitler,” while Albrecht was depicted looking at a globe. Readers were assured that in “Haushofer’s German Academy in Munich . . . the world is remade every day between breakfast and dinner.” This article was a key work in the charge against Haushofer and German geopolitics that characterized American popular discussion of geopolitics during the war. Moreover, this was an influential discussion that looked forward to hostile postwar consideration of geopolitics. Nazi aggression was traced in part to the impact of geopolitical thought, and these charges were repeated in other popular US publications such as Readers’ Digest.

The same accusation was made on film, including in Why We Fight, a series of films, intended to ensure motivation, produced by the US army’s film unit under the impressive Hollywood director, Frank Capra. In this series, Prologue to War (1942) depicted a hemisphere of light and another of dark dictatorship, while the maps of Germany, Italy, and Japan were transformed into menacing symbols. The idea of contrasting hemispheres exemplified a modern, secular geographical representation of St. Augustine’s dichotomous, but geographically unfixed, contrast of the cities of God and the Devil. The film The Nazi Strike (1942) presented Haushofer’s Institute in Munich as part of an account of geopolitics explained as the “military control of space.” In this film, a Mackinder sequence, reprising his dictum of 1919—“Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World”35—is presented as the German geopolitical intention: “Conquer Eastern Europe and you dominate the Heartland. Conquer the Heartland and you dominate the World Island. Conquer the World Island and you dominate the World.”

The MGM film Man for Destruction (1943), an account of Haushofer, depicted him as advising Hitler and coordinating German intelligence-gathering around the world. This information is presented as helping the Germans achieve victory, and Haushofer as having a master plan to dominate the heartland and then to join the Japanese in attacking the Americas. Such a presentation made President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Germany First” policy appear necessary despite the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The German naval staff indeed had well-developed plans for a forward policy in the Atlantic against North and South America. This policy involved the acquisition of bases from Portugal and Spain, notably the Azores and the Canaries.36

While Soviet commentators launched strong assaults on “Fascist Geopolitics,” more sophisticated US commentators than the filmmakers also linked German expansionism with German geopolitics and, specifically, Haushofer.37 A number of books appeared in 1942, notably: Andréas Dorpalen’s The World of General Haushofer; Robert Strauz-Hupé’s Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power; Hans Weigert’s Generals and Geographers; and Derwent Whittlesey’s German Strategy of World Conquest,38 while an edition of Mackinder’s 1919 work, Democratic Ideals and Reality, was published in New York as well as London. Moreover, German works were translated. Thus, Banse’s 1933 book, Raum und Volk im Weltkriege, appeared in a 1941 US edition, Germany Prepares for War. American commentators called for the United States to have an explicit geopolitics in keeping with its own interests, one that was divorced from the German Geopolitik that was held to represent a perversion of the subject as well as a nationalist ideology. This distinction was strongly argued by Isaiah Bowman in his essay, “Geography versus Geopolitics,” published in The Geographical Review of 1942. The last paragraph of this essay offered a powerful critique of quasi-scientific certainty, one that drew on Robert Strausz-Hupé’s Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power (1942): “Geopolitics is simple and sure, but, as disclosed in German writings and policy, it is also illusion, mummery, an apology for theft. Scientific geography deepens the understanding. But, like history or chemistry, it has no ready-made formulas for national salvation through scientifically “demonstrated” laws.”39

The combination of the war and German use of geopolitics led US political scientists and geographers to an explicit interest in geopolitics. German developments were commented on by George Kiss40 as well as by Bowman. Bowman brought forward Strausz-Hupé, an Austrian émigré, as a commentator (and understudy) able to discuss the German geopolitical school, notably in Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power (1942). Strausz-Hupé did not dream of a science of politics, the argument that geopolitics was a scientific school of politics, nor share in the view, associated with Henry Morgenthau, the secretary of the treasury, of immutable national interests, such that, under the Morgenthau Plan of 1944, Germany should be divided into two and deindustrialized. Instead, Strausz-Hupé saw Mahan and Mackinder as recruiting the immutables of geography toward the goal of understanding how to work the balance of power. Strausz-Hupé argued that earlier geopolitics had been used to encourage this balance whereas the German geopolitical school was employing geopolitics to try to overthrow the balance, a thesis also advanced by Bowman. The balance of power remained both an attractive image and a goal for a benign world order; but it was unclear how to achieve this and not least how geopolitics was to be employed to advance this goal.

However, the development of the discipline of geopolitics in North America encouraged geopolitical analysis.41 Nicholas Spykman (1893–1943), a Dutch immigrant and former journalist, who was head of the Institute for International Studies at Yale, sought to apply geopolitics to explain America’s position and to advance her interests. Rebutting the powerful isolationism of the interwar years, he argued that interventionism was a key US interest because, if any one power dominated Eurasia, it would threaten the New World, a thesis that helped explain why Roosevelt had rejected isolationism.42 To Spykman, a Europe dominated by the Soviet Union would be as dangerous as one run by Germany. This was a view similar to that taken by Harry Truman, then a senator, before the United States entered the war. Instead, Spykman sought a Europe in which the United States played a role. In his posthumously published The Geography of the Peace (1944), Spykman developed a “rimland thesis,” an idea, based on Mackinder’s marginal or inner crescent, which gave geopolitical focus to his concern about the dynamic geopolitics of Eurasia.43

In turn, Mackinder, in a thoughtful 1943 essay, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” focused both on the forthcoming strength of the Soviet Union and on the need to prevent any resurgence of Germany as an aggressive power. The latter was to be achieved by obliging Germany to face the certainty of war on two fronts: with the Soviet Union in the heartland and with sea power based on the United States, Britain as a forward stronghold, and France as the defensible bridgehead. The Soviet Union and the Western alliance were presented as friendly. In his essay, Mackinder expressed skepticism about the transformative strategic consequences of air power. Looking to the future, Mackinder saw the development of China as a cooperative project of the United States and Britain.44 This essay adopted an optimistic tone that accorded with plans for a benign postwar order. The Axis powers, their governments, commentators, and domestic critics, also looked to the postwar world. Thus the failed July 20, 1944, bomb plot against Hitler was based on the idea that a Germany without Hitler could end the war with Britain and the United States while fighting on against the Soviet Union. Facing defeat, the Japanese leadership sought in 1944 to bring the Chinese Communists into play as a post-war counterweight to the United States and the Soviet Union.45

During World War II, US geographers played a major role in the war effort, with 129 of them employed in the Office for Strategic Studies alone. Bowman advised Roosevelt and the State Department as part of a broader link between academic opinion and US policy.46 Bowman was a key figure in what might be termed the bloodline of US geopolitics. Beginning with Mahan, this line was initially limited mostly to military circles, but entered political circles with President Theodore Roosevelt, president from 1901 to 1909, who was very interested in naval history and thought.47 Roosevelt’s admiring younger cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was also interested in navalist views, was impressed by this example and hired Bowman as, in effect, his own personal geographer. In the meanwhile, however, Woodrow Wilson, president from 1913 to 1921, had repudiated the active US role in international relations encouraged by Mahan and represented by Theodore Roosevelt. Instead, Wilson had returned to the earlier US tradition of neutrality, albeit changing it into an idealism that justified, first, the intervention into World War I in 1917 that Wilson had earlier long opposed and, subsequently, support for the League of Nations. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president from 1933 to 1945, tried to combine the geopolitics of both Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson. This was seen in the plans for the United Nations, the collective security of which was to be dependent on the great powers represented in the Security Council.

Attempts to organize an intellectual response to Haushofer led to discussion about an American Institute of Political Geography, or of Geopolitics, a proposal that did not come to fruition. However, in June 1942, the Geopolitical Section was organized inside the Military Intelligence Service. This section drew on civilian interest in geopolitics, although its public role helped ensure criticism from within the military, and it was abolished the following year.

Meanwhile, US involvement in World War II expanded the logistical possibilities and requirements that constituted a key element of geopolitics in practice, and thus a major target of strategy.48 This involvement also led to a sustained need to explain the conflict to what was very much a mass democracy at war, and in a more wide-ranging conflict than any of its previous wars. In particular, in response to the potent isolationism of the interwar years, it was necessary to defend US interests in distant regions. The explanation offered addressed popular concerns, but also the governmental perception that, under the shadow of air power, the oceans no longer offered security, while Japanese and German capabilities posed direct threats to the United States.49

The government, moreover, sought to explain why the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 had led to the “Germany First” policy, in which the United States determined to focus its military efforts against Germany. The Americans faced what was for them the unique strategic dilemma of having to fight in two theatres. A “Germany First” policy was made easier by German submarines sinking many American ships off the Atlantic coast and in the Caribbean for months after Pearl Harbor.50 This policy led, for example, to the successful invasion of Vichy-ruled Morocco and Algeria in North Africa in November 1942, a goal that appeared to have little to do with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor or, indeed, to any traditional US interests. The explanation involved both an account of Axis geopolitics, specifically an interconnectedness of threats and advances, and an active propagation of a rival US geopolitics, a process taking forward that seen in World War I.51 Roosevelt’s radio speech to the nation on February 23, 1942 made reference to a map of the world in order to explain US strategy. He had earlier suggested that potential listeners obtain such a map, which led to massive demand and also to increased newspaper publication of maps. Already, on September 9, 1939, Rand McNally had announced that more maps had been sold at its New York store in the first 24 hours of the war than during all the years since 1918.52 There was another upsurge in sales after America entered the war. Roosevelt, who obtained his maps from the National Geographic Society, created a map room in the White House.

 The task of explaining engagement with distant regions posed a problem, but also produced opportunities for innovation in both conception and presentation. Thus, the film Man for Destruction (1943) depicted the actor playing Haushofer explaining global geopolitics in front of a map centered on the North Pole, an exposition of a threat that linked different parts of the world and also suggested that such a map helped explain what the US response should be. From 1935, the innovative mapmaker, Richard Edes Harrison, a designer by background who had not been trained in cartography, used orthographic projections and aerial perspectives in the magazine Fortune to bring together the United States and distant regions. Harrison rejected the Mercator projection. Instead, as in 1941 and 1943, he produced a map centered on the North Pole, with the United States presented in a key position. The preface to Harrison’s Look at the World. The Fortune Atlas for World Strategy (1944), an atlas that reproduced his maps from Fortune, explained that it was intended “to show why Americans are fighting in strange places and why trade follows its various routes. They [the maps] emphasize the geographical basis of world strategy.” Harrison’s maps put the physical environment before national boundaries, and also reintroduced a spherical dimension, offering an aerial perspective that does not exist in nature but that captured physical relationships, as in his “Europe from the Southwest,” “Russia from the South,” “Japan from Alaska,” and “Japan from the Solomons.”53 The first edition of the atlas rapidly sold out, while Harrison’s techniques were widely copied.

The reporting and presentation of war, notably the dynamic appearance of many war maps, for example, those in Fortune, Life, and Time, with their arrows and general sense of movement, helped to make geopolitics present and urgent. Far from the war appearing to American readers as a static entity, and at a distance, it was seen as in flux. The maps also made the war seem able to encompass the spectator both visually, through images of movement, and also, in practice, by spreading in his or her direction.54 The orthographic projection used for the map entitled “The Aleutians: Vital in North Pacific Strategy,” published in the New York Times on May 16, 1943, depicted the island chain as the center in a span stretching from China to San Francisco. This presentation made their potential strategic importance readily apparent.

Linked to these projections and perspectives, the role of air power, dramatized most effectively, first by the Japanese attack on the US Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and then by the Allied dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, led to a new sense of space.55 In part, this new sense, and in particular, the stress on distance, the key element in aerial range, was linked to a reduced emphasis on physical geography, in geopolitical discussion, in geographical study (at least at the global level), and in maps. Yet, this reduced emphasis also reflected the analytical shift away from materialistic explanations and, notably, those based on the physical environment. The unintentional net effect was a decline in the ability to explain, and particularly to explain with reference to the physical environment, as opposed simply to describe.

The land was present as target and not as obstacle. The new sense of space and the focus on distance reflected both vulnerability to air attack and the awareness of new geopolitical relationships. It was possible for the Americans, from July 1942, to fly over the “Hump,” the eastern end of the Himalayas, in order to move 650,000 tons of supplies from northern India to southwest China.56 This capability required the construction of a series of air bases. In turn, these bases created a new operational geography, with Japanese land offensives in China, as in 1942 and 1944–1945, in large part directed against US air bases there.57

The emphasis on air power had cartographic implications. In terms of maps, the Mercator projection was unhelpful in the depiction of air routes because great circle routes and distances were poorly presented in this projection, as distances in northern and southern latitudes were exaggerated. The former made the northern Pacific and northern Atlantic appear broader than they were, thus conveying a sense of distance from East Asia and Europe, and of security for the United States. More profoundly, World War II suggested that Leo Amery’s prediction of 1904 about the potential for air power had been vindicated, at least insofar as the means of waging war and projecting power were concerned.

Underlying the theme of rival geopolitical analyses, however, the extent to which Germany’s armies were primarily defeated on the Eastern Front (where at least two-thirds, and often three-quarters, of the Wehrmacht’s divisions were engaged from the summer of 1941) also appeared to demonstrate the thesis of the prominence of the heartland. Without this alliance with the power (then Russia) that Mackinder had warned against in 1904, without this Soviet success, Anglo-American forces would only have been able to defeat Germany by the use of the atom bomb to decapitate the Nazi regime, the target originally intended for this bomb. Had this been the outcome, then the geopolitics of the war would have looked different. Instead, the prominence of the heartland, and the value of its interior lines of communication, were shown not only in the defeat of Germany but also by the swift transfer of victorious Soviet forces from Germany to the Far East and their rapid and successful attack on the Japanese empire, particularly Manchuria, in August 1945. This attack, which the Americans pressed for, was primarily motivated by Stalin’s drive for influence and territory, and his wish to play a major role in the future of China, Japan and Korea.58

This conclusion to World War II looked toward the geopolitics of the Cold War—this was true at the regional level and at its global counterpart. Large-scale forced population displacements and resettlements in Eastern Europe after World War II undermined earlier linkages of space and people, while creating newly more-homogenous nation states designed to stabilize the new territorial order. The expulsion of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia was particularly significant.

At the global level, the combination of Soviet strength with Communist successes in Eastern Europe in 1945–1948 and in China in 1949 ensured that the heartland appeared more as one bloc, under one driving force, than ever before in history. On one level, the Soviet Union, in accordance with Communist ideology about the supremacy of the means of production, displayed little concern with geopolitical ideas, at least of Western European provenance. On another level, with reference to their own criteria of territorial advantage, the Soviets were very interested. Thus, Stalin saw Soviet possibilities in the Balkans as linked to geopolitical possibilities. In 1944, Stalin told the Greek Communist Party that it had to face “geopolitical realities” and cooperate with the British.59

By 1949, Russia-China could be seen as replacing Russia-Germany as the key relationship in the Eurasian heartland. This relationship displayed aggressive energy with the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948–1949 and with large-scale Chinese intervention in 1950 in the Korean War. It was unclear what the ideological aspect of Communist victory would mean for the validity of geopolitical analysis. With its stress on ideology, the Soviet Union showed scant interest in geopolitical arguments. Nevertheless, by 1949, the territorial dimension of international competition appeared as apparent as the ideological one.

THE MIDDLE EAST

The geopolitical narrative for the twentieth century at the global level is reasonably clear, but it overlapped and interacted with different and distinct narratives, notably, but not only, at the regional level. An important one, which had deep historical roots and continues to the present, occurred in the Middle East. The history and present of the Middle East involves a dichotomy of order and disorder. The quest for order is in part scriptural, religious, cultural and social, but is also a matter of attempts to create political spaces where these orders can be pursued and where disorder can be held at bay.

This issue was contained within imperial structures prior to the twentieth century, although these structures faced serious problems from across borders. The Wahhabis of Arabia were a prominent example in the early nineteenth century. There were also challenges from within empires, as with autonomous movements in Egypt repeatedly challenging the Ottoman Empire, and from competing empires. Prior to the second half of the eighteenth century, when Russian expansion became a serious issue, the major challenge came from other Islamic empires and movements, for example, the Ottoman overthrow of the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria in 1516–1517 or Nadir Shah of Persia’s pressure on the Ottomans in the 1730s to the 1740s. European expansion was different, ultimately, not only because it was successful in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also because it seriously challenged existing Islamic assumptions of order. In response, the Ottomans had periodic movements for renewal. In Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, the challenge to the Islamic world from Western expansion was linked to sectarian tensions relating to Jews, Christians and Druze. As a result of this response, the new imperial structures created after World War I did not work well and had to be maintained by force: in Syria, by the French in the 1920s and, in Palestine, by the British in the 1930s.

In the postimperial period in the Middle East after World War II, this process of challenge and response was repeated, but in a different geopolitical context. Moreover, the ability to devise stable domestic political solutions was made more complicated as a result of nearby hostile neighbors. Thus, whether the route pursued was control or compromise over territory, as in Israel and Lebanon, respectively, the situation was inherently difficult.

The geopolitical context ensured the pressures of terrain, climate and logistics on the implementation of strategy.60 This context also changed in a number of respects, including that of the means by which territory was represented. In a crowded world employing precise means of measurement in order to define and represent boundaries, it is understandable that the past was, and is, scrutinized to provide historical credence for such frontiers. However, for most of human history, major empires had, instead of clear lines, zones of authority in their border areas, zones in which the pretensions of imperial power did not always match the situation on the ground. And so for the Ottoman Empire, which overthrew its Mamluk counterpart in 1516–1517 and thus gained control over not only what is now Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and the Hejaz, but also won a degree of authority over the Bedouin and other tribes in what is now Jordan and the bulk of Saudi Arabia. There was no hard-and-fast border, but rather a position of military dominance presented by lines of forts that guarded major routes, notably from Egypt to Mecca and from Damascus to Mecca.61 As such, fortifications as the defense against threats from the east replicated the situation seen with the earlier Romans, Byzantines, and Crusaders, and prefigured what has been seen more recently, and in a different context, with Israel.

The Ottomans maintained this approach to the Arab population and, indeed, used troops to advance the frontiers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in a process dependent on the legitimacy of force and physical presence, rather than on lines on the map. Thus, in what is now Jordan, the Ottomans established forts and outposts in the second half of the century, and in 1867 forced the submission of the Balqa Bedouin with an armed expedition, collecting unpaid taxes and ending the Bedouin extortion of tribute from the villagers, who were the source of Ottoman revenue. Far from seeing any economic divide on the River Jordan, the Ottoman presence was consolidated with agrarian settlement and, subsequently, with the building of the Hejaz railway from Damascus to Medina in the 1900s. The accession of the reformist Young Turks to control over the Ottoman Empire in 1908 brought new energy to Ottoman government, which was manifested in expansion into Jordan. The Jabal Druze there were subjugated in 1910 and, further south, the Ottomans suppressed a revolt in Karak. Ottoman control was defended by military force, fortification and bribery.

As a result of military success in World War I, again showing the central role of force in establishing and affirming control and boundaries, Britain became the imperial power in the region. The conquered Ottoman territories were divided by the League of Nations into mandated territories, for which the ruling power was answerable to the League. This peace settlement was determined by the victors, which meant, for the Middle East, Britain and France. France became the mandate power in what became Syria and Lebanon, while the British mandate there was further south in the territories of Palestine and Transjordan. Separately, the British were also in control in Iraq and Egypt, and thus more generally able to determine boundaries. Again, force played a key role and, notably, as the British prevented expansion from Arabia by Ibn Saud, in part by using air attacks, a frequent theme in colonial control in the 1920s and 1930s.62 Palestine initially presented the British less of a military problem than did Transjordan, although in neither case was it necessary to employ the shelling and bombing used by the French in and around Damascus in 1925–1926. In Transjordan, the British found themselves faced by internecine tribal conflict and having to adopt the Ottoman role of defending settled areas against nomadic raiders. As a result, a force of cavalry and machine-gunners recruited from Circassians used by the Ottomans to this end was established by the British in Amman, as the “Reserve Force.”

The British relied on mapping as a means to affirm and use rule. Indeed, the clarification of imperial boundaries was important to the process by which colonial governments went about their business of collecting taxes, planning railways and administering territories. As a result, Palestine was surveyed by Britain. Moreover, thanks to this surveying Britain was able to produce the 1:100,000 topographical map of Palestine, in 16 sheets, between 1934 and the end of the British Mandate in 1948. As a demonstration of the use intended from such material, these maps were only printed in England. During World War II, the plates were handed over to army units serving in Palestine, for updating and printing for military needs.63

The British ability to deploy information, however, was challenged by the rise of competing nationalisms in Palestine, each of which drew on ambitions fired by the new possibilities apparently offered by the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, the late 1910s on were a peculiarly complex period, both in the Middle East and more widely, because they saw both Western imperialism carried to an unprecedented territorial height, notably with the British Empire and also, in contrast, the rise of nationalisms seeking the overthrow of these empires. In the case of Britain, contradictory assumptions and promises that owed much to the exigencies of a war (World War I) she had nearly lost, greatly complicated the situation. Competing claims in Palestine posed a problem for Britain, which it sought to deal with by compromise. Arab disorder had been a problem for much of the 1930s, but it gathered force in 1937 after the Peel Commission, which had been established to tackle the linked issues of Jewish immigration and the violently hostile Arab response, recommended the partition of Palestine between Arab and Jewish states. The boundaries chosen essentially reflected ethnic preponderance, but it was assumed that there would be a forcible exchange of people between states as part of the settlement, as had been done between Greece and Turkey in 1923. This process outlined by the Peel Commission did not reach an actual partition, and it is therefore difficult to assess the nature of the use of maps had one ensued.

Instead, the report was rejected by the Arabs and led to the Arab Rising of 1937–1938. This placed a major burden on the British military, one that coincided with the Muslim jihadi rebellion under the Faqir of Ipi on the North-West Frontier of British India. This opposition directly assisted the Fascist dictators in putting pressure on Britain. In 1938–1939, the British used 50,000 troops to suppress this rising. Concern about Palestine was accentuated by Mussolini’s attempts to exploit Arab nationalism, notably in Egypt and Palestine, as an aspect of his drive for Mediterranean hegemony, a drive that entailed the overthrow of the British position.64 The Arab Rising posed a serious problem for the British, who, faced with sniping and sabotage and short of information about the rebels, were unable to maintain control of much of the countryside. However, the opposition lacked overall leadership and was divided, in particular between clans, a geopolitical situation that was of direct military significance on the ground. The British also used collective punishment to weaken Palestinian support for the guerrillas and sent significant reinforcements in the winter of 1938–1939. The Rising was essentially over by March 1939.

British and French administrators and Jewish settlers therefore did not arrive as intruders in a self-governing Elysium, but rather became key players in a crisis of imperial power, a crisis provoked by the strains of one world war and then complicated by the consequences of the other.65 The Arabs rejected another partition scheme for Palestine in 1948, only to be left defeated and, thereby, in a far worse territorial position. This failure is recorded in maps, as that of 1967 was to be. These maps are of consequence, but they recorded, rather than shaped, change.

CONCLUSIONS

The difficulties the British encountered in Palestine were on a very different scale from those considered by Mackinder. However, there was a shared characteristic of instability. Indeed, although physical geography might largely be only slow-changing, geopolitics had to address more rapidly altering circumstances. In shaping these for the purposes of analysis and explication, there was an attempt to provide coherence and consistency, but a roller-coaster of geopolitical fortune was readily apparent, both in the world system of the first half of the century and in particular regions. The changing distribution of power and wealth came to a crisis for the old order in 1937–1942, as a combination of forces assaulted the British and French empires and the defense of the relatively liberal trading empires they presided over.66 Although these years saw, directed against Germany, the beginnings of a policy and strategy of containment and Cold War that was to be applied after 1945 against the Soviet Union,67 the eventual defeat of the Axis powers owed most to the United States and the Soviet Union. In turn, this success opened the way to the Cold War and its bipolar geopolitics. It is noteworthy that Mackinder’s essay “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace” appeared in the US journal, Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations in 1943, the year in which he received the Daly Gold Medal from the American Geographical Society—while his 1904 paper appeared in a British journal, the Geographical Journal, published by the Royal Geographical Society. The West was now very much an expression of US power.

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