DB045

Chapter 9

Black, Jeremy M.

Geopolitics since 1990

THE END OF THE COLD WAR POSED BOTH MAJOR CONCEPTUAL issues focused on a total recasting of geopolitics and also the question as to whether the subject itself had outlived its usefulness and therefore deserved extinction or, rather, relegation to an outdated part of historical literature. In the event, reports of the death of geopolitics proved totally unfounded. Instead, the second surge of writing on geopolitics—that linked to the Cold War—has been followed, from 1990, with a third surge. Moreover, this surge has been of considerable scale. From 1990 until 2014, over four hundred academic books specifically devoted to geopolitical thought have appeared, a number that does not include more narrowly focused national studies. In addition, these books have appeared in a plethora of languages, including Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, English, Finnish, French, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and Spanish. To write of a surge does not imply any necessary similarity in approach, content or tone, but does capture the extent to which geopolitical issues and language still play a major role. This can be amplified if attention is devoted to references in periodical and newspaper articles,1 and in popular fiction. For example, geopolitics is a term frequently used in James Ellroy’s 2014 novel Perfidia. Dudley Smith refers to “recent geopolitical events” in explaining why “Jimmy the Jap” would make an appropriate scapegoat.2

There have certainly been major changes in the subject since 1990 and it is no longer centered on one clear topic, as was the case during the Cold War. Those interested in the heartland idea now tend to focus the heartland further east in Eurasia in order to account for China’s post-Maoist rise in prosperity and power. That, however, is not an approach that makes much sense in terms of Mackinder’s 1904 paper. Moreover, as far as military factors are concerned, there is no Chinese threat to Europe or the Middle East.

As another key element of change, cities, Islam, and natural resources have all now emerged as geopolitical actors, even though they might not all possess the traditional geographical centering of the actors in the older geopolitical scheme of things.3 While received geopolitics therefore changed, the subject itself endured, and unsurprisingly so given the survival of state governments and their geographic concerns. At the same time, “critical geopolitics” added a key dimension to the debate, and, in turn, developed in different directions, including feminism and Marxism.

Whatever the approach, the closer any scholar, not least a historian, comes to the present, the greater the danger that the benefits of long-term perspective and reflection will be lost. This point is certainly true of the geopolitics of the 2000s and 2010s, as the struggle with radical Islam came dramatically to the fore with the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.4 This focus on radical Islam led to the subordination of other themes, such as growing US estrangement from China and, subsequently, from post-communist Russia as well. However, there were (and are) difficulties in assessing the meaning and events of change. On the one hand, the assessment of the relative importance of developments within an agreed analytical structure was unclear, with, for example, pronounced and persistent debate about the respective significance, for the United States, of the Middle East and the Far East. As a separate point, one that captured the range of contexts within which geopolitics was considered, the fracturing of geopolitical analysis with the prominence, from the 1990s, of a self-conscious “critical geopolitics,” made it harder to present the subject as objective or, at least, free from its own politics.

Of course, geopolitics, like other disciplines, has generally not displayed a consistent approach,5 nor an absence of political commitment. Moreover, it is necessary to be cautious before dividing the past into neat chronological periods with their own themes and analysts, such that 1990, for example, becomes a turning point. Instead, there was, and is, in practice, considerable continuity in the literature as well as in circumstances. For example, Mackinder spanned World War I, publishing important works and holding major roles both before and after and, indeed, lived on until 1947. In an essay, published in 1943, that noted the significance of memories and the extent of continuity, Mackinder referred to his earliest memory of public affairs, that of the Prussian victory over the French at Sedan in 1870. He linked his subsequent ideas with concern about Russia in the 1870s, a concern that nearly led Britain to war in 1878 in order to protect the Ottoman Empire.6 Also, a figure active before World War I, Haushofer died the year before Mackinder. Kissinger lived through World War II and the Cold War, going on to publish a major work of reflection in 2014. The first major work of Saul Cohen appeared in 1963, but he published an important article forty years later, with a second edition of his Geopolitics of the World System following in 2009.

Alongside continuity by individuals, the end of the Cold War encouraged a rethinking of geopolitics in some academic circles. There was an interest in a new agenda of international relations and anxieties. In Europe, this agenda included a greater concern with the geopolitical significance of the European Community, and markedly both its expansion and its governmental character.7 With the end of the Cold War, East versus West was replaced by Eastern and Western Europe. In turn, the power of NATO and the European Union was exerted in Eastern Europe and, subsequently, membership in both was greatly extended, in return for acceptance of their norms.8 Composed of six states when founded, the European Economic Community of 1957 had by 2014 become the 28-strong European Union.

In this case, and more generally, there was a degree of optimism, if not naivety, in some of the literature. This was so not only with the discussion of NATO and the European Union, but also with the hope that geopolitics, like the longer-established peace studies, could be a force for a more benign world order as well as a description of it.9 In practice, the expansion of NATO and the European Union created a geopolitical issue in terms of the hostile response of Russia, a response that was expressed in terms of control and influence over territory, especially Ukraine. Whether or not this response was inevitable and should have been anticipated, it became an issue in 2014, one that also led to disagreements over the viability of nonrealist accounts of international relations. In turn, this analysis affected discussion of China.

From 1990 regional issues around the world were generally discussed in terms of a highly specific context, that of US hegemony. Moreover, in the 1990s and early 2000s, before the situation changed from the mid-2000s, US hegemony, and the apparent inception of a unipolar world system, posed an issue not only for those offering an explicitly politicized geopolitical analysis of the present, but also for scholars looking for long-term patterns. Thus, William Thompson, a leading US political scientist, having discerned a pattern over 13,000 years in which “one state gained enough coercive advantage over its rivals—based on relative endowment deriving from the organizational-technological-political-economic-war co-evolutionary spiral—to encourage an attempt at regional hegemony,” noted that the United States had gone on from being the leading global sea power to becoming also the leading global power, which led him to wonder whether this was a temporary phenomenon or the harbinger of a new era in world politics.10 The idea of a transformation or paradigm shift in terms of such an era attracted considerable attention.

THEORIES FOR THE 1990S

In the aftermath of the Cold War, a number of theories were advanced by international relations specialists and political geographers as they sought to conceptualize global power politics and predict the future, the latter a goal that attracted much geopolitical speculation. Some of these theories benefited from considerable public attention. In turn, the content and impact of this attention varied by group and country, creating a form of geopolitics of geopolitical analysis. For example, among left-wing commentators, the displacement of Cold War containment theory at a time of apparently unipolar US power encouraged an emphasis on political economy. This emphasis provided a way to link a generally hostile account of the US/capitalist structuring of the global economy with the often-related competition at every scale over resources. Spatial issues could be incorporated into this approach.

One continued theme in the literature was the preference, on the part of those offering geopolitical analysis, to claim salience for their own particular analysis, frequently with scant allowance for other views. Indeed, a rush of world visions were on offer, for the analyses presented by writers and commentators were as much prospectuses for the future as understandings of the present, and with the two shaped together. This situation was very much the case for the two most prominent accounts advanced in the 1990s: Francis Fukayama’s 1989 article “The End of History,” published in The National Interest, a prominent US neoconservative journal,11 and Samuel Huntington’s article “The Clash of Civilizations?” published four years later in Foreign Affairs, a leading US journal.12

Neither article put spatial considerations foremost nor offered an equivalent response to an apparent spatial threat, which the varied understandings of containment had done during the Cold War. However, each account had important implications for the operation of the international system and, therefore, for the relationship between particular struggles and the wider situation. Moreover, even if silent on specific geopolitical points and, more generally, limited in their discussion of political and (even more) economic geography, each account had implications for the way in which geopolitics was understood. Fukayama’s approach was influential, or at least highly newsworthy, in the 1990s, and Huntington’s in the 2000s, particularly in the aftermath of the terror attacks of 2001.

In one sense, Fukayama—a former pupil of Huntington and the deputy director of policy planning under George H. W. Bush, Republican president from 1989 to 1993—proposed the end of geopolitics when he wrote of “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Fukayama saw this process as specifically occurring thanks to the acceptance of liberal economics by Asia, particularly China. It tends, however, to be forgotten that, toward the end of his article, he wrote, “clearly, the vast bulk of the Third World remains very much mired in history, and will be a terrain of conflict for many years to come,” and, later, that “terrorism and wars of national liberation will continue to be an important item on the national agenda.” Fukayama has been frequently criticized by those who have not read him. Moreover, like Mackinder, he was not always read with reference to the nuances in his argument or allowing for his qualifications, whether explicit or apparent. On the other hand, the tone of neither man put qualifications to the fore.

Fukuyama went on to publish his work in book-length: The End of History and the Last Man (1992). By then, his argument seemed especially prescient, as the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991 had followed that of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, while China’s engagement with the Western economy was becoming more pronounced. Adopting a commonplace approach, for example, that of the Enlightenment stadial writers, such as William Robertson and Adam Smith, Fukuyama’s account was not only spatial but also teleological, with certain states presented as more successful because they were progressive, indeed post-historical in his terms. The Fukuyama thesis proved highly conducive to American commentators arguing that US norms and power now defined, or should define, the world. In a continuation of the process by which British commentators in the eighteenth and nineteenth century had seen Britain as a Rome, America was presented as a “new Rome,” but a Rome on a global scale,13 and one thereby able to advance and protect a “global commons” of liberal norms.

This was an arresting form of geopolitics. A significant cartographic change accompanied this move to US dominance. The Soviet geopolitical menace was abruptly reduced in the Robinson projection adopted by the National Geographic Society in 1988. This offered a flatter, squatter world, and one that was more accurate in terms of area. Compared to the Van der Grinten projection, the Soviet Union in the Robinson projection moved from being 223 percent larger than it really is to being only 18 percent larger, and the United States from 68 percent larger to 3 percent smaller.14

Some critics presented Fukuyama as a triumphalist neoconservative who failed to relativize his own position—which was ironic, as in 2006 he was to repudiate “the Neoconservative legacy,” going on to write works that were more centrist in content and tone.15 There was also the problem posed by Fukuyama’s relative optimism about the prospect for a new world order; although his warning about the world of Islam as resistant to this new order was to be noted by those writing after September 11, 2001.16 Already, bitter conflict in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, particularly in Bosnia and Kosovo, had indicated the strength of ethnic, religious, and regional animosities that had only just been contained there during the Cold War by authoritarian communist rule.17

At the same time, a new form of geo-power was employed in 1995 in the successful attempt by the United States at Dayton, Ohio, to broker a new order for Bosnia, part of the former Yugoslavia, by agreeing to a new political system and a new border between the warring communities. The use of high-tech geographic information-processing systems speeded up the process of negotiation. Ironically, Powerscene, the prime system used, had been developed by the US Defense Mapping Agency for military purposes, notably the US air attack on the Bosnian Serbs in 1995. It is a computer-based terrain-visualization system, in which digital cartographic data, overlaid with remote sensing imagery, permits users to explore the landscape as a three-dimensional reality.18

Samuel Huntington was considerably less optimistic than Fukuyama. In “Clash,” which was expanded into a highly successful and much-reprinted book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Huntington rebutted Fukuyama.19 Huntington predicted, not the triumph of Western values but, rather, the rise of “challenger civilizations,” especially China and Islam. The ideas of rise and decline, strength and challenge, were key concepts in the dynamics of geopolitics, often being unproblematic, in the sense of undefined agents of change. These ideas were somewhat simple in conception and application. According to Huntington, the rise of “challenger civilizations” would be as part of a relative decline of the West that, he argued, had to be addressed carefully, a theme that was to be addressed, albeit in a very different fashion, by Kissinger in World Order (2014). Huntington provided not a book about the threat to the West from a heartland but, instead, one that proposed a different geopolitical shaping of the Eurasian question, with the rimland far more problematic than the heartland, insofar as these categories could be employed in this case.

Huntington also offered a new reading for the “declinist” interpretation of America’s global position. This interpretation owed much to Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (1987). Based essentially on the interplay of resources and strategy, Kennedy’s work had a great influence in 1988, only to appear somewhat redundant as a result of the collapse of the Cold War and US success in the 1991 Gulf War with Iraq.20 In contrast to Kennedy, Huntington’s stress was on culture, not on resources. Each has a geographical location, but a differing dynamic.

Huntington’s analysis could be applied to consider geography at a variety of scales and to incorporate a range of material. The emphasis on ideology and an ideological challenge in the shape of Islam, was one that put the inner-city immigrant communities of major places within the West, such as Paris and London, in the front-line of contention. Huntington drew on the analysis of Islam by another influential US scholar, Bernard Lewis, specifically his 1990 article “The Roots of Muslim Rage.”21 Huntington argued that, in the light of the rise of what he presented as “challenger civilizations,” the established and rival concept of a global community of nation-states accepting a shared rule of international law and a set of assumptions (a community that had been the aspiration of Wilsonian and Cold War US policies and that seemed achievable, indeed achieved, in the 1990s) could, in fact, no longer be the answer to the world’s problems and, thus, satisfy global political and social demands.22 This represented a critique of the moral universalism that had been central to US interventionism from the 1910s.

Terrorism was to drive this lesson home, and Huntington’s book, which had been over-shadowed during the triumphant globalization and Clintonian liberalism of the late 1990s, now appeared prescient after the attacks on September 11, 2001, and, indeed, was to be translated into 33 languages. The focus was on relations with Islam, and Huntington was generally regarded as an exponent of the likelihood of conflict between Christendom and Islam, and was praised or criticized accordingly. To some, Huntington, who was in fact a lifelong Democrat as well as a self-declared conservative, was, in practice, a key neoconservative who had sketched out the prospectus for the new ideological confrontation of the 2000s, as well as for the assertive US policies that followed the September 11 attacks.23

While the idea of a clash of civilizations is arresting, it also led to criticism of Huntington on the grounds of misplaced simplification. Thus, from the Left, Edward Said wrote an article, “The Clash of Ignorance,” published in the Nation on October 22, 2001, arguing that there was a danger that the September 11 attacks would, as a consequence of Huntington’s arguments, be misleadingly treated as an assault by a monolithic Islam.24 Indeed, subsequent violence within Iraq after the overthrow of its government by US-led conquest in 2003 was to demonstrate the depths of animosity within Islam. In every half-century of Islamic history, more Muslims have been killed by other Muslims than by non-Muslims.

From the perspective of specialists in geopolitics, there was also skepticism, not least based on the highly problematic nature of geography in Huntington’s work. In particular, there was a unresolved tension in his use of geography, between a realist understanding of it, as an objective and autonomous element in the political process, and, on the other hand, Huntington’s emphasis on the “primacy of subjective, non-geographical factors of social psychology.”25

It was far from ironic that the idea of a clash of civilizations was also pushed hard by Osama bin Laden and his supporters, albeit to very different ends and with a very different vocabulary. This clash was given particular geographical force by al-Qaeda as it saw Islam as a civilization with a spatial sway, and a converting and controlling faith, rather than as a religion limited in its span to the devotion of the faithful and with that group essentially static. Moreover, adopting a very long timespan, al-Qaeda treated Islam as having been driven back from spaces it should control, especially Palestine/Israel and al-Andalus (southern Spain). In addition, the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia following the Gulf War of 1990–1991 was seen by them as another instance of cultural spatial violation.26 This idea provided a degree of geopolitical coherence as well as a basis for geopolitical expansion, and ensured that different struggles could be linked. The geopolitical imagination of al-Qaeda was one that offered no prospect of peace nor of understanding of other cultures. This imagination, which was to be seen anew with the aggressive and expansionist Islamic State (ISIS) movement—suddenly pushing to the fore in 2013—and its claim to a revived caliphate of great scope, also served as a reminder of the political consequences of psychological senses of space and alienation.

In addition to the world scale, Huntington addressed developments within America although, again, in a somewhat simplistic fashion and not open to the nuances of geographical variations. In Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004), he warned about a change of consciousness and a challenge to Americanness as a consequence of large-scale immigration. This was transnationalism seen as a threatening geopolitical force. In the book, Huntington expressed concern about the applause from Mexican-Americans for Mexican teams competing with Americans. As with the Clash of Civilizations, he seemed to find both multiple identities and interdependence unwelcome concepts and, as a result, was reduced to the notion of incompatible groups operating through rivalry. Such an attitude is crucial to the habit of presenting geopolitics in binary terms. Looked at differently, binary concepts lent themselves to geopolitics and that, indeed, was an aspect of the problematic character of the use of this approach.

Although drawn by some critics, the path from Huntington’s clash of civilizations to the policies of the George W. Bush administration of 2001–2009 was in fact at best indirect. Huntington himself was critical of the neoconservatives and of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was particularly unimpressed with the attempt to install a Western-style democracy, which he saw as misplaced cultural superiority leading to a flawed transference of ideas and structures, a view held across the political spectrum. Huntington had little time for the triumphalism about Western rule and civilization offered by some commentators, who were applauded by neoconservatives, such as the historian Niall Ferguson.27

Neoconservative geopolitics was linked more to the “Project for a New American Century” (1997) than to Huntington’s thesis. This project or, rather, prospectus, was the product of a movement that arose from a reaction against the policies of President Clinton (1993–2001). Linked to this was an attempt to revive the essential elements of the Reagan administrations (1981–1989) or, rather, what was presented, with some considerable simplification, as these elements, and to reposition them for the post-Cold War era. As with earlier generations of US interventionists,28 this drive entailed a commitment to Eurasia: “America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East” declared the “Project,” and these responsibilities were seen as fundamental to US interests. The “Statement of Principles” issued on June 3, 1997, had 25 signatories, including Cheney, Fukuyama, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, George H. W. Bush’s vice president, Dan Quayle, Eliot Cohen, Donald Kagan, Norman Podhoretz, and Stephen Rosen. It began: “American foreign and defense policy is adrift” and blamed this not only on the policies of the Clinton administration but also on a failure by conservatives to advance “a strategic vision of America’s role in the world.” The signatories aimed to change this. Emphasizing the need to “shape circumstances,” they pressed for a stronger military, the promotion of “political and economic freedom abroad,” and the preservation and extension of “an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.”29

The specific policies that flowed from the assumptions of the “Project” were, in many respects, traditional Cold War policies, notably strong support for Israel and Taiwan. Indeed, in some respects, the general suppositions can be seen as formulaic and trite hyperbole that sought to provide rationale and structure for a series of specific commitments.

That remark is not intended as a criticism specifically of the neoconservatives, as it could be made, in addition, about most attempts to offer a global geopolitics, including liberal and left-wing attempts. Looked at differently, the deductive processes of geopolitics at the global level are weak, and the specific goals that arise can best be understood as individual and lacking a general structure. Thus, geopolitics as a global analysis emerges not only as a vital recovery of the spatial dimension, but also as somewhat implausible as an inductive method, and as overly weak as a deductive one. The global analysis is, perforce, weak as it is difficult to provide coherence at that level, and, more particularly, to link specific interests to a global account that also works at a dynamic level—in other words, capable of explaining change.

In the 1990s, while the fall of the Soviet Union, the anchoring of East Asia to the US economy, and economic growth were all leading to optimism among US commentators global politics had also been reshaped in a more challenging fashion for the United States.30 On the one hand, there were positive outcomes. In particular, an imploding Soviet Union did not challenge US hegemony and—unlike revolutionary France in 1789–1792 and, to a lesser extent, Russia in 1917–1920—Russia in the 1990s did not swing from revolution to dangerous expansionism. This situation provided a background for the restatement of a classic geopolitics in Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997). Across much of the world, however, identity and conflict in the 1990s were shaped and expressed in terms of an aggressive ethnic politics that did not accord with US interests or with Western views of geopolitics.

As a separate process, changes in values affected the position of particular states, or at least debate within them. This was clearly the case with China as it became more prosperous and assertive and with Russia. In the Soviet Union, formalized “theories” of the interrelationship, or interdetermination, of geography and politics had had little purchase because of their blood-and-soil connotations and, therefore, lack of ideological acceptability. However, these ideas came to enjoy widespread credence and popularity in post-Soviet Russia as a new territoriality was developed, especially by Aleksandr Dugin, a polemical commentator close to President Putin, with an assertive account of national space and the supposed biological imperatives of the nation. Indeed, Huntington’s thesis of a clash of civilizations was echoed in the emergence of ethno-geopolitics in post-Soviet Russia. However, unlike Huntington’s, this ethno-geopolitics explicitly imbued the civilizational entity with specific ethnic characteristics of its own. Some of the Russian work, in contrast, has been better-informed and not partisan.31

More generally, the results of expressing identity in terms of ethnic suppositions were frequently very much defined in spatial terms, not least as the goal of many activists were ethnically homogenous territorial spaces. This process was seen, for example, with Serbian ethnic and spatial ambitions, and offered a restatement of earlier political themes and territorial demands that had been superseded under communism.32

This emphasis on ethnic territoriality led to tension, if not violence, and was not an approach that matched the ethos of US leadership nor its attempt to reconcile change, globalization, populism, and religion. Moreover, as a separate but related issue, in some countries, particularly in the Middle East, hostility to globalization, a hostility that could be expressed in terms of pan-Islamism, meant opposition to modernism and modernization, and thus could draw on powerful interests and deep fears.

THE GEOPOLITICS OF THE 2000S AND 2010S

The September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington led to regional hostility and ideological developments in the Islamic world, becoming a key geopolitical issue for the United States, with resulting geostrategic concerns in terms of the possibilities for supporting force projection. These concerns entailed different geopolitics, one initially focused on Afghanistan, Central Asia and Pakistan, with Iraq rising in prominence from 2002 as the 2003 invasion was prepared. This was geopolitics different from that of the Cold War, when forward operating capabilities sought to meet different requirements, notably those of containment. The end of the Cold War had led to a lessening of political support for America’s overseas posture, which affected the geostrategic options facing its forces and the military strength available.33

The “War on Terror,” in contrast, led to a revival of geopolitics at a number of levels. These included the focus on area commands by the Pentagon (notably the wide-ranging Central Command), the interest in power-projection, and also the extent to which conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq obliged newspapers and the television news to include maps. Most of these maps, however, were flat maps, devoid of information on such factors as terrain or religious affiliation.

The attacks on September 11 resulted in a dramatic reconfiguration of US commitment. A determination not to be restrained by the need for international agreement and not to work through international bodies was made clear. Addressing a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush stated, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” In practice, the call for a “War on Terror” was also a call for a more broad-based action to maintain order in the world or, rather, a vision of order. Both the “War on Terror” and this call were universal missions in which geographical limits were regarded as an irrelevance that was to yield to will. In short, there was an open-ended commitment in both time and space, one that was emphasized by the US leadership. The “War on Terror” thus served as a concept to structure the complexities of world affairs and to help direct alliances.

The Cold War had offered the same, but with a far more cautious, deterrence-based approach toward action. The “rollback” of Soviet control had not been adopted as the policy of the West. In opposition to the “War on Terror,” al-Qaeda sought to use jihad as a call for action and an organizing concept that could incorporate Islamic activism and disputes across the world, as in 2009 when Osama bin-Laden pressed for jihad over Gaza, where Hamas was in conflict with Israel. In turn, autonomous Islamic groups across the world proclaimed a degree of coherence with al-Qaeda.34

In September 2002, the National Security Strategy argued the need for preemptive strikes by the United States. This was a key policy innovation that was advocated in response to the dual threats of terrorism and “rogue states,” notably Iran and North Korea, developing weapons of mass destruction. These states were seen as another variant on terrorism. The global extension of American values was presented as the answer to the danger posed by these threats: “The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom. . . . These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society—and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages. . . . We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent.”

To that end, George W. Bush pressed for democracy in the Middle East and China, a call that appeared to ignore any suggestion of geographical limits. In many respects, and here emphasizing the plasticity of the concept and placing of geopolitics, this call—for not only democracy but also for modernization—was a denial of the geopolitics of Realpolitik advanced by Kissinger and others, including, in this period, John Mearsheimer, in his The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York, 2001). The assumption, under George W. Bush, was that a change in the values of a society, as well as of the operations of its domestic politics, would alter the country’s position and activity in international relations.

Thus, building on the oft-repeated claim that democracies do not declare war on democracies, the drive for democracy was a move away from the argument that particular nations were somehow fated to a malign political system. The latter approach offered a form of political environmentalism that more readily lent itself to classic geopolitics, and to the conventional understanding of international relations as a realist structure. Moreover, the call for democratization was an aspect of a strategy seeking to maintain stability and prevent wars, as much as to win them. Opposition to weapons proliferation was part of the same policy.

Bush also argued, in a 2005 speech given at Tiblisi, the capital of Georgia, that the peace settlement of 1945 at the end of World War II had been flawed because it had left Eastern Europe under Communist control. This remark, again, underplayed the suggestion of geopolitical limits for the West, while also offering a critical comment on the Democratic administrations of the 1940s, on the Republican unwillingness to promote “rollback” in the 1950s, and on the détente of the 1970s, particularly as supported by Jimmy Carter.

In practice, the US preference in the 2000s was for democracy in the Middle East, rather than in China. The former appeared a more practical goal, as well as one made more necessary by the challenge apparently posed by Islamic fundamentalisms as well as the threat to the security of Israel. Whether it is helpful to view this prioritization in a geopolitical light is unclear unless the latter is understood, as is so often the case, as a rationalization of the obvious. For, in practice, despite the call for universal freedom, there was, as ever, a “cartography,” or geographical expression and limitation, of concern and action. In this “cartography,” prudence and pragmatism about introducing democracy played a greater role than ideological rhetoric might suggest. This point is not intended as a criticism of policy, but underlines the extent to which geopolitics can, in part, be seen as an exercise in prudence, or rather in debating strategies of prudence in terms of international concerns. This is particularly so if the emphasis is on a realist geopolitics. As such, there is a parallel with the early US republic in which the call for universal rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence (1776) was very much compromised by the exigencies of power politics in the new republic and the Americas more generally, as well as by the racial politics of the United States itself in the shape of the treatment of African American slaves and of Native Americans. So also, at the international level, with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which did not amount in practice to its pledge to defend republican independence across the New World.35

After 2001, the China issue was overshadowed for the United States by the “War on Terror,” as the country was apparently able to employ its military preponderance to ensure a freedom of action in the Islamic world.36 The Bush doctrine, which was reiterated in the version of the National Security Strategy issued in March 2006, was the opposite of isolationism, a point underlined in Bush’s address to the United Nations in September 2005. At the same time, this was multilateralism in a War on Terror very much on US terms. Donald Rumsfeld’s argument, in an interview with Larry King on CNN on December 5, 2001, that “The worst thing you can do is allow a coalition to determine what your mission is”37 was, in one perspective, a call to reject the political counterpart to environmental determinism, and thus to impose one’s will. This rejection was perceived by critics as a departure from the existing constraints of the international order, a departure reflecting the weaknesses of the latter and the gravity of the US unilateral challenge. American unilateralism had a number of sources, including a strong and lasting conviction of national exceptionalism, as well as the consequences of the US 1947 National Security Act. Nixon, an admirer of Charles de Gaulle, was also a source of unilateralism.

The strategic counterpart for the United States in the 2000s, a counterpart driving such a challenge, was that deterrence, by the Americans and/or others, no longer seemed effective when confronted by terrorism or states governed by fanatical rulers. The apparent ineffectiveness of deterrence was such that preemption appeared necessary as a strategic means and goal. Specific consequences resulted from this situation, consequences in terms of the geopolitics constructed round particular challenges. At one level, the promotion of democratic governments appeared an aspect of this preemption. It was linked to the idea of “draining the swamp,” or removing the factors that made particular areas, such as Afghanistan, prone to serving as bases or potential bases for terrorism. Looked at from the other perspective, terrorists, like guerrilla groups, require space as a base for operations. What were termed shatterbelts provided this. These shatterbelts were the focus of US concerns about the strength and stability of states;38 although strength was, and is, difficult to define, and should be discussed with reference to particular national and regional political structures. In practice, under Bush the serious weaknesses of policy were dramatically accentuated by the many fundamental deficiencies in execution.39

Alongside the immediacy of the varied issues posed by the Islamic world, China aroused growing US concern. As a reminder that geopolitics does not determine force structure, the Chinese abandoned the military ideology of asymmetry that had been followed during the period of control by Mao Zedong (1949–1976). Instead, in response to the American capability displayed in the 1990s, the Chinese changed their military ideology in pursuit of their own “revolution in military affairs.”40

The US 2006 quadrennial Defense Review described China as having “the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States and field disruptive military technologies that could over time offset traditional US military advantages.”41 This potential was as significant as China’s ability to operate as a sea power as well as a land one; in the Pacific and Indian oceans as well as in Asia.42 Confronting the Chinese challenge entailed not only appropriate force structures and doctrine, but also an understanding of the political dimension, both from the Chinese perspective and from that of other Asian powers.43 These needs were in a dynamic relationship such that, for example, “a larger number of [US] submarines could be warranted, depending on how the geopolitical situation in the Pacific plays out.”44

At the global level, tensions over resources, especially oil, water, food, and space, also played a major role in geopolitics, both local struggles and international concerns.45 This role was particularly sensitive in the Middle East and notably added a key strand in relations with the United States. US oil imports—close to 2 percent of GDP in 2005—led to a dangerous dependence on the politics of the Middle East and the stability of particular regimes, such as those of the Shah in Iran in the 1970s and the Saud dynasty in Saudi Arabia. In 2003, Saudi Arabia held 25 percent of the world’s oil reserves and Iraq another 10 percent, with the Middle Eastern OPEC states having two-thirds of the world’s reserves. The geopolitics of oil supply and the resulting strategic vulnerabilities ensured political support in the United States for the expansion of drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, notably offshore and in Alaska and, by the 2010s, for fracking. Indeed, the latter attracted geopolitical and strategic interest around the world.46

Although the role of oil in the US decision to attack Iraq in 2003 was exaggerated in what was a reflection of the more general tendency to simplify motivation and causation, oil certainly played a major role in the geopolitics of US strategy. Indeed, this was an aspect of the cost that oil dependence forced on the United States, and thus the burden placed on its economy and consumers. In 2004, the United States imported 58 percent of the oil it consumed, compared to 34 percent in 1973. Fracking indicates a very different trajectory, with a move toward oil self-sufficiency.

Natural gas was another key resource. The development of an infrastructure to supply Soviet natural gas and oil to energy-poor Western Europe had been a major issue in international relations in the last decade of the Cold War, creating tension between the United States and Western Europe. Thereafter, Russian gas became a key weapon in Russian efforts to maintain its influence. Disputes with Ukraine in 2006 and 2009 led Russia to shut its pipelines, while a renewed crisis in 2014 raised the issue anew. By then, Russia provided about a quarter of the gas used in the European Union, as well as nearly all the gas used in the Baltic republics, Finland, and Bulgaria. As a result, the arrival in the spring of 2014 of a floating gas terminal in Lithuania’s port, Klaepėda (formerly Memel) was described as “a weapon of geopolitics as important as any warship.”47 This view was offered because Lithuania’s reliance on Russian gas was thereby reduced. The routes of projected pipelines became a key geopolitical issue, notably in the Caucasus and the Balkans. This issue helped account for the importance attached to particular states.

Population growth drives resource issues alongside economic demands.48 At the global level, population changes are also an important element in geopolitics. In particular, most of the expansion in the world’s population is occurring, and will continue to occur, in East and South Asia and Africa, with the West only providing a declining minority of the world’s population. Population rises ensure a concern with food supplies—a concern that emphasizes the interdependence of supplier and consumer. The consequences were readily apparent in particular states, especially as the population increasingly masses in sprawling cities that are under only limited control.49 For example, political instability in Egypt in the early 2010s owed much to rises in the price of bread. Resource issues and access may demonstrate Mackinder’s point that the great wars of history arise from the unequal growth of nations, a point frequently made in literature about the causes of wars. Certainly, instability linked to population growth will complicate the conduct of “war amongst the people.”50 The unequal nature of economic opportunity was also an issue for those who adopted an approach to geopolitics in which economic factors, notably capitalism, were at the fore.51

CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS

The geopolitics of, and attributed to, the George W. Bush administrations (2001–2009), lent added force to the expression of the self-styled “critical geopolitics.” “Critical geopolitics” is itself a diverse project, as a 2013 collection ably displays, one with multiple ideas, sites, and agents,52 but is better described as radical geopolitics. This type of geopolitics deliberately sets out to subvert the understanding of established categories and geographical relationships by calling into question fundamental distinctions as well as realist terminology: for example, the state and society, military personnel versus civilians, and national security. “Critical geopolitics” deconstructs and challenges our common understandings of definitions, categories, and relationships and, instead, suggests and applies new perspectives and insights.

In a hostile reading, however, these understandings are, in some cases, replaced by utopian wishful thinking, by political commitment instead of an objective appreciation of the causes of conflict, by foreshortened historical understandings and by a loss of clarity in communicating ideas. “Critical geopolitics” self-consciously stands as a form of postcolonial study, one suspicious of the state, of the course of Western power and of what were presented as their accompanying geographical activities.53 Although not all postcolonial work adopts a geopolitical stance, there is often an attack on US power, portrayed as hegemony, power that is presented as the latest version of Western colonialism. This attack frequently involves calls for a different world order, one with a distinctive spatial character,54 indeed a product of the “counter-space” created in opposition to existing political structures.55

A prominent book in the field of “critical geopolitical” thought, Neil Smith’s American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (2003), provides a good example. British-born, Smith was professor of anthropology and geography at City University of New York when the book was published. Although his book is large and complex, it is notable that Smith displayed scant reluctance in offering judgments. Thus, he wrote that the Cold War “was provoked amid a 1940s battle by U.S. capital and the U.S. government for global economic access to labor and commodity markets.”56 Such simplistic, not to say misleading, arguments are an aspect of a wider problem with a strand of geographical study—for example, the critical approach adopted in much work on mapping.57

Smith’s book appeared in the series California Studies in Critical Human Geography.58 He referred in it to “deep sighs of epochal relief from the Western ruling classes after 1989,”59 and to the United Nations as “the jewel in the crown of the postwar American Lebensraum.”60 With its direct reference to Nazi attitudes and expansionism, this was a term presumably chosen to shock, but one that fails to capture fundamental differences in intentionality and method. Smith was highly critical of the United States, and this criticism can be seen in the language he employed. Writing of Isaiah Bowman, the prominent academic geographer who was an advisor to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the State Department during World War II, Smith noted of Bowman in the year 1944: “Pushed to the political wall by the strength of the Soviet come-back against Germany and by British colonialist obstinacy, which he quietly admired, his Wilsonian moralism became an ideological runt to an increasingly over-nourished nationalism. Americanness increasingly dominated his postwar vision of global Lebensraum.”61

Such a tone and approach was unfortunate because Smith’s subject is important, and indeed he captured a central point, even if it could have been phrased better: “By one account, then, the American Century took us beyond geography; by another, it was the geographic century. This contradiction between a spaceless and a spatially constituted US globalism is latent in the global history of the twentieth century [and] . . . points to the powerful necessity of understanding the preludes to globalization in a geographical register.”62

Smith responded to the attacks on September 11, 2001, by arguing that they were a local and global event misrepresented as a national tragedy: indeed, that the “need to nationalize September 11 arose from the need to justify war.”63 Smith’s point that the attacks had local, national and global scales worthy of consideration, especially how these scales interlink with one another, is valid. However, his approach was in part set by his clear hostility to the US government and its policies. Furthermore, his point offered an example of how he wanted to assert the overriding importance of a global scale, one that overrode the local and the national. Therefore, to Smith, September 11 was nationalized by the United States, despite, in his view, the attacks being local but having a global meaning. This approach, however, risked privileging the ideology of globalization and the binary divides thereby identified, over the nation. Moreover, the attack on the Pentagon was clearly an attack on the United States, while the other plane brought down by the passengers before it could reach Washington had apparently also been intended for a major national target.64

In turn, Jennifer Hyndman offered a feminist analysis of September 11 in ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (2003):

The events and aftermath of September 11th ineluctably ended the already precarious distinction between domestic space, that within a sovereign state, and more global space where transnational networks, international relations, multilateral institutions, and global corporations operate. . .. Feminists have long argued that private–public distinctions serve to depoliticize the private domestic spaces of “home” compared to more public domains. . . . Terror in the US on September 11th has been met with more terror in Afghanistan. . . . A feminist geopolitics aims to trace the connections between geographical and political locations, exposing investments in the dominant geopolitical rhetoric, in the pursuit of a more accountable and embodied geopolitics that contests the wisdom of violence targeted at innocent civilians, wherever they may be.

Hyndman also argued the need to emphasize links between the CIA and bin Laden, via Pakistan’s ISI, a proposition, however, that did not explain the policies of either. Hyndman’s analysis can be unpacked by noting the consequences of her treatment of the 2001 attacks as supporting the feminist position on the private/public distinction. Hyndman proposed no clear definition of terror, leading the reader to suppose that terror equals violence, and, moreover, as the distinction is denied by feminist critical thinkers, equals violence in the home or by the state. Insofar as the state was allegedly built on patriarchy and violence, for radical feminists it is illegitimate anyway.

US power more generally appears to pose problems for some academics who discuss geopolitics. In “Oil and Blood. The Way to Take over the World,” a piece from World Watch Magazine (2003) reprinted in the second edition of The Geopolitics Reader, Michael Renner concluded: “By rejecting U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol [to reduce climate change, 1997] early in his tenure, George W. Bush sought to throw a wrench into the international machinery set up to address the threat of climate change. By securing the massive flow of cheap oil, he may hope to kill Kyoto. In a perverse sense, a war on Iraq reinforces the assault against the Earth’s climate.”65

A focus on economies was also adopted in Pierre Grou’s Atlas Mondial des Multinationales (1990). This proposed that polarization was a product of the emergence of economic space.66 The assault on US policy was intense. Derek Gregory, in his The Colonial Present (2004), claimed that the use of the “War on Terror” created geopolitical spaces where the United States could use its massive firepower with impunity. Control over space thus became a way of rethinking, or rather newly expressing, standard political themes.

In his Geopolitics. A Very Short Introduction (2007), Klaus Dodds made clear his views on US policy. For example: “In November 2004, much to the disappointment of many US voters, presidential candidate John Kerry was not able to deny the George W. Bush administration a second term.”67 This is a sentence that, while accurate, scarcely admitted that Bush’s re-election reflected a democratic mandate reached by a significant majority of voters, approximately five million more than those who voted for Kerry. Alarm was expressed by Dodds about the policies of the Bush administration,68 and Dodds announced that “the Bush Doctrine based on pre-emption and highly selective multilateralism is the single most important danger confronting the current geopolitical architecture.”69 These were, of course, frequently repeated assertions. However, such repetition did, and does, not amount to demonstration. Inevitably, there was also a “presentist” feel to the argument.

There could also be an explicit call to action, a call that reflected heightened tension during the “War on Terror.” John Agnew, professor of geography at UCLA, was a key figure in the discipline. Co-editor of the journal Geopolitics from 1998 to 2009, he was president of the Association of American Geographers for 2008–2009. Originally published in 1998, the second edition of his Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics (2003), a popular work (i.e., often set as a text) reprinted three times in 2006 and again in 2007, concluded:

What is clear is that the state-territorial conception of power is not a transcendental feature of modern human history but, rather, a historically contingent feature of the relationship between geographical scales in the definition and concentration of political practices. . . . Political geographers and others must finally choose whether to be agents of an imagination that has imposed manifold disasters on humanity or to try to understand geographical communalities and differences in their own right. In other words, it is past time to choose sides. But first we need to understand and overcome our own bad habits of thinking and doing: vincit qui se vincit.70

Agnew’s argument captured the assumption that the world, as it is, is illegitimate and must be changed. As such, these critical thinkers differ in emphasis from realist or classical geopolitical thinkers, such as Mackinder, Mahan, and Spykman—who sought to appreciate the world as it is, and then to describe, prescribe, and predict. The perspective of the latter group was/is that power, conflict, and violence all exist and cannot be banished. Temporary fixes are possible, and indeed desirable, and can be obtained through a balance of power, or collective security, or pre-emptive war, or some action taken within an appreciation that all ends have costs and consequences, and that means can overwhelm even the best intentioned of ends. Thus, realist geopolitics tends to base itself on the argument that principles and practices of strategic thought and action cannot be ignored or wished away. More critically, Mackinder and Spykman and others can be discussed in terms, not only of seeking to appreciate the world as it was, but also of trying to defend it accordingly. They certainly saw themselves as trying to defend a set of values, values presented most clearly in the success of particular states.

Developments in the 2010s, notably in East Asia, the Middle East and over Ukraine, suggest that, as argued by Kissinger in 2014, realist-informed policy analysis is necessary in order to understand the Realpolitik that characterizes inter-state behavior.71 A contrast with the 2000s was readily apparent. When the United States was not only the major power but also the one launching wars, then critical geopolitics took on energy and weight as an aspect of the political debate within the West and, more specifically, as a means of discussing the United States. As the context changed from the late 2000s toward a more multipolar world,72 and notably in the 2010s, so the relevance of this critique became less pertinent. However, US military action, for example, air attacks against Islamic State militants from September 2014, led to a revival of such criticism in some quarters.

In discussing “critical geopolitics,” it would be foolish, as noted above, to neglect the major role of commitment in classical geopolitics, commitment in particular to the state and, at least implicitly, a form of call to action accordingly. What is notable about the self-styled “critical geopolitics” is that the commitment is different in type, especially with an attempt to reorient to “a geography for peace,”73 and is generally far more overt. For example, commitment was a theme in Colin Flint’s Introduction to Geopolitics: “Participation in geopolitics is also a matter of questioning and challenging the ‘common sense’ assumptions generated by the geopolitical structures in general (difference, conflict, etc.) as well as by the representations and actions of key geopolitical agents, the US and British governments for example.”74

The critique here of the application of a binary conception of power politics draws in part on concern about the conventional discussion of imperialism and, indeed, of the role of geographers in the process. This hostile discussion tends, however, to underplay the extent to which imperialism was practiced by non-Western powers as well75 and, moreover, sometimes neglects historical work that emphasizes the complexities of imperialism and the extent to which it entailed compromise and negotiation, which are themes pursued in chapters 2, 3, and 5. These complex “geographies of power”76 cut across the crude strictures too often expressed by those propounding a binary approach.

The explicitly political criticism that is offered draws on the justification that geopolitical discourse is inherently contestable, if not contested, and thereby political. This argument has considerable value, but all too much of the criticism is weakened, even vitiated, by resting on a fixed set of preferences and antagonisms. In particular, difficulty in coming to terms with imperialism in the past, or US power today, poses significant issues. Adopting an inherently critical approach toward such overlapping categories as American public culture, consumerism, the West (an abstraction that somehow tends not to include the critic in question), neoconservatism, imperialist geopolitics and claims to objectivity, is not only repetitive, discursive, and somewhat exhausting, but it also suffers from the difficulties of coming to terms with these forces and categories in subsequent analysis—other than in a somewhat crude fashion that sometimes relies on problematic theory, scant use of evidence and argument by assertion.

The New Imperialism (2003) by David Harvey provided an instructive example. A former member of the Oxford School of Geography who went on to teach at Johns Hopkins University before becoming distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, Harvey (who was much influenced by Marx’s priorities)77 based his book on the Clarendon Lectures he delivered in Oxford in 2003. In the preface, he acknowledged the help of Neil Smith in shaping his insight. Seeking to expose “deeper currents” in US policy, Harvey stressed “All About Oil,” the title of his first chapter; he argued that Bush’s foreign policy was designed “to impose a new sense of social order at home,” established a binary divide between “accumulation by dispossession,” as a result of neoliberal policies, and “an even rising tide of global resistance,” and presented geopolitics as the product of economic forces:

[T]he really big issue is what happens to surplus capitals generated within subnational regional economies when they cannot find profitable employment anywhere within the state. This is, of course, the heart of the problem that generates pressures for imperialist practices in the inter-state system. The evident corollary of all this is that geopolitical conflicts would almost certainly arise out of the molecular processes of capital accumulation no matter what the state powers thought they were about. . . . that the political state, in advanced capitalism, has to spend a good deal of effort and consideration on how to manage the molecular flows. . . . It will, in short, necessarily engage in geopolitical struggle and resort, when it can, to imperialist practices.78

While offering a dynamic account of the state that was different from that of simple control over territory, such an approach to US policy adopted the very Manichaeism for which the Bush administration, and also neoconservative thought in general, could with reason be heavily criticized. Indeed, aside from marked differences between states, the 2000s and 2010s also saw the continuing role of nongovernmental organizations, such as Oxfam, which had their own geopolitics, as well as the strength of other transnational movements and pressures. “Critical geopolitics” is, in part, an aspect of this remolding and representation of interests and spatiality but, notably in the focus on America, some of the work can also fail to engage adequately with the extent of this development.

More widely, the strident and partisan approach adopted by some writers unfortunately ensures that the value of “critical geopolitics” will be less than its undoubted potential as an arresting call for a new departure in the subject. Alongside Manichaeism, comes the problem of projecting one’s own frames of reference onto others. A historical account of geopolitical thought reveals a long tradition of doing so, one that predates “critical geopolitics,” but it is a practice that needs to be questioned, if not resisted. To do so is not, however, to imply the possibility of objective perfection as an alternative. Indeed, in their Historical Atlas of Louisiana (2003), Charles Goins and John Caldwell commented on the tendency to advance present-day values, notably in commenting on the impact of technology. They proposed, instead, that change takes place only within the context of its own time and space, which, they urged, should be the basis of an analysis that moved away from present-day values.79

It would be misleading to imply a coherence for all the literature that could be referred to as “critical geopolitics.” Moreover, the policies of the Bush government (and of its British ally) were debated (and criticized) across the political spectrum, including on the Right. For example, the supposed nature of US policy as imperial (a long-standing theme given new energy in the 2000s) was argued widely in a literature that brought together politics, geography, and history, with some of this literature critical, and part of it supportive. The extent to which these works had a geopolitical aspect varied, as there was often more of an interest in characterizing the central ethos and thrust of policy than its spatial dynamic and manifestations, but the attempt to move beyond the analytical confines of the Cold War was valuable.80 In an important work, American Empire. The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (2002), Andrew Bacevich searched out themes and continuities that moved him away from turning points predicated on the start and end of the Cold War, and also looked at the relationship between America’s global power and her domestic political culture, a key geopolitical theme. He concluded: “The question that urgently demands attention . . . is not whether the United States has become an imperial power. The question is what sort of empire they intend theirs to be. For policymakers to persist in pretending otherwise . . . is to increase the likelihood that the answers they come up with will be wrong. That way lies not just the demise of the US empire but great danger for what used to be known as the American republic.”81

Bacevich considered how American policy had developed with a pursuit of morality increasingly linked to the furtherance of what he saw as a potent imperium: “[T]he politicoeconomic concept to which the United States adheres today has not changed in a century: the familiar quest for an ‘open world,’ the overriding imperative of commercial integration, confidence that technology endows the United States with a privileged position in that order, and the expectation that American military might will preserve order and enforce the rules. . . . Those policies reflect a single-minded determination to extend and perpetuate American political, economic, and cultural hegemony—usually referred to as ‘leadership’—on a global scale.”82

Bacevich threw light on the extent to which the defenders of liberal internationalism had offered a mythic rendition of America’s ascent to global power, specifically what he termed the myth of the reluctant superpower. Bacevich also showed how, as the American imperium focused on globalization, so those who resisted the latter were seen as opponents of the United States. He argued that after 1945 US writers and policymakers, inheriting British ideas from the nineteenth century, focused on free trade and the unfettered movement of money, as political as well as economic goods and goals, and thus as central goods and goals for government. The state thus became a protection system for an economic worldview that, in turn, helped fund this US state. Rather than (mistakenly) seeing this relationship as the product of an economic conspiracy and class self-interest, Bacevich focused, instead, on the ideas that played a crucial role, specifically on the pursuit of a benign and mutually beneficial world order that reflected an imperium, rather than an empire of control, constraint, and coercion. The democratic objective at the heart of US capitalism was seen by Bacevich as both cause and consequence of freedom.

Drawing attention to rival geopolitical understanding of the West and the Anglosphere, Bacevich located the US determination to overthrow the European colonial empires in terms of the American hope that newly independent peoples would support democratic capitalism and thus look to the United States. This approach can be regarded as a foolish aspiration, although the alternatives were not welcome, as any consideration of the US dilemma at the time of the Anglo–French intervention against Egypt in the Suez Crisis of 1956 would indicate. Bacevich underlined the degree to which this US economic goal, seen at once as in America’s and the world’s interest, and as conducive to liberty as well as prosperity, provided a continuous theme that bridged the close of the Cold War. Democratic capitalism had to be supported and, if necessary, fought for. Yet, Bacevich argued that, in the 1990s, a greater reliance on coercion as an instrument of US policy, and the tendency of serving officers to displace civilians in implementing foreign policy, were manifestations of the increasing militarization of US statecraft after the Cold War: “Before the 1990s ended, evidence of civil–military dysfunction had become increasingly difficult to ignore. Meanwhile, events had exposed the limitations of the proconsular system—and of Americans’ reliance on gunboats and Gurkhas to police the world.”83

That last was a phrase that looked back to earlier British policy, although it was a less than adequate characterization of this policy. Bacevich took his arguments forward in the Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008). There was also a particularly pronounced, persistent political preference on the part of the officer corps, one toward the Republicans.

Moving from Bacevich back to “critical geopolitics,” the critique of modern US power, its geopolitical imagination and spatial manifestations, was matched by criticism of past geopolitical arguments that were held to anticipate modern neoconservative attitudes. Thus, Turner’s thesis of the frontier was challenged in part for ignoring economic, social, political, and ethnic divisions on the frontier, and also because it failed to consider victims adequately, especially Native Americans. Both charges were well-founded. The idea of the West as a site for contest within US society, specifically over land and profit, was advanced by Patricia Limerick in The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1988). In the striking Atlas of Native History (1981), Jack Forbes offered a dramatic repudiation of the conventions of US historical cartography. He employed the “names used by the native people themselves” and sought to “present real political conditions,” ignoring the claims of white governmental units, which, he argued, had come to compose a “mythological map.” Forbes also represented his atlas as part of an intellectual process that the country had to go through, “discovering truth free of ethnic bias and colonialist chauvinism.”84 In addition, the different geopolitical visions and practices of Native American societies attracted attention.85 In a reaction to Frederick Jackson Turner (see chapter 6), the concept of frontiers, rather than the frontier, has since been advanced as a more relevant concept.86

THE GEOPOLITICS OF TIME

The major role of continuity and memory in framing responses to crises, not least highlighting perceptions of national interest and, thus, the strategic nature and resonances (or memories) of particular geographical (and chronological) spaces, is another theme to emerge from recent scholarship. In Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (2002), Jeffrey Record showed how historical lessons, particularly Munich (1938) and Vietnam (1963–1975), were misinterpreted in the United States, and he suggested that “the tendency to regard violent nationalism in the Third World as the product of a centrally-directed international Communist conspiracy was a strategic error of the first magnitude.”87 This tendency reflected, and helped ensure, a difficulty in confronting events that were without obvious parallel in the period being plundered for examples. Thus, alongside the role of space, the geopolitics of time and memory play a key role. This is an element, moreover, that is emphasized if the stress is on the role of perception in assessing, not only power but, more particularly, threats. Thus, the linkage of history with geography is of major significance.

In part, the geopolitics of time and memory play a key role because commentators and politicians frequently continue writing and remain influential for many decades. Thus, Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor under President Carter in 1977–1980, and an academic who was a prominent user of the term geopolitics, published The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership in 2004. The previous winter, in an article for The National Interest, he had employed the concept as well as language of geopolitics in referring to “the crucial swathe of Eurasia between Europe and the Far East” as the “new ‘Global Balkans,’” a phrase intended “to draw attention to the geopolitical similarity between the traditional European Balkans of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the unstable region that currently extends from approximately the Suez Canal to Xinjiang [northwest China]. In the case of both areas, internal instability has served as a magnet for external major power intervention and rivalry[;] . . . the ferment within the Muslim world must be viewed primarily in a regional rather than a global perspective, and through a geopolitical rather than a theological prism.”88 Subsequently, Brzezinski referred in the article to “the current geopolitical earthquake in the Persian Gulf.”89

In practice, this language served Brzezinski as a call for diplomatic action and, in particular, for an active strategic partnership between a politically mobilized United States and a determined and united EU, a situation that had not pertained at the time of the Iraq Crisis of 2003. The extent, however, to which the vocabulary of geopolitics really advanced the argument in this or other cases is unclear. However, in terms of rhetorical strategy, whether the vocabulary used advanced a particular argument was a matter of the assumptions of the likely audience and their likely perception of the use of this vocabulary. As a reminder, moreover, of the malleability of geopolitical perspectives, the power politics of this “crucial swathe” were to be reexamined by Robert Kaplan, a prolific American author who took geopolitics into a more popular format, but this time from the very different perspective of power centered on the Indian Ocean.90 This malleability is one of the most striking features of geopolitics.

CURRENT GEOPOLITICS

Current geopolitics poses analytical problems, not least because the long-term is more than a series of short-terms. It is understandable that commentators frame questions and answers in terms of immediate issues—the September-11-ization of US policy or, for example, in 2013 the responses to the developing crises in Syria and the East China Sea and, in 2015, those same crises but also Iraq and Ukraine. These issues are then taken to support particular arguments in international trends.

It is also necessary to consider issues in international relations in the longer term. Internationalism challenges many traditional assumptions (as it confirms others). The extraordinary growth of the US national debt and of foreign borrowing under the George W. Bush administrations (2001–2009), amply demonstrated this, as it arose in part from the cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars,91 combined with a failure to raise taxes. Foreign borrowing also altered the geopolitics of international finance, and especially the fiscal and political relationships within the dollar world. Foreign ownership of US debt created a new geopolitics of US international concern, notably over the policies, stability, and security of debt-holders.92 Thus, Taiwan emerged as of particular significance. As a different point, for the imperial power, the United States, the internationalism made necessary by global interdependence posed, and poses, the difficulty of responding to the expectations of allies and, more seriously, to those whose alliance is sought, as well as the issue of how best to answer calls for decision-making, judgment, and arbitration through international bodies that the United States both distrusts and yet finds it necessary to use.

Alongside these issues is the question of the concepts that can be employed in discussing international relations. For example, there are the ongoing problems of what geopolitics means, and to whom, and of the degree of agency involved. When Charles Kupchan wrote, “The North-South divide will become a geopolitical fault line only if America turns it into one,”93 there was the commonplace assumption that agency, and therefore responsibility and blame, rested essentially with the United States, or had done, or should do. This approach, however, taken by many critics outside the United States, as well as by most American commentators, underplays the role of others, deliberate or unintentional, and its interaction with US policy. More systematically, it is appropriate to ask to what extent geopolitical argument at the international level is overly dependent on the idea of a hegemonic power and on the responses to that power; or, alternatively, on the idea of a binary struggle between two potential hegemonies.

For other powers in the 2000s and 2010s there was the problem of how best to protect and further national goals, whether or not conceptualized as traditional while, at the same time, reacting to the demands of the hegemonic power or powers at a time that it or they appeared particularly assertive. This issue is a key geopolitical quandary, but one that is generally underrated due to the tendency to focus on the leading power, or on the leading power and its principal rival. In practice, the global range and application, and the regional implementation of US policy, frequently competed, and compete, with the particular geopolitical concerns of individual states. For example, America sought to hamper Brazil’s interest in a hemispheric security based on military build-up, including nuclear capability.94 In a different context, notably with a pronounced ideological clash at play, Venezuela under Hugo Chávez, president from 1999 to 2013, had a distinct geopolitics. This conflated a traditional left-wing Latin American opposition to the United States with the particular dynamics of Venezuela and Latin America in the 2000s, especially Venezuela’s oil wealth and competition with Colombia. Venezuela under Chávez also sought to create a regional anti-US movement, notably with Bolivia, Cuba, and Ecuador, as well as to adapt to changes at the global level, not least in aligning with other opponents of the United States such as Iran. There was a geopolitical dimension to this politics, but it is unclear that it should be analyzed in geopolitical terms.

As a recent instance of the interplay of geopolitics and politics, Ukraine and Armenia in 2013 rejected, under Russian pressure, the EU offer of signing up to the Eastern Partnership. Free trade was to have been provided in return for democratic reforms. In what was explicitly presented as a geopolitical competition, Russia, instead, sponsored a Eurasian customs union that in part represented a revival of the Soviet Union. The 2014 overthrow, under popular pressure, of the Ukrainian government led to the rejection of this relationship with Russia, only to be followed by successful Russian military intervention, first in Crimea, and then in favor of separatist groups in eastern Ukraine.

At a very different scale, geopolitics involves the formulating, shaping and sustaining of distinct local identities as part of a way in which local autonomies, possibilities, and claims are advanced and given a geographic identity. An example is provided by the Padania of the Lega Nord (Northern League) in Italy. In 1996, Umberto Bossi, the president of this alliance of northern Italian regional parties, proclaimed the Republic of Padania, with the intention of establishing a state in Italy north of the River Po. Although there was widespread dissatisfaction with the redistribution of money to poorer southern Italy, the idea of a separate republic did not gain traction. The spatial politics of identity and grievance are important in the local process of managing more complex and larger-scale pressures and demands. A frequent, but not invariable, element of this spatial politics is an opposition to what is presented as globalization. Frequently, this opposition to globalization entails a transfer and reconceptualization of earlier opposition to imperial structures and demands. Thus, geopolitics serves as a spatial envelope for changing political pressures, and for the new expression of long-standing political tensions that have a spatial character.

A consideration of such issues underlines the emotional and symbolic as well as pragmatic, political, military, and economic issues faced by an interventionist internationalism. Addressing both goals and methods, geopolitics is a potentially valuable analytical tool in considering these issues. At the same time, it has weaknesses. For example, geopolitical discussion can as much lead to an elision between goals and policies as it can help maintain a rigorous distinction between the two. However, what are presented by contemporaries as geopolitical means, or operational policies, can become ends or strategic goals in themselves by gaining symbolic and practical weight.

The extent to which classical geopolitical theory is still valid for the post–Cold War period is problematic. On the one hand, the concept of mobilizing a nation’s mass human resources to protect the “organic state” from military or ideological conquest by foreign aggressors seems better suited to periods when great imperial systems were competing for global primacy, and notably so if they were linked to rival ideologies, whether liberal-democratic, fascist, or communist. On the other hand, both real and perceived spatial considerations continue to play a major role in power politics irrespective of the ideological dimension. For example, definite consequences and issues arise from the distribution of Kurds, Sunnis, Shia and other groups, and this situation was made very clear in the Middle East from 2003, leading to repeated problems for states as they sought to minimize or thwart the results of ethnic and religious difference.

Spatial considerations play a role within a dynamic context that is greatly affected by major changes in, for example, resource availability, trade routes, and military capability. The last can be seen with Israel’s military commitment to retaining land conquered in 1967. Geopolitical factors focused on security constituted a prominent Israeli argument against the demand that Israel should return occupied land. For example, the argument used to be that the Golan Heights gained in 1967 (as opposed simply to the positions from which Israel was shelled up to 1967) should be kept because from Mt. Hermon it was possible to look deep into Syria and Lebanon and keep an eye on Syrian preparations to attack; also, with the tank being the backbone of the Israeli army, the Golan had to be retained to provide space for concentrating forces and for maneuver. These arguments are still made, but they are now less valid as it is possible to look into Syria from space, while, with attack helicopters, Israel does not to the same extent need the land for maneuvering. Moreover, with the Israeli doctrine of warfare becoming more similar to the US concept of “Rapid Dominance,” and with firepower replacing concentration of forces, land, while still significant, is less clearly important than hitherto in military operations.

The same is the case with the West Bank. Immediately after its conquest and occupation in 1967, the Israelis came up with the Allon Plan (drafted in June 1967) to keep much of the West Bank and to build settlements along the River Jordan in order to stop a potential attack by an eastern bloc of Syria, Iraq and Jordan. However, missiles do not really care much about such buffer zones, and the strategic, operational and tactical arguments for such a zone was challenged by the use of rocket attacks on Israeli cities, a policy that began with Iraqi Scud attacks in 1991. In turn, the arguments employed were qualified by the Israeli use of the “Iron Dome” interception system to block most attacks, notably during the Gaza crisis of 2014. As far as the idea of a buffer is concerned, there were also inconsistencies. One neighbor, Jordan, has peaceful relations with Israel, while hostile Iran lacks a common border with her.

The changing validity of a military strategic rationale for continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Golan Heights throws attention back onto political debates within Israel focused on the need for, and value of, Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, and on the nature of peace that might be possible, and the role of Israeli withdrawal in such a peace settlement. These points serve as a reminder that the geopolitics of a particular question has a number of often-clashing angles. This can be seen, more generally, in the case of weapons procurement and systems as, for example, with the discussion, in the 2000s and 2010s, of whether there is a “geopolitical niche” that requires a British nuclear deterrent separate to that of US cover.95

THE MARITIME DIMENSION

Given the significance of the maritime dimension in the geopolitical ideas of Mackinder, and his stress on the changes affecting a navy’s strategic potency, it is instructive to revisit the topic. In the face of air power and then rockets, the map projections and perspectives, and linked assumptions associated with the great age of naval power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (for which Mahan provided key geopolitical ideas) came to appear as redundant as the global transoceanic empires it had sustained and displayed. To survive, navies apparently had to adapt. This was an argument pursued over the following century, first with an emphasis on aircraft carriers, notably from the 1940s, and subsequently with submarine-based rocket launchers, especially from the 1960s. Moreover, as a further erosion of naval distinctiveness, “jointness” came to the fore in the military in the late twentieth century, as both doctrine and, less successfully, practice.

Irrespective of this adaptability, the idea of aerial self-sufficiency was taken forward further in the 1990s and early 2000s as a key aspect of what was termed by its US originators and advocates the “Revolution in Military Affairs.”96 Air power appeared best to provide the speed and responsiveness that would give force to what was proclaimed to be a revolution in information technology. Midair refueling apparently provided a power-projection for aircraft that made carriers, however dramatic a display of naval power, less relevant.

From a very different direction, the sea also appeared geopolitically more marginal. Unprecedented and continuing population growth, combined with the breakdown of pre-existing patterns of social and political deference, increased the complexity of government. This situation contributed to what was termed, from the 1990s, “wars among the people.” These wars, or at least serious unrest, led in conflict, and in planning and procurement for conflict, to a focus both on major urban centers and on marginal regions that were also difficult to control. Again, this focus scarcely corresponded to an emphasis on the sea. “War among the people”—a term that originated with Rupert Smith, a British general who rose to be deputy supreme commander of Allied Powers Europe, in 1998–2001—was very much a doctrine that suited armies, which propounded it.97 This doctrine left navies apparently redundant, their ships as one with the heavy tanks now deemed superfluous. Air power and rapidly deployed ground troops appeared to provide the speed, precision and force required. The geopolitics of service politics was clearly seen to be important in this debate, as in other ones.

Moreover, this shift from naval power appeared demonstrated in the 1990s by a series of developments. These included the continued decline of the once-foremost naval power, Britain, as well as the extent to which the United States and Russia, the leading naval powers of the 1980s, no longer focused on this branch of their military. In particular, there was a major rundown in the US navy, which nevertheless was even more the foremost navy, while much of its Russian counterpart literally rusted away. The disastrous loss of the Russian submarine Kursk in 2000 suggested that Russia lacked the capacity to maintain its ships effectively. In addition, the degree to which, in the 1990s, the navy and the oceans were not then the prime commitment (militarily, politically and culturally) of the rising economic powers, China and India, appeared striking.

These indications however, were, and are, misleading; trends in the 2010s pointed in other directions. In practice, naval power remains both very important and with highly significant potential for the future. In addition, any reading of the recent past and of the present that minimizes the role of this power, both neglects the place of naval power in power-projection and risks extrapolating a misleading impression into the future.

Geography, as ever, is a key element. Here, the prime factor is the location of population growth and the related economic activities of production and consumption. Most of this growth has occurred in coastal and littoral regions and, more generally, within 150 miles of the coast. There has been significant inland expansion of the area of settlement in some countries, notably Brazil, as well as population growth in already heavily settled inland areas of the world, particularly in northern India. Nevertheless, the growth of coastal and littoral regions is more notable. In part, this growth has been linked to the move from the land that has been so conspicuous as gasoline-powered machinery became more common in agriculture from the mid-twentieth century. As a result, rural areas lost people: in the United States (particularly the Great Plains) and Western Europe from midcentury, and in Eastern Europe and China from the 1990s. The process is incomplete—especially, but not only, in India and Japan—but it is an aspect of the greater significance of cities, most of which are situated on navigable waterways, principally on the coast or relevant estuaries. Shanghai, not Beijing, is the center of Chinese economic activity, and Mumbai, not Delhi, its Indian counterpart.

The economic growth of these cities is linked to their positions in the global trading system. In this system maritime trade remains foremost. The geopolitical implications of the economic value of seaborne trade require emphasis. In large part, this value is due to the flexibility of this trade and its related transport and storage systems. Containerization from the 1950s proved a key development, as it permitted the ready movement and transshipment of large quantities of goods without high labor needs or costs, and with a low rate of pilfering and damage. Air transport lacked these characteristics, and the fuel cost of bulk transport by air made it unviable other than for high-value, perishable products, such as cut flowers. The significance of container vessels was enhanced by the ability and willingness of the shipbuilding industry to respond to, and shape, the new opportunity.

As a result, qualifying assumptions about the centrality of land routes, assumptions that were at the fore in Mackinder’s 1904 “Pivot” lecture, the character and infrastructure of global trade by sea has been transformed since the 1950s. Moreover, this transformation continues and is readily apparent round the world. A good example is provided by the massed cranes in the new container facilities at the docks of Colombo, as well as the new harbor being built with Chinese help further along the Sri Lankan coast, and the numerous container ships passing by off the southern coast of the island.

Politics played a key role in this transformation. The development of the global economy after the end of the Cold War focused on integration into the Western-dominated maritime trading system of states that had been, or still were, communist: for example, China and Vietnam, or that had adopted a communist- (or at least socialist-) influenced preference for planning: for example, India. Furthermore, in the 1990s and 2000s, the general trend was toward free-market liberalism, and against autarky, protectionism and barter or controlled trading systems. This trend remains far from complete, but it encouraged a major growth in trade, notably of Chinese exports to the United States and Western Europe. This trend remained significant in the 2000s and early 2010s, despite political tensions, particularly between the United States and China, as well as the consequences of the serious global economic crisis that began in 2008. Crucially, that crisis did not lead to a protectionism comparable to that of the 1930s. Both prior to the crisis and during it, the focus on trade between East Asia and the United States ensured that maritime trade expanded greatly.

Speculation about developing trade from East Asia overland to Western Europe has not been brought to fruition at any scale. Only the Trans-Siberian Railway was in a position to provide a link. To that extent, Mackinder’s analysis proved flawed. The ambitious railway-construction plans of China notwithstanding, there is no sign that this will change. The Chinese railway boom has much to do with high-speed lines to carry passengers and troops. It is driven by politics rather than economics, as with the building of a line to Lhasa in Tibet. Overland trade from the Far East to Europe has not prospered for economic as well as political reasons. Railway transport costs remain stubbornly higher than seaborne shipping; indeed, container ships have widened the gap. Chinese railways, old and new, provide no links to Europe.

The growth in trade after World War II, much of it maritime, was linked to the enhanced specialization and integration of production and supply networks that were a consequence of economic liberalism, as well as of the economies of scale and the attraction of locating particular parts of the networks near raw-material sources, transshipment points, or the centers of consumption. This growth was further fuelled by the opportunities and needs linked to population increases. The latter helped ensure that regions hitherto able to produce what they required were obliged now to import goods, not only food and fuel, but also manufactured products. Trade links that would have caused amazement in the nineteenth century, or even the 1950s—such as the export of food from Zambia to the Middle East and from Canada to Japan, or of oil from Equatorial Guinea to China—became significant. Most of the resulting trade was by sea. According to the Financial Times of July 10, 2014, $5,300 billion worth of goods cross the South China Sea by sea each year, which helps explain the sensitivity of threats and developments there. The trade and these threats were the active elements in a regional geopolitics of global economic significance.

Naval power was the key guarantor of this trade and played the role of providing security for what was termed the “global commons.” This concept presented sea power in a far more benign fashion than had been the case when it had been seen as an expression of imperial power.98 Instead, there was an emphasis on shared value. This emphasis was greatly enhanced from the late 2000s in response to a major increase in piracy, notably in the Indian Ocean. This increase exposed the broader implications for maritime trade of specific sites of instability. It was not only that pirates from Somalia proved capable of operating at a considerable distance into the Indian Ocean, but also that their range of operations affected shipping and maritime trade from distant waters. This was not new. Muscat raiders in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had operated from Oman to the west coast of India and to the Swahili coast of Africa, challenging European trade to India. However, in the 2000s, the challenge appeared greater, both because piracy had largely been stamped out in the nineteenth century, and because the scale of international maritime trade and the number of states directly involved were far larger.

If the operations against Somali piracy—operations that reduced its extent and enabled states such as China and India to display their naval power and train their crews—proved a clear demonstration of the importance of naval power and its ability to counter failure on land, its potential significance was further demonstrated by the expansion of piracy elsewhere, notably off Nigeria in the 2010s. This threat suggested a multilayered need for naval power. For most of the twentieth century, naval power had very much been a form of power dominated by the major states, while most other states, instead, focused on their armies, not least for internal control and policing. In the early twenty-first century, however, such control and policing increasingly also encompassed maritime tasks. Control over refugee flows, the maintenance of fishing rights, and the prevention of drug smuggling, proved prime instances. As a consequence, naval power became as much a matter of the patrol boat as of the guided-missile destroyer. Drug money is a threat to the stability of Caribbean states which, however, have tiny navies. As a result, it is the navies of major powers that have a Caribbean presence: the United States, Britain and France, each of which also has colonies there that play a key role, one that is greatly facilitated by aerial surveillance and interception capabilities.

Naval action against pirates, drug smugglers and human traffickers, the last a particularly major task for the navies of Australia, Greece, Italy, and Spain, is reminiscent of the moral agenda of nineteenth-century naval power. Such action is also an implementation of sovereignty as well as of specific governmental and political agendas.

Moreover, the utility of naval power in the early twenty-first century in part reflected the extent to which the “end of history” that had been signposted in 1989 with the close of the Cold War proved a premature sighting. Instead, there was a recurrence of international tension focused on traditional interests. Territorial waters proved a significant source of dispute, not least when linked to hopes over oil and other resources. Indeed, by 2014, there were key disputes over competing claims in the East and South China Seas, disputes that drove major regional naval buildups, particularly between China and Japan, but also involving the states of Southeast Asia, notably Vietnam and Malaysia. These disputes were characterized by aggressive Chinese steps, as in 2012 when China took over the Scarborough Shoal west of the Philippines. Moreover, control of the naval base of Sevastopol and over maritime and drilling rights in the Black Sea were important in the crisis over Crimea and, more generally, Ukraine in early 2014. Once the Russians gained control over Crimea, they announced an expansion and modernization of their Black Sea fleet, with new warships and submarines.

Concern about coastal waters encouraged a drive to ensure the necessary naval power. The disputes over the East and South China Seas and the Black Sea, and the prospect of their becoming more serious, or of other disputes following, led to a determination on the part of regional powers to step up naval strength and preparedness. In the case of Japan, there was, with the National Security Strategy and Mid-Term Defense Program formulated in 2013, a major strategic shift in focus from the defense of Hokkaido—the northern island threatened, in any war, by Russia—to concern about the southwest part of the Japanese archipelago and in particular the offshore islands in the East China Sea. This led to a greater emphasis on the navy and air force, and on a more mobile, flexible and versatile power-profile. Moreover, military exercises were increasingly geared to maritime concerns and naval power. Regional disputes in East Asian waters also directed attention to the situation as far as other, nonregional, powers, principally the United States, were concerned. These powers were troubled both about these regions and about the possibility that disputes over sovereignty would become more serious in other parts of the world, for example, the Arctic.

As a result, the nature and effectiveness of naval power increasingly came to the fore as a topic in the mid-2010s. So also did the extent to which governments and societies identified with this power. This was of particular significance in East and South Asia as, with the exception of Japan, there was little recent history of a regional naval power. Moreover, the relevant Japanese history was complicated by the legacy of World War II and the provisions of the subsequent peace treaty.

CHINA

However, the situation was transformed from the 2000s as a result of changes in China. In part, as an important aspect of a presentation of a geopolitical role, there was an emphasis on past naval activity, notably the early fifteenth-century voyages of Zheng He into the Indian Ocean. Indeed, the Zheng He is the name of the Chinese officer-training ship. There was also a presentation of Chinese naval strength as a product of government initiative, an aspect of great-power status, and a sign of modernity. These elements were seen in the treatment of history, which thereby played a major role in geopolitics. In particular, Da Guo Jue Qi (The Rise of Great Powers), a Chinese government study finished in 2006, attempted to determine the reasons why Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United States became great powers. This study was apparently inspired by a directive from Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, to determine which factors enabled great powers to grow most rapidly. The study drew together government and academic methods—as many scholars were consulted, some reportedly briefing the Politburo—and popular interest. In 2006 a twelve-part program was twice broadcast on state-owned television channel, and an eight-volume book series was produced, which sold rapidly. The president of the television channel made the utilitarian purpose of the series clear. The book project argued the value of naval power, but also the need for a dynamic economy with international trade linking the two, a factor seen as suggesting a lesson about the value of international cooperation.

Chinese naval strategy, nevertheless, focuses not on the history of other states, but on that of China. The traditional land-based focus on “interior strategies”—the development of expanding rings of security around a state’s territory—has been applied to the maritime domain in a major expansion of geopolitical concern. In part, this is in response to a reading of Chinese history in which it is argued that, from the 1830s, the ability of foreign powers to apply pressure from the sea has greatly compromised Chinese interests and integrity. “Near China” has therefore been extended as a concept to cover the nearby seas. This provides both an enhancement of security and a sense of historical validity, one that offers a mission and purpose to the Communist Party.

However, the definition and implementation of the relevant attitudes and policies ensure there are both considerable problems and mission creep, as the security of what may seem to be the near seas apparently requires regional hegemony and an ability to repel any potential oceanic-based power, which at present means the United States. The Chinese desire may be motivated by security, but it challenges that of all others and, crucially, does not adopt or advance a definition of security that is readily capable of compromise or, indeed, negotiation. In part, this is a reflection of the Chinese focus on “hard power,” a power very much presented by naval strength as a support for nonmilitarized coercion in the shape of maritime law enforcement. The Chinese navy offers a force to support the application of psychological and political pressure. However, a real and apparent willingness to resort to force creates for others a key element of uncertainty.99

The Chinese emphasis on naval strength as a key aspect of national destiny, and the rapid buildup of the Chinese navy, have helped drive the pace for other states, leading Japan and India, in particular, to put greater emphasis on a naval buildup, while also ensuring that the United States focuses more of its attention on the region. In 2015, the Australians turned to Japan in order to provide a new generation of submarines that are clearly designed against China, while China, in turn, was reported to be discussing buying Russia’s newest submarine, the Amur-1650. Talk in 2014 that conflict over the East China Sea might lead to a broader international struggle, with the United States backing Japan, underlined the significance of maritime issues and power. The previous year, the United States agreed to base surveillance drones and reconnaissance planes in Japan so as to patrol the region’s waters from the air. China’s development of anti-ship missiles capable of challenging US carriers (particularly the BF-21F intermediate-range ballistic missile fitted with a maneuvering reentry head containing an anti-ship seeker) poses a major problem. As a result, US carriers may have to operate well to the east of Taiwan, beyond the range of the US Navy’s F-35s jet aircraft. Chinese analysts emphasized the geopolitical value of Taiwan to China’s maritime perimeter.100

The ready willingness of Chinese Internet users to identify with these issues reflected their salience in terms of national identity and interests. Moreover, this willingness suggested a pattern that would also be adopted in other conflicts over maritime rights. They proved readily graspable. The Chinese government is struggling to ride the tiger of popular xenophobia. In China, as earlier with Tirpitz and the Flottenverein in Germany, popular support for naval expansion has proved easier to arouse than to calm.

Thus, the utility of naval strength was symbolic, ideological and cultural, as much as it was based on “realist” criteria of military, political and economic parity and power. It has been ever thus, but became more so in an age of democratization when ideas of national interest and identity had to be reconceptualized for domestic and international publics. The ability to deploy and demonstrate power was important in this equation, and navies proved particularly well suited to it, not least as they lacked the ambiguous record associated with armies and air forces after the interventionist wars of the 2000s and as a consequence of the role of some armies in civil control.

Therefore, 110 years after it was delivered, Mackinder’s lecture appears not prescient but an instance of the weakness of theory when confronted by economic, technological and military realities. China, not Russia, is the key power in Mackinder’s “heartland,” but this is a China with global trading interests and oceanic power aspirations, and not, as Russia seemed to be, the successor to the interior power controlling some supposed “pivot,” centered in West Siberia.

NAVAL CAPABILITY

The likely future trajectory of Chinese naval ambitions and power is currently a (if not the) foremost question for commentators focused on naval power politics,101 and that itself is a clear instance of the continuing relevance of naval strength. China’s navy has proved far more successful than either armies or air forces in combining the cutting-edge, apocalyptic lethality of nuclear weaponry with the ability to wield power successfully at the subnuclear level. Moreover, this ability is underlined by the range, scale and persistence of naval power, all of which provide, alongside tactical and operational advantages, a strategic capability not matched by the other branches. Despite aerial refueling, air power lacks the continuous presence, and thus persistence and durability, that warships can convey. Moreover, operating against coastal targets, warships offer firepower and a visual presence that is more impressive than that of many armies.

The significance of coastal regions underlines the value of amphibious power-projection.102 In turn, the potential offered is affected by technological change. In July 2014, in an exercise in Hawaii, the US Marine Corps displayed the prototype of the Ultra Heavy-lift Amphibious Connector, a vehicle designed to cut through the waves in order to carry vehicles to the coast. The tracks are made from captured-air foam blocks that stick out like flippers. The full-size version is designed to be 84 ft. long and 34 ft. high and should be able to transport at least four vehicles. Also in 2014, the building by France for Russia of Mistral-class warships intended to support amphibious operations created a serious issue when an arms embargo of Russia was proposed. Such warships were seen as a particular threat in the Black Sea. In 2015, France refused to supply the warships.

At the same time, the ability of land-based power to challenge navies is much greater than was the situation when Mackinder was writing. Indeed, his views, both of the relationship between land and sea and of the capacity of technological change, did not really comprehend this challenge. It had begun as soon as cannon greatly enhanced the capacity of coastal defenses to resist naval attack. The major improvement in artillery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries considerably increased this capacity, and the surviving sites of coastal defense—for example, off Auckland designed against Japanese warships—remain formidably impressive. In the twentieth century, the range and nature of such defense was increased first by aircraft and then by missiles. Both are now central to the equations of naval power projection, and not least in the key choke-points, such as the Taiwan Strait and the Strait of Hormuz. Moreover, longer-range weapons allow ships to project power far inshore, but at the same time they permit coastal defenses to project power far offshore, and the limited number of naval targets and the greater vulnerability of warships mean that this range factor does not balance out capabilities.

Indeed, this capability has led to the suggestion that the very nature of naval power has changed with consequent implications for the ranking of the major powers. In particular, whereas air power, especially at the cutting-edge, is dominated by the major powers, and notably the United States, the possibility of lesser powers using new technologies to counteract existing naval advantages is significant. This reflects a longstanding aspiration and practice, for example, as seen with the ideas of the French Jeune École in the 1880s and of Soviet naval planners in the 1920s.103 The extent to which small and/or unconventional forces may be as effective in their chosen spheres as major navies therefore raises the question whether this sphere can extend in order to deny the latter advantage in large areas or, more plausibly, to make that advantage very costly, not least at a time of rising price tags for cutting-edge warships. That is the doctrine that Iran, with its policy of, and procurement for, asymmetrical swarm attacks, appears to be pursuing. Advanced C-series Chinese-supplied missiles make the Strait of Hormuz a choke point vulnerable to Iranian power, a risk exacerbated by the availability of Russian Kilo-class submarines, as well as by Iran’s mine-laying capability, speedboats, midget submarines, and cruise missiles. The possible assertion of naval power in this fashion complicates the traditional military hierarchy and legacy.

In most states, navies have far less political clout than armies and play a smaller role in national self-image. This is the case, for example, of Turkey, Iran, India, Israel, and Pakistan. Yet, issues of military need and power politics complicate such situations, as with Iran. Another situation arises from India’s quest for a regional political role judged commensurate to its population size, economic development, resource concerns and political pretensions, as well as acute concerns about China and rivalry with Pakistan. This quest ensures that India will continue to seek naval strength. Warships provide states with the ability to act at a distance, notably in establishing blockades, as with Israel and Sri Lanka.

There is, however, an important contrast between the extension of national jurisdiction over the seas (which covered more than a third of their extent in 2008) and the fact that many states cannot ensure their own maritime security. This is the case for Oceania, the Caribbean, and Indian Ocean states such as Mauritius, the Maldives and the Seychelles. These weaknesses encourage the major powers to maintain naval strength and intervene, but have also led to initiatives for regional solutions, such as that supported by India from 2007.

There are therefore a number of levels of naval asymmetry. The possibility of making advantages in naval capability, notably, but not only, those enjoyed by the leading naval powers, too costly to use, or, indeed, maintain, is enhanced by the extent to which the procurement structure of naval power has driven leading navies toward fewer, more expensive vessels. For example, each of the new British D class Type 45 destroyers, the first of which was launched in 2006, has more firepower than the combined fleet of eight Type 42 destroyers they replaced, destroyers that came into service in 1978. This is because the missile system of the D class can track and attack multiple incoming aircraft and missiles. The successful maintenance in service of each of such vessels thus becomes more significant, and this enhances vulnerability, irrespective of the specific weapons characteristics of these vessels and their likely opponents. The availability of fewer, larger and more expensive warships reduces their individual vulnerability, but makes them more difficult to risk. A similar process has affected aircraft.

The cost element helped drive US military retrenchment from the 1990s. Having risen rapidly in the early and mid-2000s, US military spending fell with the end of the commitment in Iraq and its rundown in Afghanistan. The size of the accumulated federal debt and of the annual budget deficit had an impact as did the political preference, notably under the Obama administration (2009–2017) for welfare expenditure and economic priming. Whereas the US share of global military expenditure peaked at about 42 percent in 2010, it fell to 37.9 percent in 2013, when the United States spent $582.4 billion. While the army and marines were scheduled for significant cuts in the 2010s, there were even more substantial cuts in the navy, which is scheduled to be reduced to 280 vessels, of which only about 90 would be at sea at any one time. Partly as a result, the ability of the United States to inflict a rapid defeat on Iran was called into question in 2013. Moreover, the reduction in US naval strength created concern among regional allies, such as Japan, worried about Chinese naval plans and expansionism.104 The Japanese defense budget was increased in 2013.

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

CONCLUSION

A discussion of the maritime dimension today underlines the extent to which there is only limited continuity in the understanding or use of natural environments, irrespective of the extent to which these environments themselves continue essentially unchanged, allowing for a measure of degradation through overuse. Similar points could be made about the land environment. This demonstrates the extent to which the strategic aspect of geopolitics changes in accordance with a range of factors, including technology and tasking, and, in changing, creates new challenges, opportunities, and capabilities that affect the military value, understanding, and use of territory.

Underlying the range of issues that can be approached today in terms of geopolitics, there is the question of global information systems, of US dominance and use of the Internet, of critical or hostile responses, notably in China and Iran, and of the spatial and political dimensions of these topics. The meanings of space and control over space are particularly unsettled in this context. In his 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” John Barlow wrote: “Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace. You have no sovereignty where we gather. . . . We will create a civilization of the mind in cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.”105 From a very different direction, another presentation of geopolitics, that of the relationship between geography and human destiny, has attracted attention with popular works that stress the role of environmental factors, rather than (or alongside) race and culture.106 More generally, the current relevance of geopolitical issues and debates provides, in the next chapter, a point of departure for looking at the future, because much of the current discussion hinges on the issue of future consequences.