Classical Geopolitics

The formulation of national strategy is influenced by a wide variety of factors, including the past history of the nation; the nature of the regime; the ideology, religion, and culture; economic factors, to include technology; and governmental and military institutions. When Albert Einstein remarked that “politics is harder than physics,” he had in mind the enormous number of such variables that the statesman and strategist must consider when describing international phenomena and developing prescriptive measures.

Geography and Geopolitics

Perhaps the most important influence on strategy making, however, is geography, the physical setting of human activity, whether political, economic, or strategic. As Nicholas Spykman observed, “Geography is the most fundamental factor in foreign policy because it is the most permanent.” The geographic setting imposes distinctive constraints on a nation’s foreign policy and strategy while at the same time providing distinctive opportunities. As Colin Gray has remarked, geography at a minimum defines the players in international relations, the stakes for which the players contend, and the terms by which they measure their security relative to others.

Geography, the descriptive science of the earth, can be understood in a number of ways. Saul Cohen provides three definitions of geography: the “science of area differentiation,” the science of “spatial relations and interaction,” and the “science of distributions.” Thus, the geographer examines such physical factors as space, topography, and climate.

There are many subdivisions of geography, but those of greatest interest to the statesman and strategist are variants of human geography, which studies the ways in which physical factors interact with population, political institutions, culture, communications, industry, and technology. The resulting branches of human geography include political geography, economic geography, cultural geography, military geography, and strategic geography.

A form of geographic reasoning that necessarily encompasses all these branches is geopolitics, “the relation of international political power to the geographical setting.” Geopolitics is essentially the study of the political and strategic relevance of geography to the pursuit of international power. As such, it is most closely related to strategic geography, which is concerned with the control of, or access to, spatial areas that have an impact on the security and prosperity of nations.

The Post–Cold War Security Environment: Contending Perspectives

The end of the Cold War has generated a number of competing candidate descriptions of the international environment, some of which essentially proclaim the “end of geopolitics.” Optimistic nongeopolitical descriptions of the post–Cold War international environment include Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, which argues that the end of the Cold War represents the final triumph of liberal democracy over its twentieth-century ideological competitors, fascism and communism.

Other optimistic nongeopolitical visions of the future world include “global interdependence,” the idea that the pursuit of power in its geographic setting has been supplanted by liberal economic cooperation. According to such analysts as Richard Rosecrance and Jessica Mathews, the near future will feature borderless economic interdependence and the end of the nation-state.

Pessimistic nongeopolitical images of the future include Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” and Robert Kaplan’s “coming anarchy.” Huntington claims that “fault lines between civilizations are replacing the political and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed.” Kaplan contends that in the future much of the globe will be consumed by ethnic, racial, and religious strife unleashed by the failure of territorial states to protect the lives and property of those who live within their borders.

Some have proposed semigeographic but nongeopolitical views of the future. Prominent among these are concepts of “core” and “periphery,” “pivotal states,” and “geo-economics.” Immanuel Wallerstein proposed the core and periphery as part of his neo-Marxist model of world politico-economic development. According to Wallerstein, the capitalist world economy created a single global unit, generating two fundamental inequalities: the traditional class inequality identified by Marx between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and the spatial inequality between the states of the developed capitalist core and those of the nondeveloped periphery.

What Wallerstein identified as the capitalist core is tantamount to what the great geographer Sir Halford Mackinder called the “Midland Basin”: North America and Western Europe. Most of the rest of the world is the periphery. Wallerstein’s model is in essence a spatial representation of Lenin’s theory of uneven capitalist development. Although the dynamics are reversed, it also bears a striking resemblance to Lin Piao’s conceptualization of the world as the capitalist “city” surrounded by agrarian, revolutionary “countryside.”

Non-Marxists like Barry Buzan have adapted the core-and-periphery concept to “structural realism.” One component of this application is the notion that while multipolarity is emerging among the capitalist great powers, the ideological harmony within the core has lessened the importance of military power among states within the core, but not between the core and the periphery.

The pivotal-state concept is geographical in that it argues that certain states are important to the stability of entire regions. It is, however, nongeopolitical in that it does not explicitly describe a hierarchy among those regions.

Geo-economics purports to place international politics on an economic basis. In the words of Edward Luttwak, “Everyone, it appears, now agrees that the methods of commerce are displacing military methods—with disposable capital in lieu of firepower, civilian innovation in lieu of military-technical advancement, and market penetration in lieu of garrisons and bases. States, as spatial entities structured to jealously delimit their own territories, will not disappear but reorient themselves toward geo-economics in order to compensate for their decaying geopolitical roles.” In geo-economic state rivalry, the “logic of conflict” will be expressed in the “grammar of commerce.”

Adherents of geopolitics argue that to be of any use to the statesman and strategist, these various descriptions of the future must be placed within a geopolitical context. Real international relations occur in real geographical space. The relative importance of a given geographical space may be modified by technology or the infusion of capital, but geographical space cannot be ignored, as several of these approaches do.