Post–Cold War Geopolitics

What might a post–Cold War geopolitics look like? To begin with, it must reject the idea that geography is the only important factor affecting international action, and it must understand geographical phenomena as complex “spatial patterns and relations that reflect dynamic physical and human processes.” A useful starting point is the global geopolitical structure proposed by Saul Cohen (Map 2).

Cohen’s geopolitical structure is hierarchical. At the highest level are two geostrategic realms, which are “arenas of strategic place and movement.” Reflecting the classical origins of geopolitics, he identifies these geostrategic realms as the maritime and the Eurasian continental. They are characterized not only by the physical characteristics of place and movement but also by cultural and strategic outlook. Realms are vast spatial areas affecting everything within their strategic-military reach.

Below the realms are geopolitical regions, which are shaped by “contiguity and political, cultural, military and economic interaction.” Cohen identifies nine geopolitical regions. Four are contained within the maritime geostrategic realm: Anglo-America and the Caribbean; Maritime Europe and the Maghreb; offshore Asia; and South America and sub-Saharan Africa, most of which constitutes what he calls the “quartersphere of strategic marginality.” Two are part of the Eurasian continental realm: the Russian heartland and East Asia.

Of the remaining regions, Cohen argues that one, South Asia, is independent. Another, the Middle East, remains a shatterbelt. Yet another, Central and Eastern Europe, Cohen describes as a “gateway region,” a transitional zone that can facilitate contact and interchange between the two realms.”

Below the regions are states, hierarchically ordered according to their power, geographical location, and function within the world system. Certain states dominate, or contend for domination of, the various regions. The United States is the “controlling state” within the maritime geostrategic realm. Geopolitical analysis suggests that China and Russia will vie for that position within the Eurasian continental realm.

Such an analytical framework allows us to discern broad spatial patterns, make predictions about the future shape of the international political system, and develop strategic options for ensuring the nation’s place in this system. Within this framework, a number of variables interact with geography to shape the world. As we have seen, one is technology. Another, however, is the infusion of capital and economic development.

The infusion of capital can modify the relative importance of a given geographic space by, for example, shifting power centers. In the early twentieth century the core of the maritime geostrategic realm shifted from Europe to North America. On the other hand, lack of capital can consign geographical regions to the world’s periphery. For instance, Cohen’s “quartersphere of marginality” is peripheral largely because, with the exception of such pockets of modernity as South Africa, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, these regions are relatively untouched by “the capital flows, technology transfer, and specialization of industry that characterize the developed market economies . . . , continental Eurasia . . . , and South Asia.”

But geopolitical reasoning suggests limits to the impact of economic development. Location still matters. Consider the relative importance to the security of the United States of Brazil and China. Some consider Brazil to be a pivotal state, but its location in South America makes Brazil relatively less strategically important than China. Even supposing rapid economic growth, Brazil does not possess the weight and position of China. While Brazil has a long coastline, it does not command the sea lines of communications of great maritime, manufacturing, and trading powers. China does. Indeed, in all respects, China possesses the geographic location, extent of territory, and number of population to affect the international order for good or ill.

What are the strategic implications of geopolitical analysis? How do they differ from those of the other assessments of the post–Cold War international political system? First, geopolitical reasoning suggests that the consistent concerns of the geopolitical tradition—that is, the geographical correlation of power, the identification of core areas, and the relationship between maritime and continental capabilities—will continue to shape U.S. policy and strategy. Second, geopolitical reasoning suggests that the overarching strategic imperative of the United States will continue to be to prevent the rise of a hegemon capable of dominating the Eurasian continental realm and of challenging the United States in the maritime realm. In other words, future American regional strategic priorities will resemble those of the past.

There are several further implications of geopolitical reasoning. Among the most important, the first is that the United States should maintain sufficient land power to influence Europe and East Asia, keeping in mind that it cannot be a land power beyond North America without also being a sea power. Second, Nato should be expanded in order firmly to anchor Mitteleuropa to the maritime realm. This is important because, detached from Western Europe, the region of Central and Eastern Europe may revert to its traditional role as a shatterbelt. This is also true of the Balkans; there is substantial evidence to support the contention that the region is reemerging as a shatterbelt. Third, there are limits to improved relations between the United States and Russia on the one hand and with China on the other. Neither Nato nor the United States–Japan relationship should be sacrificed based on the hope or expectation of an entente with Russia or China. Fourth, concerns about drugs, environmental degradation, migration, and economic chaos in Africa and South America—the quartersphere of strategic marginality—should not divert the United States from its perennial overarching strategic goal of preventing the rise of a Eurasian hegemon. Fifth, space, distance, and the fact that South Asia is an independent geopolitical region limit the ability of the United States to affect directly the emerging India-Pakistan arms race. Sixth, because of oil and strategic location, the Middle East shatterbelt will continue to be a zone of turmoil. Without a strategic U.S. presence, this turmoil could spread to affect the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean in one direction and Central Asia in another.

Limits, Opportunities, and International Politics

Napoleon defined strategy as the art of using time and space. His focus was the operational level of war, but his definition applies as well to the level of grand strategy. Geopolitics provides the link between geography and strategy. Geopolitics is based on the undeniable fact that all international politics, running the gamut from peace to war, takes place in time and space, in particular geographical settings and environments. It then seeks to establish the links and causal relationships between geographical space and international political power, for the purpose of devising specific strategic prescriptions.

Geopolitics is not geographic determinism, but it is based on the assumption that geography defines limits and opportunities in international politics: states can realize their geopolitical opportunities or become the victims of their geopolitical situation. One purpose of grand strategy is to exploit one’s own geographical attributes and an adversary’s geographical vulnerabilities.

Geopolitics is dynamic, not static. It reflects international realities and the global constellation of power arising from the interaction of geography on the one hand and technology and economic development on the other. Technology and the infusion of capital can modify, though not negate, the strategic importance of a particular geographic space.

Finally, geopolitics clarifies the range of strategic choices, providing a guide for achieving strategic efficiency. While it places particular stress on geographic space as a critically important strategic factor and source of power, it recognizes that geography is only a part of the totality of global phenomena.

As Colin Gray observes, geopolitics is “a word—as well as a basket of associated ideas—that all but begs to be abused by the unscrupulous.” Properly understood and employed, however, geopolitical analysis is an indispensable part of strategy making.

Military Idustrial and Political Complex

Shifting stance of the Military Industrial and Political Complex

The might of the superpowers be it the past USSR or the present USA is based mainly on its vast arms and manufacturing industry and its research establishments.

The origin of the MIC (Military Industrial complex)

Dwight Eisenhower's presidency is probably better remembered less for what he did than for what he said while heading for the exit. In a nationally televised address on January 17, 1961, only four days before John F. Kennedy's inaugural, Eisenhower warned of the dangers of "undue influence" exerted by the "military-industrial complex." He cautioned that maintaining a large, permanent military establishment was "new in the American experience," and suggested that an "engaged citizenry" offered the only effective defense against the "misplaced power" of the military-industrial lobby.

Press accounts at the time and the remembrances of those on the scene suggest that Eisenhower's surprising attack on the military lobby initially had only a modest ripple effect. The historian Douglas Brinkley points out that it was only years later, as the Vietnam War loomed large in the national consciousness, that activists in the antiwar movement seized on Eisenhower's remarks to support their own critiques of the national security state.

Forty years on, it is surely fitting to look afresh at Eisenhower's warning, and to appraise the present and future of the military-industrial complex. At first glance, Dwight David Eisenhower seemed an unlikely candidate to launch a blistering critique of the military-industrial complex (a phrase coined by Eisenhower's speechwriters Ralph Williams and Malcolm Moos). As a four-star general and a hero of the Allied assault against Hitler, he certainly believed in maintaining a strong military. And although Eisenhower tried to hold the line on military spending, his administration still maintained an annual military budget ranging from $42 billion to $49 billion-three to four times higher than defense spending during the brief postwar demobilization. As the historian Blanche Wiesen Cook has remarked, it is not as if Ike was a raving peacenik: his doctrine of massive nuclear retaliation increased the risk of nuclear war, and his administration's support for coups d'état that helped install repressive regimes in Iran and Guatemala undermined the stability of the Persian Gulf and Central America, even as they tarnished America's reputation as a force for democracy.

Yet in retrospect, it was precisely Eisenhower's martial posture that gave authority to his warning about the growing influence of the military-industrial establishment. As the late Washington columnist Lars Erik-Nelson noted in his last published essay, Eisenhower's speech was not just a rhetorical throwaway meant to steal the thunder of the incoming Kennedy administration: it was deeply felt, grounded in his own bitter experiences.3 In the 1956 elections, conservative Democrats, egged on by officials in the air force, accused Eisenhower of permitting a "bomber gap" by refusing to fund their new B-70 bomber. And in 1960, Richard Nixon, who served eight years as Eisenhower's vice president, was excoriated by his Democratic rival John F. Kennedy for allowing a supposedly dangerous "missile gap" to develop between U.S. and Soviet forces. The bomber gap proved a figment of the fevered imaginations of the weapons boosters, while the missile gap was real enough-though it was a gap that dramatically favored the United States, not the Soviet Union, as hard-line Democrats like Kennedy and Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson had maintained.

If an Eisenhower could not rein in the military lobby, small wonder that Bill Clinton, perceived as a draft-evading child of the 1960s, let the Joint Chiefs have their way. Clinton bequeathed his Republican successor a Pentagon budget not only higher in constant, 2001 dollars than it was when Eisenhower sounded his alarm, but also higher than the budget that Donald Rumsfield presided over during his first stint as secretary of defense in the mid-1970s. The United States has no superpower adversary, as it did then, yet we spend more on our military forces than eight runner-up nations combined. As for the so-called rogue states, or "states of concern" as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright called them, the United States now spends 22 times as much as Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba combined. And the United States and its closest allies, including the NATO member-states, Japan, and South Korea, currently account for nearly two-thirds of global military spending, a much greater proportion than obtained during the Reagan buildup of the 1980s, when the United States and these same allies accounted for just over half of total expenditures.

Given these realities, Clinton's Pentagon budget was as much testimony to the enduring power of the military-industrial complex as it was to the military capabilities of potential adversaries.

Ambitious Goals

To achieve this leaner, meaner, more mobile military, there is a need to "skip a generation of technology" in certain systems. These were fighting words for the military, the arms industry, and their allies in Congress. Skipping a generation implies canceling one or more big-ticket systems, such as the Lockheed Martin F-22 fighter, the Boeing/Textron V-22 Osprey (half airplane, half helicopter), or the United Defense Crusader artillery system. That would mean sacrificing jobs and contracts now to husband resources for novel future systems-a perfectly reasonable management strategy, and arguably the only way to make room in the budget for Bush's ambitious missile defense system, plus tens of billions in research and development money for the next generation of weaponry. But it is also an extremely difficult feat in the face of opposition from the pampered "iron triangle": the military, the arms industry, and Congress.

The alternative to killing the Pentagon's sacred cows would be to seek a massive increase in military spending-in the range of $50 billion to $100 billion annually-that would cover costs of pork-barrel schemes already in the budget and simultaneously provide funding for missile defenses and new-wave weaponry.


Criticizing Congress

In the penultimate draft of his final address, President Eisenhower warned of the "growing influence of the military-industrial-congressional complex" but decided to strike the word "congressional" because he thought it was "not fitting...for a President to criticize Congress."6 George W. Bush may not have the luxury of being so gracious. If he wants to win approval for his military build-up - rather than one that conforms to Trent Lott's wishes, or John Warner's, or Joe Lieberman's-he will have to play hardball.

As an example, McCain spotlighted the Lockheed Martin C-130 transport plane, produced in Marietta, Georgia, and shepherded through Congress by heavy hitters from the South-including former Senate Armed Services Committee member Sam Nunn and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. From 1978 to 1998 (according to a report by the General Accounting Office), the air force requested a total of five C-130s, but Congress voted funds for 256 of the aircraft, surely a record in pork-barrel politics. McCain complained there were so many excess C-130s that we could afford to park one in "every schoolyard in America." Without missing a beat, or blushing, the next speaker at the same hearing, Democratic senator Max Cleland of Georgia, said he felt compelled to suggest that the excess C-130s were justified since America needed the capability to deploy our schoolyards anywhere in the world on short notice.

Senator Cleland isn't the only lawmaker who thinks bringing home the bacon is a suitable subject for political humor. When a former Georgia senator, Mack Mattingly, was running to regain his former seat in the U.S. Senate, Sen. Trent Lott joined him for a day of campaigning. The GOP Majority Leader said that if Georgia voters picked "good old Mack," he would keep the lucrative F-22 fighter project at Lockheed's Martin Marietta plant, but if they elected a Democrat, production might move to Lott's Mississippi. Given Lott's proclivity for shoveling defense dollars to his own state for everything from a $1.5 billion Marine helicopter carrier to a space-based laser project, it took a moment for Georgians to realize this was a joke. The irony of Lott's remark was heightened by the fact that Mattingly had just completed a stint as paid lobbyist for Lockheed Martin.

In fall 1998, when Representatives Jerry Lewis, a California Republican, and Jack Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, put procurement funds for the F-22 on hold, on grounds of cost and performance, (at $200 million per plane, it is the most expensive fighter ever built), Lockheed Martin hired Mattingly to spearhead its successful lobbying campaign to rescue the project. Other legislators, including Democrat Buddy Darden, who used to represent the Georgia district where the C-130 is built, and former Mississippi Republican representative Sonny Montgomery, who chaired the committee that added C-130s to the Pentagon budget for distribution to National Guard units, have also worked as lobbyists for Lockheed Martin since leaving Congress.

A list of constituencies for redundant weapons systems would include the Litton Ingalls military shipyard in Trent Lott's home town of Pascagoula, Mississippi; the Newport News shipyard, launcher of submarines and aircraft carriers, in the home state of Virginia's John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; the McDonnell Douglas division of Boeing in St. Louis, maker of the F-18E and other combat planes favored by House Minority Leader Dick Gephart; and the Boeing plant in suburban Philadelphia, maker of the troubled V-22 Osprey, whose booster is Republican representative Curt Weldon. Connecticut's Democratic senators, Christopher Dodd and Joseph Lieberman, have gone to bat for everything from General Dynamics' Electric Boat facility in Groton to the United Technologies/Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters that are part of the $1.3 billion U.S. military aid package for Colombia. In Washington State, Democratic representative Norm Dicks has campaigned doggedly to revive Boeing's B-2 bomber program. Add to this the assiduous labors of House Majority Whip Tom "The Hammer" DeLay and Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson and others in the Texas delegation on behalf of Lockheed Martin's and Bell Textron's fighter plane and helicopter factories in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

All concerned were generously rewarded with campaign contributions. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and TRW together provided more than $11 million in soft money contributions during the year 2000 election cycle, and the giving continued through election day. At the GOP convention, Lockheed Martin kicked in $60,000 for the "Lott Hop," a dance fundraiser honoring Trent Lott, including performances by Bobby Vee and the Four Tops. TRW, which is under investigation for possible fraud in the national missile defense program, sponsored a luncheon at the Philadelphia Union League Club in honor of Sen. John Warner and Virginia representative Tom Davis, the chief fundraiser for House Republicans.

In Los Angeles, meanwhile, Raytheon pitched in with a fundraising party at the Santa Monica pier for "Blue Dog" Democrats, a conservative caucus whose members tend to be in favor of missile defense. Ironically, California Democrat Loretta Sanchez, herself a "Blue Dog," had been criticized by the Gore-Lieberman campaign for planning a fundraiser of her own in Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion. Sanchez moved the fundraiser to avoid losing her speaking slot at the Democratic Convention.
Friendly Fire
Besides defending their version of the military buildup from "friendly fire" on Capitol Hill, President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld will have to do battle with the Joint Chiefs. The Joint Chiefs and their allies on the Hill were caught by surprise in early February when the White House indicated that there would be no big supplemental spending bill in the first part of 2001, and the projected Clinton/Gore budget of $310 billion would have to suffice for now. And Bush and Rumsfeld's decision to tap Andrew Marshall, an unconventional thinker who runs the Pentagon's Office of Net Military Assessment and has criticized Cold War weapons platforms ranging from aircraft carrier battle groups to the F-22 fighter, to oversee the defense policy review, suggests they may be willing to dispense with some of the old weapons in the pipeline.

The shrill complaints by conservatives in both parties that Bush was somehow disavowing his campaign pledge to build up the U.S. military masked their true concerns. What this means, however, is that if Bush and Rumsfeld are to achieve the military buildup they have in mind, which will emphasize an expansive missile defense, a new generation of more "usable" low-yield nuclear weapons, and a new generation of more maneuverable weapons platforms equipped with the latest sensor and communications technologies, they will have to do battle with key players within the military-industrial complex.

The Bush-Rumsfeld agenda, which amounts to a unilateralist drive for U.S. preeminence based on an ambitious missile defense scheme and a re-legitimation of the role of nuclear weapons as an instrument not only of deterrence, but of warfare, ought to be opposed.11 The good news for those who would do so is that there is no single agenda within the defense establishment. There are competing agendas-on Capitol Hill, among the services, and in the White House. As these power centers fight it out to determine the outlines of U.S. military spending, there should be room for input from the forgotten actors in this drama, the "alert and knowledgeable citizenry" that Eisenhower saw as our best hope for making sure that the military establishment serves the public interest, not the economic interest of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, or the parochial interests of powerful members of Congress.

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.

Geopolitics and IMF

When the IMF originally planned its annual meeting for late September in Washington, the top item on the agenda might have been called "back to basics." Fund officials recognized that their institution had become vastly overextended. Founded in 1944 to resolve balance-of-payments crises that threaten the global financial system, the fund has instead evolved into a mega-bureaucracy that tries to micromanage everything from trade policies to social programs in dozens of developing nations. Thus, the IMF has become a lightning rod for both the right and the left. And it has gained a reputation for spending too much time pushing U.S. policy agendas.

Ripples have been felt in all corners of the world by the decisions made by IMF. It still functions as a industrialized nations bank, with all the controls and authority in the hands of a small select group of countries that still try to hold on to their past laurels.