In Defense of Classical Geopolitics

August 20, 2015

By Mackubin T. Owens

Mackubin T. Owens is Dean of Academics at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. He is also the Editor of Orbis: a Journal of World Affairs and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Abstract: First published in 1999 in the Naval War College Review, this article is republished unchanged here as an example of how geopolitical reasoning can be used to make predictions about the future. The article first reviews the development and critique of classical geopolitics, defending it as a legitimate approach to understanding international relations, and then uses geopolitics as a lens to predict trends in the world of the twenty-first century.

he 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 T 1 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.2

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.”3 The geographic setting imposes distinctive constraints on a nation’s foreign policy and strategy while at the

1 Williamson Murray and Mark Grimsley, “Introduction: On Strategy,” in Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein, eds., The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 6–20. 2 Cited in Geoffrey Parker, Western Geopolitical Thought in the Twentieth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), p. 173. 3 Nicholas J. Spykman, The Geography of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1944), p. 41.

Fall 2015 | 463 doi: 10.1016/j.orbis.2015.08.006 OWENS

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.4 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.”5 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.6 A form of geographic reasoning that necessarily encompasses all these branches is geopolitics, “the relation of international political power to the geographical setting.”7 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.8 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

4 Colin S. Gray, “The Continued Primacy of Geography,” Orbis, Spring 1996, pp. 248–249. 5 Saul B. Cohen, Geography and Politics in a World Divided (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, 2nd ed.), p. 3. 6 See John M. Collins, Military Geography for Professionals and the Public (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1998), which is divided into physical, cultural, and political-military sections. See also Geoffrey Kemp and Robert Harkavy, Strategic Geography and the Changing Middle East (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace/Brookings, 1997). 7 Cohen, Geography and Politics in a World Divided, p. 29 8 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, Summer 1989, and The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

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