Geopolitics

• 1. Introduction

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  Geopolitics is the study of how the physical shape of the Earth - its oceans, mountains, landmasses, and resources - bends the will of nations. In 1904, a British geographer named Halford Mackinder stood before the Royal Geographical Society in London and published an article called "The Geographical Pivot of History." His argument was stark: control Central and Eastern Europe, and you control the Heartland; control the Heartland, and you command the World Island of Eurasia and Africa; command that, and you rule the world. It sounds like a game. But for over a century, those words shaped the foreign policies of superpowers. What is this field that blurs the boundary between science and ideology? Who built it, who twisted it, and who is still playing by its rules today?

• 2. A Field is Named

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  The Austro-Hungarian historian Emil Reich, born in 1854 and died in 1910, is credited with coining the term geopolitics in English as early as 1902. His book Foundations of Modern Europe, published in England in 1904, set the word into circulation. But the ideas behind it stretched back further into French, German, and British scholarly traditions, each pulling the field in sharply different directions. Some researchers note that the term now does enormous work - used as a loose synonym for international political relations, or more specifically to imply the global structure of those relations. That dual meaning traces back to what was, in its earliest form, labeled a pseudoscience of political geography. At the level of foreign policy practice, geopolitics became a method for explaining and predicting how nations behave by analyzing geographical variables: climate, topography, demography, natural resources, and applied science. The Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellen is also cited among its early architects, and his ideas fed directly into the German tradition that would follow.

• 3. Sea Power and Land Power

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  Alfred Thayer Mahan, born in 1840 and died in 1914, argued that national greatness was inextricably tied to the sea - to its commercial use in peace and its control in war. Drawing on the strategic framework of Antoine-Henri Jomini, Mahan identified six conditions a nation needs to be a sea power: an advantageous geographic position; serviceable coastlines with natural resources and a favorable climate; sufficient extent of territory; a population large enough to defend it; a society with an aptitude for the sea and commercial enterprise; and a government inclined to dominate the sea. He singled out a critical zone of Asia between 30 and 40 degrees north, stretching from Asia Minor to Japan, where independent nations like Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, China, and Japan still survived. Mahan saw those states as caught between Britain and Russia - which he compared to Scylla and Charybdis - and considered Russia the greater threat because of its transcontinental size and favorable position for southward expansion. Mackinder's 1904 article directly challenged Mahan's sea-power doctrine, arguing instead that the age of navies, which he associated with the Columbian era from roughly 1492 through the 19th century, was yielding to the age of land power. His Heartland theory posited that a great empire built in the interior of Eurasia - Ukraine, Western Russia, and Mitteleuropa, with Ukraine's grain reserves and abundant natural resources - would never depend on coastal transport and could not be strangled at sea. The World Island of Eurasia and Africa, Mackinder argued, was noticeably larger than all peripheral regions including the Americas, Australia, and the British Isles. Those peripheral lands required sea transport to function at a technological level comparable to the resource-rich World Island.

• 4. German Geopolitik and Its Shadow

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  Friedrich Ratzel, born in 1844 and died in 1904, drew on Darwin and the zoologist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel to argue that states were organic, growing entities. Borders, in his view, were only temporary stops in a state's movement, and a static country was a country in decline. His 1901 essay "Lebensraum" introduced a concept about biogeography and the biological needs of states that would later be hijacked for purposes he did not design. After World War I, Karl Haushofer, born in 1869 and died in 1946, took up Ratzel's ideas and in 1923 founded the Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik, the Journal for Geopolitics. Haushofer's key concepts - Lebensraum, autarky, pan-regions, and organic borders - argued that states had an undeniable right to seek natural borders guaranteeing self-sufficiency. He called Mackinder's 1904 article a "genius' scientific tractate" and wrote of it: "Never have I seen anything greater than those few pages of geopolitical masterwork." Haushofer adopted both Mackinder's Heartland thesis and his view of a potential Russian-German alliance, and went further by adding Japan to his envisioned Eurasian bloc. The relationship between Haushofer's Geopolitik and the Nazi state is more complicated than popular accounts suggest. Bassin in 1987 argued that common views of geopolitics as foundational to Nazi ideology are in important ways misleading and incorrect. Geopolitics held that human society was shaped by external geographical forces - a form of scientific materialism and geographic determinism. National Socialism explicitly rejected both materialism and determinism and elevated innate racial character as the decisive factor in society. These differences produced friction between Geopolitik and Nazi ideologues after 1933, and ultimately open denunciation. Nevertheless, German Geopolitik was discredited by its use and misuse in Nazi expansionist policy during World War II, and it never recovered the standing it held before the war. Edmund Walsh, who had established the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in 1919, strongly criticized Haushofer's work and argued for a new and distinctly American geopolitics. After the war, Walsh served as an advisor to the Nuremberg Trials and personally interviewed Haushofer in captivity.

• 5. The Rimland and Containment

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  Nicholas Spykman built his theory as both a follower and a critic of Mahan and Mackinder. He accepted Mackinder's basic divisions of the world but renamed the "inner or marginal crescent" the Rimland - an intermediate region lying between the Heartland and the marginal sea powers. He extended Mackinder's framework to include the unity of air power alongside sea power. Where Mackinder had argued "Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island," Spykman offered a revision: "Who controls the rimland rules Eurasia. Who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world." Spykman died before World War II ended, but his argument that the United States should support states in the Rimland to balance any Heartland power found its way into the concept of containment and, scholars note, into the logic of the Truman Doctrine. Homer Lea, writing in The Day of the Saxon in 1912, had anticipated some of this thinking. Lea warned that British overseas possessions faced threats from German, Russian, and Japanese expansionism - what he called a "dreadful Dreibund." He predicted wars between Britain and Germany and between Japan and the United States, but argued that a war between Germany and Russia before their common defeat of the British Empire would be mutually defeating for both. That a writer before the First World War could anticipate such fault lines speaks to how persistently geographic logic shaped strategic imagination.

• 6. Cold War Revival

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  Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, two national security advisors from the Cold War period, argued in the 1990s that the dissolution of the Soviet Union had not dissolved the geographic logic behind American strategy. Kissinger, in his book Diplomacy, warned against the belief that hostile intentions had ended with the USSR. He quoted a geopolitical argument about Russia: regardless of who governed it, Russia sat astride the territory Mackinder called the geopolitical heartland, and it remained heir to one of the most powerful imperial traditions in history. Kissinger also argued that Germany had become so strong that European institutions alone could not balance it against its partners - and that without American involvement, Britain and France could not manage Germany and Russia together. He feared a German-Russian partnership in which each country saw itself as the principal partner, a arrangement he called a condominium. Three years after Diplomacy, Brzezinski published The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, which described the American victory in the Cold War as the first time a non-Eurasian power had emerged as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations. Three years later came The Geostrategic Triad: Living with China, Europe, and Russia. Brzezinski acknowledged that Eurasia's power vastly overshadowed America's, and formulated a geostrategic doctrine aimed at preventing the unification of that mega-continent. His stated purpose was explicit: "The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book." In 2004, at the centenary of Mackinder's "Geographical Pivot of History," historian Paul Kennedy observed that with hundreds of thousands of US troops deployed across the Eurasian rimlands, Washington appeared to be taking Mackinder's century-old injunction seriously.

• 7. French and Russian Traditions

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  French geopolitical doctrines took a distinctly different path from the German tradition. French geography focused on polymorphic territories shaped by human action across long time spans, resisting the determinism that underpinned Ratzel and Haushofer. Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws, had argued that climate shaped temperament and political systems - that hotter climates produced hot-tempered people and that France's mild climate was uniquely suited to good governance. Elisee Reclus, considered one of the founders of French geopolitics, wrote Nouvelle Geographie universelle and, unlike Ratzel, held that geography was not fixed but evolved alongside human society. Jacques Ancel, born in 1879 and died in 1936 and considered the first theoretician of geopolitics in France, delivered lectures at the European Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Paris and published Geopolitique in 1936, explicitly rejecting Haushofer's doctrines. In the mid-1970s, Yves Lacoste wrote La geographie, ca sert d'abord a faire la guerre - Geography's first use is war - in 1976, and later founded the Institut Francais de Geopolitique and its journal Herodote. Michel Foucher, connected to this school, coined the term Horogenesis to describe the study of how borders are born, and his 1991 book Fronts et frontieres remains untranslated into English. In Russia, Vadim Tsymbursky, born in 1957 and died in 2009, coined the term "island-Russia" in the 1990s while working as a senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Aleksandr Dugin wrote "The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia" in 1997, which became a textbook at the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian military and drew significant attention from powerful Russian political figures.

• 8. The New Great Game

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  Chinese geopolitical experts in the early 21st century, according to a report from the National Bureau of Asian Research, viewed American strategy through the lens of Spykman and Brzezinski - as a policy of containing Eurasian peer competitors to sustain US hegemony. The US 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review's concept of the "geostrategic encirclement of China's maritime environment" reinforced that reading. China's response included the Belt and Road Initiative, described by various analysts as a geostrategic effort to expand China's role in global affairs, and co-founding the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and New Development Bank as alternatives to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Bobo Lo noted that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was advertised as a "political organization of a new type" claimed to transcend geopolitics. Xiangming Chen compared China's role in Central Asia to Britain's historical role in the Great Game, with Russia now playing the part the Russian Empire once did. In 2018, Paul Stronski and Nicole Ng wrote in the Carnegie Endowment that China had not fundamentally challenged Russian interests in Central Asia. During the 2020s, the geopolitical focus on oil and gas faded somewhat, partially replaced by competition over clean energy technologies, critical materials, solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles - sectors where China achieved a dominant position. Political scientist Pak Nung Wong identified cybersecurity competition, technology standards regulation, social media platform policy, and both traditional and non-traditional espionage as major forms of US-China geopolitical contest. One conviction shared across Chinese, Russian, and Anglo-American schools of geopolitics remains the same as when Mackinder first wrote it: Eurasia is the main arena of great-power competition.