Axel de Vernou
The United States has a geography problem. Fortunate enough to be “bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors, and to the east and west by fish,” as Otto Von Bismarck quipped, contemporary American leaders have forgotten the foundational emphasis on geography espoused by the founders and frontiersmen responsible for the nation’s success. This negligence has closed off a crucial branch of American statesmanship while Russian and Chinese intellectuals draw from Western geostrategic thought to justify the creation of a new world order. Without an attention to geography, the United States will be limited in its ability to develop a strategic response to military and energy-based threats.
Even before the Declaration of Independence was signed, colonists understood the importance of securing arable land before Spanish, British, and French settlers did. The founders remained deliberately vague about the nation's frontiers as they established institutions easily transferable to new states joining the union. Indeed, when Gouverneur Morris was asked in 1803 to “recollect with precision all that passed in the Convention” to confirm whether the Louisiana Purchase was constitutional, he wrote back that he had not inserted a territorial limitation clause because “all North America must at length be annexed to us.”
The source of America’s thalassocratic power was a desire to defend its ports, rivers and trading posts from outside powers. In Federalist 11, Alexander Hamilton skillfully articulated the necessity of an indivisible union for the creation of a navy. To resist Spain’s penetration into the Mississippi and France and Britain’s interest in American fisheries, Hamilton argued, state navies would be insufficient. Each geographic region of the United States is endowed with its own resources and population: “Some of the Southern and…the Middle States yield a greater plenty of iron, and of better quality. Seamen must chiefly be drawn from the Northern hive.” When fused together, Hamilton predicted, a “great American system” would be born.
A rich topography would also be a curse for the United States. An often overlooked part of George Washington’s Farewell Address is his prescient concern for the union’s durability rooted in individuals’ tendency to embrace a geographic rather than a common American identity. Foremost among “the causes which may disturb our union,” Washington explained, is the danger of “geographical discriminations—Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western—whence designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views.” Washington’s enumeration of the agricultural, navigational, and commercial differences between the United States’ four geographic poles would come back to haunt the nation during the Civil War.
Americans discovered more about the vast continent which lay to their west through the Lewis and Clark expeditions, independent explorers, and land-hungry settlers. Although the spiritual concept of manifest destiny justified their westward push, resources and territory were at the heart of the movement. Westward expansion was precisely a recognition that the country’s future would be rooted in the territorial gains made by those who inherited the country’s unparalleled geographic fortune. Frederick Jackson Turner, a prominent historian at the end of the 19th century, cited the origins of American identity in this malleable, continually westward moving frontier. “American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier,” he wrote. “This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.”
The early republic’s domestic and international pre-eminence thus became inextricable from geographic considerations. The United States further took advantage of its distance from the reigning European powers of the time with the Monroe Doctrine. The policy ejected Europe from the Western Hemisphere and established Washington as a guarantor of Latin American security despite its relative military weakness compared to Britain, France, and Spain. The doctrine granted the United States a special role over the Americas based primarily on its geographic proximity, stating that “we are of necessity more immediately connected” to what happens in the Western Hemisphere. Washington sustained this ascension throughout the 19th century by deploying a North Atlantic Squadron responsible for facilitating trade, deterring piracy, discovering new canals, and intervening in Latin American wars that risked destabilizing the continent.
The founders’ acute attention to the United States’ geographic advantages did not translate to the development of a body of geopolitical thought as occurred in Europe. Americans had little motivation to introduce the Earth’s natural features to their political education. Even though geography had been the source of the United States’ prosperity, for the Atlantic Ocean and the sparsely populated regions to the north and south enabled the union to mature industrially and economically without interruption, American political thinkers understandably focused more on the exceptional political institutions that had emerged from the founding period. Geography is predestined, while the Declaration of Independence is a historical outlier.
There are several notable exceptions, however, which can guide the United States back to a more holistic approach toward military strategy and global affairs. One is Alfred Thayer Mahan. Among the six prerequisites for achieving naval influence in The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, three of them are inherently limited by the territory that a country occupies: geographic position, physical conformation, and the extent of one’s territory. There is little a country can do to influence these elements beyond undertaking wars of conquest and purchasing land, both of which have become less relevant in a world where every corner of the Earth has been settled. The other half of Mahan’s conditions are, upon scrutiny, also intimately related to a country’s geography. For example, the size of one’s population depends on available land. Moreover, what Mahan calls the “character of the people” is also strongly shaped by the three geographic factors outlined above. A quasi land-locked country such as Germany is less likely to show interest in China’s naval activities in the Indo-Pacific than France or Britain, both of which have outward-facing navies that have dictated their navigation for centuries.
While Mahan’s doctrine certainly assumes that there are some natural circumstances beyond a country’s control, it does not argue that geographic misfortune entails irremediable failure. After reading Mahan and romanticizing the Royal Navy he had grown up with as Queen Victoria’s grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered an unprecedented naval build-up to reverse centuries of German history that had consigned the state to a tellurocratic position. Although he failed to defeat the Royal Navy during WWI, he demonstrated that a state can still work to overcome its geographic fate by swaying its national character through propaganda campaigns and domestic reform.
In any case, it is important to remember that an American thinker led the way in what would later become known as geostrategy, though it was not defined as such at the time. The British followed closely behind. The couple dozen miles separating Britain from France at the English Channel go far in explaining the country’s history: its cautious involvement in mainland Europe’s systematic conflicts, the construction and maintenance of the world’s most formidable navy, and the formation of an unparalleled financial system that started, in part, as speculation in the ships that left British ports. Consequently, it was unsurprising that they would take such an interest in Mahan’s school of thought.
Sir Julian Corbett, a naval historian whose Some Principles of Maritime Strategy may have influenced Admiral John Fisher during the Royal Navy’s period of reform at the turn of the 20th century, framed his work around the central thesis that “command of the sea…means nothing but the control of maritime communications, whether for commercial or military purposes.” British gunpoint diplomacy was the real-world manifestation of such a strategy. Vessels patrolled every corner of the Earth that Britain found valuable and applied pressure on regimes that failed to bend appropriately to the British crown. Corbett’s emphasis on strategic chokepoints, shipping routes, and blockades shows a similar attention to the Earth’s geography which American statesmen would benefit from studying today. Mahan would come to the same conclusion in his later works, explaining that the objective “of a blockade proper is to embarrass the finances of a country by shutting its ports to foreign commerce, thus deranging one main feature of its general markets.”
The British geostrategist who has been the subject of renewed attention of late is Halford Mackinder. In the midst of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, repeated denial of cereal exports from the Black Sea, and increased presence in the Arctic Sea, one question from Mackinder’s seminal 1904 speech, The Geographical Pivot of History, should occupy policymakers’ minds: “Is not the pivot region of the world’s politics that vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomads, and is to-day about to be covered with a network of railways?” Maybe so, but for all his strengths, Mackinder’s legacy has been far from flawless. Most of Ukraine, the Black Sea, and the Taiwan Strait are not included in Mackinder’s Heartland.
Perhaps the greatest but most often ignored geostrategist is Nicholas J. Spykman, who taught international relations at Yale University from 1928 to 1943—his life cut short by an early death. Not only did he prophetically correct Mackinder by identifying the “rimland” as the true source of world domination, he also presented a roadmap for American geopolitical interests that offers guidance for the warning signs Washington should look out for in the decades to come.
In response to Mackinder’s generous description of Russia’s natural tellurocratic strength, Spykman retorted: “The actual facts of the Russian economy and geography make it not at all clear that the heartland is or will be in the very near future a world center of communication, mobility, and power potential.” An underperforming military, increasing ostracization from global markets, and a lack of soft power compared to countries that Mackinder had placed in the periphery give more credibility to Spykman’s analysis than his predecessor.
Spykman’s exhaustive and insightful overview of the topography that has shaped states’ behavior builds up to his predictions for the future of geopolitical relations which have become particularly pertinent today. These cannot be understood without his geostrategic backdrop which, unfortunately, has faded from international relations theory in the current problematic trifecta between realism, liberalism, and constructivism.
Writing during the second World War, Spykman explained that “[t]he region which has the most immediate concern for the United States is the contact area between the littoral of Eurasia and the string of marginal seas which surrounds it.” This fact remains true today. Taiwan, the Strait of Hormuz, the South China Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Strait of Malacca are all included in the pitch black ring which Spykman draws around the Eurasian landmass. Instead of replicating Mackinder’s exclusive focus on the Russian heartland as the center of civilizational struggle, Spykman anticipated that the surrounding regions would be the targets of pressure applied from the inside out.
Spykman also foresaw the danger of disequilibrium on the European continent and the essential role that the United States must play in maintaining stability there. Recent tensions between France and Germany over energy, industrial exports, and the Inflation Reduction Act should concern Washington. “Germany, which controls the largest single power potential on the [European] continent, must be balanced by the power of France and that of Eastern Europe, but no one of the three regions can be allowed to gain complete control,” Spykman warned.
He rejected theories at the time positing that the best mechanism for the United States to gain access to the Old World would be through the Arctic Sea, and fell back on a recommendation which brings Corbett to mind: “the United States will have to depend on her sea power communications across the Atlantic and Pacific to give her access to the Old World. The effectiveness of this access will determine the nature of her foreign policy.” In the 21st century, this translates to a well-funded Navy conducting exercises with European and Asian countries, maintaining a strong presence in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, and shipping LNG through the former ocean to those in Europe detaching from Russian energy dependence.
Indeed, Russia took quite literally the opposite path from the one Spykman advised when the Soviet Union was still an Ally, and the effects are quite obvious today. “[A]s long as she does not herself seek to establish a hegemony over the European rimland, the Soviet Union will be the most effective continental base for the enforcement of peace,” Spykman said. A few years later, the Soviet Union was already pushing beyond the rimland into the heart of Europe, something even Spykman could not have predicted in 1944. However, he keenly foresaw its demise if it attempted such an expansionist strategy. “At the same time, her own strength, great as it is, would be insufficient to preserve her security against a unified rimland,” Spykman warned.
Russia and the United States’ failure to pursue a united vision for world order even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, driven primarily by the former’s rejection of joining defense and commercial alliances, leads to Spykman’s prognostications regarding China. “Russia’s strength in the north will be the only continental balance to China,” he wrote. At the present moment, this is off the table. Where does that leave Washington? “If the Western Powers are to retain any influence at all in [Asia], they will have to establish island bases for their power,” Spykman explained. To some extent, the United States has heeded his advice. Naval bases, support centers, and facilities dot the ring that hugs the Eurasian mainland in Japan, Guam, Korea, Singapore, the Philippines, and the Indian Ocean.
The problem is that these outposts have limited utility if the vessels and submarines they harbor do not receive enough funding to keep pace with Chinese and Russian modernization. Before lawmakers overrode its sharp cuts, the Biden Administration’s FY 2022 budget would have significantly decreased the number of U.S. destroyers while holding small frigates constant. The joint U.S.-UK Diego Garcia military base, strategically located right in the middle of the Indian Ocean, inched closer to China’s reach after the UK inexplicably began negotiations to hand over the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius, which is heavily indebted to the Chinese. With regards to airpower, Spykman would be equally disappointed. The United States’ nocturnal abandonment of the Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan is one of several blows that Washington has taken to its influence in the rimland.
During Spykman’s time, it seemed obvious that American “bases [would] probably be sufficient to counterbalance any future attempt of China to dominate the Far East completely.” This is no longer the case. These bases must be paired with reliable allies located in Spykman’s rimland, vigilance toward Chinese espionage into American military capabilities, and the extension of diplomatic and economic incentives to important Asian actors such as India. In other parts of the world, the United States has more closely followed Spykman’s advice. For example, Washington established naval bases in Dakar, Iceland, and Greenland in the second half of the 20th century—three areas specifically named by Spykman as ways to increase American oversight of the Atlantic, African, and near Arctic regions.
On a macroscopic level, Spykman’s counsels could have been written this year. He urged American policymakers to “recognize…permanently, that the power constellation in Europe and Asia is of everlasting concern,” advice which went unheeded after the end of the Cold War. Since the founding, there has been what Spykman described as “a strange provincialism,” or a desire to turn “our gaze inward, and bec[o]me occupied with the internal development of an unconquered wilderness.” The United States harshly felt the repercussions of this detachment from global politics during World War II. Today, it must fight against a similar temptation.
American political scientists and policymakers have handled geopolitics begrudgingly since it was grotesquely sabotaged by the German thinkers who informed Nazi ideology. Fusing their own tradition of geographic analysis stretching back to the early 18th century with Mackinder and Mahan, German professors and political strategists during the Weimar Republic sought to articulate a school of thought that would energize the German people to challenge Britain’s vast colonial holdings.
These thinkers, many of whom joined the Nazi party and influenced Hitler’s decision-making, distorted the principle that geography is an indispensable discipline. They developed a concept called Lebensraum, or living space, which depicted the state in anthropomorphic terms. The state constantly needs to be fed with new territory to sustain a burgeoning population, which, in turn, multiplies further when additional resources are introduced by more conquered space. Boundaries are flexible and ambiguous, meant to be thrust outward to give citizens more breathing room on the Earth’s surface.
Advocates of this outlook, including Karl Haushofer, a German professor who supposedly inspired a chapter in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, latched onto Mackinder’s idea of land- and sea-based powers. They did not seek to emulate Britain’s dominion of the waves, for they knew that she would be replaced by a rising United States. They instead believed that Germany needed to implacably expand to become the world’s greatest tellurocratic power, breaking free from the confines of its claustrophobic position in Europe while absorbing its racially pure neighbors in the process. This was a gross deviation of Mackinder’s categorization which permanently polluted geostrategy once the true extent of Hitler’s global ambitions were revealed after 1945.
Spykman saw Haushofer for who he really was: a professor claiming to perpetuate a rich geopolitical tradition even if, in reality, his only objective was to justify ceaseless territorial expansionism. “Haushofer,” Spykman wrote, “took over [Mackinder’s] interpretation… and adapted it to his own peculiar needs.” More specifically, Haushofer, like all the other German political scientists who supported Lebensraum, did not “give the really important facts about topography which, in a geopolitical analysis, are indispensable.” Unlike the American statesmen who used their understanding of geography’s value to predict the future course of the United States, German political thinkers in Hitler’s circle were justifying conquest with flimsy geographic explanations.
Haushofer’s obsession with the difference between land- and sea-based powers as a fundamental principle in statecraft did not dissolve after the Nazis surrendered. Carl Schmitt, a dishonored Nazi legal theorist, continued to develop the idea by positing that the world is divided between land and sea people who each have their own nomos, which he defines as the appropriation, distribution and production of resources. “Where do we stand today?” Schmitt asked in 1950. Still unequivocally in support of the regime that shaped him, Schmitt argued that the “[t]he earlier balance, based on the separation of land and sea, has been destroyed. Development of modern technology has robbed the sea of its elemental character.” Strangely, he cited the cataclysmic clash of arms between Napoleon and the Russian army in 1812 as proof that nature and the balance of universal forces favor land.
This perversion of Mackinder’s worldview which Spykman warned against thrives in Russia and China today. Alexander Dugin is a case in point. An adjunct professor at Moscow State University and frequent commentator on Russian state television channels, his book, Last War of the World-Island, bends Mackinder’s theories to propose a path that the Kremlin can take to reassert global dominance. While his direct influence on Russian President Vladimir Putin can be questioned—it is uncertain whether the two have ever even met—his ideas have undoubtedly shaped the minds that compose Moscow’s premier political circles.
“Russian geopolitics is by definition the geopolitics of the Heartland; land-based geopolitics,” Dugin declares upfront. To maintain unity over this expansive Heartland, the “conservatism” and “collective anthropology” of Putin’s presidency are vital, Dugin explains. As a result of Russia’s unique geopolitical position, he adds, the country is inevitably “doomed to conflict with the civilization of the Sea… embodied today in the USA and the unipolar America-centric world order” [emphasis in the original].
The existential crisis Russia is dealing with today, then, is how to reconcile the fact that its land-based might has proven to be much less impressive than it was thought to be just a year ago. To make up for these deficiencies, Russia is attempting to catch up on its naval front. Putin recently developed a new naval doctrine and announced plans to establish naval bases in the Mediterranean Sea and throughout the Indo-Pacific. The Kremlin aims to boost Russia’s shipbuilding and introduce new submarines to its Baltic Fleet. Moscow knows it cannot take down the West alone, however, so it has chosen to heavily lean on China as the latter pioneers its own unprecedented military build-up.
Chinese thinkers have also taken up the mantle of adapting Mackinder to their needs. Recent naval encroachment in the Pacific Islands, the Indian Ocean, the coasts of Africa, and Latin American ports highlight Beijing’s desire to make the transition from being a thalassocratic to a tellurocratic power. This is especially important for China as it turns its eyes toward Taiwan, fabricates and lays claim to artificial islands in the South China Sea, and seeks to plunge island nations once allied with the West into economic debt. Historically reluctant to venture beyond the Asian continent since the abrupt termination of Zheng He’s voyages in the 15th century, Beijing knows that it must focus on its naval leg to challenge what Dugin called “the civilization of the Sea.”
In that spirit, Jiang Shigong, a prominent law professor at Beijing University who has advised the Chinese Communist Party, used Mackinder’s address to articulate a worldview that bears little resemblance to the text he draws from. Mackinder divided world history into different ages of technological development to capture how various civilizations were able to exert their will on crucial pivot points like the Heartland. Technological, institutional, and financial development allowed the United States to shape the world order unlike any other country in this competitive system. From this idea, Jiang concludes that national sovereignty is a lie, since the United States is now at the top of a world order that dictates every action taken by the countries forced into this hierarchy, including those who disagree with it, like Russia and China. “The reason that [American] economic sanctions, based on domestic law, can achieve the results they do, is because the world has been organized in such a way as to cater to this single ‘world empire,’” Jiang claims in his 2020 piece, Empire and World Order.
China’s responsibility in the decades to come, according to Jiang, is to construct an entirely new world order outside of the Western framework by leveraging its economic and technological might. There is a noteworthy overlap between these theoretical ideas and the points Xi Jinping raises in his national addresses. Jiang is to Xi as Dugin is to Putin. Neither Jiang nor Dugin exert direct influence on their respective leader, especially since they operate in top-down authoritarian systems, but their modification of Western geopolitical thought is undoubtedly guiding Chinese and Russian policy in the 21st century.
The United States must counter this resurgence of Chinese and Russian geopolitical thought with its own revival of geostrategy. Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Bill Clinton, was an emblematic example of how this is still possible. His attention to geostrategy contributed to his far-sightedness during a time of American complacency. “The exercise of American global primacy must be sensitive to the fact that political geography remains a critical consideration in international affairs,” Brzezinski wrote in The Grand Chessboard. “Thus, focusing on the key players and properly assessing the terrain has to be the point of departure for the formulation of American geostrategy for the long-term management of America's Eurasian geopolitical interests.”
As government agencies restructure their departments and funnel resources to regional bureaus to prepare for an era of great power competition, it will be crucial to combine today’s newfound focus on regional expertise and language acquisition with geographic literacy. This will demand considerable reform in the American education system, where international relations theory has constrained itself to an inflexible triangle and universities no longer teach geography. Assembling student groups for the purpose of studying geostrategy is a start.
Finally, this will also require State Department training for diplomats and field officers deployed abroad so that they can understand the historical forces at play in their geographic region of specialty. The Nazi, Russian, and Chinese subversion of Anglo-Saxon geostrategy should not prevent American students from rediscovering this branch of global affairs. On the contrary, the process is more valuable than ever before. As war rages in Europe and tensions coalesce in Spykman’s rimland, American statesmen must revive the study of geography before it gets completely appropriated by their adversaries.
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