Geostrategy
Defining geostrategy
Academics, theorists, and practitioners of geopolitics have agreed upon no standard definition for "geostrategy." Most all definitions, however, emphasize the merger of strategic considerations with geopolitical factors. While geopolitics is ostensibly neutral, examining the geographic and political features of different regions, especially the impact of geography on politics, geostrategy involves comprehensive planning, assigning means for achieving national goals or securing assets of military or political significance.
History of geostrategy
Precursors
Herodotus talks about a Greek plan to gain the "empire of the sea."
Alexander Hamilton was a geostrategic thinker. Thomas Jefferson understood the balance of power, although he did not design a good navy with which to preserve it.
Golden Age
Between 1890 and 1919 the world became a geostrategist's paradise. The international system featured rising and falling great powers, many with global reach. There were no new frontiers for the great powers to explore or colonize. From this point forward, international politics would feature the struggles of state against state.
World War Two
After the second world war, the term "geopolitics" fell into disrepute, because of its association with Nazi geopolitik. Virtually no books published between the end of WWII and the mid-1970's used the word "geopolitics" or "geostrategy" in their titles, and geopoliticians did not label themselves or their works as such.
The most prominent German geopolitician was General Karl Haushofer. After WWII, during the Allied occupation of Germany, the United States investigated many officials and public figures to determine if they should face charges of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. Haushofer, an academic primarily, was interrogated by Father Edmund A. Walsh, a professor of geopolitics from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, at the request of the U.S. authorities. Despite his involvement in crafting one of the justifications for Nazi aggression, Fr. Walsh determined that Haushofer ought not stand trial.
As the Cold War began, N.J. Spykman and George F. Kennan laid down the foundations for the U.S. policy of containment, which would dominate Western geostrategic thought for the next forty years.
Post-Cold War
To be written...
Notable geostrategists
The below geostrategists were instrumental in founding and developing the major geostrategic doctrines in the discipline's history. While there have been many other geostrategists, these have been the most influential in shaping and developing the field as a whole.
Alfred Thayer Mahan
Alfred Thayer Mahan
Halford J. Mackinder
Halford J. Mackinder
Friedrich Ratzel
Influenced by the works of Alfred Thayer Mahan, as well as the German geographers Karl Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt, Friedrich Ratzel would lay the foundations for geopolitik, Germany's unique strain of geopolitics.Ratzel wrote on the natural division between land powers and sea powers, agreeing with Mahan that sea power was self-sustaining, as the profit from trade would support the development of a merchant marine. However, his key contribution were the development of the concepts of raum and organic state theory. He theorized that states were organic and growing, and that borders were only temporary, representing pauses in their natural movement. Raum was the land, spiritually connected to a nation (in this case, the German peoples), from which the people could draw sustenance, find adjacent inferior nations which would support them, and which would be fertilized by their kultur (culture).
Ratzel's ideas would influence the works of his student Rudolf Kjellén, as well as those of General Karl Haushofer.
Rudolf Kjellén
Rudolf Kjellén was a Swedish political scientist and student of Friedrich Ratzel. He first coined the term "geopolitics." His writings would play a decisive role in influencing General Karl Haushofer's geopolitik, and indirectly the future Nazi foreign policy.His writings focused on five central concepts that would underlie German geopolitik:
- Reich was a territorial concept that was comprised of Raum (Lebensraum), and strategic military shape;
- Volk was a racial conception of the state;
- Haushalt was a call for autarky based on land, formulated in reaction to the vicissitudes of international markets;
- Geselleschaft was the social aspect of a nation’s organization and cultural appeal, Kjellén anthropomorphizing inter-state relations more than Ratzel had; and,
- Regierung was the form of government whose bureaucracy and army would contribute to the people’s pacification and coordination.
General Karl Haushofer
Karl Haushofer
Nicholas J. Spykman
Nicholas J. Spykman was an Dutch-American geostrategist, known as the "godfather of containment." His geostrategic work, The Geography of the Peace (1944), argued that the balance of power in Eurasia directly affected United States security.N.J. Spykman based his geostrategic ideas on those of Sir Halford Mackinder's Heartland theory. Spykman's key contribution was to alter the strategic valuation of the Heartland vs. the "Rimland" (a geographic area analogous to Mackinder's "Inner or Marginal Crescent"). Spykman does not see the heartland as a region which will be unified by powerful transport or communication infrastructure in the near future. As such, it won't be in a position to compete with the United States' sea power, despite its uniquely defensive position. The rimland possessed all of the key resources and populations—its domination was key to the control of Eurasia. His strategy was for Offshore powers, and perhaps Russia as well, to resist the consolidation of control over the rimland by any one power. Balanced power would lead to peace.
George F. Kennan
George F. Kennan, U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, laid out the seminal Cold War geostrategy in his Long Telegram and The Sources of Soviet Conduct. He coined the term "containment", which would become the guiding idea for U.S. grand strategy over the next forty years, although the term would come to mean something significantly different from Kennan's original formulation.Kennan advocated what was called "strongpoint containment." In his view, the United States and its allies needed to protect the productive industrial areas of the world from Soviet domination. He noted that of the five centers of industrial strength in the world—the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany, and Russia—the only contested area was that of Germany. Kennan was concerned about maintaining the balance of power between the U.S. and the USSR, and in his view, only these few industrialized areas mattered.
Here Kennan differed from Paul Nitze, whose seminal Cold War document, NSC-68, called for "undifferentiated or global containment," along with a massive military buildup. Kennan saw the Soviet Union as an ideological and political challenger rather than a true military threat. There was no reason to fight the Soviets throughout Eurasia, because those regions were not productive, and the Soviet Union was already exhausted from WWII, limiting its ability to project power abroad. Therefore, Kennan disapproved of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and later spoke out critically against Reagan's military buildup.
Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Zbigniew Brzezinski laid out his most significant contribution to post-Cold War geostrategy in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard. He defined four regions of Eurasia, and in which ways the United States ought to design its policy toward each region in order to maintain its global primacy. The four regions (echoing Mackinder and Spykman) are:- Europe, the Democratic Bridgehead
- Russia, the Black Hole
- The Middle East, the Eurasian Balkans
- Asia, the Far Eastern Anchor
Criticisms of geostrategy
To be written...
Related topics
Other geostrategists
Listed below are other geostrategists whose works, while not developing the foundations of geostrategy as a discipline for their respective eras, were important for their insights of influence nonetheless:- Brooks Adams, American geostrategist
- Aleksandr Dugin, Russian geostrategist
- Homer Lea, American geostrategist
- Otto Maull, German geostrategist
Geostrategy by country
The following articles discuss geostrategy from the sole perspective and history of a single country, taking into account each respective country's unique strategic goals:- British geostrategy
- Chinese geostrategy
- French geostrategy
- German geostrategy
- Russian geostrategy
- United States geostrategy
Geostrategy by region
These articles discuss geostrategy in regions of the world. They discuss the various historical and current strategic interests that competing outside states have had in each region. (They do not discuss strategy from a specific point-of-view, see above.)- Geostrategy in Central Asia
- Geostrategy in East Asia
- Geostrategy in Europe
Geostrategy by topic
These articles discuss geostrategy as it relates to a specific strategic means or resource:- Oil geostrategy
- Naval geostrategy
- Space geostrategy
Geostrategic places
Listed here are geographic features that are of enduring strategic value:| Straits | Passes | Islands | Territory |
|---|---|---|---|
| To be written... | To be written... | To be written... |
Further reading
- Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: Basic Books, 1997.
- Gray, Colin S. and Geoffrey Sloan. Geopolitics, Geography and Stategy. Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1999.
- Mackinder, Halford J. Democratic Ideals and Reality. Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1996.
- Mahan, Alfred Thayer. The Problem of Asia: Its Effects Upon International Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003.
External links
To be written...
