The continued primacy of geography - A Debate on Geopolitics

ORBIS, Spring, 1996 by Colin S. Gray

Geopolitics is neither deterministic nor inexorably aggressive in its policy implications. "The geographical setting" is only a stage; it is not the script, though it does suggest the plot and influence the cast of characters. Geopolitics, in common with the broader discipline of international relations, cannot but have implications for public policy.

For the same reasons that the authors of The Federalist Papers were concerned to deny European polities the opportunities to play some American states off against others, their successors have been determined to keep what Mackinder called the World-Island of Europe and Asia (and Africa) politically divided.(27) By far the most influential geopolitical concept for Anglo-American statecraft has been the idea of a Eurasian "heartland," and then the complementary idea-as-policy of containing the heartland power of the day within, not to, Eurasia. From Harry S Truman to George Bush, the overarching vision of U.S. national security was explicitly geopolitical and directly traceable to the heartland theory of Mackinder.

Mackinder's relevance to the containment of a heartland-occupying Soviet Union in the cold war was so apparent as to approach the status of a cliche; much more challenging is the problem of geopolitical interpretation for this post-cold war world. There is urgent need for constructive geopolitical analysis for the twenty-first century.

The influence of the geographical setting upon international power relations is so pervasive that it can escape notice. But that influence can be seen by contrasting the sharply different geostrategic implications of hypothetical developments in two very different regions: South America and continental East Asia. With respect to the former, Henry Kissinger was almost brutally to the point when he observed dismissively that South America is a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica. In other words, adverse developments south of Panama would probably threaten nothing of great importance to the United States. Geopolitically and geostrategically, despite the long-standing U.S. rhetoric about hemispheric security (not to mention the Monroe Doctrine), what happens in South America does not matter very much to U.S. citizens.

The contrast with continental East Asia could hardly be more stark. The emerging Chinese superstate is located in Eurasia, as the Eastern "rimland" of the historical "heartland," while its long sea coast flanks the principal sea lines of communication of the great maritime, manufacturing, and trading empire of Japan. China has weight and position. Unlike the unlamented, erstwhile USSR, China is not a landlocked power, and she cannot be landlocked by a prudent U.S. containment policy.

That is not to say China matters to the United States whereas Brazil does not. It is to say that, for reasons of geography, China is vastly more important than Brazil. Indeed, because of size, character of territory, population, social habits, and location, it would be difficult to exaggerate the potential positive or negative contribution of China to international order.