Geopolitics began as a theory that coastlines and continents decide the fate of nations
Can a map predict which nations will dominate? A century ago, strategists thought so. One argued that sea power was the key to greatness; another claimed whoever held the rim of Eurasia would steer the world's destiny. Their ideas, sometimes dismissed as pseudoscience, still echo through foreign policy.
The word joins Greek terms for earth and politics, and the field studies how geography shapes relations between states. Analysts weigh climate, terrain, population, natural resources and territorial waters to explain and forecast how countries behave, especially a large power beside smaller neighbours. The Austro-Hungarian historian Emil Reich is credited with first using the term in English, as early as 1902, and it appeared in his 1904 book Foundations of Modern Europe. Critics note its roots in an early twentieth-century pseudoscience of geographic determinism, and a school called critical geopolitics picks apart how classical theories served great powers.
The American naval thinker Alfred Thayer Mahan tied national greatness to the sea, both trade in peacetime and control in war. Drawing on Antoine-Henri Jomini, he stressed choke points, canals and coaling stations, and listed conditions for sea power such as usable coastlines, a population big enough for defence, a seafaring commercial society and a government keen to dominate the oceans. He singled out a band of Asia between 30 and 40 degrees north, from Asia Minor to Japan, where independent states sat between Britain and Russia like ships between Scylla and Charybdis.
Nicholas Spykman both followed and criticised Mahan and Halford Mackinder. He renamed Mackinder's inner crescent the Rimland, the belt between the Eurasian interior and the ice-free ports, and coined the slogan that whoever controls the Rimland rules Eurasia, and whoever rules Eurasia controls the world's destinies. He died before the Second World War ended, but his theories stayed influential.
Edmund Walsh, who founded Georgetown's School of Foreign Service in 1919, attacked the German geopolitics of Karl Haushofer and later interviewed him in captivity while advising at Nuremberg. In the 1990s Henry Kissinger's Diplomacy and Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard revived these classical Anglo-American ideas.
Source: Geopolitics
