Geostrategy

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Geostrategy, a subfield of geopolitics, is a type of foreign policy guided principally by geographical factors^[1] as they inform, constrain, or affect political and military planning. As with all strategies, geostrategy is concerned with matching means to ends^{[2][3][4][5][6]} Strategy is as intertwined with geography as geography is with nationhood, or as Colin S. Gray and Geoffrey Sloan state it, "[geography is] the mother of strategy."^[7]

Geostrategists, as distinct from geopoliticians, approach geopolitics from a

the strength of the country's resources, the scope of the country's goals, the political geography of the time period, and the technological factors that affect military, political, economic, and cultural engagement. Geostrategy can function prescriptively, advocating foreign policy based on geographic and historical factors, analytically, describing how foreign policy is shaped by geography and history, or predictively, projecting a country's future foreign policy decisions and outcomes.

Many geostrategists are also geographers, specializing in subfields of geography, such as human geography, political geography, economic geography, cultural geography, military geography, and strategic geography. Geostrategy is most closely related to strategic geography.

Especially following

Definition

Most definitions of geostrategy below 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.

Original definition

The term "geo-strategy" was first used by Frederick L. Schuman in his 1942 article "Let Us Learn Our Geopolitics."^[12] It was a translation of the German term "Wehrgeopolitik" as used by German geostrategist Karl Haushofer. Previous translations had been attempted, such as "defense-geopolitics". Robert Strausz-Hupé had coined and popularized "war geopolitics" as another alternate translation.^[13]

Modern definitions

This section contains too many or overly lengthy quotations. Please help summarize the quotations. Consider transferring direct quotations to Wikiquote or excerpts to Wikisource. (September 2012)

[G]eostrategy is about the exercise of power over particularly critical spaces on the Earth's surface; about crafting a political presence over the international system. It is aimed at enhancing one's security and prosperity; about making the international system more prosperous; about shaping rather than being shaped. A geostrategy is about securing access to certain trade routes, strategic bottlenecks, rivers, islands and seas. It requires an extensive military presence, normally coterminous with the opening of overseas military stations and the building of warships capable of deep oceanic power projection. It also requires a network of alliances with other great powers who share one's aims or with smaller "lynchpin states" that are located in the regions one deems important.

— James Rogers and Luis Simón, "Think Again: European Geostrategy"^[14]

[T]he words geopolitical, strategic, and geostrategic are used to convey the following meanings: geopolitical reflects the combination of geographic and political factors determining the condition of a state or region, and emphasizing the impact of geography on politics; strategic refers to the comprehensive and planned application of measures to achieve a central goal or to vital assets of military significance; and geostrategic merges strategic consideration with geopolitical ones.

— Zbigniew Brzezinski, Game Plan (emphasis in original)^[15]

For the

security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.

— Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard^[16]

Geostrategy is the geographic direction of a state's foreign policy. More precisely, geostrategy describes where a state concentrates its efforts by projecting military power and directing diplomatic activity. The underlying assumption is that states have limited resources and are unable, even if they are willing, to conduct a tous asimuths foreign policy. Instead they must focus politically and militarily on specific areas of the world. Geostrategy describes this foreign-policy thrust of a state and does not deal with motivation or decision-making processes. The geostrategy of a state, therefore, is not necessarily motivated by geographic or geopolitical factors. A state may project power to a location because of ideological reasons, interest groups, or simply the whim of its leader.

— Jakub J. Grygiel, Great Powers and Geopolitical Change (emphasis in original)^[17]

It is recognized that the term "geo-strategy" is more often used, in current writing, in a global context, denoting the consideration of global land-sea distribution, distances, and accessibility among other geographical factors in strategic planning and action... Here the definition of geo-strategy is used in a more limited regional frame wherein the sum of geographic factors interact to influence or to give advantage to one adversary, or intervene to modify strategic planning as well as political and military venture.

— Lim Joo-Jock, Geo-Strategy and the South China Sea Basin. (emphasis in original)^[18]

A science named "geo-strategy" would be unimaginable in any other period of history but ours. It is the characteristic product of turbulent twentieth-century world politics.

— Andrew Gyorgi, The Geopolitics of War: Total War and Geostrategy (1943).^[13]

"Geostrategy,"—a word of uncertain meaning—has ... been avoided.

— Stephen B. Jones, "The Power Inventory and National Strategy"^[19]

Geostrategy is the geographic direction of a state's foreign policy. More precisely, geostrategy describes where a state concentrates its efforts by projecting military power and directing diplomatic activity. The underlying assumption is that states have limited resources and are unable, even if they are willing, to conduct an all-out foreign policy. Instead they must focus politically and militarily on specific areas of the world. Geostrategy describes the foreign-policy thrust of a state and does not deal with motivations or decision-making processes. The geostrategy of a state, therefore, is not necessarily motivated by geographic or geopolitical factors. A state may project power to a location because of ideological reasons, interest groups, or simply the whim of its leader.

— Krishnendra Meena, "Munesh Chandra asked: What is the difference between geo-politics and geo-strategy?"^[20]

Theory and methodology

As a science or science-based political practice geostrategy uses factual and

The geostrategy of location include river valleys, inland sea, world ocean, world island, and so on. For instance, the start of Western civilization was located in the river valleys of the Nile in Egypt and the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia. The Nile and Tigris and Euphrates not only provided the fertile soil for crop production, but also allowed for the floods that taxed the ingenuity of the inhabitants. The climate of the area was conducive to an existence based primarily upon agriculture. The rivers also provided the avenues of trade in a period when muscles of man and the winds of the sky were the motive power of ships. The river valleys became a unifying factor in the political development of the people.^[24]

History

Precursors

As early as Herodotus, observers saw strategy as heavily influenced by the geographic setting of the actors. In History, Herodotus describes a clash of civilizations between the Egyptians, Persians, Scythians, and Greeks—all of which he believed were heavily influenced by the physical geographic setting.^[25]

Dietrich Heinrich von Bülow proposed a geometrical science of strategy in the 1799 The Spirit of the Modern System of War. His system predicted that the larger states would swallow the smaller ones, resulting in eleven large states. Mackubin Thomas Owens notes the similarity between von Bülow's predictions and the map of Europe after the unification of Germany and of Italy.^[26]

Golden age

Between 1890 and 1919 the world became a geostrategist's paradise, leading to the formulation of the classical geopolitical theories. 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—the entire world was divided between the empires and colonial powers. From this point forward, international politics would feature the struggles of state against state.^[26]

Two strains of geopolitical thought gained prominence: an Anglo-American school, and a German school.

World War II

The most prominent

Cold War

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 World War II and the mid-1970s used the word "geopolitics" or "geostrategy" in their titles, and geopoliticians did not label themselves or their works as such. German theories prompted a number of critical examinations of geopolitik by American geopoliticians such as Robert Strausz-Hupé, Derwent Whittlesey and Andrew Gyorgy.^[26]

As the

Post-Cold War

After the Cold War ended, states started preferring management of space at low cost to expansion of it with military force. Use of military force in order to secure space causes not only great burden on countries, but also severe criticism from the

Such mechanisms let countries to have indirect control over space. The indirect space management reduces required capital and at the same time provides justification and legitimacy of the management, that the countries involved do not have to face criticism from the international society.

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 was a U.S. Navy officer and president of the Naval War College. He is best known for his Influence of Sea Power upon History series of books, which argued that naval supremacy was the deciding factor in great power warfare. In 1900, Mahan's book The Problem of Asia was published. In this volume he laid out the first geostrategy of the modern era.

The Problem of Asia divides the continent of Asia into 3 zones:

• A northern zone, located above the 40th parallel north, characterized by its cold climate, and dominated by land power;
• The "Debatable and Debated" zone, located between the 40th and 30th parallels, characterized by a temperate climate; and,
• A southern zone, located below the 30th parallel north, characterized by its hot climate, and dominated by sea power.^[30]

The Debated and Debatable zone, Mahan observed, contained two

North of the 40th parallel, the vast expanse of Asia was dominated by the Russian Empire. Russia possessed a central position on the continent, and a wedge-shaped projection into Central Asia, bounded by the Caucasus Mountains and Caspian Sea on one side and the mountains of Afghanistan and Western China on the other side. To prevent Russian expansionism and achievement of predominance on the Asian continent, Mahan believed pressure on Asia's flanks could be the only viable strategy pursued by sea powers.^[30]

South of the 30th parallel lay areas dominated by the sea powers – the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and Japan. To Mahan, the possession of India by the United Kingdom was of key strategic importance, as India was best suited for exerting balancing pressure against Russia in Central Asia. The United Kingdom's predominance in Egypt, China, Australia, and the Cape of Good Hope was also considered important.^[30]

The strategy of sea powers, according to Mahan, ought to be to deny Russia the benefits of commerce that come from sea commerce. He noted that both the

In this contest between land power and sea power, Russia would find itself allied with France (a natural sea power, but in this case necessarily acting as a land power), arrayed against Germany, Britain, Japan, and the United States as sea powers.^[30] Further, Mahan conceived of a unified, modern state composed of Turkey, Syria, and Mesopotamia, possessing an efficiently organized army and navy to stand as a counterweight to Russian expansion.^[30]

Further dividing the map by geographic features, Mahan stated that the two most influential lines of division would be the Suez and

Halford J. Mackinder

's major work, Democratic ideals and reality: a study in the politics of reconstruction, appeared in 1919.[12] It presented his theory of the Heartland and made a case for fully taking into account geopolitical factors at the Paris Peace conference and contrasted (geographical) reality with Woodrow Wilson's idealism. The book's most famous quote was: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World."

This message was composed to convince the world statesmen at the Paris Peace conference of the crucial importance of Eastern Europe as the strategic route to the Heartland was interpreted as requiring a strip of buffer state to separate Germany and Russia. These were created by the peace negotiators but proved to be ineffective bulwarks in 1939 (although this may be seen as a failure of other, later statesmen during the interbellum). The principal concern of his work was to warn of the possibility of another major war (a warning also given by economist John Maynard Keynes).

Mackinder was anti-

Mackinder's work paved the way for the establishment of geography as a distinct discipline in the United Kingdom. His role in fostering the teaching of geography is probably greater than that of any other single British geographer.

Whilst Oxford did not appoint a professor of Geography until 1934, both the

) in 1923.

Mackinder is often credited with introducing two new terms into the English language: "manpower" and "heartland".

The Heartland Theory was enthusiastically taken up by the German school of Geopolitik, in particular by its main proponent Karl Haushofer. Geopolitik was later embraced by the German Nazi regime in the 1930s. The German interpretation of the Heartland Theory is referred to explicitly (without mentioning the connection to Mackinder) in The Nazis Strike, the second of Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" series of American World War II propaganda films.

The Heartland Theory and more generally classical geopolitics and geostrategy were extremely influential in the making of US strategic policy during the period of the Cold War.^[32]

Evidence of Mackinder's Heartland Theory can be found in the works of geopolitician Dimitri Kitsikis, particularly in his geopolitical model "Intermediate Region".

Friedrich Ratzel

Influenced by the works of Alfred Thayer Mahan, as well as the German geographers Carl 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

Ratzel's ideas would influence the works of his student Rudolf Kjellén, as well as those of General Karl Haushofer.[33]

Rudolf Kjellén

His writings focused on five central concepts that would underlie German geopolitik:

1. Reich was a territorial concept that was composed of Raum (Lebensraum), and strategic military shape;
2. Volk was a racial conception of the state;
3. Haushalt was a call for autarky based on land, formulated in reaction to the vicissitudes of international markets;
4. Gesellschaft was the social aspect of a nation's organization and cultural appeal, Kjellén
   anthropomorphizing
   inter-state relations more than Ratzel had; and,
5. Regierung was the form of government whose bureaucracy and army would contribute to the people's pacification and coordination.^[34]

General Karl Haushofer

Haushofer defined geopolitik in 1935 as "the duty to safeguard the right to the soil, to the land in the widest sense, not only the land within the frontiers of the Reich, but the right to the more extensive Volk and cultural lands."^[28] Culture itself was seen as the most conducive element to dynamic expansion. Culture provided a guide as to the best areas for expansion, and could make expansion safe, whereas solely military or commercial power could not.^[33]

To Haushofer, the existence of a state depended on living space, the pursuit of which must serve as the basis for all policies. Germany had a high population density, whereas the old colonial powers had a much lower density: a virtual mandate for German expansion into resource-rich areas.^[33] A buffer zone of territories or insignificant states on one's borders would serve to protect Germany.^[33]

Closely linked to this need was Haushofer's assertion that the existence of small states was evidence of political regression and disorder in the international system. The small states surrounding Germany ought to be brought into the vital German order.

Haushofer and the Munich school of geopolitik would eventually expand their conception of lebensraum and autarky well past a restoration of the German borders of 1914 and "a place in the sun." They set as goals a New European Order, then a New Afro-European Order, and eventually to a Eurasian Order.^[34] This concept became known as a pan-region, taken from the American Monroe Doctrine, and the idea of national and continental self-sufficiency.^[34] This was a forward-looking refashioning of the drive for colonies, something that geopoliticians did not see as an economic necessity, but more as a matter of prestige, and of putting pressure on older colonial powers. The fundamental motivating force was not economic, but cultural and spiritual.^[33]

Beyond being an economic concept, pan-regions were a strategic concept as well. Haushofer acknowledged the strategic concept of the

Nicholas J. Spykman

Nicholas J. Spykman was a 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").

Balanced power would lead to peace.

George F. Kennan

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

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.^[39] 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 World War II, 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

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

In his subsequent book, The Choice, Brzezinski updates his geostrategy in light of

and the intervening six years between the two books.

In his journal called America's New Geostrategy, he discusses the need of shift in America's geostrategy to avoid its massive collapse like many scholars predict. He points out that:

• the United States needs to shift away from its long-standing preoccupation with the threat of a nuclear war between the superpowers or a massive Soviet conventional attack in central Europe.
• a doctrine and a force posture are needed that will enable the United States to respond more selectively to a large number of possible security threats to enhance deterrence in the current and foreseeable conditions.
• the United States should rely to a greater extent on a more flexible mix of nuclear and even non-nuclear strategic forces capable of executing more selective military mission^[42]

Other notable geostrategists

Name	Nationality
Brooks Adams	United States
Thomas P. M. Barnett	United States
Saul B. Cohen	United States
George Friedman	United States
Julian Corbett	British
Colin S. Gray	United States
Homer Lea	United States
Otto Maull	German
Alexander de Seversky	United States
Robert Strausz-Hupé	United States
Ko Tun-hwa	Republic of China (Taiwan)

See also

• German geostrategy
• Indian geostrategy
• Pakistani geostrategy
• Geostrategy in Taiwan
• Geostrategy in Central Asia
• Oil geostrategy
• Geoeconomics

References

Further reading

• Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: Basic Books, 1997.
• Brzezinski, Zbigniew. America's New Geostrategy. Council on Foreign Relations, 1988
• Gray, Colin S. and Geoffrey Sloan. Geopolitics, Geography and Strategy. 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.
• Daclon, Corrado Maria. Geopolitics of Environment, A Wider Approach to the Global Challenges. Italy: Comunità Internazionale, SIOI, 2007.
• Efremenko, Dmitry V. Russian Geostrategic Imperatives. Collection of Essays. Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences, 2019.
• European Geostrategy
• Ukrainian Geostrategy
• The GeGaLo index of geopolitical gains and losses assesses how the geopolitical position of 156 countries may change if the world fully transitions to renewable energy resources. Former fossil fuels exporters are expected to lose power, while the positions of former fossil fuel importers and countries rich in renewable energy resources is expected to strengthen.^[1]

1. hdl:11250/2634876
   .