by John Bellamy Foster
The New Geopolitics

But it was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that was to constitute the sea change for the U.S. empire. The U.S. assault on Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, was made possible by the erosion of the balance of power in the Middle East in the wake of the weakening of Soviet power. At the same time, the Soviet meltdown and signs of its possible breakup constituted one of the chief reasons why the United States refrained from invading and occupying Iraq during the Gulf War. Geopolitical uncertainties associated with the collapse of the Soviet bloc were such that Washington could not afford to pin down large numbers of troops in the Middle East. Nor could it risk the possibility that an invasion and occupation of Iraq might serve to revive Soviet concerns about U.S. imperialism, and thus delay or reverse the massive changes then occurring in that country. The Soviet Union’s demise came only months later in the summer of 1991.

The “new world order” that followed was soon dubbed a “unipolar world” with the United States as the sole superpower. The Department of Defense lost no time in initiating a strategic review known as the Defense Planning Guidance, directed by Paul Wolfowitz then undersecretary of defense for policy. Parts of this classified report, leaked to the press in 1992, stated in Spykman-like language that “Our strategy [after the fall of the Soviet Union] must refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor.” Wolfowitz also took a leaf from the Heartland doctrine, arguing that “Russia will remain the strongest military power in Eurasia and the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the United States.”25 The Defense Planning Guidance proposed a global geopolitical goal for the United States of permanent military hegemony through preemptive actions. Yet, strong objections from U.S. allies forced Washington to back off from the draft report’s explicit commitment to unilateral domination of the globe.

Over the following decade an intense debate took place within U.S. national security and foreign policy circles concerning the extent to which the United States should pursue the goal of indefinite planetary hegemony. Eugene Rostow, undersecretary of state for political affairs from 1966 to 1969, responded in 1993 to the collapse of the Soviet Union by pointing out that it was necessary to contain “the [Russian] Heartland area, [which] constitutes an enormous center of power from which military forces have attacked the coastal regions of Asia and Europe (the Rimlands, in Mackinder’s [sic.] terminology).” Similarly, Kissinger wrote in 1994: “Students of geopolitics....argue, however, that Russia regardless of who governs it, sits astride what Halford Mackinder called the geopolitical heartland, and is the heir to one of the most important imperial traditions.”26 The express goal of such leading national security analysts was to secure the rimland as a means to global power. Much of the controversy in this period centered not so much on the endgame itself, but on whether the United States should rule the globe jointly with its junior partners in the triad (Western Europe and Japan) or should unilaterally seek its own empire of the earth.27

In the end the debate on the new world order was made academic by the actual exercise of U.S. military power abroad, as the United States in the George H. W. Bush and Clinton years actively sought to renew and extend its economic hegemony by military means. The immediate goal was clearly one of securing the perimeter to the Eurasian heartland following the Soviet demise. Thus military interventions occurred in the 1990s not only in the Persian Gulf and the Horn of Africa but in Yugoslavia in Eastern Europe, where NATO under the leadership of the United States bombed for eleven weeks (in the case of Kosovo) and then landed ground troops, leading to the establishment of permanent military bases in an area that had formerly been part of the Soviet sphere of influence. In the Persian Gulf Iraq was faced with an economic embargo and daily bombings by the United States and Britain. Meanwhile, the United States sought military bases in Central Asia in areas surrounding the oil-and-natural-gas-rich Caspian Sea basin, formerly part of the Soviet Union.

In 1999 Mackubin Thomas Owens, Professor of Strategy and Force Planning at the Naval War College, authored a landmark article for the Naval War College Review entitled “In Defense of Classical Geopolitics.” Building on Mackinder and Spykman, while criticizing Haushofer, Owens insisted that the overwhelming geopolitical goal of the United States in the post–Cold War world remained that of preventing “the rise of a hegemon capable of dominating the Eurasian continental realm and of challenging the United States in the maritime realm.”28

Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser, emerged in this period as one of the most avid proponents of the geopolitics of U.S. empire. In his Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997) he alluded directly to the Heartland doctrines promoted by Mackinder and Haushofer (and what he called “the much vulgarized echo” of this in “Hitler’s emphasis on the German people’s need for ‘Lebensraum’”). What had changed was that, “geopolitics has moved from the regional to the global dimension, with preponderance over the entire Eurasian continent serving as the central basis for global primacy. The United States...now enjoys international primacy, with its power directly deployed on three peripheries of the Eurasian continent”—in the West (Europe), the South (south-central Eurasia, including the Middle East) and the East (East-Asia Pacific Rim). “America’s global primacy,” Brzezinski argued, “is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.” The goal, he argued, was to create a “hegemony of a new type,” which he called “global supremacy,” establishing the United States indefinitely as “the first and only truly global power.”29

During the Clinton administration both neoliberal globalization and imperial geopolitics governed foreign policy, but the former often took precedence. In the George W. Bush administration the double commitment remained, but the emphasis was reversed from the start, with more direct attention given to strengthening U.S. global primacy through the exercise of geopolitical/military as opposed to economic power. This shift can be seen in two key position statements issued at the time of the 2000 elections. The first was a foreign policy paper entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses released in September 2000, at vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney’s request, by the Project for the New American Century (a strategic policy group that included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, and George Bush’s younger bother Jeb). This report strongly reasserted the overtly imperialist strategy of the Defense Policy Guidance of 1992. The other was a speech entitled “Imperial America,” delivered on November 11, 2000 by Richard Haass, who was soon to join Colin Powell’s state department as director of policy planning. Haass insisted that the time had come for Americans “to re-conceive their role from a traditional nation-state to an imperial power.” The main danger threatening the U.S. global order was not one of “imperial overstretch” as suggested by Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers but “imperial understretch.”30

The immediate response of the Bush administration to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was to declare a universal and protracted global war on terrorism that was to double as a justification for the expansion of U.S. imperial power. The new National Security Strategy of the United States, delivered by the White House to Congress in September 2002, at the very same time that the administration was beating the war drums for an invasion of Iraq, was modeled after Wolfowitz’s earlier Defense Planning Guidance of 1992. It established as official U.S. strategic policy: (1) preventing any state from developing military capabilities equal to or greater than the United States; (2) carrying out “preemptive” strikes against states that were developing new military capabilities that might eventually endanger the United States, its friends or allies—even in advance of any imminent threat; and (3) insisting on the immunity of U.S. officials and military personnel to any international war crime tribunals. Once again the language mirrored Spykman’s declaration that the goal should be “directed at the prevention of hegemony”—though in this case the explicit goal was to prevent any future challenges to U.S. global supremacy.

Domination of Persian Gulf oil, through an invasion and occupation of Iraq, offered the quickest way of enhancing U.S. imperial power, ensuring that it would have a stranglehold over the world’s major petroleum reserves in a time of growing demand and declining supply of oil worldwide. The fact that the preponderance of long-term oil and natural gas supplies are concentrated in the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea basin, and West Africa allows U.S. “vital interests” in this broad region to be dealt with more circumspectly in the language of geopolitics with little mention of the fossil fuels themselves.

In May 2004, Alan Larson, under secretary of state for economic, business, and agricultural affairs, issued a report entitled “Geopolitics of Oil and Natural Gas,” which declared that “it is almost an axiom in the petroleum business that oil and gas are most often found in countries with challenging political regimes or difficult physical geography.” Here the geopolitics of oil and natural gas was seen as creating vital U.S. strategic interests in the Persian Gulf, Russia and the Caspian Sea basin, West Africa, and Venezuela.31

The new geopolitics shares with classical geopolitics the aim of world domination, but entails a strategic shift aimed in particular at south-central Eurasia. “The purpose of the war in Iraq,” according to Michael Klare, “is to redraw the geopolitical map of Eurasia to insure and embed U.S. power and dominance in the region vis-à-vis...other potential competitors” such as Russia, China, the European Community, Japan, and even India. “The U.S. elites have concluded that the European and East Asian rimlands of Eurasia are securely in American hands or [are] less important, or both. The new center of geopolitical competition, as they see it, is south-central Eurasia, encompassing the Persian Gulf area, which possesses two-thirds of the world’s oil, the Caspian Sea basin, which has a large chunk of what’s left, and the surrounding countries of Central Asia. This is the new center of world struggle and conflict, and the Bush administration is determined that the United States shall dominate and control this critical area.”32

In a special July 1999 supplement entitled “The New Geopolitics,” the Economist magazine explicitly adopted Brzezinski’s “grand chessboard” analysis, arguing that the key geopolitical struggle for the “empire of democracy” led by the United States after Kosovo was the control of Eurasia and particularly Central Asia. Both China and Russia were seen as potentially extending their geopolitical influence into the energy rich Caspian Sea basin. U.S. imperial expansion to preempt this was therefore necessary.33

U.S. geopolitical strategy accepts no bounds short of Brzezinski’s “global supremacy.” It thus reflects what Mackinder called the tendency to a “single World-Empire.” So brazen has this new geopolitics now become among today’s empire enthusiasts that Atlantic Monthly correspondent Robert Kaplan began his recent book, Imperial Grunts, by celebrating the Pentagon’s global military map of five “unified commands” in terms of its “uncanny resemblance” to a map “drawn in 1931 for the German military by Professor Karl Haushofer, a leading figure of Geopolitik.” Lest his meaning remain unclear, Kaplan proceeded to refer to Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” as embodying “idealistic” values, and he went on to characterize his own journalistic “odyssey through the barracks and outposts of the American Empire” as a tour of the new “Injun Country.”34

The Failures of Geopolitics

The unpopularity of geopolitical analysis after 1943 is usually attributed to its association with the Nazi strategy of world conquest. Yet the popular rejection of geopolitics in that period may have also arisen from the deeper recognition that classical geopolitics in all of its forms was an inherently imperialist and war-related doctrine. As the critical geopolitical analyst Robert Strausz-Hupé argued in 1942, “In Geopolitik there is no distinction between war and peace. All states have the urge to expand, and the process of expansion is viewed as a perpetual warfare—no matter whether military power is actually applied or is used to implement ‘peaceful’ diplomacy as a suspended threat.”35

U.S. imperial geopolitics is ultimately aimed at creating a global space for capitalist development. It is about forming a world dedicated to capital accumulation on behalf of the U.S. ruling class—and to a lesser extent the interlinked ruling classes of the triad powers as a whole (North America, Europe, and Japan). Despite “the end of colonialism” and the rise of “anti-capitalist new countries,” Business Week pronounced in April 1975, there has always been “the umbrella of American power to contain it....[T]he U.S. was able to fashion increasing prosperity among Western countries, using the tools of more liberal trade, investment, and political power. The rise of the multinational corporation was the economic expression of this political framework.”36

There is no doubt that the U.S. imperium has benefited those at the top of the center-capitalist nations and not just the power elite of the United States. Yet, the drive for global hegemony on the part of particular capitalist nations and their ruling classes, like capital accumulation itself, recognizes no insurmountable barriers. Writing before September 11, 2001, István Mészáros argued in his Socialism or Barbarism that due to unbridled U.S. imperial ambitions the world was entering what was potentially “the most dangerous phase of imperialism in all history”:

For what is at stake today is not the control of a particular part of the planet—no matter how large—putting at a disadvantage but still tolerating the independent actions of some rivals, but the control of its totality by one hegemonic economic and military superpower....This is what the ultimate rationality of globally developed capital requires, in its vain attempt to bring under control its irreconcilable antagonisms. The trouble is, though, that such rationality...is at the same time the most extreme form of irrationality in history, including the Nazi conception of world domination, as far as the conditions required for the survival of humanity are concerned.37
In the present era of naked imperialism, initiated by the sole superpower, the nature of the threat to the entire planet and its people is there for all to see. According to G. John Ikenberry, Professor of Geopolitics and Global Justice at Georgetown University, in his 2002 Foreign Affairs article “America’s Imperial Ambition”: the U.S. “neoimperial vision” is one in which “the United States arrogates to itself the global role of setting standards, determining threats, using force, and meting out justice.” At present the United States currently enjoys both economic (though declining) and military primacy. “The new goal,” he states, “is to make these advantages permanent—a fait accompli that will prompt other states to not even try to catch up. Some thinkers have described the strategy as ‘breakout.’” Yet, such a “hard-line imperial grand strategy,” according to Ikenberry—himself no opponent of imperialism—could backfire.38

From the standpoint of Marxian theory, which emphasizes the economic taproot of imperialism, such a global thrust will be as ineffectual as it is barbaric. Power under capitalism can be imposed episodically through the barrel of a gun. Its real source, however, is relative economic power, which is by its nature fleeting.

The foregoing suggests that interimperialist rivalry did not end as is often thought with the rise of U.S. hegemony. Rather it has persisted in Washington’s drive to unlimited hegemony, which can be traced to the underlying logic of capital in a world divided into competing nation states. The United States as the remaining superpower is today seeking final world dominion. The “Project for the New American Century” stands for an attempt to create a U.S.-led global imperium geared to extracting as much surplus as possible from the countries of the periphery, while achieving a “breakout” strategy with respect to the main rivals (or potential rivals) to U.S. global supremacy. The fact that such a goal is irrational and impossible to sustain constitutes the inevitable failure of geopolitics.

Marxian theories of imperialism have always focused on the importance of geoeconomics even more than the question of geopolitics. From this standpoint, uneven-and-combined capitalist development results in shifts in global productive power that cannot be controlled by geopolitical/military means. Empire under capitalism is inherently unstable, forever devoid of a genuine world state and pointing to greater and potentially more dangerous wars. Its long-term evolution is toward barbarism—armed with ever more fearsome weapons of mass destruction.

What hope remains under these dire circumstances lies in the building of a new world peace movement that recognizes that what ultimately must be overcome is not a particular instance of imperialism and war, but an entire world economic system that feeds on militarism and imperialism. The goal of peace must be seen as involving the creation of a world of substantive equality in which global exploitation and the geopolitics of empire are no longer the principal objects. The age-old name for such a radical egalitarian order is “socialism.”

Notes
1. Michael Klare, “The New Geopolitics,” Monthly Review, vol. 55, no. 3 (July–August 2003), 51–56. The phrase “economic taproot of imperialism” is taken from John Hobson’s classic 1902 work Imperialism: A Study (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 71.
2. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), 147.
3. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, 1890); Brooks Adams, The New Empire (London: Macmillan, 1902); Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in History (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1921). The Turner book contains his original 1893 article and his 1896 Atlantic Monthly analysis in which he extended the argument to encompass the need for U.S. overseas expansion—see The Frontier in History, 219.
4. Halford Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal, vol. 23, no. 4 (April 1904), 421–44.
5. Halford Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1919), 1–2.
6. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, 179–81. For the evolution of Mackinder’s economic views see Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1960), 157–68.
7. Halford Mackinder, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 21, no. 4, (July 1943), 601.
8. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, 186.
9. Brian W. Blouet, Halford Mackinder (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), 172–77.
10. Ratzel quoted in Robert Strausz-Hupé, Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942), 31.
11. Strausz-Hupé, Geopolitics, 66, 227; Neumann, Behemoth, 156–60.
12. Haushofer quoted in Strauz-Hupé, Geopolitics, 152; Neumann, Behemoth, 144.
13. Derwent Whittlesey, “Haushofer: Geopoliticians,” in Edward Mead Earle, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), 388–411; German Strategy of World Conquest (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1942), 70–78; Andreas Dorpalen, The World of General Haushofer (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942), 70–78; David Thomas Murphy, The Heroic Earth: Geopolitical Thought in Weimar Germany, 1918–1933 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997); Saul B. Cohen, Geopolitics in the World System (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 21–22.
14. Nicholas John Spykman, The Geography of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1944), 43.
15. Nicholas John Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1942), 19, 458–60.
16. Spykman, Geography of the Peace, 57.
17. Noam Chomsky, “The Cold War and the Superpowers,” Monthly Review, vol. 33, no. 6 (November 1981), 1–10; Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalizaton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 325–31.
18. Smith, American Empire, 287, 329.
19. Mackinder, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” 598.
20. Colin S. Gray, The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era (New York: Crane, Russak, and Co., 1977), 14.
21. James Burnham, The Struggle for the World (New York: John Day, 1947), 114–15, 162, 182; Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004), 22–25; Francis P. Sempa, Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 25–63. Like Burnham, Raymond Aron referred to the Soviet Union as a danger to the World Island in his Century of Total War (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 111.
22. Leslie W. Hepple, “The Revival of Geopolitics,” Political Geography Quarterly, volume 5, no. 4 (October 1986), supplement, S21–S36.
23. “Fresh Fears that the Soviets Will Cut Off Critical Minerals,” Business Week, January 28, 1980, 62–63; Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War (New York: The New Press, 2003), 180–81.
24. Michael Klare, Blood and Oil (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2004), 2.
25. “Excerpts from Pentagon’s Plan: ‘Preventing the Re-Emergence of a New Rival,’” New York Times, March 8, 1992; “Keeping the U.S. First,” Washington Post, March 11, 1992; Dorrien, Imperial Design, 40–41.
26. Eugene V. Rostow, A Breakfast for Bonaparte (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1993), 14; Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 814.
27. Renewed interest in Mackinder’s work in this context led to the reprinting of Democratic Ideals and Reality by the National Defense University in 1996.
28. Mackubin Thomas Owens, “In Defense of Classical Geopolitics,” Naval War College Review, vol. 52, no. 4 (Autumn 1999), http://www.nwc.navy.mil/press/review/1999/autumn/art3-a99.htm.
29. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 3, 10, 30, 38–39.
30. See John Bellamy Foster “‘Imperial America’ and War,” Monthly Review, vol. 55, no. 1 (May 2003), 1–10.
31. Alan Larson, “Geopolitics of Oil and Natural Gas,” Economic Perspectives, May 2004 http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/ites//0504/ijee/larson.htm.
32. Klare, “The New Geopolitics,” 53–54.
33. “The New Geopolitics,” Economist, July 31, 1999, 13, 15–16.
34. Robert Kaplan, Imperial Grunts (New York: Random House, 2005), 3–15.
35. Strausz-Hupé, Geopolitics, 101.
36. “The Fearful Drift of Foreign Policy,” Business Week, April 7, 1975, 21.
37. István Mészáros, Socialism or Barbarism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 38.
38. G. John Ikenberry, “America’s Imperial Ambition,” Foreign Affairs vol. 81, no. 5 (September–October 2002), 44, 50, 59.