Executive Summaries of Geopolitical Readings, Part 1

Executive Summary: Week 1

In Defense of Classical Geopolitics, Mackubin Thomas Owens

Thesis: While geopolitics stresses geographic space as a critically important strategic factor, it recognizes that geography is only part of the totality of the “global phenomenon”. Geopolitical analysis is an indispensable part of strategy making.

• Geography and Geopolitics

1. The most important influence on strategy is geography, or the physical setting of human activity.
   
2. Geography examines the physical factors of the earth, such as space, topography and climate.
   However there are many subdivisions of geography, including political geography, economic geography, military geography, etc.
   
3. Geopolitics encompasses all these branches.
   

• The Post Cold War Security Environment: Contending Perspectives
  

1. Nongeopolitical [sic] perspectives:
   Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis.
   “Global Interdependence” or globalization
   Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” and Kaplan’s “Coming Anarchy”
   Neo-Marxist politico-economic development (Wallerstein)
   Non-Marxist structural realism and multipolarity (Buzan)
   

• Geopolitics, Con and Pro
  

1. Cons:
   The term is derived from geopolitik, a theory embraced by the Nazis
   It smacks of “geographic determinism”, and is viewed as an excuse for aggression.
   
2. Pros:
   It is essential to having an effective strategic culture, and will help a country make the right national security decisions based on its surroundings.
   
3. Geopolitics is descriptive, in that it helps us understand that world as a whole, and prescriptive in that it suggests a course of action.
   

• Classic Geopolitics Revisited
  

1. Geopolitik and Organic State theory is one of the main strands of thought, and emphasizes social Darwinism, and the attitude of expand or die.
   
2. Geostrategy, the other main strand of thought, focused more on discovering patterns of state development and maintenance of power.
   
3. The geopolitics of containment main concept was that each region has a cornerstone, and that, if it falls, the rest will fall with it. It tried to stop this.
   

• Post Cold War Geopolitics
  

1. Post-cold war geopolitics must reject the idea that geography is the only important factor affecting international action, and must understand geographical phenomena as complex.
   
2. The geographical structure is hierarchal with two geostrategic realms, the maritime and the Eurasian continental. Realms are vast spatial areas affecting everything in their reach.
   

• Limits, Opportunities, and International Politics
  

1. Napoleon defined strategy as that art of using time and space. Geopolitics provides the link between geography and strategy.
   
2. Geopolitics is based on the fact that all international politics take place in time and space, and in particular geographical setting s and environments.
   
3. Geopolitics is dynamic, not static. Factors can alter but not negate the need for it.