Fluent Essays

Judging simply by past and current actions. Criteria Ratings Points Content 65 to >59.0 pts Advanced The student thoroughly addressed all 7 areas of the analysis. 59 to >54.0 pts Proficient The student sufficiently addressed all 7 areas of the analysis. 54 to >0.0 pts Developing The student did not accurately address all 7 areas of the analysis. 0 pts Not Present 65 pts Content Analysis and Conclusion 40 to >36.0 pts Advanced Major points are clearly articulated and sufficiently supported. There is a logical flow of arguments. Contextual factors are considered, complex issues are navigated with precision and nuance, and relevant research is used. 36 to >33.0 pts Proficient Major points are not always clearly analyzed, and/or some aspects of context, terminology, awareness of complexity, the need for nuanced understanding, or relevant research are lacking. AND/OR The paper does not have a logical flow to its arguments. 33 to >0.0 pts Developing The major points are largely unclear or presented in a superficial manner that does not deal with the context, terminology, complexity, or relevant research related to the subject matter. 0 pts Not Present 40 pts Structure Formatting 25 to >22.0 pts Advanced The student meticulously followed strict current Turabian guidelines when writing the paper and had the required page count (3 -5 pages). 22 to >20.0 pts Proficient The student mostly followed strict current Turabian guidelines when writing the paper but had an insufficient page count. 20 to >0.0 pts Developing The student did not follow strict current Turabian guidelines when writing the paper and/or did not have a sufficient page count. 0 pts Not Present 25 pts Structure Spelling and Grammar 20 to >17.0 pts Advanced There are few to no spelling and grammar errors. 17 to >16.0 pts Proficient There are a several spelling and grammar errors. 16 to >0.0 pts Developing There are considerable spelling and grammar errors. 0 pts Not Present 20 pts Total Points: 150 Psychological Profile of Contemporary World Leader Grading Rubric | PPOG506_B02_202140 PPOG 506 Psychological Profile of Contemporary World Leader Assignment Instructions Overview One of the most important abilities for a diplomat is to have at least basic understanding of people’s characters and what makes them the way they are (sometimes going on quite limited information). You are not expected to look at this as might a professional in the field of psychology. However, this is your chance to put yourself in such a situation and see what you might learn from the research you will do. Instructions Choose a current, foreign world leader and write a concise paper on his/her psychological profile to the best of your abilities. Judging simply by past and current actions, identify the following: 1. Strengths and weaknesses of the leader 2. The leader’s ability to compromise 3. The US’s interest in the chosen leader’s country and politics 4. The foreign leader’s interest in the US and its politics 5. Potential collaboration points and potential clashing points between the US and the foreign leader’s country with this leader in charge 6. Potential dangers to US national security stemming from this leader’s tendencies 7. Techniques and incentives for a good cooperation in the future for both the US and the foreign leader’s country · Length of assignment: 5 pages (not including title page and bibliography). · Format of assignment: Turabian. · Number of citations: minimum of 3 scholarly citations. · Acceptable sources: scholarly articles, news articles, and books from respectable sources. Note: Your assignment will be checked for originality via the Turnitin plagiarism tool. Eastern Europe is more than just a geographic concept. We tend to look at it from the cartographer’s point of view in terms of geography. But it is more than just that because what goes along with that is a distinct culture and also a distinct socio-economic pattern. For the most part, when we've looked at Eastern Europe, we've thought of it in terms not of geography, but rather in terms of politics. And so, the concept of Eastern Europe was typically seen as the Communist party states associated with the Warsaw Pact as allies of the Soviet Union. And in that sense, Eastern Europe stretched all the way from Poland, south, going as far as Albania and even Yugoslavia. With the changes in Eastern Europe that were brought about because of relationships with the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia cease to be seen as part of the Soviet Bloc. But it was still part of Eastern Europe in political terms because it was a socialist economic entity. Justice Albania repudiated its ties with the Soviet Union. In the early 1960s, continued to be more than anything else, a rigid Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist state. All of this then underscored the history of the region, its relationships with the Byzantine Empire, with the Orthodox Church. Also, there was the influence of the Ottoman Turks. Probably the best-known country in Eastern Europe to the, in the mind of the average American is Romania. Romania is probably more significant than any other of these nations because of its hostile relationship with the Ottomans. And the most famous remaining evolve time, of course, lad SEPIC better Normally it's Dracula is somebody whose reputation hinges zone. His resistance to the Turkish invaders and his use of psychological operations to undermine their forces. The use of developed terrorist tactics against the Turks that really were successful in stopping the Turkish advance through Eastern Europe. And of course, where it was initially focus known as its ultimate objective was Western Europe. And so Eastern Europe was seen largely as a political entity. With the collapse of the communist party states in Eastern Europe. Though we're once again forced to make a redefinition of what we mean by Eastern Europe. And we recognize that Greece is just as much a part of eastern Europe as Slovakia is a part of Eastern Europe. Something else, it also has changed with the collapse of the Communist Party States has been attitudes toward ethnicity. Ethnicity in the communist party era was suppressed, at least in part because this was nationalism. In nationalism is seen as the antithesis of class consciousness. And so, in an effort to promote an environment in which people define themselves by their relationship to the means of production rather than by their language or their cultural heritage. There was an effort to suppress ethnicity. The best and most violent example of this is Yugoslavia, where the majority Serbs and Croatians effectively govern without emphasizing their Serbian Croatian identity. In fact, the one room in Yugoslav politics and later Serbian politics. I don't talk about ethnicity. With the collapse of Tito or with the death of Tito. In the 1990's, this situation changed. And finally, Milosevic emerges is the Serbian later. And Milosevic is the first prominent Yugoslavian politician to talk about ethnicity. And his emphasis on ethnicity hastened the war in Yugoslavia, which began in full measure in 990 one and spread to Kosovo and involved eventually American and British involvement in that war. One thing that has been important in our examination of Eastern Europe, one theory is the Heartland theory. And it does a lot to explain the important relationship between Eastern Europe and Russia. The Heartland theory was based on the notion that whoever controls the heart land of Europe, which was Eastern Europe, would be in an advance, advantageous position to dominate all of Europe. For decades. That was the Soviet Union. For decades, people that tried to assess the geopolitical future of the region focused on Russian control over Eastern Europe. With the collapse of the East European economies, with the deterioration of the Soviet economy. And in 990 one, the collapse of the Soviet Union, East, East Europe was finally able to assert itself completely from Russian domination. In fact, most of that was accomplished during the revolutions of 1989. This has had a tremendous impact on Russia's geopolitical position as the Soviet Union. This was truly a multi-national state. And you could look at the different regions of the Soviet Union. And you saw in all of this that the Slavic regions really accounting for no more than 50 percent of the population of the Soviet Union. And so what this indicated very early on was the deterioration of the dominant Russian position. With the collapse of the Soviet Union. This brought a humiliation of Russia in particular. And that ushered in the Yeltsin administration. And Yeltsin was not regarded as a serious figure. If you look at Russian diplomats today, people who will talk about Russian politics with, without siders. The one thing upon which they agree is that Yeltsin did not do justice to Russia. The enthusiasm that exists for, for Putin is based enlarge measure on the belief that Putin has been responsible for the restoration of Russian dignity, if not the Russian Empire. Those other regions it used to be part of the Soviet Union. In varying degrees have fallen under a certain amount of Russian influence. Central Asia, for example, independent, ethnically distinct, broke away from Russia in the years after the collapse of Soviet Union, Uzbekistan played a very important role in US policy. In 2001, when the United States responded to the Al-Qaeda attacks, the United States use the same basis in his back withstand that the Russians had used to invade Afghanistan a decade or so before that. That close relationship between the United States in Uzbekistan did a lot to help keep the Russians out. And the Uzbeks, for their part, wanted to do this. In the interest of human rights concerns. Early in the Bush administration, relations between Uzbekistan in the United States deteriorated. And with that, Russia has been able to reassert itself and its Pakistan, along with the Chinese. This has had an important geopolitical impact in that it weakens American leverage, but it's also had a negative impact on the human rights situation. With all of this, what we see is Russia's geopolitical situation is under pressure today because of ethnic considerations. In particular, the fact that this country is becoming increasingly Islamic. And you can look at this in many ways. If you see the number of mosques which exist in the Soviet Union collapsed. There were about 300. Today, there's about 10 thousand, and the number is increasing at the popular level today, there's a great deal of prejudice against Muslims. And there's a general perception that you can express that hostility without any repercussions. But it is a reminder of the fact that Russia is still sensitive about its security situation and recognizes that they face that challenge from radical Islam. Just are the European nations and the United States face a similar challenge. THE END OF THE COLD WAR POSED BOTH MAJOR CONCEPTUAL issues focused on a total recasting of geopolitics and also the question as to whether the subject itself had outlived its usefulness and therefore deserved extinction or, rather, relegation to an outdated part of historical literature. In the event, reports of the death of geopolitics proved totally unfounded. Instead, the second surge of writing on geopolitics—that linked to the Cold War—has been followed, from 1990, with a third surge. Moreover, this surge has been of considerable scale. From 1990 until 2014, over four hundred academic books specifically devoted to geopolitical thought have appeared, a number that does not include more narrowly focused national studies. In addition, these books have appeared in a plethora of languages, including Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, English, Finnish, French, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and Spanish. To write of a surge does not imply any necessary similarity in approach, content or tone, but does capture the extent to which geopolitical issues and language still play a major role. This can be amplified if attention is devoted to references in periodical and newspaper articles,1 and in popular fiction. For example, geopolitics is a term frequently used in James Ellroy’s 2014 novel Perfidia. Dudley Smith refers to “recent geopolitical events” in explaining why “Jimmy the Jap” would make an appropriate scapegoat.2 There have certainly been major changes in the subject since 1990 and it is no longer centered on one clear topic, as was the case during the Cold War. Those interested in the heartland idea now tend to focus the heartland further east in Eurasia in order to account for China’s post-Maoist rise in prosperity and power. That, however, is not an approach that makes much sense in terms of Mackinder’s 1904 paper. Moreover, as far as military factors are concerned, there is no Chinese threat to Europe or the Middle East. As another key element of change, cities, Islam, and natural resources have all now emerged as geopolitical actors, even though they might not all possess the traditional geographical centering of the actors in the older geopolitical scheme of things.3 While received geopolitics therefore changed, the subject itself endured, and unsurprisingly so given the survival of state governments and their geographic concerns. At the same time, “critical geopolitics” added a key dimension to the debate, and, in turn, developed in different directions, including feminism and Marxism. Whatever the approach, the closer any scholar, not least a historian, comes to the present, the greater the danger that the benefits of long-term perspective and reflection will be lost. This point is certainly true of the geopolitics of the 2000s and 2010s, as the struggle with radical Islam came dramatically to the fore with the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.4 This focus on radical Islam led to the subordination of other themes, such as growing US estrangement from China and, subsequently, from post-communist Russia as well. However, there were (and are) difficulties in assessing the meaning and events of change. On the one hand, the assessment of the relative importance of developments within an agreed analytical structure was unclear, with, for example, pronounced and persistent debate about the respective significance, for the United States, of the Middle East and the Far East. As a separate point, one that captured the range of contexts within which geopolitics was considered, the fracturing of geopolitical analysis with the prominence, from the 1990s, of a self-conscious “critical geopolitics,” made it harder to present the subject as objective or, at least, free from its own politics. Of course, geopolitics, like other disciplines, has generally not displayed a consistent approach,5 nor an absence of political commitment. Moreover, it is necessary to be cautious before dividing the past into neat chronological periods with their own themes and analysts, such that 1990, for example, becomes a turning point. Instead, there was, and is, in practice, considerable continuity in the literature as well as in circumstances. For example, Mackinder spanned World War I, publishing important works and holding major roles both before and after and, indeed, lived on until 1947. In an essay, published in 1943, that noted the significance of memories and the extent of continuity, Mackinder referred to his earliest memory of public affairs, that of the Prussian victory over the French at Sedan in 1870. He linked his subsequent ideas with concern about Russia in the 1870s, a concern that nearly led Britain to war in 1878 in order to protect the Ottoman Empire.6 Also, a figure active before World War I, Haushofer died the year before Mackinder. Kissinger lived through World War II and the Cold War, going on to publish a major work of reflection in 2014. The first major work of Saul Cohen appeared in 1963, but he published an important article forty years later, with a second edition of his Geopolitics of the World System following in 2009. Alongside continuity by individuals, the end of the Cold War encouraged a rethinking of geopolitics in some academic circles. There was an interest in a new agenda of international relations and anxieties. In Europe, this agenda included a greater concern with the geopolitical significance of the European Community, and markedly both its expansion and its governmental character.7 With the end of the Cold War, East versus West was replaced by Eastern and Western Europe. In turn, the power of NATO and the European Union was exerted in Eastern Europe and, subsequently, membership in both was greatly extended, in return for acceptance of their norms.8 Composed of six states when founded, the European Economic Community of 1957 had by 2014 become the 28-strong European Union. In this case, and more generally, there was a degree of optimism, if not naivety, in some of the literature. This was so not only with the discussion of NATO and the European Union, but also with the hope that geopolitics, like the longer-established peace studies, could be a force for a more benign world order as well as a description of it.9 In practice, the expansion of NATO and the European Union created a geopolitical issue in terms of the hostile response of Russia, a response that was expressed in terms of control and influence over territory, especially Ukraine. Whether or not this response was inevitable and should have been anticipated, it became an issue in 2014, one that also led to disagreements over the viability of nonrealist accounts of international relations. In turn, this analysis affected discussion of China. From 1990 regional issues around the world were generally discussed in terms of a highly specific context, that of US hegemony. Moreover, in the 1990s and early 2000s, before the situation changed from the mid-2000s, US hegemony, and the apparent inception of a unipolar world system, posed an issue not only for those offering an explicitly politicized geopolitical analysis of the present, but also for scholars looking for long-term patterns. Thus, William Thompson, a leading US political scientist, having discerned a pattern over 13,000 years in which “one state gained enough coercive advantage over its rivals—based on relative endowment deriving from the organizational-technological-political-economic-war co-evolutionary spiral—to encourage an attempt at regional hegemony,” noted that the United States had gone on from being the leading global sea power to becoming also the leading global power, which led him to wonder whether this was a temporary phenomenon or the harbinger of a new era in world politics.10 The idea of a transformation or paradigm shift in terms of such an era attracted considerable attention. THEORIES FOR THE 1990S In the aftermath of the Cold War, a number of theories were advanced by international relations specialists and political geographers as they sought to conceptualize global power politics and predict the future, the latter a goal that attracted much geopolitical speculation. Some of these theories benefited from considerable public attention. In turn, the content and impact of this attention varied by group and country, creating a form of geopolitics of geopolitical analysis. For example, among left-wing commentators, the displacement of Cold War containment theory at a time of apparently unipolar US power encouraged an emphasis on political economy. This emphasis provided a way to link a generally hostile account of the US/capitalist structuring of the global economy with the often-related competition at every scale over resources. Spatial issues could be incorporated into this approach. One continued theme in the literature was the preference, on the part of those offering geopolitical analysis, to claim salience for their own particular analysis, frequently with scant allowance for other views. Indeed, a rush of world visions were on offer, for the analyses presented by writers and commentators were as much prospectuses for the future as understandings of the present, and with the two shaped together. This situation was very much the case for the two most prominent accounts advanced in the 1990s: Francis Fukayama’s 1989 article “The End of History,” published in The National Interest, a prominent US neoconservative journal,11 and Samuel Huntington’s article “The Clash of Civilizations?” published four years later in Foreign Affairs, a leading US journal.12 Neither article put spatial considerations foremost nor offered an equivalent response to an apparent spatial threat, which the varied understandings of containment had done during the Cold War. However, each account had important implications for the operation of the international system and, therefore, for the relationship between particular struggles and the wider situation. Moreover, even if silent on specific geopolitical points and, more generally, limited in their discussion of political and (even more) economic geography, each account had implications for the way in which geopolitics was understood. Fukayama’s approach was influential, or at least highly newsworthy, in the 1990s, and Huntington’s in the 2000s, particularly in the aftermath of the terror attacks of 2001. In one sense, Fukayama—a former pupil of Huntington and the deputy director of policy planning under George H. W. Bush, Republican president from 1989 to 1993—proposed the end of geopolitics when he wrote of “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Fukayama saw this process as specifically occurring thanks to the acceptance of liberal economics by Asia, particularly China. It tends, however, to be forgotten that, toward the end of his article, he wrote, “clearly, the vast bulk of the Third World remains very much mired in history, and will be a terrain of conflict for many years to come,” and, later, that “terrorism and wars of national liberation will continue to be an important item on the national agenda.” Fukayama has been frequently criticized by those who have not read him. Moreover, like Mackinder, he was not always read with reference to the nuances in his argument or allowing for his qualifications, whether explicit or apparent. On the other hand, the tone of neither man put qualifications to the fore. Fukuyama went on to publish his work in book-length: The End of History and the Last Man (1992). By then, his argument seemed especially prescient, as the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991 had followed that of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, while China’s engagement with the Western economy was becoming more pronounced. Adopting a commonplace approach, for example, that of the Enlightenment stadial writers, such as William Robertson and Adam Smith, Fukuyama’s account was not only spatial but also teleological, with certain states presented as more successful because they were progressive, indeed post-historical in his terms. The Fukuyama thesis proved highly conducive to American commentators arguing that US norms and power now defined, or should define, the world. In a continuation of the process by which British commentators in the eighteenth and nineteenth century had seen Britain as a Rome, America was presented as a “new Rome,” but a Rome on a global scale,13 and one thereby able to advance and protect a “global commons” of liberal norms. This was an arresting form of geopolitics. A significant cartographic change accompanied this move to US dominance. The Soviet geopolitical menace was abruptly reduced in the Robinson projection adopted by the National Geographic Society in 1988. This offered a flatter, squatter world, and one that was more accurate in terms of area. Compared to the Van der Grinten projection, the Soviet Union in the Robinson projection moved from being 223 percent larger than it really is to being only 18 percent larger, and the United States from 68 percent larger to 3 percent smaller.14 Some critics presented Fukuyama as a triumphalist neoconservative who failed to relativize his own position—which was ironic, as in 2006 he was to repudiate “the Neoconservative legacy,” going on to write works that were more centrist in content and tone.15 There was also the problem posed by Fukuyama’s relative optimism about the prospect for a new world order; although his warning about the world of Islam as resistant to this new order was to be noted by those writing after September 11, 2001.16 Already, bitter conflict in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, particularly in Bosnia and Kosovo, had indicated the strength of ethnic, religious, and regional animosities that had only just been contained there during the Cold War by authoritarian communist rule.17 At the same time, a new form of geo-power was employed in 1995 in the successful attempt by the United States at Dayton, Ohio, to broker a new order for Bosnia, part of the former Yugoslavia, by agreeing to a new political system and a new border between the warring communities. The use of high-tech geographic information-processing systems speeded up the process of negotiation. Ironically, Powerscene, the prime system used, had been developed by the US Defense Mapping Agency for military purposes, notably the US air attack on the Bosnian Serbs in 1995. It is a computer-based terrain-visualization system, in which digital cartographic data, overlaid with remote sensing imagery, permits users to explore the landscape as a three-dimensional reality.18 Samuel Huntington was considerably less optimistic than Fukuyama. In “Clash,” which was expanded into a highly successful and much-reprinted book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Huntington rebutted Fukuyama.19 Huntington predicted, not the triumph of Western values but, rather, the rise of “challenger civilizations,” especially China and Islam. The ideas of rise and decline, strength and challenge, were key concepts in the dynamics of geopolitics, often being unproblematic, in the sense of undefined agents of change. These ideas were somewhat simple in conception and application. According to Huntington, the rise of “challenger civilizations” would be as part of a relative decline of the West that, he argued, had to be addressed carefully, a theme that was to be addressed, albeit in a very different fashion, by Kissinger in World Order (2014). Huntington provided not a book about the threat to the West from a heartland but, instead, one that proposed a different geopolitical shaping of the Eurasian question, with the rimland far more problematic than the heartland, insofar as these categories could be employed in this case. Huntington also offered a new reading for the “declinist” interpretation of America’s global position. This interpretation owed much to Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (1987). Based essentially on the interplay of resources and strategy, Kennedy’s work had a great influence in 1988, only to appear somewhat redundant as a result of the collapse of the Cold War and US success in the 1991 Gulf War with Iraq.20 In contrast to Kennedy, Huntington’s stress was on culture, not on resources. Each has a geographical location, but a differing dynamic. Huntington’s analysis could be applied to consider geography at a variety of scales and to incorporate a range of material. The emphasis on ideology and an ideological challenge in the shape of Islam, was one that put the inner-city immigrant communities of major places within the West, such as Paris and London, in the front-line of contention. Huntington drew on the analysis of Islam by another influential US scholar, Bernard Lewis, specifically his 1990 article “The Roots of Muslim Rage.”21 Huntington argued that, in the light of the rise of what he presented as “challenger civilizations,” the established and rival concept of a global community of nation-states accepting a shared rule of international law and a set of assumptions (a community that had been the aspiration of Wilsonian and Cold War US policies and that seemed achievable, indeed achieved, in the 1990s) could, in fact, no longer be the answer to the world’s problems and, thus, satisfy global political and social demands.22 This represented a critique of the moral universalism that had been central to US interventionism from the 1910s. Terrorism was to drive this lesson home, and Huntington’s book, which had been over-shadowed during the triumphant globalization and Clintonian liberalism of the late 1990s, now appeared prescient after the attacks on September 11, 2001, and, indeed, was to be translated into 33 languages. The focus was on relations with Islam, and Huntington was generally regarded as an exponent of the likelihood of conflict between Christendom and Islam, and was praised or criticized accordingly. To some, Huntington, who was in fact a lifelong Democrat as well as a self-declared conservative, was, in practice, a key neoconservative who had sketched out the prospectus for the new ideological confrontation of the 2000s, as well as for the assertive US policies that followed the September 11 attacks.23 While the idea of a clash of civilizations is arresting, it also led to criticism of Huntington on the grounds of misplaced simplification. Thus, from the Left, Edward Said wrote an article, “The Clash of Ignorance,” published in the Nation on October 22, 2001, arguing that there was a danger that the September 11 attacks would, as a consequence of Huntington’s arguments, be misleadingly treated as an assault by a monolithic Islam.24 Indeed, subsequent violence within Iraq after the overthrow of its government by US-led conquest in 2003 was to demonstrate the depths of animosity within Islam. In every half-century of Islamic history, more Muslims have been killed by other Muslims than by non-Muslims. From the perspective of specialists in geopolitics, there was also skepticism, not least based on the highly problematic nature of geography in Huntington’s work. In particular, there was a unresolved tension in his use of geography, between a realist understanding of it, as an objective and autonomous element in the political process, and, on the other hand, Huntington’s emphasis on the “primacy of subjective, non-geographical factors of social psychology.”25 It was far from ironic that the idea of a clash of civilizations was also pushed hard by Osama bin Laden and his supporters, albeit to very different ends and with a very different vocabulary. This clash was given particular geographical force by al-Qaeda as it saw Islam as a civilization with a spatial sway, and a converting and controlling faith, rather than as a religion limited in its span to the devotion of the faithful and with that group essentially static. Moreover, adopting a very long timespan, al-Qaeda treated Islam as having been driven back from spaces it should control, especially Palestine/Israel and al-Andalus (southern Spain). In addition, the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia following the Gulf War of 1990–1991 was seen by them as another instance of cultural spatial violation.26 This idea provided a degree of geopolitical coherence as well as a basis for geopolitical expansion, and ensured that different struggles could be linked. The geopolitical imagination of al-Qaeda was one that offered no prospect of peace nor of understanding of other cultures. This imagination, which was to be seen anew with the aggressive and expansionist Islamic State (ISIS) movement—suddenly pushing to the fore in 2013—and its claim to a revived caliphate of great scope, also served as a reminder of the political consequences of psychological senses of space and alienation. In addition to the world scale, Huntington addressed developments within America although, again, in a somewhat simplistic fashion and not open to the nuances of geographical variations. In Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004), he warned about a change of consciousness and a challenge to Americanness as a consequence of large-scale immigration. This was transnationalism seen as a threatening geopolitical force. In the book, Huntington expressed concern about the applause from Mexican-Americans for Mexican teams competing with Americans. As with the Clash of Civilizations, he seemed to find both multiple identities and interdependence unwelcome concepts and, as a result, was reduced to the notion of incompatible groups operating through rivalry. Such an attitude is crucial to the habit of presenting geopolitics in binary terms. Looked at differently, binary concepts lent themselves to geopolitics and that, indeed, was an aspect of the problematic character of the use of this approach. Although drawn by some critics, the path from Huntington’s clash of civilizations to the policies of the George W. Bush administration of 2001–2009 was in fact at best indirect. Huntington himself was critical of the neoconservatives and of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was particularly unimpressed with the attempt to install a Western-style democracy, which he saw as misplaced cultural superiority leading to a flawed transference of ideas and structures, a view held across the political spectrum. Huntington had little time for the triumphalism about Western rule and civilization offered by some commentators, who were applauded by neoconservatives, such as the historian Niall Ferguson.27 Neoconservative geopolitics was linked more to the “Project for a New American Century” (1997) than to Huntington’s thesis. This project or, rather, prospectus, was the product of a movement that arose from a reaction against the policies of President Clinton (1993–2001). Linked to this was an attempt to revive the essential elements of the Reagan administrations (1981–1989) or, rather, what was presented, with some considerable simplification, as these elements, and to reposition them for the post-Cold War era. As with earlier generations of US interventionists,28 this drive entailed a commitment to Eurasia: “America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East” declared the “Project,” and these responsibilities were seen as fundamental to US interests. The “Statement of Principles” issued on June 3, 1997, had 25 signatories, including Cheney, Fukuyama, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, George H. W. Bush’s vice president, Dan Quayle, Eliot Cohen, Donald Kagan, Norman Podhoretz, and Stephen Rosen. It began: “American foreign and defense policy is adrift” and blamed this not only on the policies of the Clinton administration but also on a failure by conservatives to advance “a strategic vision of America’s role in the world.” The signatories aimed to change this. Emphasizing the need to “shape circumstances,” they pressed for a stronger military, the promotion of “political and economic freedom abroad,” and the preservation and extension of “an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.”29 The specific policies that flowed from the assumptions of the “Project” were, in many respects, traditional Cold War policies, notably strong support for Israel and Taiwan. Indeed, in some respects, the general suppositions can be seen as formulaic and trite hyperbole that sought to provide rationale and structure for a series of specific commitments. That remark is not intended as a criticism specifically of the neoconservatives, as it could be made, in addition, about most attempts to offer a global geopolitics, including liberal and left-wing attempts. Looked at differently, the deductive processes of geopolitics at the global level are weak, and the specific goals that arise can best be understood as individual and lacking a general structure. Thus, geopolitics as a global analysis emerges not only as a vital recovery of the spatial dimension, but also as somewhat implausible as an inductive method, and as overly weak as a deductive one. The global analysis is, perforce, weak as it is difficult to provide coherence at that level, and, more particularly, to link specific interests to a global account that also works at a dynamic level—in other words, capable of explaining change. In the 1990s, while the fall of the Soviet Union, the anchoring of East Asia to the US economy, and economic growth were all leading to optimism among US commentators global politics had also been reshaped in a more challenging fashion for the United States.30 On the one hand, there were positive outcomes. In particular, an imploding Soviet Union did not challenge US hegemony and—unlike revolutionary France in 1789–1792 and, to a lesser extent, Russia in 1917–1920—Russia in the 1990s did not swing from revolution to dangerous expansionism. This situation provided a background for the restatement of a classic geopolitics in Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997). Across much of the world, however, identity and conflict in the 1990s were shaped and expressed in terms of an aggressive ethnic politics that did not accord with US interests or with Western views of geopolitics. As a separate process, changes in values affected the position of particular states, or at least debate within them. This was clearly the case with China as it became more prosperous and assertive and with Russia. In the Soviet Union, formalized “theories” of the interrelationship, or interdetermination, of geography and politics had had little purchase because of their blood-and-soil connotations and, therefore, lack of ideological acceptability. However, these ideas came to enjoy widespread credence and popularity in post-Soviet Russia as a new territoriality was developed, especially by Aleksandr Dugin, a polemical commentator close to President Putin, with an assertive account of national space and the supposed biological imperatives of the nation. Indeed, Huntington’s thesis of a clash of civilizations was echoed in the emergence of ethno-geopolitics in post-Soviet Russia. However, unlike Huntington’s, this ethno-geopolitics explicitly imbued the civilizational entity with specific ethnic characteristics of its own. Some of the Russian work, in contrast, has been better-informed and not partisan.31 More generally, the results of expressing identity in terms of ethnic suppositions were frequently very much defined in spatial terms, not least as the goal of many activists were ethnically homogenous territorial spaces. This process was seen, for example, with Serbian ethnic and spatial ambitions, and offered a restatement of earlier political themes and territorial demands that had been superseded under communism.32 This emphasis on ethnic territoriality led to tension, if not violence, and was not an approach that matched the ethos of US leadership nor its attempt to reconcile change, globalization, populism, and religion. Moreover, as a separate but related issue, in some countries, particularly in the Middle East, hostility to globalization, a hostility that could be expressed in terms of pan-Islamism, meant opposition to modernism and modernization, and thus could draw on powerful interests and deep fears. THE GEOPOLITICS OF THE 2000S AND 2010S The September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington led to regional hostility and ideological developments in the Islamic world, becoming a key geopolitical issue for the United States, with resulting geostrategic concerns in terms of the possibilities for supporting force projection. These concerns entailed different geopolitics, one initially focused on Afghanistan, Central Asia and Pakistan, with … Geopolitics and the Cold War THE TOTAL VANQUISHING OF THE THIRD REICH AND IMPERIAL  Japan set the stage for the next phase of geopolitical thought and discourse—this time to account for, and to game-plan, the new US role internationally. This phase was grafted onto the older challenge of the “heartland” power, in the shape of a Soviet Union of unprecedented power and geographical range, the situation predicted by Mackinder in 1943. There were also the practical and theoretical questions of how far newer technology, in the form of long-range bombers, missiles and nuclear weapons vitiated the older heartland and oceanic geopolitical theses. Indeed, during the Cold War, newer types of core-periphery geopolitical formulations surfaced in the form of containment, the “Domino Theory,” and multipolarity. George Kennan and Henry Kissinger were the most prominent examples of geopoliticians in action. However, aside from the significance of traditional mental maps, US geopolitical propositions were not left unchallenged, most conspicuously by Soviet commentators, and by Western radicals, such as the French thinker Yves Lacoste, who claimed that post-1945 geopolitical theory was in practice a justification for military aggression. A different challenge to geopolitical accounts came from the rise of environmentalism and an appreciation of the constraints that human interaction with the physical environment could place upon geopolitical theorizing and action. Less conspicuously, official and popular views within the West frequently did not match those of the United States.1 COLD WAR RIVALRY The Cold War was presented in geopolitical terms, both for analysis and for rhetoric. As during World War II, a sense of geopolitical challenge was used to encourage support for a posture of readiness, indeed of immediate readiness. The sense of threat was expressed in map form, with both the United States and the Soviet Union depicting themselves as surrounded and threatened by the alliance systems, military plans and subversive activities of their opponents. These themes could be seen clearly not only in government publications, but also in those of other organizations. The dominant role of the state helps to explain this close alignment in the case of the Soviet Union and its Communist allies. In the United States, there was also a close correspondence between governmental views and those propagated in the private sector, not least in the print media. News magazines offered an important illustration of the situation and, in the United States, served actively to propagate such governmental themes as the need for the containment of Communism. Thus, in the April 1, 1946, issue of Time, the leading US news magazine, R. M. Chapin produced a map, entitled “Communist Contagion,” which emphasized the nature of the threat and the strength of the Soviet Union. The latter was enhanced by a split-spherical presentation of Europe and Asia, making the Soviet Union more potent as a result of the break in the center of the map. Communist expansion was emphasized in the map by presenting the Soviet Union as a vivid red, the color of danger, and by categorizing neighboring states with regard to the risk of contagion employing the language of disease: states were referred to as quarantined, infected, or exposed. Such terminology underlines the politicized nature of some of the use of geography during the Cold War. A sense of threat was also apparent in the standard map projection employed in the United States. The Van der Grinten projection, invented in 1898, continued the Mercator projection’s practice of exaggerating the size of the latitudes at a distance from the equator. Thus, Greenland, Alaska, Canada, and the Soviet Union appeared larger than they were in reality. This projection was used by the National Geographic Society from 1922 to 1988, and their maps were the staple of educational institutions, the basis of maps used by newspapers and television and the acme of public cartography. In this projection, a large Soviet Union appeared menacing, a threat to the whole of Eurasia, and a dominant presence that required containment. However, before employing these examples simply to decry US views then, it is necessary to point out that Soviet expansionism was indeed a serious threat and that the geopolitical challenge from the Soviet Union was particularly acute due to its being both a European and an Asian power. The situation was captured by the standard Western depiction of the Soviet Union. In turn, the Soviets employed cartographic imagery and language different to that of the West, a difference which reflected the expression of contrasting, as well as rival, worldviews. A sense of menace was repeatedly presented. Carrying forward Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s use of maps to support his fireside chats over the radio, President John F. Kennedy, in a press conference on March 23, 1961, employed maps when he focused on the situation in Laos, a French colony until 1954, where the Soviet- and North Vietnamese-backed Pathet Lao were advancing against the forces of the conservative government: “These three maps show the area of effective Communist domination as it was last August, with the colored portions up on the right-hand corner being the areas held and dominated by the Communists at that time. And now next, in December of 1960, three months ago, the red area having expanded—and now from December 20 to the present date, near the end of March, the Communists control a much wider section of the country.” The use of the color red dramatized the threat, as did the depiction on the map of Laos’s neighbors: Thailand, Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Burma. Thus, the Domino Theory was in play, predicting a Communist advance in stages, and this theory was employed to support the deployment of 10,000 US marines who were based in Okinawa. In early 1961, Kennedy ordered marines into border areas of Thailand in order to send a message to the Communist Pathet Lao not to take over Vientiane, the Laotian capital. This strategy was an aspect of the new geopolitics that followed World War II. The threat of a graver regional conflict encouraged the negotiation of a ceasefire agreement for Laos ten months after the press conference.2 The Domino Theory was an instance of the degree to which, compared to the classical European geopolitics of the 1900s, a relatively vague, less theoretically grounded, and more generic sense of geopolitics helped to shape the mental maps of US leaders and the American public during both World War II and the Cold War. In those years, this approach focused on whose camp other states were placed in: the West, the Axis, or the Communist bloc. This added ideological dimension, certainly compared to the 1900s, ensured that geopolitical perceptions differed greatly from traditional concepts of spheres of influence. US officials and political scientists came to use the terminology of the Domino Theory with special reference to Southeast Asia in the 1960s: If South Vietnam falls, then Laos and Cambodia, and then Thailand. Eugene Rostow (1913–2002), a foreign policy guru for the Johnson Administration when he served as undersecretary of state for political affairs (1966–1969), pushed this belief, dutifully picked up and trumpeted by the secretary of state from 1961 to 1969, Dean Rusk, a former professor of political science. Underlying this construction was a tacit admission of US military weakness insofar as the Americans could neither defend nor fight on all fronts. In that respect, the Domino Theory certainly differed from earlier, more orthodox, formulations of geopolitical doctrine. There were more dramatic departures from classical geopolitics, suggesting very different measures of power. For example, the cover of Time on May 15, 1950, provided an image very much of a US counter to the Soviet Union in other than conventional military terms. The cover depicted a globe with facial features eagerly drinking from a bottle of Coca-Cola being offered from behind the Earth by an animated planet that was Coca-Cola. The perspective was instructive. The image of the Earth was Atlanticist, with the nose on the face appearing between Brazil and West Africa and a bead of perspiration on the brow sliding down from Greenland. The Soviet Union was only partly seen and, at that, on the edge of the map, while newly Communist China and war-torn Korea were not seen on this perspective. The title “World and Friend. Love that piaster, that lira, that tickey, and that American way of life,” captured a particular account of geopolitics. Without such animation, there was a publication of geographical works in which the contents were in effect highly political. This carried forward a tendency seen during World War II. Thus, the publisher’s note for the fifth (1942) edition of Albert Hart’s American History Atlas declared: “The students in our schools today are the citizens of tomorrow. On them will fall the burden of conducting the affairs of the nation. They must, therefore, be educated for citizenship in a democracy. To carry on intelligently, the electorate must be well informed. In addition to love of country, Americans must ‘know’ their country.”3 Praise increased during the early stages of the Cold War. Thus, The March of Civilization in Maps and Pictures (1950) referred to the United States as “a land populated by every race, creed, and color, and a haven of refuge for the oppressed[;] its phenomenal growth has never been equaled. Far removed from the traditions and hampering fetters of the Old World, it has charted a new course in government. Its freedom-loving people have devoted their energies to developing the riches that Nature has so lavishly supplied.”4 There was also support for US foreign policy and American companies, as with the treatment, in atlases and other works, of the United Fruit Company and the Alliance for Progress in Latin America.5 There were similar accounts from other powers. The Atlas of South West Africa (1983), a work sponsored by the Administrator General of South West Africa and published in South Africa, emphasized the government’s care for the welfare of the population, which scarcely described the situation in this South African colony.6 Turning from the use of geographical works to advance political views, the more formal nature of geopolitical discussion during the Cold War faced a number of serious problems that can be regarded as objective. It was unclear how best to assess the likely impact of strategic nuclear power and, subsequently, of rocketry. The high-spectrum military technology was never used, and therefore it was difficult to gauge its probable effectiveness. This point, which did not exhaust the imponderables of possible conflict between the great powers, meant that it was very unclear how to measure strength and, therefore, respective capability. In terms of geopolitics, and more specifically of the likely equations of power that might lead to the discussion of posture and policy as aggressive or defensive, this situation created serious difficulties. These equations were not restricted to the high-spectrum end of the capability of the great powers. There were also conceptual and methodological issues arising from the processes of anti-imperialism and decolonization. These processes involved the shifting meaning of control, influence and effectiveness. More particularly, the nature and frontier of control in anti-insurgency struggles were difficult to assess as a result of a reliance on air power, which proved less effective than its exponents had hoped and had initially seemed the case. THE DECLINE OF GEOPOLITICS AS AN ACADEMIC SUBJECT Meanwhile, to a certain extent, the very idea and practice of geopolitics appeared redundant. Indeed, the rise of nuclear power with the United States in 1945 followed by the Soviet Union in 1949, in conjunction with the later development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, apparently made conventional geopolitical assumptions obsolete as the entire world could be actualized as a target. Moreover, the target could be rapidly hit. As such, the world had become an isotropic surface, one that was equal in every point. A different form of simplification was provided by clear-cut ideological readings of the world in terms of West or East. Neither account appeared to leave much room for geopolitics. Further, its reputation as a subject declined in the postwar years. To a considerable extent, this decline was because geopolitics was associated with the Nazis and was differentiated from the US discussion of the spatial aspects of power, a discussion described as political geography. The latter was presented as different from geopolitics in both content and method because it was American and allegedly objective, and the term geopolitics was avoided. Moreover, the conceptualization of the subject was not pursued. Indeed, geography was in decline in US education. Harvard University, a key institutional model and opinion leader, dismantled its Department of Geography in 1948, in large part to get rid of Derwent Whittlesey, a homosexual who headed the program.7 Appointed in 1928 and made a full professor in 1943, Whittlesey continued to be listed as professor of geography, but there was no longer a department, and he was the sole geography professor still on the staff. Whittlesey published Environmental Foundations of European History (1949); he died of a heart attack in 1956. Harvard’s example was followed by other prominent institutions, such as Stanford. The elderly, but still influential Bowman was much involved in the fall of Whittlesey. With such a lead, it was not surprising that many US state and local education systems also dropped a subject now held to be irrelevant. The teaching of geography was largely relegated to the elementary level, and this was greatly to affect geopolitical understanding. Political and intellectual currents interacted. Political geography no longer seemed acceptable in the United States,8 and was anyway largely separated from geopolitics by scholars such as Jean Gottmann, Richard Hartshorne and Stephen Jones.9 Geopolitics was discredited as a pseudo-science and by being linked to special pleading and, more specifically, Nazi Germany.10 This theme was continued by Tete Tetens, a German émigré who argued that geopolitics was being kept alive “for a new German approach to divide and conquer the world.”11 Tetens, a German journalist who fled for political reasons to Switzerland in 1933, moved to the United States after living in Argentina from 1936 to 1938. From 1939, Tetens produced research reports for Bernard Baruch (1870–1965), an important advisor to President Roosevelt, and for the Office of Strategic Services. Tetens focused on Nazi sympathizers in the United States and on German geopolitical plans. In 1941, Tetens reported on Haushofer’s plan for world conquest and on Hitler’s plan for an iron ring around the United States.12 After the war, Tetens presented Haushofer’s disciples as playing a key role in directing German foreign policy13 toward a new alignment in which Germany shed US shackles and dominated Europe anew. Tetens quoted neo-Nazi circles, not least the Geo-Political Centre in Madrid, and its ambition that Germany have Ausweichmoeglichkeiten im geopolitischen Raum (the necessary geopolitical space for strategic maneuverings).14 Tetens argued that geopolitical naivety on the part of the Pentagon had ensured that Germany was not purged of its pro-Nazi sympathizers and that this provided the possibility for Germany to pursue the geopolitical fundamentals that had governed German–Russian relations in the past.15 European unification was traced back by Tetens to the pan-German School under Emperor Wilhelm II (r. 1888–1918) and to Haushofer’s ideas.16 Some geopolitical work continued in the United States, in part by being presented as a different subject.17 However, geography as a subject, and thus the potential for a geopolitics grounded in geographical research, was also affected by criticism of environmental determinism. The attacks on the mono-causal character of environmentalism by the anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) influenced Carl Sauer (1889–1975), a geographer interested in anthropology. Sauer criticized US geographers, notably Semple (who drew on Ratzel) and, instead, advanced a possibilist interpretation of the role of environment.18 In Britain, political geography was distinguished from geopolitics. The former aspired to impartiality and generality: the nationality or ethnicity of a political geographer, it was argued, should be no more deducible from his writings than that of a paleontologist or quantum physicist. As developed in Britain, political geography worked mainly by classification.19 Meanwhile, despite the example of Mackinder, geopolitics as an academic subject lost impetus in Britain and largely died out in about 1970. In Germany, geopolitics ceased to be a major subject. After a gap beginning in 1945, when Germany lay devastated by war, the publication of the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik resumed in 1951, only to end again in 1968. Thanks to their connotations of Nazi thought and practice, formalized theories of the interrelationship or underdetermination of geography and politics, let alone explicit geopolitics, had limited purchase in the Soviet Union.20 Soviet historical geography has also been presented as underdeveloped,21 although it could be quite sophisticated, in preuniversity textbooks, university textbooks, and post university historical literature. Once the obligatory ideological cant in Russian-language Soviet journals and books was cut through, the authors so often implied geopolitical formulations that even relatively astute readers could pick them up. Moreover, there were parallels between Marxist thought and classical geopolitics. These included laying claim to a spurious analytical objectivity, even precision, asserting the importance of materialist factors, and proclaiming, or at least suggesting, a determinist route to the future. In both Marxist thought and classical geopolitics, agency poses a key problem, notably the tendency to downplay the role of the human perception of the situation and the extent of choice. CONTAINMENT An intellectual pursuit of geopolitics from the perspective of the academic conceptions of the time can only go so far, however, because whatever the attitude of universities, the contemporary pressure of the Cold War was in many respects acutely spatial. Indeed, the possibility of nuclear conflict initially played out very much in a territorial fashion as the early atomic weapons were free-fall bombs to be dropped from aircraft. Thus, as part, in particular, of a range of power based on aviation,22 the geography of power-projection, of bases and range, took on considerable weight. The United States rapidly sought to develop air bases able to take on the tasks of strategic warfare with the Soviet Union. A new geography led to new base requirements, including Iceland and Greenland.23 In the event of World War III breaking out, it was assumed that, with its far greater numbers of troops and tanks, the Soviet army would be able to invade continental Europe. The Soviet Union, in turn, could be struck by British and US bombers from East Anglia, as well as from air bases in the British colony of Cyprus and in northern Iraq. Iraq was part of the British alliance system until 1958. For example, intermediate-range Canberra bombers could fly from Cyprus, over Turkey, a NATO ally, and the Black Sea to attack industrial cities in Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. In turn, to protect the United States from Soviet attacks across the Arctic, major efforts were put into the construction of early-warning stations in Canada. As a significant aspect of the system, and providing a new geopolitical facility, the Semi-Automatic-Ground Environment Air Defense System, launched in 1958, enabled the predicting of the trajectory of aircraft and missiles. The largest computers ever built were developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for this system. Once a new nuclear geography of ground- and submarine-based intercontinental missiles gradually supplanted long-range bomber doctrine during the late 1950s and 1960s, strategic and geopolitical considerations that focused on aircraft ceased to be pertinent when considering large-scale nuclear conflict. As a separate issue, there was the question of the strategic viability of carriers, particularly for Britain.24 The significance of nuclear weaponry ensured a separate geopolitics focused on the availability of the raw materials. Thus, US policy in the Congo crisis in the early 1960s was affected by a determination to protect access to the Shinkolobwe mine, a source of uranium. Separately, however, a strongly spatial sense of international politics had arisen in the development and application of Cold War ideas of containment. The perception of threats and opportunities shaped these ideas,25 as did the views of specific military interests and their planners.26 More was involved than the prospect of Soviet advances into particular areas, for the effort to avoid any large-scale conflict in the late 1940s combined with the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weaponry in 1949 to induce a rethinking of US strategy. This need was driven by a sense of Soviet expansionism, but also by a belief that periods of peace and war alike served Soviet interests, and that the Western powers needed to plan throughout to oppose these interests. Indeed, as far as Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator from 1924 to 1953, was concerned, geostrategic and geopolitical issues shaped both foreign policy and internal political developments. These issues included incipient East–West antagonisms and the ambition for territorial expansion into, or political control over Eastern Europe, a region seen by the Soviets as an ideological bridgehead, strategic glacis (protection) and economic resource. This list underlines the difficulty of handling geopolitical concepts with precision. In practice, each territory represented a range of interests, commitments, and perceptions. The concept of legitimacy in international relations had become more important, or at least newly institutionalized, with the establishment of the United Nations in 1945; but, at the same time, the Cold War led to a geopolitics based on rivalry and the threat of war. Containment, certainly as a concept that was to be applied in US political and military strategy, received its intellectual rationale in 1947 from George Kennan, an American diplomat and intellectual. His article in Foreign Affairs in April 1947 made much use of the word containment. This concept was followed by the Truman government advancing the idea of America’s perimeter of vital interests. Moreover, this perimeter was to be consolidated by the creation of regional security pacts, foremost of which was to be the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), created in 1949. NATO was a product of America’s global concern and Western Europe’s acute feeling of vulnerability. In 1950, the National Security Council’s NSC-68 document reflected the strong geopolitical sense of US strategy. The outbreak of the Korean War mightily drove the formulation of NSC-68 and also put US rearmament into motion.27 The call to defend Western Europe and related waters accorded with the geopolitical stress by Spykman on the “rimland,” notably Western Europe and Southeast Asia. However, other areas could be pushed into prominence by the application of the essentially malleable concept of containment. Europe could be taken to mean Western Europe but could also be extended to comprehend the eastern approaches to the Mediterranean. Thus, in the late 1940s Soviet pressure on Greece and Turkey constituted key occasions for American engagement, as the United States, from 1947, took over geopolitical roles hitherto associated with Britain. Greece and Turkey were, from 1952, members of NATO, despite an Anglo-Canadian preference for a focus for NATO on Western Europe and the North Atlantic. Defensive pacts were also organized in South and Southeast Asia: the Baghdad Pact (1955), which in 1959 became CENTO, and SEATO (1955). The US emphasis was on a global struggle because, for those concerned with opposition to Communism, individual states whichever bloc they were in, such as Belgium (the West) or Poland (the Communist bloc), took on meaning in these terms, rather than having important issues of their own, including specific geographical and political concerns and characters. This approach indeed captured a key aspect of the international situation. However, the approach also seriously underplayed the role of separate interests within blocs and, particularly, the extent to which allies and supporters had (and have) agency as, for example, with the roles of North and South Korea in the run-up to the Korean War,28 or the independence toward the United States displayed by Israel, and still displayed, notably over settlements in the occupied West Bank. The failure to appreciate the role of these interests caused repeated problems for US foreign policy. At the same time, the primacy of geostrategic concerns during the Cold War meant that the geopolitics of containment was more concerned with territory and strength than with values.29 Linked to this, the United States and NATO were ready to ally with autocratic states such as in Turkey, Spain, Greece, Pakistan and others in Latin America, rather than focus on populist counterparts. For example, the United States and Franco’s Spain signed an agreement in 1953 giving the Americans the right to establish air bases. This geostrategic approach was to lead to a failure to appreciate the difference between Communism and Third World populist nationalism, a failure that repeatedly led to problems for US foreign policy. A number of writers developed the idea of containment, but did so in a context different from geopolitics because German Geopolitik had not only discredited the subject and language of geopolitics at the university level,30 but also affected its more general public profile. In the United States, there was the attempt to define and apply what was, in effect, a geopolitics based on containment, with “defense intellectuals” playing a prominent role—of which the diminished community of academic geographers fought shy. A key figure was Robert Strausz-Hupé (1903–2002), the Viennese-born US political scientist who, in his Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power (1942), had criticized Haushofer.31 Strausz-Hupé argued the need for a geopolitics directed against the Soviet Union, which he correctly saw as combining the expansionism of Imperial Russia with the revolutionary threat of Marxist-Leninism.32 Strausz-Hupé supported a European federalism anchored in an Atlantic Alliance as a crucial bar to Soviet expansion, and he very much backed NATO. His The Estrangement of Western Man (1952) presented a robust Western civilization, now headed by the United States, as a key component in the geopolitical equation, one that must limit Communism. Strausz-Hupé argued that the crisis he had lived through reflected more than short-term problems and, instead, focused on larger issues in Western culture, specifically an absence of social values that rested on philosophical and moral confusion and failure. Thus, the geopolitical response he advocated—Britain and France joining in the cause of European unity, which he saw as likely to cooperate with the United States in bearing the burden of Western defense—could, to Strausz-Hupé, only be part of the remedy. In his thesis, cultural and intellectual clarity, coherence, and values—in short metaphysical rearmament—were crucial to the defense of the West. Five years later, in 1957, Strausz-Hupé followed with “The Balance of Tomorrow,” an essay published in the first issue of Orbis, a quarterly he founded (still published in 2015): “The issue before the United States is the unification of the globe under its leadership within this generation. . . . The mission of the American people is to bury the nation-states, lead their bereaved peoples into larger unions and overcome with its might the would-be saboteurs of the new order who have nothing to offer mankind but putrefying ideology and brute force.” In Protracted Conflict (1959), Strausz-Hupé, and the others who helped him write his book, argued that the Soviet Union was waging such a war, one that employed the Islamic idea of a bloc that was immune to democratic influence and opposed to another that was to be worn down, the West. Convinced that the Soviets were out to sap the West through means short of large-scale conflict, Strausz-Hupé argued, as George Kennan had done in 1947, that détentes would simply be short-term periods in which the Soviets would pursue their interests by different goals. In short, Protracted Conflict was a call both to vigilance and to a more …