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Geostrategy, a subfield of geopolitics, is a type of foreign policy guided principally by geography factors as they inform, constrain, or affect political and military planning. As with all strategy, geostrategy is concerned with matching means to ends. Strategy is as intertwined with geography as geography is with , or as Colin S. Gray and Geoffrey Sloan state it, "geography the mother of strategy."
Geostrategists, as distinct from geopoliticians, approach geopolitics from a nationalist point of view. Geostrategies are relevant principally to the context in which they were devised: the strategist's nation, the historically rooted national impulses, the strength of the country's resources, the scope of the country's goals, the political geography of the time period, and the technological factors that affect military, political, economic, and cultural engagement. Geostrategy can function prescriptively, advocating foreign policy based on geographic and historical factors, analytically, describing how foreign policy is shaped by geography and history, or predictively, projecting a country's future foreign policy decisions and outcomes.
Many geostrategists are also geographers, specializing in subfields of geography, such as human geography, political geography, economic geography, cultural geography, military geography, and strategic geography. Geostrategy is most closely related to strategic geography.
Especially following World War II, some scholars divide geostrategy into two schools: the uniquely German organic state theory; and, the broader Anglo-American geostrategies.
The geostrategy of location include river valleys, inland sea, world ocean, world island, and so on. For instance, the start of Western civilization was located in the river valleys of the Nile in Egypt and the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia. The Nile and Tigris and Euphrates not only provided the fertile soil for crop production, but also allowed for the floods that taxed the ingenuity of the inhabitants. The climate of the area was conducive to an existence based primarily upon agriculture. The rivers also provided the avenues of trade in a period when muscles of man and the winds of the sky were the motive power of ships. The river valleys became a unifying factor in the political development of the people.Fifield, Russell H. (The Journal of geography, Vol.- No.-, 1944) SSCI,
Dietrich Heinrich von Bülow proposed a geometrical science of strategy in the 1799 The Spirit of the Modern System of War. His system predicted that the larger states would swallow the smaller ones, resulting in eleven large states. Mackubin Thomas Owens notes the similarity between von Bülow's predictions and the map of Europe after the unification of Germany and of Italy.
Two strains of geopolitical thought gained prominence: an Anglo-American school, and a German school. Alfred Thayer Mahan and Halford J. Mackinder outlined the American and British conceptions of geostrategy, respectively, in their works The Problem of Asia and " The Geographical Pivot of History".H.J. Mackinder, The geographical pivot of history. The Geographical Journal, 1904, 23, pp. 421–37; Pascal Venier, " The Geographical Pivot of History and Early 20th Century Geopolitical Culture ", Geographical Journal, vol. 170, no 4, December 2004, pp. 330–336. Friedrich Ratzel and Rudolf Kjellén developed an organic theory of the state which laid the foundation for Germany's unique school of geostrategy.
As the Cold War began, N.J. Spykman and George F. Kennan laid down the foundations for the U.S. policy of containment, which would dominate Western world geostrategic thought for the next forty years.
Alexander de Seversky would propose that airpower had fundamentally changed geostrategic considerations and thus proposed a "geopolitics of airpower." His ideas had some influence on the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, but the ideas of Spykman and Kennan would exercise greater weight. Later during the Cold War, Colin Gray would decisively reject the idea that airpower changed geostrategic considerations, while Saul B. Cohen examined the idea of a "shatterbelt", which would eventually inform the domino theory.
The Problem of Asia divides the continent of Asia into 3 zones:
The Debated and Debatable zone, Mahan observed, contained two on either end (Anatolia and the Korean Peninsula), the Suez Canal, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, two countries marked by their mountain ranges (Iran and Afghanistan), the Pamir Mountains, the Himalayas, the Yangtze, and Japan. Within this zone, Mahan asserted that there were no strong states capable of withstanding outside influence or capable even of maintaining stability within their own borders. So whereas the political situations to the north and south were relatively stable and determined, the middle remained "debatable and debated ground."
North of the 40th parallel, the vast expanse of Asia was dominated by the Russian Empire. Russia possessed a central position on the continent, and a wedge-shaped projection into Central Asia, bounded by the Caucasus Mountains and Caspian Sea on one side and the mountains of Afghanistan and Western China on the other side. To prevent Russian expansionism and achievement of predominance on the Asian continent, Mahan believed pressure on Asia's flanks could be the only viable strategy pursued by sea powers.
South of the 30th parallel lay areas dominated by the sea powers – the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and Japan. To Mahan, the possession of India by the United Kingdom was of key strategic importance, as India was best suited for exerting balancing pressure against Russia in Central Asia. The United Kingdom's predominance in Egypt, China, Australia, and the Cape of Good Hope was also considered important.
The strategy of sea powers, according to Mahan, ought to be to deny Russia the benefits of commerce that come from sea commerce. He noted that both the Turkish Straits and Danish straits could be closed by a hostile power, thereby denying Russia access to the sea. Further, this disadvantageous position would reinforce Russia's proclivity toward expansionism in order to obtain wealth or warm water ports. Natural geographic targets for Russian expansionism in search of access to the sea would therefore be the Chinese seaboard, the Persian Gulf, and Asia Minor.
In this contest between land power and sea power, Russia would find itself allied with France (a natural sea power, but in this case necessarily acting as a land power), arrayed against Germany, Britain, Japan, and the United States as sea powers. Further, Mahan conceived of a unified, modern state composed of Turkey, Syria, and Mesopotamia, possessing an efficiently organized army and navy to stand as a counterweight to Russian expansion.
Further dividing the map by geographic features, Mahan stated that the two most influential lines of division would be the Suez and . As most developed nations and resources lay above the North–South divide, politics and commerce north of the two canals would be of much greater importance than those occurring south of the canals. As such, the great progress of historical development would not flow from north to south, but from east to west, in this case leading toward Asia as the locus of advance.
[[File:Mahan Problem of Asia 1900.png|thumb|center|600px|This map depicts the world as divided by geostrategist Alfred Thayer Mahan in his 1900 piece The Problem of Asia. Asia is divided along the 30 north and 40 north parallels, represented here by green lines. In between the 30th and 40th parallel is what Mahan termed the "Debatable and debated ground," subject to competition between the land powers and sea powers.
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This message was composed to convince the world statesmen at the Paris Peace conference of the crucial importance of Eastern Europe as the strategic route to the Heartland was interpreted as requiring a strip of buffer state to separate Germany and Russia. These were created by the peace negotiators but proved to be ineffective bulwarks in 1939 (although this may be seen as a failure of other, later statesmen during the interbellum). The principal concern of his work was to warn of the possibility of another major war (a warning also given by economist John Maynard Keynes).
Mackinder was anti-Bolshevik, and as British High Commissioner in Southern Russia in late 1919 and early 1920, he stressed the need for Britain to continue her support to the White Movement forces, which he attempted to unite.
Mackinder's work paved the way for the establishment of geography as a distinct discipline in the United Kingdom. His role in fostering the teaching of geography is probably greater than that of any other single British geographer.
Whilst Oxford did not appoint a professor of Geography until 1934, both the University of Liverpool and University of Wales, Aberystwyth established professorial chairs in Geography in 1917. Mackinder himself became a full professor in geography in the University of London (London School of Economics) in 1923.
Mackinder is often credited with introducing two new terms into the English language: "manpower" and "heartland".
The Heartland Theory was enthusiastically taken up by the German school of Geopolitik, in particular by its main proponent Karl Haushofer. Geopolitik was later embraced by the Germany Nazism regime in the 1930s. The German interpretation of the Heartland Theory is referred to explicitly (without mentioning the connection to Mackinder) in The Nazis Strike, the second of Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" series of United States World War II .
The Heartland Theory and more generally classical geopolitics and geostrategy were extremely influential in the making of US strategic policy during the period of the Cold War.Sloan, G.R. Geopolitics in United States Strategic Policy, Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1988.
Evidence of Mackinder's Heartland Theory can be found in the works of geopolitician Dimitri Kitsikis, particularly in his geopolitical model "Intermediate Region".
Ratzel wrote on the natural division between land powers and , agreeing with Mahan that sea power was self-sustaining, as the profit from trade would support the development of a merchant marine. However, his key contribution were the development of the concepts of lebensraum and the organic theory of the state. He theorized that states were organic and growing, and that were only temporary, representing pauses in their natural movement. Raum was the land, spirituality connected to a nation (in this case, the German peoples), from which the people could draw sustenance, find adjacent inferior nations which would support them, and which would be fertilized by their kultur (culture).
Ratzel's ideas would influence the works of his student Rudolf Kjellén, as well as those of General Karl Haushofer.
His writings focused on five central concepts that would underlie German geopolitik:
Haushofer defined geopolitik in 1935 as "the duty to safeguard the right to the soil, to the land in the widest sense, not only the land within the frontiers of the Reich, but the right to the Volksdeutsche and cultural lands." Culture itself was seen as the most conducive element to dynamic expansion. Culture provided a guide as to the best areas for expansion, and could make expansion safe, whereas solely military or commercial power could not.
To Haushofer, the existence of a state depended on living space, the pursuit of which must serve as the basis for all policies. Germany had a high population density, whereas the old colonial powers had a much lower density: a virtual mandate for German expansion into resource-rich areas. A buffer zone of territories or insignificant states on one's borders would serve to protect Germany.
Closely linked to this need was Haushofer's assertion that the existence of small states was evidence of political regression and disorder in the international system. The small states surrounding Germany ought to be brought into the vital German order. These states were seen as being too small to maintain practical autonomy (even if they maintained large colonial possessions) and would be better served by protection and organization within Germany. In Europe, he saw Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Denmark, Switzerland, Greece and the "mutilated alliance" of Austro-Hungary as supporting his assertion.
Haushofer and the Munich school of geopolitik would eventually expand their conception of lebensraum and autarky well past a restoration of the German Empire and "a place in the sun." They set as goals a New European Order, then a New Afro-European Order, and eventually to a Eurasian Order. This concept became known as a pan-region, taken from the American Monroe Doctrine, and the idea of national and continental self-sufficiency. This was a forward-looking refashioning of the colonialism, something that geopoliticians did not see as an economic necessity, but more as a matter of prestige, and of putting pressure on older colonial powers. The fundamental motivating force was not economic, but cultural and spiritual.
Beyond being an economic concept, pan-regions were a strategic concept as well. Haushofer acknowledged the strategic concept of the Heartland Theory put forward by the Halford Mackinder. If Germany could control Eastern Europe and subsequently European Russia, it could control a strategic area to which hostile sea power could be denied. Allying with Italy and Japan would further augment German strategic control of Eurasia, with those states becoming the naval arms protecting Germany's insular position.
N.J. Spykman based his geostrategic ideas on those of Sir Halford Mackinder's Heartland theory. Spykman's key contribution was to alter the strategic valuation of the Heartland vs. the "Rimland" (a geographic area analogous to Mackinder's "Inner or Marginal Crescent"). Spykman does not see the heartland as a region which will be unified by powerful transport or communication infrastructure in the near future. As such, it won't be in a position to compete with the United States' sea power, despite its uniquely defensive position. The rimland possessed all of the key resources and populations—its domination was key to the control of Eurasia. His strategy was for Offshore powers, and perhaps Russia as well, to resist the consolidation of control over the rimland by any one power. Balanced power would lead to peace.
Kennan advocated what was called "strongpoint containment." In his view, the United States and its allies needed to protect the productive industrial areas of the world from Soviet domination. He noted that of the five centers of industrial strength in the world—the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany, and Russia—the only contested area was that of Germany. Kennan was concerned about maintaining the balance of power between the U.S. and the USSR, and in his view, only these few industrialized areas mattered.
Here Kennan differed from Paul Nitze, whose seminal Cold War document, NSC 68, called for "undifferentiated or global containment," along with a massive military buildup. Kennan saw the Soviet Union as an ideology and political challenger rather than a true military threat. There was no reason to fight the Soviets throughout Eurasia, because those regions were not productive, and the Soviet Union was already exhausted from World War II, limiting its ability to project power abroad. Therefore, Kennan disapproved of U.S. involvement in Vietnam War, and later spoke out critically against Ronald Reagan's military buildup.
In his journal called America's New Geostrategy, he discusses the need of shift in America's geostrategy to avoid its massive collapse like many scholars predict. He points out that:
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