405) Geopolitics for Dummies...

Obama and Mackinder’s Paradox
(Part I)
By Luis Martinez Montes
Globalist Paper > Global Politics, Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Due to the impending geopolitical closing of the world, Mackinder said statesmen should divert their attention “from territorial expansion to the struggle for relative efficiency.”
Janus-like, throughout the 20th century, America found itself in the position of being at the same time a classic, status quo-oriented hegemon and a promoter of radical changes in the economic and social realms.
The rise of large territorial states like Germany and Russia — and the prospect that one of them or a combination of both could dominate the heart of the Eurasian landmass — was seen as a major threat to the survival of the British Empire.
Markets were used to surpass borders as the primary drivers of the U.S. century. In this way, from the perspective of U.S. ascendancy, globalization became the continuation of geopolitics by other means.


The financial crisis is putting into serious doubt some certainties held by advocates of a liberal world order. Now the world — and the new U.S. Administration — faces a choice wherein the revival of geopolitics would herald the end of the current wave of globalization. But there is another way of looking at things, argues Luis Martínez Montes.

What if globalization and geopolitics were not contradictory forces but complementary undercurrents in our stage of human history? It could then be argued that mastering the globalizing and geopolitical sources of power, also in times of crisis, is a prerequisite for achieving global preeminence.

Actually, this theoretical framework could be the main way of explaining America’s recent ascendancy and hegemony in world affairs. It could also provide the explanation of its eventual decline. Any potential challenger to the US hegemony should set about dominating both dimensions of power. Could China rise to the occasion?

The triumph of geopolitics

Halford Mackinder, the British geographer, is widely considered to be the father of the Anglo-American school of geopolitics. In a seminal lecture delivered in 1904 entitled “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Mackinder painted a vast canvass of historical evolution in which he pitched land-based states against maritime thalassocracies.

While the latter had long been the powerful ones, at the time of his presentation, he considered that the ebb and flow of history might be turning against sea-based powers like Britain.

The rise of large territorial states like Germany and Russia and the prospect that one of them or a combination of both could dominate the heart of the Eurasian landmass was seen as a major threat to the survival of the British Empire.

To counter this ominous trend, Mackinder proposed in his lecture and in further writings what would become a major tenet of British foreign policy. In order to avoid and/or to contain the forging of a massive Eurasian world power, Britain should promote the formation of counterbalancing coalitions. At their center, he envisioned a Commonwealth of the English- speaking nations.

The butterfly effect

From a geopolitical point of view, history from the early 20th century on to the present has been, to a large extent, about the unfolding of Mackinder’s vision. The attempts at reordering geographical space among the great powers have long constituted the main storyline of international relations.

However, around 1900, most of the world had been politically appropriated and distributed among the big powers of the day. It was the end of the Columbian epoch of Western expansionism — and the beginning of the post-Columbian age characterized by the forming of a worldwide closed political system.

From that moment on, in Mackinder’s words “every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the world, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence.”

Does this insight ring a familiar bell? In chaos theory, it is called the “butterfly effect”.

From geopolitics to globalization

Now, let us imagine a rising and ambitious country like the United States trying to find its place in the sun at the beginning of the post-Columbian age.

With natural resources aplenty to draw from, capital to invest and entrepreneurial people imagining new ventures, the prospect of arriving too late to the struggle for space and riches afar could be really frustrating.

In fact, the United States certainly attempted to emulate its elders. In 1898 the American republic launched a war of aggression against Spain. This war was based, as history has firmly confirmed, on fabricated evidence — remember the Maine? — and fuelled by an avid yellow press.

As a result of that “splendid little war,” the United States became a classic territorial Empire with possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the remnants of the declining Spanish Empire.

But it was too little, too late. The extraordinary resources and vital energy accumulated by the young Republic were still constrained by a world of diminishing territorial opportunities.

Changing tactics

Unexpectedly, the solution to that predicament could be found in the very same pages in which Mackinder laid out the principles of Anglo-Saxon geopolitics.

Due to the impending geopolitical closing of the world, Mackinder said statesmen should divert their attention “from territorial expansion to the struggle for relative efficiency.”
In other words, the exploitation of innovative technologies, the invention of new forms of production and societal organization — and, above all, the expansion of existing markets and the creation of new, if possible deterritorialized, ones for the unimpeded flow of capital, goods, services and ideas — were bound to substitute (or rather complement) the old methods of competition based on the direct control of space and its resources.

As Neil Smith put it in his biography of Isaiah Bowman, the American geographer who introduced British geopolitics and globalizing practices to the budding U.S. foreign policy establishment, “the emerging American Empire defined its power in the first place through the more abstract geography of the world market — rather than through direct political control of territory”.

Markets were used to surpass borders as the primary drivers of the U.S. century. In this way, from the perspective of U.S. ascendancy, globalization became the continuation of geopolitics by other means.

Bestriding both dimensions of power

The emphasis on globalization by no means implied that the architects of the American century neglected the cultivation of the geopolitical sources of power.

On the contrary, when confronted to challenges posed by large, geopolitically–minded, expansionist states like Germany, Japan or the Soviet Union, the United States paid back in kind. After all, it had the territory, resources, population and military might to do so.

As a result, Janus-like, throughout the 20th century, America found itself in the position of being at the same time the paragon of a classic, status quo-oriented hegemon — preventing the balance of world power from being radically unsettled by any revisionist state — and a promoter of radical changes in the economic and social realms.

Via the latter, it managed to bring down barriers to capital and ideas that had served to preserve a well-ordered system of Westphalian territorial states.

The U.S. capacity to play both cards successfully was helped during the last century by the basic fact that no other state could challenge simultaneously the globalizing and geopolitical dimensions of American power.

Even the Soviet Union at the apex of its existence could only become a relative military match for U.S. dominance, but it was never able to compete on equal terms in the economic race. In the globalization arena, the most the Soviet Union could do was temporarily to prevent Western capital, people and ideas from penetrating into Moscow’s sphere of influence.


Obama and Mackinder’s Paradox
(Part II)
By Luis Francisco Martínez Montes
Globalist Paper > Global Politics, Thursday, January 22, 2009

Despite claims to the contrary by the Chinese leadership, there is ample evidence that China is trying to expand its geopolitical reach.
Terrorist groups need the very same networks created by globalization to communicate, finance and publicize their attacks — even though they oppose globalization itself.
The United States could choose to keep on expanding globalization by accepting to share an increasing part of its benefits and responsibilities with a rising star like China.
Far from resigning itself to becoming a divided and encircled appendix of the West, Russia has bounced back.



The genius of American power on the world stage has been the switch from geographical expansion to economic expansion as a mechanism to extend U.S. power and influence. Luis Martinez Montes asks if the Obama Administration will face a fateful choice as new powers — like Russia, India, Brazil and especially China — rise.

From the perspective of the interplay between geopolitics and globalization, the end of the Cold War meant that territories, population and resources formerly under Soviet control could be incorporated as additional assets into global markets for production and consumption.

The post-Cold War era was bound to be a merger by absorption of the communist adversary into the triumphant fold of an expanding capitalist order. And the same destiny awaited the most profitable areas of the former Third World now freed from ideological competition. For the benefit of advancing globalization, the era was labeled the roaring nineties.

Beyond the economic dimension, the forces of classic geopolitics were also reinforcing
America’s predominance. As the 20th century drew to a close, a U.S.–led Western alliance was expanding its geopolitical borders through the European Union and NATO enlargements to encircle the core of the former Soviet bloc.

This drove a wedge between Germany and a weakened Russia bordering on chaos. As a result, Mackinder’s nightmare — the prospect of a coalition between the Germanic and Slavic peoples turned against the Atlantic world — was vanishing from the horizon.

But that was then. Now we have entered into a transitional period of indeterminate length — "the end of the post Cold War era.”

Two main trends seem to be shaping it. First, even before the current financial crisis, there has been a backlash against globalization spearheaded by those political communities and social and religious movements that refused to be connected in a position of subordination to the globalizing forces dominated by the West.

In the worst cases, this resistance has taken the form of terrorist networks or rogue states.

In many other instances, those who simply were not willing to be integrated but did not resort to violence were nevertheless lumped together in neoconservative language as “failed” or “terrorist” entities. Mixing all these variegated actors indiscriminately together is the stuff the “War on Terror” is still made of.

Second, there is a geopolitical backlash emanating from those states which have (re)emerged from their near catastrophic demise as viable political entities during the nineties. Russia is the classic example.

Far from resigning itself to becoming a divided and encircled appendix of the West, Russia has bounced back due to a combination of strong leadership and the accumulation and mobilization of new-found wealth for the benefit of a pragmatic and expansionist foreign policy.

In doing so, Moscow has also shown the way to a new wave of neo-authoritarian, resource-rich states willing to play their more limited geopolitical cards by making the best use of their income as leverage against the alleged meddling into their internal affairs by external powers.

To be sure, neither the War on Terror nor the challenge posed by the return of old style, wannabe world (or regional) powers has represented a fundamental challenge to the United States’ dual source of hegemony.

To start with, terrorist groups need the very same networks created by globalization to communicate, finance and publicize their attacks — even though they oppose globalization itself. At the same time, they lack (or are being deprived of) the territorial bases that would be needed for launching a sustainable conventional campaign against the United States (a neo-Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan could be the exception).

As to the (re)emerging powers, including the likes of Russia, Iran, Brazil or India, they are usually too dependent on the vagaries of the global energy, technological and financial markets to feed their still fragile growth.

At the same time, their geopolitical base and reach is still confined to a limited spatial scope. Unless there is a dramatic shift in their capacity to increase both dimensions of power, none of them can pose a major threat or challenge to U.S. dual hegemony in the short term.

Among the rising powers, the only exception to the rule is China. Via its increased mastery of geopolitical and globalization forces, Beijing could follow the path of an ascending American republic in its way to preeminence.

Despite claims to the contrary by the Chinese leadership, there is ample evidence that China is trying to expand its geopolitical reach in at least three concentric circles represented by its near abroad — meaning Taiwan and the South Chinese Sea; inner Eurasia and the Plus Ultra encompassing the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

China is even going beyond the confines of Earth by engaging the United States and others in a civilian and possibly military competition for outer space.

As to the global arena, China is not only becoming integrated into the global flows and markets that make the fabric of the most advanced form of capitalism. It is also shaping them to the extent that we can no longer talk about a Western or U.S.-dominated globalization. Again, the financial crisis — far from curtailing this process — could reinforce it as China achieves a stronger relative position vis à vis the West.

The rise of China on both fronts, if sustained at similar rates in the incoming decades, could force the United States to unveil its true historic nature. If in the not-so-distant future, China were to pose a simultaneous and direct challenge to America’s geopolitical and globalizing sources of power, the United States would have to make an existential decision.

It could choose to keep on expanding globalization by accepting to share an increasing part of its benefits and responsibilities with a rising star like China. To be sure, co-opting China as a responsible stakeholder will be the first step, but it will not be enough.

In due time, as any aspiring great power, China will demand a greater say in those decisions that affect not only the area of its immediate national interests — but the course of global affairs. For the Untied States, preserving globalization at such a cost could then entail losing its already shaken status as the only superpower.

Alternatively, to prevent that from happening, the United States could choose to defend its geopolitical position at the expense of globalization. This is the course of action preferred by China hawks.

They would like the United States to engage in a range of policies from containment to confrontation precisely to prevent China from acquiring a superpower status. During the previous Bush Administration, some of them were openly advocating the forging of anti-Chinese, NATO-like alliances in Asia and the Pacific.

Others, mainly in the U.S. Congress, are preaching the virtues of a kind of selective protectionism aimed at Chinese goods and capital. By doing so — and apparently ignoring or downplaying the growing interdependence among the United States, China and the world economy at large — they could end up undermining the very same foundations on which globalization has been built mainly by and to the benefit of the United States.

Ultimately, if this second option prevails and the United States would confront China in the name of old-style geopolitics, this could provide the final blow to the current wave of globalization. It would be a blow that might prove to be far more devastating than the combined effect of a dozen financial crises.

Furthermore, by choosing to behave like other traditional powers have done in the past, the United States could finally be destined to the same fate that has befallen all of them — demise.