77

Chapter 3.

SPYKMAN AND GEOPOLITICS

David Wilkinson

Nicholas John Spykman, Dutch-American journalist, sociologist, political scientist and geopolitician, was chief among the
diffusers of geopolitics from Europe to America. [1] His attempt
to link geopolitics on the one hand to liberal-idealistic values
of individual freedom, national independence, national liberation
and anti-imperialism, and on the other hand to political-realist
assumptions of the permanence and inevitability of struggles for
power, have had a significant influence on the ideological bases
of American foreign policy since 1941, of a durability not widely
recognized.
Though he did some work of a "normal science" type
and in state-level geopolitics, he is best known, as a theoretical
geopolitician, for his part in the system-level grand-theoretical
debate over Mackinder's Heartland doctrine, to which he counterposed his own Rimland idea, which remains theoretically significant.
FROM IDEALISM TO INTERVENTIONISM VIA GEOPOLITICS
The roots of Spykman's approach to geopolitics are to be
found in his participation in the complex dialectic which in
twentieth century American political thinking has prevailed among
streams of thought roughly identifiable as liberal idealism, political realism, and scientism.
Spykman, now known almost exclusively as a political realist,[2] in fact attempted to unite these
divergent tendencies.
Indeed, in his earliest non-journalistic
work, The Social Theory Qf Georg Simmel, Spykman developed a
position neither realist nor geopolitical, but idealistic and
scientistic to a fault.
Beginning with an assertion of abstract
and absolute values, with an unconditional commitment to individual freedom and to the "liberation of the individual," Spykman
argued that such liberation would require control over social
forces, "mastery over
social structure," and hence a

C. E. Zoppo et al. (eds.), On Geopolitics: Classical and Nuclear

Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague 1985

78

competent "social engineering technique," which he saw as then "in

its infancy." The fault for this lay fundamentally in the backwardness and parochialism of the "social sciences," which must
provide "general timeless law" before there could be an applied
science to engineer "liberation." Simmel's work, Spykman thought,
allowed one to hope for a "common method" by which the social
sciences might be unified and deracinated.[3]
As it turned out, Spykman's main work was not the development
of such a common method, but rather the appraisal of one particular social force, the influence of geography upon politics, which
seemed to him especially maleficent in its general and timeless
potential for affecting freedom.
Spykman's liberal-idealist commitment remained, sometimes heavily obscured, through his work,
controlling in particular the questions which he asked and the
goals of his geopolitical social engineering.
Had he been a
nationalist, a pacifist, a socialist, or an immovable pessimist,
the whole line of his inquiry, even as a geopolitician, would have
been markedly different from what it was.
But why should a political idealist become a geopolitician at
all?
Spykman had already argued his way from idealism to scientistic social engineering; in his next significant work, his
contributions to the Fourth (1929) and Fifth (1933) Conferences of
Teachers of International Law and Related Subjects,[4] he made the
case that the science
of international politics has geopolitics
as its basis.
A political scientist interested in international
political behavior, necessarily seeking for what is most general
and timeless, must ask the question "What is general in the behavior of all states?" What appeared to Spykman as most general
was a struggle for power among states, and a resulting international order, which might or might not be in accord with ethical
values.
The foreign policies of states, though of different
types, timelessly embodied the power struggle.
Such policy, or
behavior, was conditioned internally and externally.
The most
important conditioning factor, in Spykman's opinion (an opinion
which he asserted rather than seeking to demonstrate), was geography.
Henceforth he did his substantive work upon the constraints
placed by geography upon political objectives.
In two articles each published in two parts in the American
Political
Science Review,
one on "Geography
and
Foreign
Policy,"[S] the other (with Abbie A. Rollins) on "Geographic
Objectives in Foreign Policy,"[6] Spykman provided a rationale and
the elementary theoretical underpinnings for geopolitical statecraft.
Geography "is the most fundamentally conditioning factor
in the formulation of national policy because it is the most
permanent."[7]

79

Because the geographic characteristics of states are

relatively unchanging and unchangeable, the geographic
demands of these states will remain the same for centuries, and because the world has not yet reached that
happy state where the wants of no man conflict with
those of another, these demands will cause friction.
Thus at the door of gegraphy may be laid the blame
for many of the age-long struggles which run persistently through history while governments and dynasties
rise and fall.[8]
Rejecting both the geographic determinism of Friedrich Ratzel
and the possibilism of Lucien Febvre, Spykman asserted that geography does less than cause policy but more than simply offer
possibilities:
it makes demands and sets problems for statecraft
which statecraft can neither escape nor ignore but only deal with
more or less successfully.[9]
The geographic factors that affect a state's policy are its
size, natural resource endowment, location, topography and climate. These variously impinge on the power, unity, centralization
and prosperity of a state. They also affect its security, and its
foreign and military policy, by creating certain temptations to
its expansion and potential threats to its independence, by
offering certain points and lines of trade and contact, by compelling
attention
to
the politics and
policy
of
certain
neighbors. [10]
Spykman in these articles was especially concerned with the
problems of state expansion and interstate boundaries.
When
states expand, they do so on certain modal patterns and according
to certain habitual principles. There are, and expansion follows,
lines of least resistance; there are, and expansion reaches,
limits of effective control.
The territory that can be conquered
is not identical to the territory that can be consolidated.
Geographic expansion displays parallels to military tactics of
flanking, encirclement and breakthrough. [11] The expansions most
notably influenced by geography involve attempts to consolidate
control of river valleys; to gain and improve access to the sea;
and to consolidate control of seas by circumferential, transmarine
and ultramarine annexations. [12]
Except as myths to inspire the troops, there are no natural
frontiers.
All political frontiers are unnatural, the result of
policy, compromise, and temporary power relationships. Different
frontiers do have different offensive and defensive military
values.
Since froRtiers are problems as much as solutions,

80

products of an ever-shifting distribution of power, they will

continue to change; states will continue to seek changes in them;
no frontier, real or idealized, can be considered immutable.[13]
The articles of 1938 and 1939 deal with geopolitics at the
level of analysis of the state as actor.
They contain no worldscale geopolitical concepts like those of Mackinder.
They are
Kleingeopolitik rather than Grossgeopolitik.
Spykman's Kleingeopolitik adds original research data on maritime expansion to,
subtracts geographic determinism from, and topically overlaps the
"political geography" of Friedrich Ratzel, who explored the political consequences of location, area, density, communications,
boundaries, water margins and topographic relief.[14] Spykman's
state-level assertionsi~ are properly treated as "normal science,"
slowly developing out of prior work by commentary, critique,
accretion, reception, ratification.
They provide evidence that
geopolitics has a "normal science" phase and may develop undramatically. Spykman's later work is of a rather different character.
The first of Spykman's two geopolitical books, America's
Strategy in World Politics (1942), was mostly written just before
a~d was published just after the American entry into the Second
Wprld War. America's Strategy in World Politics is best known for
i~s advocacy of an American foreign policy of interventionist
g~obalism, which is justified by reference to a world-system-level
g~opolitical theory.
Spykman examined the policies of "hemisphere
dFfense" and "quarter sphere defense" then in vogue among some
opponents of U.S. intervention in the world struggle that was
being fought in Europe and Asia.
Such "isolationsist" or "antiinterventionists" relied upon the oceanic barriers, theabundance
of raw materials, and the allegedly increasing Pan-Americanism of
the Western Hemisphere to render that Hemisphere impregnable. But
Spykman, having examined the spatial distribution of power as
between New World and Old, and as between North America and Latin
America, concluded that against a united Eastern Hemisphere Latin
America could not successfully defend itself or be defended, and
that North America, though defensible, could not prevail nor
survive economic isolation.
"There is no safe defen~ive position
on this side of the oceans.
Hemisphere defense is nb defense at
all.
The Second World War will be lost or won in Europe or
ASia."[17] Intervention in the then-proceeding European and Asian
wars, against the hegemonistic powers, was therefore in the American interest.
*E.g., "the overwhelming majority of the strong states have
been large states";[15] "the northern Atlantic is today. the
most desirable body of water on which a state can be located."[16]

81
Spykman's other geoplitical book is The Geography of the
Peace (1944), a posthumous work based on a 1942 lecture by Spykman
and compiled by his ex-research assistant Helen R. Nicholl from
that lecture, and from Spykman's maps, notes and correspondence.
The book envisions the world as it would be after the conclusion
of the Second World War, and the security position of the United
States therein, in terms of the same world-system-leve1 political
and geopolitical ideas embodied in America's Strategy in World
Politics.
The Geography of the Peace developed Spykman's "rimland
thesis," in opposition to Halford Mackinder's Heartland doctrine.
Spykman and Mackinder both believed that, from time to time,
certain geopolitical regions become pivotal and prominent (and
others are relegated to temporary oblivion) as the result of
shifts in centers and patterns of power.[18]
Mackinder had
claimed new and pivotal status for a Russian-East European
"heartland." But Spykman contended that considerations of population size, resource availability, economic achievement, and economic potential, all combined to make not the "heartland" but the
"rim1and"--and more especially, peninsular Europe and the coastal
Far East--the currently most significant world geopolitical zone.
Either of the rimland's major components (Europe or the Far East),
if united by a single power--and even more certainly a united
Europe allied with a united Far East--would stand a better chance
of dominating the Old World than the already-united Russian
Heartland. The interests of the United States in her own independence and security, Spykman therefore concluded, required the
prevention of the unification of either the European or the Far
Eastern coastland by any hostile coalition.[19]
As of that time (1945 foreseen from 1942), those interests
could be appropriately protected by American acquisition of North
Atlantic and trans-Pacific naval and air bases, and of continental
allies in or against the two key regions.
Russia would be the
most effective such continental ally "as long as she does not
herself seek to establish a hegemony over the European rimland."[20]
This implied neither unshakeable cooperation with
Russia, nor irremediable opposition, nor for that matter inescapable submission, but rather a postwar policy of watchful response
to Soviet power and power-seeking.
CASSANDRA AMID THE IDEALISTS
The timeliness of Spykman's intellectual assault on American
anti-interventionism/isolationism--an attitude which Pearl Harbor
threw into instant political discredit, and which remained in

82

innocuous desuetude until the Vietnam War--gave his work an uncomBut some of his forecasts and proposals,
monly large audience.
especially those rooted in geopolitics, startled that audience,
astonished it, even alienated or repelled it.
Would there be a new world order after the war--a world
state?
An Anglo-American hegemony?
"Basically, the new order
will not differ from the old, and international society will
continue to operate with the same fundamental power patterns."[2l]
Malcolm Cowley, writing in the New Republic, thought this less
than realistic:
"If Hitler loses, the United Nations will dominate the world."[22] Eugene Staley judged that, as of the middle
and late twenti~th century, world conquest and world federation
were most likely the only alternatives:
"'balance' among independen t power units is out." [23]
Spykman's assertion of Rimlandism contradicted the thenprevailing Heartlandist tendency in geopolitics,
which Hans
Weigert defended with polemic and vigor.
Confronting the rimland
doctrine directly, Weigert questioned whether the main power of
the USSR lay west of the Urals, and flatly denied that China's
power lay mostly in her coastal regions.
Rather, the fact was
that the rise of far-inland regions of Russia and China heralded a
"new age . . dawning in Asia in which the decisive activity will
generate in the center and radiate toward the fringes on the
Pacific coastline."
American transmarine bases, alliance with
Britain and Germany and Japan, all would amount to no more than
pillars in a "cardhouse to balance the power of Russia and China,"
a futile endeavor since "No balance of power combination can stop
this trend" of power to emerge from the heart of Asia.
The most
likely result of opposition to the "new age" would be a RussoChinese coalition, joined by Germany and Japan, which "could spell
doom for this country."[24]
Contemporary American public oplnlon looked forward to the
end of the war as the end of the need for American military
involvement in Europe, whose security would be collectively guaranteed by a world body, a new League of Nations with American
participation.
Spykman instead espoused regionalism.
His hope
was that the "European power zone can be organized in the form of
a regional League of Nations with the United States as an extraregional member."[25]
A leading American political scientist,
Clyde Eagleton, pointed out at the time that "This is simply
incredible--either that the United States would take on such a
risk, or that other states would permit such interference from
outside."[26]

83
American public oplnlon during the war looked forward to the
more or less permanent disarmament of Germany.
Spykman thought
this both improbable and imprudent.
"The present war effort is
undoubtedly directed [toward] the destruction of Hitler and the
,National Socialist Party, but this does not necessarily imply that
it is directed at the destruction of Germany as a military power."
Strange though it might seem, Spykman argued, it was quite conceivable that Britain, and even the United States, would become
convinced of the desirability of a powerful Germany.[27]
Alvin
Adey, writing in Current History, declared this to be "one of the
most astonishing conclusions that could well be imagined."
Still worse, thought Adey, was Spykman's anticipation that
after Axis defeat, Russia would emerge much stronger; that China
too would develop into a formidable power; and consequently that
"The post-war period will witness a continuation of the struggle
of Russia and China for control and influence over Sinkiang Province and Outer Monglia."[28] To Adey, such "guessing and surmising" was "wishful thinking," and he warned against "looking too
far ahead
into a period which it is . . impossible for us
to have even the vaguest ideas . "[29)
The ambivalence in Spykman's remarks on the postwar role of
the Soviet Union in world politics, and on U.S. relations to it,
has already been cited.
As long as she does not seek to establish a
hegemony over the European rimland, the Soviet
Union will be the most effective continental base
for the enforcement of peace . . [but] it may be
that the pressure of Russia outward toward the
rimland will constitute one important aspect of
the post-war settlement.[30]
A Russian state from the Urals to the North
Sea can be no great improvement over a German
state from the North Sea to the Urals.[31]
Open ambivalence is rarely welcomed, perhaps rarely comprehended, in American public discussion, though that discussion
itself is generally ambivalent.
Spykman's vacillation towards
Russia seems in retrospect not undue.
Since he wrote, American
administrations have at times perceived Soviet tendencies towards
hegemony, and met them with policies of containment and deterrence, while occasional signs of Soviet restraint have evoked
American policies of negotiation and detente. As a result, American policy has seemed to vacillate, and has.

84

Was Spykman wrong to have seen Russia as a potential peace

enforcer?
It is surely true that the Soviet Union in her way
effectively keeps the peace among the states of Eastern Europe,
for which they are probably not as grateful as they might be.
No
doubt the USSR could be at least as effective at peacekeeping in,
say, the Middle East as at disturbance.
Thus to persuade the
Soviet Union that her best interests are those of a status quo
rather than a revisionist or imperial power remains the common
objective of many of the other states in the system, though some
prefer coercive measures, others try barter, and yet others hope
to succeed by persuasion unalloyed.
The size of the reward for
success continues to encourage every attempt.
Being ambivalent
toward the Soviet Union, following ambivalent policies toward it,
and trying to resolve Russia's own ambivalence--today this is the
stodgy, moderate, centrist line of the foreign offices of a dozen
Western nations; in Spykman's day it was a rather eccentric
notion.
Spykman's view of the future of Japan and China
more clearly at odds with his audience's ideals.

was

still

With the defeat of Japan in this war, the control

of sea access to the mainland will cease to be in her
hands, and China will be left as the largest and most
powerful state in the region. [32]
"The danger of another Japanese conquest of Asia must be
removed, but the main difficulty of the post-war period [in East
Asia] will not be Japan but China." Chinese power potential was,
he thought, greater than Japanese.
"If the balance of power in
the Far East is to be preserved in the future as well as in the
present, the United States will have to adopt a. . . protective
policy toward Japan similar to that preViously pursued toward
Bri tain]. "[33]
Michael Greenberg objected to SpykIl1an' s proposals
for future American support of Japan.
"By looking at maps, one
can see that Japan is an island, but not that it is a fascistmilitarist state which must continuously hope to divert from
internal crisis by external expansion."[34] Alluding to the durability of geography, Spykman had elsewhere noted "Ministers come
and ministers go, even dictators die, but mountain ranges stand
unperturbed. "[35]
Militarists came, militarists went.
Japan
remains an island country. It expands markets, not empire. It is
militarily weaker than China; and for American policy toward it
"protective" is and remains the best single adjective.
Indeed, Spykman's crystal ball seems to have been less cloudy
than his critics'
Despite Staley and Cowley, the postwar world
was and is one of independent powers; despite Weigert and Adey,

85

Russia and China did emerge as formidable powers, allied only

briefly, and struggled for control of their borderlands during
much of the postwar period.
Today a historian would hardly be
thought unrealistic for declaring that the world after the Second
World War resembled a society of large and small powers rather
than a world state or an Anglo-Saxon hegemony.
To say that the
United States has a protective policy toward Japan would not seem
challenging.
One is no longer astonished to find that the United
States looks favorably upon German and Japanese military power-nor even that its enthusiasm is greater than theirs. The degree of
risk which the United States takes, and the American interference
which other states permit, in European military arrangements,
might well surprise Spykman, and has gone well beyond what was
then "simply incredible" to Eagleton.
This is not to say that Spykman reincarnated Nostradamus.
Not all his premonitions were so close to the mark.
He first
anticipated a postwar world of six great powers rather than five
(the U.S., Russia, Britain, China, Germany rather than France,
Japan)[36] and later a world of "three superpowers" rather than
two--Britain was to be the third.[37] He anticipated that the
three superpowers would all find their security threatened after
the war, so that they might well find an overriding common interest in jointly guaranteeing the security of the Eurasian rim
against any hegemonic power.[38]
Still, Spykman's work seems foresightful, and its reception
more than a little perverse.
Spykman anticipated a future which
his critics wished to deny.
Their choral protest amounted to
Spykman's excommunication from the American liberal communion, to
which his values should have admitted him.
Today, from the perspective of forty years onward (and many more such excommunications) the 1940's controversy over Spykman takes on a different
significance.
Spykman, though not as accurate (nor as illtreated) as Cassandra, did compile a premonitory "batting average"
that is impressive enough, especially in light of his critics' far
less successful forecasts, to make one curious about how he came
by his premonitions. He did not hide his sources. One was a view
of the nature of politics in general, of the kind now usually
known as political realism, considered by some antithetical to but
.. by. Spykman complementary to liberal idealism; another was the
dl'scipline of geopolitics.
SPYKMAN AND POLITICAL REALISM
Spykman's geopolitics is mostly embedded in the ideology,
attitude, or doctrine known as "political realism." Versions of

86
this teaching, some domestic, some imported to the United States
in British writings and by Central European intellectuals, have
been expounded to Americans by George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, E.
H. Carr, Martin Wight, John Herz, Reinhold Neibuhr, Dean Acheson,
Louis Halle and Arnold Wolfers--among others.
Spykman's political realism begins with a critique of political will and morality, and unfolds into a set of assumptions and
propositions about what is, what matters, what can be, what will
be, and what ought to be done in politics.
Spykman rejected the
demand to teach "what international relations ought to be.
I
personally feel that our principal task is to teach what they are
and how they came to be."[39]
[C]ertain liberals and many who call themselves
idealists consider that studies concerning the
organization of peace and security should deal only
with the ideals of our democratic civilization and
visions of a better world order in which power will
play no part.[40]
Spykman did not share this view.
Power was, and always
would be, central to real politics, and therefore belonged at the
center of the study of politics.
Force was and would remain
central to international politics.
To hope "for a world that
will operate without coercion
is an attempt to escape from
reality into a world of dreams."[41] "Strife is one of the basic
aspects of life. an element of all relations between individuals, groups, and states."[42]
Ideals, morals and dreams also exist. Men "are motivated by
other desires than the urge for power
International as
well as national affairs are influenced by love, hate, and charity, by moral indignation and the hope of material gain, by the
moods and psychological abnormalities of rulers, and by the emotional afflictions of peoples."[43] Some liberal and idealistic
dreams were worthy ones:
the abolition of war;[44] America's
security and freedom;[4S] co-operation, conciliation, the growth
of law, peace, justice;[46] collective security, democracy, order,
the integrity of small states;[47] "life, property, and the pursuit of happiness."[48]
But, as they are
power terms.

worthy, they

must be fully translated into

[N]either the self-evident truth of our principles nor

the divine basis of our moral values is enough to
assure a world built in the image of our aspirations.

87
Force is manifestly an indispensable instrument both
for national survival and for the creation of a better
world. [49]
[P]olitical ideals and V1Slons unsupported by force
appear to have little survival value. Our Western
democracies certainly owe their existence and preservation to the effective use of power [50]
To abolish war, one would have to disarm all states and provide a
a
means to mobil'ize the force of the community against violence:
world state.[51]
On the other hand, balanced power encourages cooperation,
conciliation, the growth of law, the preservation of peace, the
maintenance of justice, the prevention of tyranny.[52] Only "in a
system of approximately balanced power is collective security
workable
justice is most likely to prevail among states of
approximately equal strength and democracy can be safe only in a
world in which the growth of unbalanced power can be effectively
prevented."[53]
And the survival, security and independence of
any nation "depends ultimately on the strength which it can command
either within its own territory or through its allies
and protectors."[54]
The result of the basic power aspect of all politics is that
any men or groups seeking objectives which require the cooperation
of other men or groups inescapably become engaged in the struggle
for power and must make improvement of their power position "a
primary objective."[55] In the absence of a world state,
individual states must make the preservation and
improvement of their power position a primary objective of their foreign policy.[56]
In international society all forms of coercion are
permissible, including wars of destruction. This
means that the struggle for power is identical with
the struggle for survival, and the improvement of the
relative power position becomes the primary objective
of the internal and the external policy of states.
All else is secondary, because in the last instance
only power can achieve the objectives of foreign policy. Power means survival, the ability to impose
one's will on others, the capacity to dictate to those
who are without power, and the possibility of forcing
concessions from" those with less power In

88
this kind of world states can survive only by constant devotion to power politics.
At one point in this lengthy eulogy
reaches:

for

power,

Spykman

over-

The statesman who conducts foreign policy can concern himself with values of justice, fairness, and
tolerance only to the extent that they contribute
to or do not interfere with the power objective.
They can be used instrumentally as moral justification for the power quest, but they must be discarded
the moment their application brings weakness. The
search for power is not made for the achievement of
moral values; moral values are used to facilitate
the attainment of power.[58]
The harshest criticisms of Spykman have been those provoked by
this passage, e.g., Weigert, "This is the voice of destruction and
nihilism. "[59]
The language is indeed reminiscent of Machiavelli
at his least prepossessing.
Earle[60] and Prescott[61] have perceived a contradiction between Spykman's letter of 1943 and the
views implied by this passage (and cf. Burton[62] on the prevalence of such ambiguity among political realists). Such a contradiction does exist.
In most of Spykman's work, power is consistently treated as an instrument for, as a conditoner of, as a
limit on, or as an end intermediate (end-means) to, higher and
ultimate ends and values.
That view is not at all visible in
these uncharacteristic words. They are anomalous.
States in a world of states struggling to "improve their
relative power position"[63] are necessarily attempting to reduce
the relative power of some or all other states.
If for no other
reason than this (and many others exist), states are potential
enemies. Thus they seek to "influence directly the power position
of other states, to weaken some, to strengthen others."[64] They
protect or strengthen weak "buffer states" on their borders; they
cooperate with the neighbors of strong neighbors.
They seek to
"stop the expansion of some great states which after further
growth might become a menace"; they work to prevent "hegemony, a
power position which would permit the domination of ' all within its
reach."[65]
The policy of restraining the expansion of strong
dynamic states, "the balance of power policy," is a part of the
diplomacy of all successful states.
It is to be applied not only
against neighbors, but against distant states who are threatening
to become neighbors.
It is primarily a policy for Great
Powers. [66]
It allows collaboration in the service of mutual
interests among any Great Powers currently seeking to prevent

89
(rather than establish) hegemony; and such collaboration
tutes a true collective security system. [67]

consti-

Though states seek and have sought to balance the power of

hostile or dangerous other states, they do not wish to balance
their own, and thus do not really seek a balance; or, with a shift
of meaning, they seek a balance in their favor--'~ot an equilibrium, but a generous margin." To be secure from an enemy one must
be a little stronger than he; to be free to act one must not be
fully checked by others. Thus, even if economics, technology, and
alliances were all stable (as they are not) and even if judgments
of relative power were certain, mechanical and objective (as they
too are not), any condition of balanced power "is inherently
unstable because all parties are constantly attempting to destroy
it." While it lasts it produces order, moderation, conciliation,
and reasonableness.
When it is upset, there is war.
If states
"wish to survive, they must be willing to go to war to preserve a
balance against the growing hegemonic power of the period .
[F]orce remains the most efficient instrument with which to check
the expansion of states
War is unpleasant, but it is an
inherent part of state systems composed of sovereign independent
units
[W]ar will remain a necessary instrument in the
preservation of a balance of power."[68]
The search for power as the universal means thus resolves
itself in the relations among independent units to a search for
military power:
Where the ultimate form of conflict is war, the
struggle for power becomes a struggle for war power,
a preparation for war.[69]
In consequence, geopolitics is for Spykman a strategic discipline:
"A sound foreign policy for the United States must develop a
grand strategy for both war and peace based on the implications of
its geographic location in the world."[70]
Power is in the last instance the ability to wage
successful war, and in geography lie the clues to
the problems of military and political strategy.
The territory of a state is the base from which
it operates in time of war and the strategic position which it occupies during the temporary armistice
called peace.[71]
Spykman thus associates the doctrines of political realism
with those of geopolitics.
That association is traditional-Mackinder titled his book on geopolitical problems in the foreign

90

relations of democratic states Democratic Ideals and Reality.

We
should note in passing, however, that realist geopolitics is
neither necessary nor inevitable. The cosmic idealist R. Buckminster Fuller, explicitly placing himself in succession to Mahan,
Mackinder and Haushofer, [72] created the Dymaxion world map[73] to
view the earth's surface as one great world-island in one worldocean. He wished his readers to visualize, hence to conceive, the
planet as a single air-ocean world town of "inherently integrated
lands" moving toward realized intellectual, technological, economic, cultural and political integration. Idealist geopolitics,
which has of course existed in nationalistic form, can be, and is,
thus manifested in international dress.
The association of geopolitics with political realism is therefore circumstantial rather
than necessary.
At this point it may also be in order to remark that both
Spykman and geopolitics bridge another intellectual-ideological
divide in the study of politics, that between "traditionalism" and
"scientism." Spykman's realist doctrines have become assumptions,
axioms and hypotheses for "working scientists."
For instance,
Pitman's attempt to construct a game-theoretic calculus for describing and analyzing the stability of the international strategic environment takes as a starting point Spykmanite actors, each
seeking a "margin of strength"; in consequence of this search,
equilibrium, and mutual deterrence, is not a stable outcome
without deliberate engineering. [74] Chatterjee's formal model of
the classical balance of power system, whose actors seek to increase their own capabilities while prohibiting the emergence of a
single dominant actor or coalition, behaves in accord with Spykman's perception of a system in unstable equilibrium; more precisely the conditions under which hegemony is prevented without
major war ("the equilibrum is stable") are fairly restricted and
improbable. [75] While there has been a long struggle between
parity

>

fluidity

>

peace

>

war

and
parity

>

instability

hypotheses (see for instance Singer, Bremer and Stuckey[76] or

Cannizzo[77]), the weight of evidence is with the latter, [78]
which is Spykman's reiterated teaching.[79] Spykman's geopolitical proposition that "power is effective in inverse ratio to the
distance from its source"[80] is reconceived by Boulding as a
"loss-of-strength gradient" whose structure affects national viability, spheres of influence, weapons types and bases. [81]
The
same proposition Wohlstetter[82] treats as a hypothesis--which he

91

believes is wrong: "Adding several thousand miles to the distance

at which remote wars are fought increases the total cost of
fighting by only a very tiny percentage."[83] And if Rogowski's
demand for parsimony ("All leaders of states seek to maximize one
thing. What?"[84]) were ever responded to, even Spykman's most
extreme--and atypical--assertions about "the power objective"[85]
would become paradigmatic.
Despite Fuller's idealistic geopolitics, despite the absorption or "acknowledgement of some of Spykman's realist and
realist-geopolitical doctrine by the scientistic corpus, and despite the disowning of geopolitics by Hans Morgenthau,[86] the
discipline of geopolitics remains largely identified with the
approach of traditional political realism. So far as the American
study of politics is concerned, that identification seems due to
the fact that Spykman, one of the paradigm-builders of political
realism in mid-century American political science, [87] and the
most influential American exponent of geopolitics, treated the two
virtually as one.
Any revived geopolitics should keep in mind
that they are two, not one; a well-matched pair, but not
inseparable, nor incapable of being harnessed to ideal goals.
SPYKMAN AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY
Spykman played, and arguments traceable to or through Spykman
still play, a significant role in the coalescence of the ideas
governing or justifying the general line of American foreign
policy after 1941.
The influence of Spykman, and of that intellectual tendency for which he was the ablest spokesman during
World War II, is to be detected in the decline of American exceptionalism and isolationism, and in the persistence of American
globalist, interventionist, anti-hegemonist, and containment doctrines and practices.
Anti-Exceptionalism
Spykman's anti-exceptional ism was an attack upon the thenpopular use of historical precedent (meaning the past decisions,
assertions, slogans, commitments or visions of American statesmen)
and of the writings of the 18th century American "Founding
Fathers," as suitable means of devising or justifying a general
line for American foreign policy in the present.
"Not conformity
with the past but workability in the present is the criterion of a
sound policy.
Not specially selected instances in the history of
the United States, but the general experience of states should be
made the guide for a program of action."[88]
The idea that
America is a state much like other states, with something to learn

92
from experiences other than its own, incapable of greater novelty
or higher morality, is still, I think, rejected at a visceral
level by most Americans, not excluding the educated, the influential, the cosmopolitan elites.
But that idea is now capable of
being cerebrally entertained and discussed, and policies conceived
from readings of "general experience" are not automatically contaminated and invalidated by that origin.
Interventionism
Spykman's attack on American isolationism was a blow struck
in a less ambiguously successful struggle.
While idealistic
interventionists argued for American military and political involvement in World War II by invoking fraternal principles
(whether the brotherhood was that of Anglo-Saxonry, democracy, or
humanity), Spykman presented a clear blunt rationale for selfinterested intervention--what Andrew Gyorgy called "the first
energetic formulation of a geopolitifal theory of interventionism."[89] In the words of W.T.R. Fox,
[Spykman] assumed the existence of a two-state world,
the Old World and the New World, and then demonstrated
to his own satisfaction that the Old could conquer the
New. If, he concluded, you do not want that to happen,'
you must, to the extent necessary, intervene in the Old
World to prevent its being dominated by some one power
or combination of powers.[90]
It would not be difficult to secure agreement that, despite some
contrary tendencies around 1946 to 1975, American foreign policy
since World War II has been fundamentally interventionist rather
than isolationist in doctrine and practice, and remains so.
American interventionism, however, has been neither fundamentally
realist (Spykmanist) nor fundamentally idealist in these years.
No stable policy of intervention that embraces one of these
approaches and shuns the other has emerged.
None is likely to
emerge.
On the other hand, while any contemporary isolationists
must labor under the initial burden of being presumed to be defending an absurd conclusion, idealistic interventionists (most
recently on behalf of human rights, or against Communism, or both)
are merely presumed to be unbalanced in advocating a potentially
defensible activity.
Similar strictures apply to realist interventionists: in the American public debate, arguments employing a
geopolitical rationale would normally be treated today as legitimate but incomplete.

93
Globalism
American globalism owes much to American universalistic
idealists like Wilson and Dulles. But the general postwar acceptance of the idea that American self-interest was also global in
character owes much to Spykman's contention that "the total
earth's surface has, today, become a single field for the play of
political forces."[91] Spykman asserted the thoroughgoing economic, political and military interdependence of all states.[92]
Realist, geopolitical globalism (for everybody) had been much
earlier formulated by Mackinder,
From the present time forth we shall
have to deal with a closed political system
of world-wide scope.[93]
Whether we think of the physical, economic,
military, or political interconnection of things
on the surface of the globe, we are now for the
first time presented with a closed system.[94]
The absence of a frontier or hinterland where states could undertake political or territorial expansion against negligible resistance implied to Mackinder that from that moment on no state
either could or would escape the impact of war, revolution, social
change, shock or disaster anywhere else in the world system-"Every deed of humanity will henceforth be echoed and re-echoed
around the world. "[95]
Mackinderite globalism, a globalism
born of necessity rather than of universalist ideals, of involvement inescapable rather than voluntarily chosen, was transmitted
to American consciousness through Spykman in words both efficacious and prophetic: "no region of the globe is too distant to be
without strategic significance, too remote to be neglected in the
calculations of power politics."[96]
One could imagine an American awareness of and involvement
with its external political environment that would have defined
one part of that environment as "relevant" and the rest as "extraneous." The "relevant" portion might have been (for instance)
North American, New World, Anglophone, Atlantic, Christian, or
First-World.
One might then have seen interventionism practiced
within the "relevant" world, isolationism with regard to the
"extraneous."
Such has not been the case.
Globalism, once a
British and long a Soviet stance, has ruled American foreign
policy for more than thirty years, to the various discomfitures of
American Asia-firsters in the 1940's, of Latin American nations in
the 1950's and 1970's, of West Europeans perhaps since the Dulles
years, and of nations that would like to be nonaligned (and

94
treated with
conceived.

on

a non-globalist basis) since

nonalignment

was

Anti-hegemonism
A line of foreign policy long articulated in British balanceof-power literature as a generally commendable but peculiarly
British policy was expressed by Spykman as a universal interest in
"the prevention of hegemony, a power position which would permit
the domination of all within its reach."[97]
Spykman discussed
hegemony in terms of interest rather than values: thus the United
States was lucky to have local hegemony; [98] to preserve its
independence and security, however, "our constant concern in peace
time must be to see that no nation or alliance of nations is
allowed to emerge as a dominating power" in either Western Europe
or East Asia (and a fortiori in both at once). [99]
Spykman's
assertion of an over~iding American interest (or general interest)
in anti-hegemonism has never become a part of American official
rhetoric or public debate in the way that, say, a similar doctrine
(without obvious intellectual roots) has embedded itself in
Chinese declarations of anti-hegemonist policy.
Anti-hegemonism
appears to exist in American political consciousness only as
directed against the hegemony of somebody rather than of anybody-against Germany or Japan at one time, against Russia or China at
another, but not, or not yet, against hegemony per se. In this
regard it is noteworthy that Spykman averred that
A European federation is not a power constellation
that the United States should encourage The
interests of the United States demand the prevention
of a federal Europe. [100]
Spykman
American
becomes
America
European

deduced this demand

oplnlon has never yet
anti-hegemonist only
initiated, supported
Community.

from anti-hegemonist principles.

incorporated such principles and
on specific provocation.
Thus
or tolerated the slow growth of a

Containment
Given Spykman's realist, globalist, interventionist and antihegemonist arguments, it should come as no surprise when AndreLouis Sanguin asserts that
la theorie de Spykman inspire encore la strat~gie
militaire Americaine (doctrine du containment).[lOl]

95

If, like John Lewis Gaddis, we accept that the Truman Doctrine was
a continuation, with a change of target, of a policy of opposing
even at risk of war any hostile hegemony over Europe,[102] then
the idea that Spykman's name belongs on the intellectual pedigree
of containment, a policy formulated years after his death, will
not seem strange.
The immediate credit or responsibility for formulating the
policy of containment of the Soviet Union can hardly be denied to
George F. Kennan, despite his later change of heart. Kennan's "X
article" characterized Soviet policy as a patient, cautious,
fluid, persistent, "unceasing constant pressure" to expand into
every "nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world
power."[103] He argued that
Soviet pressure is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of
counter-force at a series of constantly shifting
geographical and political points, corresponding to
the shifts and manoevres of Soviet policy [104]
And with slightly different adjectives and emphases,
tended elsewhere that

Kennan con-

the main element of any United States policy must

be that of a long-term, patient but firm and
vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies [ 105 ]
or argued for
a policy of firm containment, designed to confront
the Russians with unalterable counter-force at
every point where they show signs of encroaching
upon the interests of a peaceful and stable
world. [106]
Kennan then believed that if "the Western world finds the
strength and resourcefulness to contain Soviet power over a period
of ten to fifteen years," it would "promote tendencies which must
eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual
mellowing of Soviet power."[107]
Spykman never espoused "containment" as such, nor did he
single out Russian' influence as uniquely in need of containment-Germany, China, even Britain would in his view have merited a
close watch ~ the immediate aftermath of war until new patterns
of expansion and decline had manifested themselves. Given the

96
actual postwar patterns, however, Spykman would no doubt have
focused his scrutiny on the Soviet Union as soon as Kennan and his
confreres.
Spykman did support American acquisition of transatlantic and transpacific bases, of insular and continental
allies, and backed the preservation of the military capabilities
(under new regimes) of the defeated states, on the general principle that it was geopolitically imperative to be able to resist any
hostile unification of rimland Europe or East Asia. It is easy to
imagine him adopting and defending the same close-in containment
by military aid, alliance and presence in West Europe and East
Asia that has served as the concrete imperative of United States
policy toward the USSR since 1947.
If Kennan is the reluctant
"father of containment" even so, he ought to shar~ the credit or
blame with Nicholas John Spykman.
He might do so willingly. While it would be hard to find any
particular aspect of the generation-long American policy of intervening against the external engrossment of Soviet! influence that
directly conflicts with the letter of the revered advice of the
author of the X article, Kennan has since testified that he intended "containment until mellowing" to be carried out at a distance, in selected locales, by non-military means. Kennan's later
conviction that those who adopted the containment policy militarized it beyond his intention may be exaggerated, given his
repeated advocacy of "counter-force" which, after all, sounds more
like "force" than "threat" or "diplomacy." Nevertheless, Spykman
is even more explicit than Kennan in asserting that "force remains
the most efficient instrument with which to check the expansion of
states," that "if [states] wish to survive they must be willing to
go to war to preserve a balance against the growing hegemonic
power of the period,"[108] that "war will remain
a necessary
instrument in the preservation of a balance of power."[109]
The actual American policy of containment, one might fairly
contend, has been rather less "forceful" with respect to the
Soviet Union than Kennan's article advocated, and much less forceful than Spykman would have anticipated. I would attribute this to
the sobering effects--which Kennan did not predict--of nuclear
weapons--which Spykman did not anticipate.
There are other aspects of recent American foreign policy and
its world environment which Spykman did not anticipate:
power
bipolarity, alliance bipolarization, the proliferation of small
weakly aligned independent states.

97

Bipolarity
Spykman was attempting to anticipate the future by appeal to
historical experience.
Since the historical frequency of power
bipolarity is very small, and the degree of damage that World War
II would inflict on Germany, Japan and Great Britain was unclear
till years after Spykman's death, his failure to anticipate bipolarity need be no surprise. It does leave a notable void in his
political and geopolitical theory; but I suspect that Spykman
could accommodate bipolarity more readily than one might imagine.
Presumably he would both predict and recommend that the two superpowers make each other the main objects of their foreign policy,
each opposing the other's potential global hegemony and seeking to
undermine its existing regional hegemony; and that other states
seek to escape domination by either, and oppose the expansionism
while supporting the obstructionist policies of both.
The geopolitics of bipolar relations between an insular
American and a Heartland Russian superpower would be even easier
for Spykman to handle:
he would expect the main locale of conflict to be the Rimland, with the greatest commitments being in
Europe and East Asia, and flank operations of lesser magnitude in
the rimland zones between.
Of post-World War II crisis areas,
only Cuba 1962 would have come to Spykman as an audacious surprise; he, like others, might have judged it a "hair-brained
scheme" lacking geopolitical rationale.
While Spykman could have accommodated bipolarity, he would no
doubt have disapproved it in principle.
His views on the postwar
role of Germany and Japan[110] evidently reflect the classical
balance-of-power doctrine of "moderation" toward defeated greatpower adversaries, as expressed by Gulick[lll] or as codified by
Kaplan.[112]
Spykman preferred not just to retain old great
powers but where possible to create new ones.[113] In his view,
"there can be no security in an international society in which
there
are wide differences in strength
between
individual
units."[114]
Surely he would have approved the postwar rehabilitation of Italy, West Germany and Japan as military and economic
He might well have advocated what he at one point prepowers.
dicted, the reconstruction of Britain, China, Germany and Japan as
military and political equals of the U.S. and USSR. But while it
is reasonably clear where Spykman would stand in the bipolaritymultipolarity debate in principle, and what postwar policies he
would in consequence have approved, it is far less clear what
steps he would recommend to re-establish a multipolar situation
today.
A West European nuclear force, defense community, and
political union?
Massive economic and military aid to China (or
India?) to create a new superpower malgre lui?
One might

98

speculate; but the possibilities for real tripolarity or multipolarity seem so distant as to render speculation bootless.
Bipolarization
The persistence of the North Atlantic Treaty and the Warsaw
Pact, of alliance bipolarization, seems at first to be hard to
reconcile with Spykman's assertions that
He who plays the balance of power can have no permanent friends . . The ally of today is the
enemy of tomorrow. One of the charms of power
politics is that it offers no opportunity to grow
weary of one's friends.[115]
"Weariness" has, one might say, been present in the West since
shortly after, and prevalent in the East since before, the formalization of their respective alliances.
It represents a continuing danger to the Eastern alliance, several of whose member
governments would doubtless prefer to take the Rumanian attitude
thereto, and an increasing menace to the Western alliance.
The
durability of the Western alliance is, being uncoerced, all the
more remarkable, partly explainable, it would seem, by bipolarity
and nuclear weapons, partly by the techniques of hegemonic stabilization proposed by E. H. Carr[116] and allegedly practiced by
the United States until the 1970's.
With the decline in American
power and the loss of American maneuvering room for economic
concepsions, the question of whether the Western alliance can
confront ennui as effectively as it has confronted hegemonism has
been reopened.
Spykman would not, I think, be an optimist.
Still, the alliance continues to serve both actual and potential
common interests; and if it is menaced by boredom, it is buttressed by inertia: so no untimely collapse seems imminent.
The Third World
The dissolution of the multinational empires of Germany,
Japan, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Portugal came after
Spykman's death.
He foresaw only the first two dissolutions,
possible results of the then-likely but not quite realized defeat
of the Axis powers in World War II.
The actual collapse of all
the rest of the multinational empires (except Russia's and perhaps
in a different sense America's) he did not foresee, any more than
he foresaw the decline of all but two great powers.
The proliferation of new states, on the average smaller,
poorer and weaker than their ex-metropoles--or than small powers

99
independent before World War II--might well have seemed
Spykman, who argued that

odd

to

The small states, unless they can successfully combine together, can only be weights in a balance used
by others stakes rather than players
A small state is a vacuum in a political high
pressure area. It does not live because of its own
strength but because nobody wants its territory or
because i,ts preservation as a buffer state or as a
weight in the balance of power is of interest to a
stronger nation. When the balance disappears, the
small states usually disappear with it.[117]
Indeed, John W. Burton[118] holds the creation, maintenance,
and relatively stable boundaries of the post-war crop of small,
"unarmed" states to be a stumbling-block to Spykman's ideas that
e.g., "when pressures become unequal, boundaries move."[119]
Burton feels that Spykman's invocation of balancing pressures by
major powers to explain the continued political independence and
territorial integrity of small states is artificial and "unrealistic."
And i t is true today that not all the states weaker than
America and Russia conceive themselves as "small" and in consequence seek to seem modest, inconspicuous, careful, unobtrusive.
Some (well-protected) small states like Cuba and Israel take large
risks, acting far more like "players" than "sta,k'es"--and survive.
Vietnamese nationalism and imperialism, and Afghan resistance to
being turned from a "buffer" into a "glaCiS," have accomplished
what they have to a large degree "because of [their] own
strength."
Yet the Third World, fully engaged as it is (despite all the
hopes, doctrines and claims of nonalignment) in the bipolar cold
war, clearly does not constitute a new order of small strong
states, independent, active, self-sufficient, secure and viable.
Its mixed history might have compelled Spykman to qualify his
strictures by admitting exceptions to them; that he would have
withdrawn them entirely seems quite improbable, since on the whole
the small states of the Third World look much more like stakes
than players in the global power game.
Perhaps it was because small states could not properly perform the anti-hegemonic roles in that game that Spykman judged
them on the whole, despite their "great historical contributions
to thought and civilization," to be, not simply fragile and implausible, but truly undesirable.

100

Small states have become even less viable than they

were already and they have ceased to perform buffer
functions for the larger states. They are more than
ever a power vacuum in a high-pressure area and a
temptation to ambitious neighbors. [T]hey are
a political hazard to the whole international 'community.[l20]
Spykman held that the primary geopolitical design criterion for
postwar reconstruction should be to produce "individual states
of approximately the same strength" in each significant power
zone.
Under such circumstances, the overwhelming force needed to
restrain anyone state would be readily available; all states
would be players rather than vacua or buffers; no state "would be
so small that it would have to hesitate to participate in common
action, for fear of becoming a special victim of revenge."[121]
In practice, Spykman advocated federations "strong enough to
discourage thoughts of easy conquest," most especially for Eastern
Europe (excluding Germany and Russia) from the Baltic to the
Mediterranean.
Northwest Europe (British-Scandinavian) and Latin
Europe also seemed federable.
Extra-European regions like East
Asia
and the Americas offered fewer opportunities for federating
small states:
for these Spykman advocated regional organizations
with extra-regional great power members as invited participants,
to provide some means of redressing regional imbalances which
would otherwise, as he thought, favor Chinese hegemony in East
Asia and U.S. hegemony in the New World. [122] Weaker institutions
have in fact emerged:
a regional organization with an extraregional great power member (NATO) for West Europe, instead of a
federation; extra-regional great power intervention as an ad hoc
or bilateral basis in East Asia and the Americas.
Spykman would today no doubt see fewer present opportunities
for making large states out of small, and more consequent need to
rely upon bringing extra-regional powers into the extant regional
groupings for the Americas, Africa and Southeast Asia, or upon
creating new regional groupings with outside members wherever a
set of more or less nonaligned small states may be found (e.g.,
the Middle East, South Asia). Even to such creations there would
be rather severe practical limits.
What is practical is however
one matter; the consequence of its impracticality is another.
That Spykman could not reasonably hope to rid today's world of
small states, one may concede.
But could he be persuaded to
admire what he could not expect to abolish?
The demonstrated
inability of most non-superpowers, and particularly of most new
small states, to exclude superpower influence, to maintain genuine
neutrality and nonalignment, and to avoid being used as pieces,

101
pawns and chessboards, would hardly weaken Spykrnan's judgment that
small states are unhelpful, and even dangerous, to the stability
of the system.
Geopolitical theory need not, and geopolitical theories do
not, unambiguously refute national exceptionalism and isolationism, nor unambiguously promote globalism, interventionism,
anti-hegemonism and containment.
Spykman's (and Mackinder's)
geopolitical doctrines and analyses did undermine American exceptionalism and isolationism and support American globalism and
interventionism. They still can, and do. By localizing hegemonic
opportunities to the Old World, they implicitly contraindicate
American hegemonism and explicitly approve American anti-hegemonism.
Given the latter, Spykman's analyses provide a rationale
for containment as vigorous as Kennan's, and one less dependent
upon shifting beliefs regarding the character and prospects of the
Soviet regime.
Spykman's failure to anticipate nuclear weapons, bipolarity,
bipolarization, and the proliferation of small states was widely
shared.
Analyses of the causes and effects of these phenomena is
almost entirely retrodictive. To accommodate Spykman's geopolitical doctrines to these unexpected facts would not require as much
work as one might suppose. To place them in some geopolitical
analysis would be a straightforward task; but they would compel
very major reV1Slons, and the major revisions, to Spykman's books
on (and his judgments about) America's strategy in world politics, and the geography of the peace, were these to be brought up
to date.
One can predict some of Spykman's reactions to these
novelties, but by no means all. There is consequently a niche for
a successor who can reconstruct the analysis and reconsolidate the
doctrine.
SPYKMAN AND THE ASSUMPTIONS OF
GEOPOLITICS
Spykman ultimately conceived geopolitics as an applied discipline--the planning of political action in terms of geography.
Geopolitical analysis uses geographic factors in the formulation
of policies for the achievement of certain ends. If the objective
is the independence and safety of a state, geopolitical analysis
focuses attention on the location of the national territory in the
world, its size and resources, and the location and power of other
countries. If the objective is global peace and security, geopolitical analysis demands discussion of world geography, of the
spatial distribution of states and resources over the whole surface of the earth.[l23]

102
Spykman's substantive contribution to the discipline of geopolitics includes some comments, of mixed value, on the nature and
weight of geographic causation in politics, and his far more
important Rimland concept and thesis, evoked in a dialectic and
critique of Mackinder's contrary, more original, but also more
ethereal ideas.
Geographic Determinism and Possibilism
Spykman's thoughts on the manner in which geography affects
politics mirror more than resolve the general debate on that
subject.
Consequently it is possible for J.R.V. Prescott to find
little difference between Spykman's and the French possibilist
positions, [124] while Andrew Gyorgy can call Spykman's geopolitical interpretation "determinist."[125] Nonetheless, Spykman explicity rejected (as erroneous) geographic determinism, which he
identified with Ratzel. "Geography does not determine"; i t is not
the cause of policy.
Equally clearly, he rejected geographic
possibilism, typified by Lucien Febvre, as an understatement.
Geography does offer possibilities for us, but it does more:
it
demands that they be used; it cannot be ignored; it provides the
material for policy.
The possibilities it offers will be used,
well or badly, in one way or 'another. [126] Spykma~statements
on this subject seem consistent with one another and with his
other work, where geography provides a limited and particular set
of challenges and opportunities, different for each actor, whose
choices may be judged sound or unsound, and whether sound or
unsound may maintain, improve or degrade, widen or narrow the
range of challenges and opportunities.
Geographic Primacy
To Spykman, the geographic was "the most important factor in
interstate relations."[127] Geography is "the most significant"
of "the various factors that condition the foreign policy of
states." Geography "is the most fundamentally conditioning factor
in the formulation of national policy because it is the most
permanent." Because "the geographic characteristics of states are
relatively unchanging and unchangeable, the geographic demands of
those states will remain the same for centuries . "[128]
These statements seem to represent a weakness in Spykman's
case for geopolitics.
Surely one might equally well contend (as
Morgenthau would) that human nature endures far longer than particular states and their geographies.
Surely one can imagine an
argument (and Fuller would make it) that technology is the "most
significant" factor precisely because it is the least permanent,

103
most changing,
states.

and

most changeable influence on the affairs

of

Spykman would have been more prudent to conclude that the

birth and death of states, and the expansion and contraction of
empires, change the geographic characteristics and demands of
actors in international politics, sometimes quite abruptly.
The
same may be said of alliances and spheres of influence, in which
some parts may engraft the geographic concerns and demands of
others, or from which a new (if provisional) whole with its own
geographic characteristics and demands may emerge.
To argue the
importance of geopolitics, one need not claim paramountcy for
geography, or permanence for any particular spatial configuration:
that space matters a great deal and that it matters in consistent
ways for very long times, is enough to compel politics to come to
terms with geography.
Geopolitics as Science Vs. Practice
Spykman accepted a scientistic paradigm for the study of
politics.
Unlike Hans Morgenthau[129] he saw no conflict between
political realism and political scientism.
"I am a political
scientist and I am interested in political behavior
that
behavior that has reference to the struggle for power and the
establishment and functioning of government."[130]
To Spykman,
science implied a method of observation and verification, and the
production of abstractions true in general rather than uniquely,
of propositions about how "A" is correlated to "B" in general
rather than at any given time and place.[131] To study foreign
policy scientifically meant studying "the foreign policy of states
at all times and in all places" to find "what is general in the
behavior of all states."[132]
At the same time, it would be wrong to say that Spykman
intended to build a mere pure science of international politics.
His undergraduate teaching was "largely a social science study of
what policies have been and what factors have shaped them"; but
his graduate students were "asked to design foreign policies for
specific countries to be followed in the future."[133]
And he
viewed science as arising from the attempt to manipulate or engineer reality, and as required for its successful manipulation. To
change the behavior of a state required knowledge of the forces
that shaped its behavior.
Science and practice were activities
intimately conjoined, though different by definition.[134]
Spykman seemed to criticize German students of Geopolitik for
combining with their study of the geographic conditioning of
political phenomena the "advocating [of] policy, which is hardly a

104
scientific endeavor."[135] He then proceeded in his books to mix
abstract generalizations with advocacy of policies.
Prescott
notes this apparent inconsistency. [136] In view of Spykman's
expressed views on the subject, no real inconsistency exists.
Science serves practice; the scientist may well be a practitioner;
but practice is not a scientific activity.
Both Spykman's
thoughts and Prescott's comment on his actions imply some admonitions for students of geopolitics.
They will be describing and
evaluating attempts to control, in order to frustrate some such
attempts and admonish others.
Advocacy may require analysis; and
analysis is likely to inspire advocacy.
They will be better
scientists and more creditworthy advocates the easier it is to
tell, sentence by sentence or phrase by phrase, where their
science stops and their advocacy starts.
Complete separation is
unlikely and unnecessary; but their readers will have reason to be
ungrateful if they cannot tell which is presented where, and
geopoliticians have perhaps been unduly careless of their readers'
gratitude in the past.
Spykman's middle ground between geographic determinism and
possibilism is appealing, but not convincingly or even unambiguously elaborated and defended.
His case for geographic primacy
seems made more strongly than is warranted or needed.
His
thoughts on the relation of science to practice are to the point,
in politics as well as geopolitics.
SPYKMAN AND MACKINDER
The World-Island
Spykman's political cartography of the world is a recension
of Mackinder's.
Mackinder reconceives, renames and renumbers the
continents and the seas of the world.
"The joint continent of
Europe, Asia and Africa, is now effectively, and not merely theoretically, an island." It might be called the Continent; Mackinder calls it the "Great Island," the "World-Island." There
are
no longer many seas:
"There is one ocean covering nine-twelfths
of the globe; there is one continent--the World Island--covering
two-twelfths of the globe; and there are many smaller islands,
whereof North America and South America are, for effective purposes, two, which together cover the remaining one-twelfth."[137]
Mackinder therefore rejects the "New World" label as implying
a wrong perspective.
The "New World" in no way equals the Old,
nor can have an independent destiny: it is a satellite. Spykman,
an American dealing with a public containing hemispheric isolationists, found it expedient to classify the "transoceanic New

105
World" as somewhat different from the "off-shore islands and
continents of Great Britain, Japan, Africa and Australia" because
i t is set apart by an "oceanic belt"[138] which renders the logistics of an Old World invasion of the New World much more complex
and costly than those of a continental invasion of Britain or
Japan.
Spykman's image of the globe seems in this respect
superior to Mackinder's.
Otherwise Spykman accepts Mackinder's
contention that Eur-Afro-Asia must be treated as a single enormous
continent, subject to endogenous unification by landpower.
The Heartland Concept
Mackinder's World Island seemed to him divisible into two
parts, on the basis of transport and access.
One part--the
Heartland of the Great Continent--is essentially defined by having
"no available water-ways to the ocean" and thus by not being
"accessible to shipmen."[139] This area, in the center and north
of the World Island, includes the nearly half of Asia and quarter
of Europe whose rivers flow either to the icy and nearly unnavigable Arctic or into salt lakes with no outlet to the ocean.[140]
Though it extends to Iran, Tibet and Mongolia, the Heartland
was originally for most practical purposes co-extensive with
Imperial Russia.[141] Mackinder came to believe that relative
ease of land access from the Heartland and of refusal of sea
access by a strong Heartland power warranted adding East Europe,
more precisely the drainage area of the Baltic and Black Seas, to
the Heartland. [142] Later still, he suggested that undeveloped
Siberia east of the Yenisei need not be considered Heartland for
strategic purposes.[143] All three versions of the Heartland are
today in the Soviet sphere.
Mackinder was impressed by various geopolitical features
which combined to render the Heartland immensely important.
Not
only was it immune to seapower,[144] it had wonderfully strong
geographic defenses against landpower.
"The Heartland is the
greatest natural fortress on earth." Set "in its girdle of broad
natural defenses--ice-clad Polar Sea, forested and rugged Lenaland, and Central Asiatic mountain and arid tableland," i t is
open broadly only to the west, and provides room for defense in
great depth against invasion from that direction.[145] The "fortress" is well provided with natural resources;[146] and its
position is as advantageous for offensive purposes as its communications are for defensive.
"In the world at large [Russia]
occupies the central strategical position held by Germany in
Europe.
She can strike on all sides and be struck on all
sides."[147]

106

Heartland and Empire

The power potential of the Heartland could not be realized
as long as it was politically divided[148] and sparsely populated.[149] Russian rule had corrected both these deficiencies.
Mackinder consequently predicted a vast increase in the worldwide
economic and military significance of the Heartland, and therefore aggrandizement of Tocquevillian or even Danilevskian scale
for Russia, unifier of the Heartland. [150] Mackinder perceived
fine prospects for an imperialism of at least super continental
scope.
"The Heartland offers the basis of an all-powerful militarism."[151]
"Who rules the Heartland commands the World
Island."[152]
---And what then?
"What if the Great Continent, the whole
World-Island or a large part of it, were at some future time to
become a single and united base of seapower? Would not the other
insular bases be outbuilt as regards ships and outmanned as
regards seamen?"[153]
The oversetting of the balance of power in
favor of the pivot state, resulting in its expansion
over the marginal lands of Euro-Asia, would permit
of the use of vast continental resources for fleetbuilding, and the empire of the world would then
be in sight.[154]
What I suggest is that great industrial wealth
in Siberia and European Russia and a conquest of
some of the marginal regions would give the basis
for a fleet necessary to found the world empire.[155]
Who rules the World-Island commands the World. [156]
Unless I wholly misread the facts of geography
the grouping of lands and seas, and of fertility
and natural pathways, is such as to lend itself to the
growth of empires, and in the end of a single world
empire. [157]
Nature [in the Heartland] offers all the prerequisites of ultimate dominance in the world.[158]
Mackinder's teachings about the geopolitical vulnerability
of the world system to a heartland-based empire may be emp~r~
cally sound, ideologically potent, or both.
In either or both
roles they have something to do with the attempt of other great
powers to obstruct the reassembling of the Russian Empire after

107
the First World War; the desperate German venture, Operation
Barbarossa, in World War II; the unprecedented peacetime involvement of the United States in Eur-Afro-Asia during the Cold War.
But the American involvement has as much to do with Spykmanism as
with Mackinderism, and with rimlandism as with heart1andism.
The Rimland Concept
Though the Heartland drew most of his attention, Mackinder
had asserted the geopolitical ~ignificance of other areas as well.
"To east, south and west of [the] heart-land are marginal regions,
ranged in a vast crescent, accessible to shipment."[159]
The
lands thus set apart and consolidated by Mackinder included, more
or less continental Europe west of Russia, North Africa; the
Middle East; continental South, Southeast and East Asia. In this
small compass of the world land area was contained the vast majority of the world population.
Most great civilizations, religions and empires had arisen there. [160] And for just such
reasons Spykman accorded this marginal crescent, sited between the
heartland and the off-shore islands and continents, united
by
peripheral and mediterranean seas, far greater geopolitical importance than had Mackinder. He renamed it the "rimland."[16l]
Not all geographic analysts acquiesce in the rimland concept.
Norris and Haring declare that the rimland "should never be considered a region" because it is "the epitome of geographical
diversity" and that its unity exists only "from a special historical view based on British sea power."[162] Surely this is an
exaggeration.
Granting that some geopolitical views reflect the
power or position of this or that particular state, their validity
remains an issue independent of their place of origin, except that
the unequal world distribution of power may make whatever views
prevail in the more powerful or aggressive states effectively
binding upon others.
The same authors note elsewhere that "since
World War II, most wars and political disturbances have occurred
along the fringes of the heartland. "[163] "Fringes of the
heartland" seems to be a euphemism for "rimland." Indeed most of
the superpowers' alliances, diplomatic rivalries, crises and competitive interventions have been in the rimland.
One need not
then be British to accept that, because of the superpowers, their
locations and their rivalry, the rimland "exists" in operation as
well as in imagery.
The actual role of the rimland as Soviet-American cockpit is
quite in accord with both Mackinder's and Spykman's descriptions
of it.
Mackinder pointed out that the marginal crescent was
accessible to both land power organized in the heartland and sea
power stemming from the "outer or insular crescent"--the islanders

108

of Britain, Japan, the Americas.

(It was also suited to the
organization and projection both of land power inward and of sea
power outward--Mackinder's closest approximation to Spykman's
later rimland doctrine.)[164] Spykman too described the rimland
as, among other things, "a vast buffer zone of conflict between
sea power and land power."[165] But it was Spykman's
conviction
that the rimland had another, and far more decisive, part
to
play.
Spykman's Rimland Doctrine
Spykman's break with Mackinder, and his geopolitical originality, lies in his rimland doctrine.
Mackinder did not substantiate his forecast of Heartland primacy in the World-Island by
comparing Heartland power potentials with those of other continental regions even to the limited, mostly rhetorical degree in which
he had defended his analysis of World-Island primacy in the world.
Spykman did so--though likewise to a limited degree--and derived a
contrary thesis.
"The Mackinder dictum, 'Who controls eastern
Europe rules the Heartland; who rules the Heartland rules the
World Island; and who rules the World Island rules the World' is
false.
If there is to be a slogan for the power politics of the
Old World,
it must be 'Who controls the rimland rules Eurasia;
who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world. "'[166]
Spykman defended the rimland doctrine only tangentially, by
references to the rimland's "vast power potential. "[167]
Power
potential, to Spykman, meant population and production. [168] Is
the rimland doctrine defensible, even in these terms? Given that
the rimland essentially includes China, India and continental
Europe, a contemporary all-rimland union or empire would seem a
But given that the rimland
Power of most considerable dimension.
excludes the Americas, Britain, Japan and Russia, such a rimland
Power would possess a much larger share of world population than
of world production, not to mention forces-in-being.
Surely it
could not immediately rule Eurasia; surely it would take decades
or centuries of economic and military development on the rimland
(and relative stagnation or decline among its neighbors) before
such an improbable political entity could ever "control the destinies of the world." (Saul Bernard Cohen, who agrees that "rule of
Rimland would not mean automatic control of World Island," argues
that the improbability is geopolitical:
"no Rimland power is
capable of organizing all of the Rimland because of the vulnerability of the Rimland to both the Heartland and the Offshore
Power.")[169]
Spykman's rimland doctrine, developed during the
brief, rapid and shocking rise of the Berlin-Tokyo axis, seems as
untenable in its stark original form as does Mackinder's heartland
doctrine.

109
On the other hand, the accession of the whole rimland's
population and production to either an Islander or a Heartlander
party would surely challenge bipolarity in the short run; it might
possibly provide the resources needed to establish hegemony in the
long.
Saul Bernard Cohen would say "certainly" rather than "possibly"--"Complete control of Rimland by either side [Heartland or
Outer Crescent] would mean world domination."[170]
Colin Gray,
however, would reinstate Mackinder's forecast:
"Control of the
World Island of Eurasia-Africa by a single power would, over the
long term, mean control of the world"; control of the "Rimlands
and marginal seas by an insular power is not synonymous with
control of the World-Island, but.
does-mean the denial of
eventual global hegemony to the Heartland power."[171] The difference of forecasts as between Cohen and Gray may be echoed in the
contemporary difference
of opinion between a China fearful of
American as well as Soviet hegemony, and an America to which its
own hegemony seems inconceivable, unreal, impossible, even absurd.
Whoever may be right in this argument, it seems that, as
between the superpowers, some attentuated form of the rimland
doctrine--perhaps Cohen's, perhaps Gray's--still holds.
If so,
then it would be prudent for them to spend most of their competitive energies there:
so they do. And if so, it should be difficult for them to come directly or decisively to grips with one
another, and necessary to mediate their conflict through rimland
allies and rimland bases:
so they do.
If America has a proven,
felt, chronic military weakness it is in landpower, the forte of
continental states; if Russia has one, it is in sea power. Thus
even today the conventional-force weaknesses of nuclear giants
with immense military expenditures limit and color their ability
to act against each other in the rimland in the manner that prenuclear geopoliticians would have anticipated.
Some version of
the rimland doctrine, or the debate over that doctrine, is worth
preserving.
Spykman and Landpower
Preoccupation with landpower (which Spykman and Mackinder
share) sets them apart from the historic mainstream of American
Mackinder's best-known aphorism
and British strategic doctrine.
connects the geographic notion of the World-Island to the political notion of universal empire:
"Who rules the World-Island
commands the World." To take this proposition very seriously, one
Are there altermust be a fairly extreme believer in landpower.
natives?
To place the land power doctrine in context, one may imagine
similarly extreme doctrinal statements 2!..2. seapower ("Who rules

110

the World-Ocean commands the World") and airpower ("Who rules the
Air-Ocean commands the World"), These perhaps are more musical to
Anglo-American ears, since they imply that the offshore islands
and continents can sunder their political fates from that of the
Eur-Afro-Asian supercontinent.
But does anyone, did anyone, ever
take them seriously?
Mahan, the great American exponent of seapower, was no seapower extremist.
Mahan sought to rescue the
historic, political and military significance of control over the
sea from obscurity and neglect, not to demonstrate the prepotent
decisiveness of seapower.
In fact, the extreme seapower doctrine
has no true defenders.
Airpower extremis, on the other hand, has had sincere advocates. Douhet really meant to assert (as he did assert) that "the
command of the air is a necessary and sufficient condition of
victory" in modern war.[172] And even in 1904, when Mackinder
first stated his views, airpower had an advocate. Amery responded
to Mackinder that, once air-mobile force had been developed, "a
great deal of this geographical distribution must lose its importance, and the succcessul powers will be those who have the
greatest industrial basis. Itwill not matter whether they are in
the centre of a continent or on an island .... 11[173] Douhet complements Amery.
Airpower extremism modo Douhet implies the
irrelevance of geopolitics, or at least of Mackinder's ideas, modo
Amery.
An airpower geopolitics (or a missile geopolitics) would
be confined to the study of bases, ranges, obstacles, targets. To
an airpower extremist, control over the World-Island would be the
result, not the means, of world domination. Has airpower nullified the assumptions of Mackinder's and Spykman's geopolitics?
The total record of airborne, airlift, airdrop, strategic
bombing, air reconnaissance, and ground support, and of airpower
operations in general, is mixed rather than decisive. Command of
the air was either unnecessary or insufficient to victory in World
War II, Korea, Vietnam, even in the Iranian hostage rescue
attempt.
The (felt or proved) chronic weakness of American
land power and Russian seapower have not been canceled by the
development of these states' ability to impose enormous destruction from enormous distances.
The Amery-Douhet era has not yet
arrived.
Yet if till now and still untrue, the idea that technopolitics will abolish geopolitics by annihilating the significance
of space remains seductive and plausible:
a fruitful error and a
productive vision as well as a dangerous illusion.
No one now credits seapower extremism.
Airpower extremism
remains at best premature.
Can the landpower extremists be correct?
Spykman seems to have been among them.
When he assesses
the global distribution of power, Spykman assigns far more weight

III

to long-term power potentials (population, resources and production) than to forces-in being, which serve mainly to express or to
exploit such potentials.
Of necessity he echoes Mackinder's conclusions about the politically decisive role of the enormous land
mass, the World-Island.
"The distribution of power resources
gives to the Old World greater possibilities for the exertion of
force than to the New World."[174] "Who rules Eurasia controls
the destinies of the World."[175]
The acceptance of landpower geopolitics has direct policy
consequences for Spykman, as for Mackinder.
Not contemplating
American hegemony, and opposing any other, Spykman reasons that
America's "main political objective, both in peace and in war,
must be to prevent the unification of the Old World centers of
power in a coalition hostile to her own interests" or to "make it
impossible for the Eurasian land mass to harbor an overwhelming
dominant power in Europe and the Far East."[176] If Spykman had
rejected and opposed hegemony, as he did, but adhered to seapower
or airpower doctrines (or both), he would evidently have been led
to dramatically different politico-military policies.
To prevent
another's hegemony, a state need only maintain sea/air forces
sufficient to deny the other control over the World Ocean/AirOcean.
A navy or air force "as good as the best and second to
none" might then serve not only as an American national objective
but as the index of any great power's anti-hegemonic commitment,
its acceptance of its public international duty.
One might reason by analogy, in the nuclear era, that for a
great power to seek a second-strike capability against every
other great power makes sense only if it accepts both antihegemonist values and missilepower-extremist doctrines.
And the
attempt to develop a credible first (and last) strike capability
against all other great powers makes sense only if one combines
hegemonist objectives with missilepower extremism.
What defense-policy and force-structure consequences would
follow from landpowerextremism?
Substantial consequences, indeed.
Even if:the Soviet Union were treated as the only conceivable hegemonic threat, and Europe and East Asia the only geopolitically crucial areas, the anti-hegemonic states would at minimum
have to add to their current military responsibilities the foundation of massive, credibly deterrent conventional forces in Europe
and the creation of a similar, modernized force in East Asia, most
likely in Chin?
These undertakings have been considered, and
have thus far proved too formidable for either the West Europeans
or the Chinese.
Instead, various more or less questionable strategems for nuclear deterrence of conventional war have evolved for
dealing with the European strategic dilemma, while in the East

112
Asian balance the uncertainty associated with guerrilla warfare
substitutes for conventional defense or deterrence.
The problems
in these areas are indeed so fundamental that it seems to have
been necessary to ignore them. Costs, not doctrine, have been the
main constraints.
Landpower extremism seems to have produced
policies that are judged strategically sound and fiscally unworkable.
Airpower/missilepower extremism has had the opposite results, and the practical success. And there the matter rests.
Spykman's main contribution to geopolitics is to be found in
his dialogue with and critique of Mackinder.
Accepting with some
revisions Mackinder's image of the globe and his assumption of the
long-term primacy of landpower, Spykman claimed for the "Rimland"
the historically pivotal role Mackinder had assigned to the
"Heartland." Both Heartlandism and Rimlandism appear now to have
been inspirational myths, hyperbolic, yet exaggerating features
which did exist and do persist.
There is a Heartland, united
under one power, pre-eminent in land power, weak in sea power,
enjoying the advantages of central position but laboring under the
feared and the real disadvantages of encirclement.
There is a
Rimland, with enormous potential, but with no ability whatever to
unite, and hence functioning passively as ground debated and
denied by continental out-island antagonists.
Of the two doctrines, Mackinder's Heartlandism is the more original, more extreme, less credible.
Spykman's Rimlandism, as a gloss on
Mackinder's idea, renders it more sensible and acceptable, though
less provocative, without displacing it. The potential for domination by the Heartland has been demonstrated, but checked.
If
the Rimland has such a potential, its demonstration now seems to
lie very far in the future. Neither Mackinder nor Spykman thought
the possible hegemony of the offshore islands or continents worth
consideration--an
interesting
fact,
given that both
were
islanders, and that there have after all existed believers in
British, American, or Anglo-American hegemony. But were Mackinder
and Spykman blinded to islander hegemony because they themselves
were islanders?
Or is it rather that the believers in islander
hegemony have been able to retain their credulity because they
have not been geopoliticians?
GEOPOLITICS AFTER SPYKMAN
Spykman's Influence (Past)
Spykman's intellectual influence has been profound, enduring
and yet increasingly obscured.
Harold and Margaret Sprout attest
that

113
America's Strategy in World Politics was probably
read by more people in America during World War
II than was any other book on international politics
this book represents a crucial turning point
in American thinking about foreign affairs, and
its imprint on American thinking is still discernible [177]
The "turning point" and "imprint" adverted to have to do with the
change from a predominantly isolationist to a predominantly interventionist public opinion, and from a predominantly idealistic to
a more evenly divided idealist-realist tone to public political
controversy. As Furniss[178] declared, the structure and analytical framework for the field of international politics that Spykman
envisaged were the structure and framework that came to play the
leading role in the American study of international politics after
the Second World War.
Since World War II, American texts on international politics
taking a more or less political-realist tone have ordinarily
discussed "power," less or more squeamishly accepting, like Ball
and Killough,[179] Spykman's dictum that power "is in the last
instance the power to wage war," and providing in their discussion
of the nature or "factors" of power some reference to geographic
position.
Padelford and Lincoln, contending that "a state's participation in international affairs is largely affected by its
location with respect to neighboring countries and to the Great
Powers,"[180] indeed credit Spykman for their ideas about position.
More recently, however, American texts have treated geographic factors in a curt and not very provocative manner.[181] This
may reflect the fact that Spykman'sKleingeopolitik was developed
only in a preliminary way, that his grand theory is evidently
flawed, that he did not live to complete the one or correct the
other, and that he has thus far inspired no successors to do so
either.
One reason for this failure may be that, after his death,
Spykman was eclipsed by another emigre from the European continent, Hans J. Morgenthau; as chief American defender of the
political-realist paradigm with which Spykman had (only partly
correctly) become identified.
Morgenthau was considerably bolder
and more articulate as a doctrinaire than Spykman, or than most
other exponents of realism, who were, personally or by the nature
of their bureaucratic roles, more reticent or less single-minded.
And Morgenthau, while conceding geography to be "the most stable
factor upon which the power of a nation depends" in Spykmanlike

114
terms,[182] is rhetorically hostile to geopolitics ("a pseudoscience") which he identifies exclusively with Heartlandism.[182]
This error is all the more surprising in that Morgenthau cites
Spykman's Geography of the Peace as source reading on geopolitics.[184] But however clearly mistaken this judgment was, coming
as it did from the most influential teacher of political realism
in his time, it may have prevented continuation of Spykman's
endeavor by just those students who would otherwise have been most
likely to carry it on.
One voice, however, has recently been raised in vigorous
defense of Spykman and of geopolitics.
Colin Gray[185] has
attempted to correct the misidentification of the discipline with
one doctrine (Heartlandism) within it, to restore Spykman and
Mackinder (vs. Haushofer) as the central figures in geopolitics,
to correct Mackinder's ideas with Spykman's, and to conceive the
U.S.-Soviet relationship in geopolitical terms.
Gray, fluent and
lucid, may by the provocative character of his anti-hegemonist
writings succeed in compelling his detentist adversaries to meet
him on his chosen (geopolitical) ground--and may thereby help to
revive the concepts of his mentor Spykman, as anti-hegemonist as
Grpy but, being a Rim1andist, less inclined to view the Soviet
Union with awe.
In a more detached and less activist way, Saul Bernard
Cohen[186] has continued Spykman's endeavors, using the Rim1and
concept to some degree, rejecting the Rim1and doctrine, criticizing Spykman's list of geopolitical zones and arguing for their
displacement by others in the contemporary geopolitical image of
the globe. To a limited degree Cohen thereby continues one aspect
of Spykman's work--the geopolitical survey. [187]
However, as
Gyorgy pointed out at the time, [188] Spykman's appraisal of South
America and the Western Hemisphere is a "defensive geopolitical
survey," examining conflicts, alignments, orientations and potentials with an eye to deciding whether the New World, or any part
of it,
possessed the political solidarity,
economic selfsufficiency and military strength to render it defensible against
any outside assault. In that respect, as Gyorgy also noted, it is
the parallel and counterpart of Ewald Banse's appraisal[189] of
the states of the world, their political, economic, and geographic
strengths and weaknesses, their value in war as allies, neutrals
or enemies, an appraisal carried out with an offensive strategy in
mind.
Cohen's inventory is less strategically committed, less
practically oriented, than either Banse's or Spykman's.

115
Spykman's Influence (Future)
Having said what influence Spykman had, one may next wonder
what influence he ought to have in the future--what difference
ought Spykman's work to make that it has not yet made?
Spykman's work is not sufficiently comprehensive to serve as
the sole basis for the future development of geopolitics; but nor
is any other's.
1.ess opaque (but less original) than Mahan's,
more explicit regarding assumptions than (but still derivative
from) Mackinder's, more systemic (though far less systematic) than
Ratzel's, more in accord with contemporary (Western) political
prejudices than Haushofer's, it can probably serve as geopolitics'
system-level
matrix,
with contributions from other writers
rounding it out.
For contemporary use, however, lacunae in geopolitical doctrine caused by the phenomena Spykman did not foresee--bipolarity, nuclear weapons, small-state proliferation--must
be filled.
Bipolarity poses the new challenge of recreating
multipolarity, which can be seen as a sharper form of the old
challenge of restoring ex-great powers and admitting new ones; it
does not reduce the salience of the Rimland or the long-term
hegemonistic potential of a continental Heartland power.
Nuclear
weapons and bilateral second-strike capabilities have rendered
armaments more important, and alliances less important, in the
main global power balance than was so before; but the change is
far from total even there, and has if anything been reversed at
the regional level, where superpowers kept near-bankrupt by superweapons rely more, not less, on allies.
Some small states have
exploited bipolarity, stalemate and superpower paralysis to become
"players" rather than "stakes"--proxies, isolanis, local hegemons,
zealot Alamuts; but most even of these are compelled to choose
roles in the systemic, bipolar struggle rather than in the game
they would prefer to play (which ordinarily centers round their
own visions).
The system has not been totally changed; it seems
these phenomena will require amending, not scrapping, Spykman's
ideas.
Spykman's underlying liberal ideals, and his liberal-realist
compromises, give his geopolitics a distinct political coloration.
What he has to say cannot be of much direct use to, say, the
nationalist and militarist idealists of southern South America
where geopolitics flourishes by asking and answering a very different agenda of questions, or to a Soviet navalist (to whom
Spykman must seem as perverse as the inverted Hegel to Marx).
While democratic socialists have not developed a geopolitics of
their own, if they did so it would doubtless look as different
from Spykman's as does Fuller's optimistic cooperative globalism.
In general, the less central freedom is to one's value structure,

116
or the more one believes in the transiency of power struggles, the
farther from Spykman one's geopolitical agenda and doctrines will
take one.
Still, I would venture three suggestions about the
future development of geopolitics sufficiently abstract, perhaps,
to meet the approval of researchers not sharing Spykman's aspirations.
At least in the United States, Kleingeopolitik, the geopolitics of the state, the geopolitics whose scope resembles Ratzel's
political geography, has made little or no progress since Spykman's articles (which contain original material on transmarine
expansion), and has indeed, if textbook summaries are taken as
evidence, begun to retrogress, losing detail and definition.
This regrettable trend has doubtless been caused in part by the
doubly mistaken equation of geopolitics with Haushofer and of
Haushofer with Hitler, and in part by the illusory aspects of the
nuclear-age insight expressed by Herz:
"now that power can destroy power from center to center, everything is different."[190]
Whatever its sources, the trend needs reversing.
A first step
would be to complete Spykman's attempt to pass Ratzel and the
Ratzelian corpus through a critical filtration, removing determinisms while seeking to discover systematic evidence bearing upon
the degree and circumstances of acceptability of the various
propositions of Kleingeopolitik.
World-system-Ievel geopolitics can profitably take up the
Rimland problem where Spykman left it, as Gray and Cohen have
sought to do.
In the longer run, through abstract calculation of
summed measures of power potential, it ought to prove possible
with contemporary data and analytical techniques, to discern a set
of "minimum winning coalitions"-l< (adjacent and disjacent) in the
world system according to various, necessarily speCUlative definitions of such coalitions.
Looking at their spatial distribution
might conceivably incline us toward Heartlandism or Rimlandism or
World Islandism--or "bipolarism," "First Worldism," "Northism," or
some other, perhaps less geopolitical ideas and apprehensions.
Whatever one accepts as a possible "minimum winning coalition" may
then be used to define a counterstrategy for members of the potential counterpart "losing coalition." I suspect that we would find
that there is in principle as much good reason for the South to
seek to split the North, the Second World to split the First, and
-l(-The reference is to Riker's idea that "In social situations
similar to ~-person, zero-sum games with side-payments, participants create coalitions just as large as they believe will ensure
winning and no larger."[191]

117
the non-superpowers to impede bipolar collusion, as for the
offshore islanders to impede heartland control over the World
Island--but no more.
Containment of Soviet expansion by island-rimland cooperation, though not the only item on the global power-political
agenda, would thus remain important in principle, and even more so
in practice. One could not expect containment to be the only line
of policy on any state's agenda, except perhaps for the United
States (and not even for it in moments when detente seems to offer
it a "winning coalition" with the Soviet Union).
System-level
geopolitics would then be simply one aspect of, rather than the
most fundamental feature of, system-level politics.
Finally, though geopolitical surveys such as those of Spykman
are doubtless continued by contemporary military staffs (and ought
to be if they are not), they ought also to be more or less systematically carried on for the benefit of the publics of various
countries--and for those decision-makers who attend to public
information rather than classified documents.
Such sensitive
topics as whether the Central European front of NATO would hold up
under certain contingencies for years, months, weeks, days or
minutes, would probably prove, in the net, more profitable than
dangerous as subjects of public debate.
"Obfuscation" being a
function of "office," one cannot expect official candor on such
subjects, not even from highly placed leaders.
It would be more
informative, I suspect, to call together academic scholars, researchers at independent institutes of various political hues, and
journalists; to ask them their opinions on such topics; to invite
them to defend their views, to assail others', even to change
their minds. In the process of such dialogue, geopolitical surveys
a la Spykman should be sought, and would doubtless be created, in
a context that would enhance their interest.
In each of the three directions I have suggested for the
development of contemporary geopolitics, then, Spykman figures.
In ,state-level geopolitical theorizing, he exemplifies an attitude
suited to the appropriation and transformation of the Ratzelian
heritage.
At the world-system level, Rimlandism may, and I think
World-Islandism will, define a potential winning coalition, though
not the only one, and thus maintain the value, though not the
exclusive value, of Spykman's global image.
And in coalitionlevel surveys, Spykman provides an example of the kind of publicism that ought to be promoted by groups seeking to encourage
independent perspectives on alliances and alliance policies.
Not
to be imitated, but to be learned from, continued, criticized, set
aside,
surpassed,
each of these in some degree, and not

118

incidentally to be admired: such, I think is the role of Nicholas

John Spykman as a precursor to contemporary geopolitics.

119
SOURCES
1. Nicholas John Spykman, born in Amsterdam October 13, 1893,
"earned a bachelor's degree (1921), master's degree (1921), and a
doctorate (1923) from the University of California. He had been a
young journalist in the Near East from 1913 to 1916, in the Middle
East from 1916 to 1919, and in the Far East from 1919 to 1920. He
was an instructor in political science and sociology at the University of California from 1923 to 1925 before going to Yale in
1925. In 1935 he became chairman of Yale's Department of International Relations and Director of the Yale Institute of International Studies, positions he held until 1940." He died on June
26, 1943. (Kenneth W. Thompson, Masters of International Thought,
Louisiana State University Press, 1980, p-.-92).
2. As in Kenneth W. Thompson, Political Realism and the
Crisis of World Politics (Princeton University Press, 1960), pp.
29-32.
3. Nicholas J. Spykman, The Social Theory of Georg Simmel
(New York: Russell & Russell), 1964 (1925), pp. v-vii, xi-xvi,
268, 273.
4. Nicholas John Spykman, "The Teaching of International
Relations--Methods and Topics," Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of Teachers of International Law and Related Subjects, 1929,
38-43, 52; idem, "Methods of Approach to the Study of International Relations," Proceedings of the Fifth Conference of Teachers
of International Law and Related Subjects, 1933, 58-81, 101-102.
5. Nicholas J. Spykman, "Geography and Foreign Policy, I,"
32 American Political Science Review No.1 (February 1938), 28-50;
idem, "Geography and Foreign Policy, II," 232 American Political
SCIence Review No.2 (April 1938), 213-236.
6. Nicholas J. Spykman and Abbie A. Rollins, "Geographic
Objectives in Foreign Policy, I," 33 American Political Science
Review No.3 (June 1939), 391-410; idem, "Geographic Objectives in
Foreign Policy, II," 33 American Political Science Review No. 4
(August 1939), 591-614.
7.

Spykman, "Geography and Foreign Policy, I," p. 29.

8.

Ibid.

9.

Ibid.

10.

Ibid., and Spykman, "Geography and Foreign Policy, 11."

120
11. Spykman and Rollins,
Policy, I," pp. 392-394.
12. Spykman
Policy, II."

and Rollins,

13. Spykman and Rollins,

Policy, I," pp. 395-410.
14. Friedrich Ratzel,
Oldenbourg, 1923 [1895]).

"Geographic Objectives in

Foreign

"Geograhic Objectives in

Foreign

"Geographic Objectives in

Foreign

Politische

Geographie

(Munich:

15.

Spykman, "Geography and Foreign Policy, I," p. 31.

16.

Ibid., p. 42.

R.

17. Nicholas John Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), p. 457.
18. Nicholas John Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, ed.
Helen R. Nicholl (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1944), p. 6.
19.

Ibid., p. 45.

20.

Ibid., pp. 57-58.

21.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 461.

22. Malcolm Cowley, "Geopolitik," 106 New Republic No. 16,

Whole No. 1429 (April 20, 1942), 546-547, p. 546.
23. Eugene Staley, review of America's Strategy in World
Politics, 32 American Economic Review No.4 (December 1942), 893898, pp. 896-897.
24. Hans W. Weigert,"America's 'Security Situation'
row," 27 Saturday Review No. 17 (April 22, 1944), 10.
25.

Tomor-

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 468.

26. Clyde Eagleton, Review of America's Strategy in World

Politics, 222 Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science (July 1942), 189-190, p. 190.
27.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 460.

28.

Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, p. 51.

121

29. Alvin Adey, "Power Politics Again" 2 Current History No.

10 (June 1942), 297-299.
30.

Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, p. 53.

3l.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 460.

32.

Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, p. 58.

33.
469-470.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, pp. 460,

34. Michael Greenberg, review of America's Strategy in World

Politics, 15 Pacific Affairs No.3 (September 1942), 380-383, p.
382.

38.

35.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p, 41.

36.

Ibid., p, 460.

37.

Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, p. 57.

38.

Ibid., pp. 57-61.

39.

Spykman,

40.

Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, p. 3.

41.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 12.

42.

Ibid.

43.

Ibid., p. 7.

"The

Teaching of International Relations," p.

44. Nicholas John Spykman, "States' Rights and the League,"

24 Yale Review n,s. No. 2 (December 1934), 274-292, p. 282.
45.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 6.

46.

Ibid., p. 472.

47. Nicholas John Spykman, Letter, 14 Life No.2 (January 11,

1943), 2.
48.

Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, p. 60.

49.

Ibid., p. 3.

122

50.

Ibid.

51. Spykman, "States' Rights and the League," p. 282; Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, pp. 4, 60.
52. Nicholas John Spykman, "Frontiers, Security, and International Organization," 32 Geographical Review No.3 (July 1942),
436-447, p. 472.
53.

Spykman, Life letter.

54. Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, pp. 4, 5; Spykman,

America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 17.

31.

55.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 13.

56.

Ibid., p. 7.

57.

Ibid., p. 18.

58.

Ibid.

59.

Weigert,

"America's 'Security Situation' Tomorrow," p.

60. Edward Mead Earle, "Power Politics and American Policy,"

58 Political Science Quarterly No. 1 (March 1943), 94-106, pp.
105-106.
61. J.R.V. Prescott, The Geography
(Chicago: Aldine, 1968), p. 3~

of

State

62. J. W. Burton, International Relations:

Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 53.

Politics
A General

63.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 18.

64.

Ibid., p. 19.

65.

Ibid.

66.

Ibid., p. 20.

67.

Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, pp. 60-61.

68. Spykman,
25, 471-472.

America's Strategy in World Politics, pp. 21-

123

69.

Ibid., p. 18.

70.

Ibid., pp. 7-8.

71.

Ibid., p. 41.

72. Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities (New

Collier Books,1969), pp. 32-33.--

York:

73. Ibid., pp. 137-141; R. Buckminster Fuller and Robert

Marks, The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller (Garden City, N.Y.:
Anchor Books, 1973), pp. 50-55, 148-159.
74. George R. Pitman, Jr., "A Calculus of Military Stability," Journal of Peace Research No.4 (1966), 349-358, p. 350.
75. Partha Chatterjee, "The Classical Balance
Theory," Journal of Peace Research No. 1 (1972), 51-61.

of

Power

76. J. David Singer, Stuart Bremer, and John Stuckey,

"Capability Distribution, Uncertainty, and Major Power War, 18201965" (pp. 19-48 in Bruce M. Russett, ed., Peace, War, and Numbers,
Beverly Hills, California: Sage, 1972).
77. Cynthia Cannizzo, "Capability Distribution and
Power War Experience, 1816-1965," 21 Orbis No. 4 (Winter
947-957.

Major1978),

78. David Wilkinson, Deadly Quarrels (University of California Press, 1980), pp. 102~103.
79. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, pp. 2125, 458, 467, 471-472.
80.

Ibid., p. 448.

81. Kenneth Boulding, Conflict and Defense (New York: Harper

and Row, 1962), pp. 75-76 and Chs. 12-13.
82. Albert Wohlstetter, "Illusions of Distance," 46 Foreign
Affairs No.2 (January 1968), 242-255; idem, "Theory and OpposedSystems Design, 12 Journal of Conflict Resolution No. 3 (September
1968), 302-331.
83.

Wohlstetter, "Illusions of Distance," p. 245.

124
84. Ronald Rogowski, "International Politics: The Past as
SCience," 12 International Studies Quarterly No. 4 (December
1968), 394-418, p. 417.
85.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 18.

86. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 5th ed. rev.

(New York: Knopf, 1978), pp. 164-166.
87. Rogowski, "International Politics: The Past as Science,"
pp. 407-409.
88.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 7.

89. Andrew Gyorgy,

Press, 1944), p. 257.

Geopolitics,

(University of

California

90. William T.R. Fox, "The Uses of International Relations

Theory" (pp. 29-49 of Theoretical Aspects of International Relations, ed. William T.R. Fox, University of Notre Dame Press,
1959), p. 30.
91.

Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, p. 35.

92.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 165.

93. Halford J. Mackinder, "The Geographical Pivot of History," 213 Geographical Journal No. 4 (April, 1904), 421-444, p.
422.
94. Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, ed.
Anthony J. Pearce (New York: Norton, 1962 [1919]), p. 29.
95.

Ibid., p. 30.

96.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 165.

97.

Ibid., p. 19.

98.

Ibid., p. 59.

99.

Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, pp. 33-34, 45.

100.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 466.

101. Andre-Louis Sanguin, "L'evolution et Ie renouveau de la

geographie politique," 84 Annales de Geographie No. 463 (May-June
1975), 275-296, p. 280.

125
102. John Lewis Gaddis, "Was the Truman Doctrine a
Turning Point?" 52 Foreign Affairs No. 2 (January 1974),
402, pp. 386-387.

Real
386-

103. X (George F. Kennan), "The Sources of Soviet Conduct,"

25 Foreign Affairs No.4 (July 1947), 566-582, pp. 574-575.
104.

Ibid., p. 576.

105.

Ibid., p. 575.

106.

Ibid., p. 581.

107.

Ibid., p. 582.

108.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 25.

109.

Ibid., pp. 471-472.

110.

Ibid., p. 460.

Ill. Edward Vose Gulick, Europe's Classical Balance of Power

(New York: Norton, 1967 [1955]), pp. 72-77.
112. Morton A. Kaplan, System and Process in International
Politics (New York: John Wiley, 1957), p. 23.
113.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 466.

114.

Ibid., p. 463.

115.

Ibid., pp. 103-104.

116. Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 19191939, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1964 [1946]), pp. 235-239.

51.

117.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 20.

118.

Burton,

International Relations:

A General Theory, p.

119. Spykman and Rollins, "Geographic Objectives in Foreign

Policy, I," p. 398.
120.

Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, p. 463.

121.

Ibid., p. 464.

126

40.

122.

Ibid., pp. 468-471.

123.

Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, pp. 5-7.

124.

Prescott, The Geography of State Politics, p. 35.

125.

Gyorgy, Geopolitics, p. 254.

126.

Spykman, "Geography and Foreign Policy, I," p. 30.

127.

Spykman, "The Teaching of International Relations," p.

128.

Spykman, "Geography and Foreign Policy, I," pp. 28, 29.

129. Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man

Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1946).

43.

65.

Versus

Power

130.

Spykman, "Methods of Approach," p. 61.

131.

Ibid., pp. 62-63, 101.

132.

Ibid., pp. 65, 66.

133.

Spykman, "The Teaching of International Relations," p.

134.

Spykman, "Methods of Approach," pp. 62, 74-78.

135.

Spykman, "Geography and Foreign Policy, I," p. 30.

136.

Prescott, The Geography of State Politics, p. 36.

137.

Mackinder,

Democratic Ideals and Reality, pp. 62, 64-

138.

Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, p. 38.

139.

Mackinder, "The Geographical Pivot of History," p. 431.

140.

Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, pp. 72-73.

141.
435-437.
142.

Mackinder,

"The

Geographical Pivot of History,"

pp.

Mackinder, Democractic Ideals and Reality, pp. 104-110.

127
143. Halford J. Mackinder, "The Round World and the Winning
of the Peace," 21 Foreign Affairs No. 4 (July 1943), 595-605, p.
598.
144. Mackinder, "The Geographical Pivot of History," p. 431;
Mackinder, "The Round World and the Winning of the Peace," p. 598.
145. MacKinder, "The Round
Peace," pp. 601, 599-600, 603.

World and the Winning of

the

146.

Ibid., pp. 603-604.

147.

Mackinder, "The Geographical Pivot of History," p. 436.

148.

Ibid., p. 433.

149.

Ibid., pp. 434, 443.

150.

Ibid., p. 434.

151.

Mackinder, Democractic Ideals and Reality, p. 164.

152.

Ibid., p. 150.

153.

Ibid., p. 170.

154.

Mackinder, "The Geographical Pivot of History," p. 436.

155.

Ibid., p. 443.

156.

Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, p. 150.

157.

Ibid., p. 2.

158.

Ibid., p. 170.

159.

Mackinder, "The Geographical Pivot of History," p. 431.

160.

Ibid., pp. 431-432.

161.

Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, pp. 38, 40-41, 52.

162. Robert E. Norris and L. Lloyd Haring, Political

Geography (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1980), p. 41.
163.

Ibid., p. 37.

128

435.

164.

Mackinder, "The Geographical Pivot of History," pp. 431,

165.

Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, p. 41.

166.

Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, p. 43.

167.

Ibid. , p. 44.

168.

Ibid. , pp. 28-29.

169. Saul Bernard Cohen, Geography and Politics in

Divided, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 51.
170.

World

Ibid.

171. Colin S. Gray, The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era (New

York: Crane and Russak, 1977), p. 15.
172. Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans.
Ferrari (New York: Coward-McCann, 1942)-,-p~14~25.

Dino

173.

Mackinder, "The Geographical Pivot of History," p. 441.

174.

Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, p. 58.

175.

Ibid., p. 43.

176.

Ibid., pp. 45, 60.

177. Harold and Margaret Sprout, Foundations of International

Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1962), p. If1.
178. Edgar S. Furniss, Jr., "The Contribution of Nicholas
John Spykman to the Study of International Politics," 4 World
Politics No.3 (April 1952), 382-401, pp. 383, 400-401.
179. M. Margaret Ball and Hugh B. Killough,
Relations (New York: Ronald, 1956), p. 86.

International

180. Norman J. Padelford and George A. Lincoln, International

Politics (New York: MacMillan, 1954), p. 23.
181. See, for instance, Theodore A. Couloumbis and James H.
Wolfe, Introduction to International Relations, 2nd ed. (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982), pp. 73-74, or Bruce Russett
and Harvey Starr, World Politics: The Menu for Choice (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1981), pp. 139-140.----

129

Two.

182.

Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, p. 117.

183.

Ibid., pp. 164-166.

184.

Ibid., p. 597.

185.

The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era.

186.

Geography and Politics in

187.

Spykman,

188.

Geopolitics, p. 254.

World Divided.

America's Strategy in World

Politics,

189. Ewald Banse, Germany Prepares for War,

Harris (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934).

trans.

Part

Alan

190. John H. Herz, International Politics in the Atomic Age

(Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 108.
191. William H. Riker, The Theory of Political
(Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 32-33.

Coalitions