Geopolitics is not simply a pretentious way of saying “international relations.” It is a method for thinking about the world and forecasting what will happen down the road. Economists talk about an invisible hand, in which the self-interested, short-term activities of people lead to what Adam Smith called “the wealth of nations.” Geopolitics applies the concept of the invisible hand to the behavior of nations and other international actors. The pursuit of short-term self-interest by nations and by their leaders leads, if not to the wealth of nations, then at least to predictable behavior and, therefore, the ability to forecast the shape of the future international systems. - page 10
I’m a long-time reader of StratFor (the organization that Mr. Friedman is CEO of). It’s not that I want their perspectives to be true because I don’t gain any moral satisfaction from them. I simply find a tighter correlation between their predictions and reality. My geopolitical studies are inherently apolitical, but this is not to say that I don’t color them with my biases or have strong feelings one way or the other.
In the same way that science shines a light on the core superstitions of religion, geopolitics shines a light on the core conceits of idealism and politics. If you are a believer in utopias of any kind, the geopolitical view is unnerving. However, I think it’s very valuable for understanding the disconnection between what we think and what is. Consider your own picture of what underpins American power and then read the following:
The Grand Strategy of the United States (beginning on page 40)
- The complete domination of North America by the United States army
- The elimination of any threat to the United States by any power in the western hemisphere
- Complete control of the maritime approaches to the United States by the navy in order to preclude any possibility of invasion
- Complete domination of the world’s oceans to further secure U.S. physical safety and guarantee control over the international trading system
- The prevention of any other nation from challenging U.S. global naval power
Having achieved the unprecedented feat of dominating all of the world’s oceans, the United States obviously wanted to continue to hold them. The simplest way to do this was to prevent other nations from building navies, and this could be done by making certain that no one was motivated to build navies – or had the resources to do so. One strategy, “the carrot,” is to make sure that everyone has access to the sea without needing to build a navy. The other strategy, “the stick,” is to tie down potential enemies in land-based confrontations so that they are forced to exhaust their military dollars on troops and tanks, with little left over for navies. – page 45
A sitting American president couldn’t tell the populace the geopolitical reasons for the invasion of Iraq. This is because the average American perceives their nation and the world at large through their ideological perspectives.
Iraq is relatively flat, has access to the ocean, borders more nations than any other Middle Eastern country, and we know the terrain. We didn’t care about Iraq for any of the squishy reasons argued by neo-conservatives. We wanted to alter the behavior of the nations surrounding Iraq visa vis their support of terrorist groups. On this score, the invasion was mostly successful. Bringing peace to the region was always secondary, because the primary reason was to stop coalitions from forming.
We cared more about Libya than we did about Iraq because those bordering nations were the real target of our actions. I find this argument thoroughly immoral, but far closer to the truth. We justify our behavior after the fact and use our particular cultural mythos to justify or condemn our own actions.
Having systematically achieved its strategic goals, the United States has the ultimate aim of preventing the emergence of any major power in Eurasia. The paradox, however, is as follows: the goal of these interventions was never to achieve something – whatever the political rhetoric might have said – but to prevent something. The United States wanted to prevent stability in areas where another power might emerge. Its goal was not to stabilize, but to destabilize. And that explains how the United States responded to the Islamic earthquake – it wanted to prevent a large, powerful Islamic state from emerging. - page 46
Within this read, it wasn’t about oil like liberals argued and wasn’t about bringing democracy to the Middle East like the conservatives argued. Absent a more useful framework for understanding these matters, we fall to the descriptions that serve our personal political identities.
We see this contradiction: on the one hand, the United States is deeply resented and feared; on the other hand, individual nations still try to find a way to get along with the United States. This disequilibrium will dominate the twenty-first century, as will efforts to contain the United States. It will be a dangerous century, particularly for the rest of the world. - page 47
This seems a decent description of the reality. How can it be that all these issues that – in another life – I wasn’t even aware of are the more likely drivers of international affairs. The navy is used to keep the American-run system functioning and the shift of global-trade away from Europe determined that power would likely reside with the nation whose geographical position is astride two oceans.
But isn’t that too tidy? Isn’t this an after-the-fact justification? That’s the other voice that starts sounding my head when I write words like that. But StratFor’s method includes more than just predictions. They also place those predictions next to reality in the year following. This provides a means for self-testing and, from what I’ve read, they appear to desire better accuracy. My ethical self wants them to be wrong all the time, but so far I have been mostly disappointed.
