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Iran has tightened its grip on an age-old trade route, once used to transport silk, spices, and Arabian horses, to choke off oil to much of the world and put pressure on the Trump administration. More than 2,000 miles from Iran’s coast, a remote island in the Indian Ocean with a population of roughly 4,000 people has become central to America’s global competition with China.
The message is clear: geopolitics has returned. Indeed, it never left. And it has often been determinative.
Technology changes. Culture shifts. But in many ways, geography is destiny. The fate of nations has both risen and fallen by dint of where certain things — key waterways, resources, borderlands, and trade routes — can be found on a map.
To 21st century minds unaccustomed to inherent limits, this sort of thinking might be hard to grasp. Policy debates over the last hundred or so years have often been centered on “isms”: communism, capitalism, internationalism, isolationism, neoconservatism, Wilsonianism, and everything in between. But these are creations of the modern era. By contrast, geopolitics seems to belong to another age.
But what might strike some as archaic has long been a feature of both war and peace. It is enduring. But it is often forgotten, or at best, minimized. However, this hasn’t always been the case.
More than a century ago, foreign policy debates were centered less on high-minded ideals and ivory tower arguments and more on geographic facts.
Perhaps the most famous, and arguably the most influential of its exponents, was America’s Alfred Thayer Mahan. A U.S. Naval officer and professor, Mahan spent years thinking about geography and war. Mahan went on to coin the term “Middle East” to describe what was previously known as West Asia. His works on “The Influence of Seapower in History” were hugely influential and were championed by everyone from Teddy Roosevelt to Kaiser Wilhelm II. Mahan, the late historian John Keegan claimed, “was the most important American strategist of the nineteenth century.”
Mahan’s acolytes championed both seapower and the idea of great and decisive naval battles. His works inspired naval buildups from Berlin to Tokyo, and often with fateful consequences. As the well-known podcast host Dan Carlin quipped: “Has anyone in history done more damage than Alfred Thayer Mahan?”
Yet Mahan’s ideas also stood at the forefront of the U.S.’s rise to global power. America’s pre-World War II naval buildup — reaching its pinnacle under President Teddy Roosevelt’s “Great White Fleet” — was underpinned by Mahan’s thinking. In many respects, the massive attack that occurred four decades later by the naval and armed forces of Imperial Japan on American ships anchored at Pearl Harbor was the culmination.
Nor was Mahan alone. Contemporaries such as Britain’s Halford Mackinder, whose “Heartland Theory” argued that whoever controlled the Eurasian land mass would de facto control the world, influenced generations of policymakers, for good and ill, in the United States and far beyond. “Who rules Eastern Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; who rules the World Island commands the world,” he famously intoned.
The fever dreams of both Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin agreed. But so too did the U.S. and Allied defense planners who championed the “Europe First” strategy during World War II, as well as those who recognized the necessity of the Marshall Plan and preventing industrialized Europe from falling into the Soviet Union’s hands.
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Certain things are immutable.
War planners and military strategists have long understood the importance of geopolitics. Indeed, they had no choice. After all, they deal with harsh realities and hard figures. Aircraft and naval vessels can only go so far without refueling, tanks can only operate under certain conditions, and access to waterways and chokepoints is often determinative. You can’t land forces if there are no places for them to land.
Unlike some pundits and academics, they do not have the option, the false conceit, of substituting sloganeering for sound strategy. They’re less likely to be ensnared in fantastical thinking, to roll the dice on some daring gambit. As Napoleon famously advised: “If you want to take Vienna, take Vienna.” Adventurism is to be discouraged.
And certain places will always be of prime geostrategic importance.
Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, is one famous example. It was more than the capital of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. Located on the Bosphorus Strait, situated between the Mediterranean and Black seas, the city sat astride key trade routes, making it both a commercial hub and a prime target for invaders for centuries. Today, Turkey remains a gateway between East and West — a source of friction for its forfeited aspirations of European Union membership but also a wellspring of its power. Certain countries and certain tracts of land will always matter. And some are smaller than others.
Take the Chagos Islands, for example. The largest of the islands, Diego Garcia, has hosted a joint U.S.-U.K. military base for more than half a century. And for good reason. The entire concept of the base was “conceived and initiated by the U.S., not the U.K., to assert American control in the Indian Ocean,” according to the British think tank Chatham House. U.S. naval planners wanted to ensure U.S. access to overseas bases during the Cold War.
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Chagos offered a key location to project American power to Russia, China, India, and the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean. Accordingly, the U.S. constructed a base. Decades later, that base is arguably more important as the U.S. looks to pivot to the Pacific to confront an increasingly bellicose China. As President Donald Trump warned, it is “strategically located.” And in many ways, it is irreplaceable.
Further signifying its importance, Iran recently launched missiles at Diego Garcia, prompting the U.K. government to decry Tehran’s actions as “reckless.” Yet the government of U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is seeking to hand over the archipelago to Mauritius, a proxy of the Chinese Communist Party. This itself is reckless and shortsighted, and has earned public rebukes from the Trump administration. For reasons of geography alone, Diego Garcia can’t be forfeited, let alone to our enemies.
Another recent event has underlined the importance of geography. Since antiquity, the Strait of Hormuz has been essential to global trade. But where Arabian horses, silk, spices, and jewels once passed, now oil and essential commodities float. Roughly 20% of the world’s oil, much of it destined for energy-starved countries in the Pacific, passes through the Strait.
The power that holds decisive control over the strait, be it the 17th-century Safavid Empire in Persia or the Islamic Republic of today, can bring global trade to its knees. In 1951, amid an oil dispute, the British Empire blocked Iranian ships from exiting the strait. Now the Islamic Republic has returned the favor, holding the strait hostage at a time of war.
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Indeed, as the U.S. looks to the Pacific, other countries and waterways loom large. The Taiwan Strait is a critical maritime artery. No less than one-fifth of global maritime trade passes through its waters, much of it related to semiconductors and other key ingredients for the modern economy. Yet Taiwan itself is key, an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” as the late U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur put it. Should Taiwan fall to China, defending the second island chain, which includes U.S. treaty allies, will become more difficult and more costly. That is an inescapable fact.
Other countries, including the Philippines and India, among others, will play important roles in the growing competition with China. Geography says as much. And unlike leaders and ideas, geography is less subject to change. As Nicholas Spykman, a prominent international relations theorist in the early twentieth century observed: “Geography is the most fundamental factor in foreign policy because it is the most permanent.”