School of War - Ep 83: Aaron O’Connell on 'Geopolitics 101'

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

Aaron O’Connell, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, joins the show to talk about the “founding fathers” of 20th century geopolitical thought: Mahan, Mackinder, and Spykman.  ▪️ Times    •    01:46 Introduction      •    02:20 From Marine to scholar to the NSC     •    06:24 Alfred T. Mahan     •    12:27 Choke points, decisive battle, and battleships     •   15:45 Security through imperialism       •    18:08 Chinese Mahanians     •    20:33 China’s crowded neighborhood     •    21:27 Halford Mackinder     •   28:56 Heartland rising       •    31:36 Inner and outer crescent     •    33:01 Nicholas Spykman      •    37:55 The nature of power     •    39:03 Containment     •   42:11 The American role     •    46:22 The path of partnerships Follow along on Instagram

Geopolitics is the study of, quote, the geographic influences on power relationships in international relations. It's a mode of thinking that strategists have engaged in since men traded and made war against one another in organized groups. Indeed, long before there was a word for it or even a self-conscious notion of strategy. But as a formal line of inquiry, it's quite young. And today, we are going to do a whirlwind tour of the thought of three of its founding fathers, each of whose work built on that of the last. Alfred Thayer Mahan, Halford McKinder, and Nicholas Spickman. Geopolitics 101, today on School of War. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of

Vietnam is to end in a state of it. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. And the people who are not seen buildings. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, photos, and more School of War content, follow along on Instagram at School of War. Just tap the link in the show notes and subscribe. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks so much for joining School of War.

I am delighted to be joined today by Aaron O'Connell. Aaron is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas, Austin. He's a Marine who served in Afghanistan. around the same time I did. We used to teach together at the United States Naval Academy. Aaron's an impressive guy. He served on the NSC. He's the author of a history of the Marine Corps during the early part of the Cold War

called Underdogs, the Making of the Modern Marine Corps. Aaron, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you, Aaron. It's a pleasure to be here. So one of the things I like on other podcasts, are the podcasts where hosts ask their guests to tell us a little bit of their own story before we dive into the subject at hand. And I started doing that on School of War and then dropped the practice because so many of my guests, brilliant guests who have brilliant things to say about their subjects, I would ask them this question and they would basically give me some version of, well, you know, I got a PhD.

And then I've been writing about this subject for the last 40 years. And that was their life. This is not your life, though. So tell us a bit about yourself and where you grew up and how you became a Marine and then how you became a scholar. Right. Yes, I think it's fair to say I've had an unconventional academic career. I grew up in New York City and in Connecticut and went to college to a small liberal arts college, Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut, and studied American studies, the study of American culture. I decided the right way to put that into practice was to join the Marines. So I did immediately upon graduating and did five years on active duty as a combat engineer. This was in the mid-1990s. There wasn't a lot of combat, but it was a a growth, a growing experience for me, and it really shaped me, shaped my life in many, many ways, so much so that even though I'd only planned to stay for three years, I stayed five on active duty and then stayed in the reserves for another 22. So I left the Marine Corps as a colonel. And as you noted, I served in Afghanistan. And halfway through, I got a PhD and that really changed the jobs I was offered in the military. I got channeled towards strategist positions. So I worked in SIGs and Cags, commanders' initiatives groups and commanders'

actions groups. These are all small groups of usually five to 10 people, typically with PhDs, that advise four-star generals in the day-to-day business of their affairs and write for them and do directed analysis. So I did that for General Petraeus in Afghanistan. I did it for General Dempsey when he was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And then I did it for Harry Harris as the paycom commander and Admiral Phil Davidson as the Indo-Paycom commander. So most of my military time has been doing something similar to my academic work, writing strategic analyses for general officers, often trying to put into practice the very things I wrote and taught about at Annapolis and now at Texas. I'm sort of formulating this question as I go, so help me out here. But you know, you've been

an advisor on policy and strategy at all these different sort of very important modules of American power. The NSC, obviously sort of atop them all, but for the, as you just said, for the chairman, for Indo-Pacom, for the Marine Corps. Today we're going to be talking about these sort of founding geopolitical thinkers, folks like Mahan and McKinder and so forth. How much is what you study and what you research as a serious thinker about strategy in American military history, sort of the business of the day-to-day in those different kinds of places?

And how much do those places resemble one another? Like, what's the work like when you're there? Yeah. So this kind of 30,000-foot theorizing is not the day-to-day work of the the principal of the four star himself, who rarely gets more than an hour to focus on a specific issue. But it is the day-to-day work of the Sigs or Cags. They're all led by a director who's with the principal almost all day long, but then that director brings back specific taskings. And they're usually things like, how important will the littorals be in the next 30 years,

give me three pages. Syria is an enormous problem. Can we achieve our goals in Syria through a means not related to Syria. So in other words, yes, large big picture theoretical questions where the writings of Mahan, McKinder, and Spickman are central to understanding what the range of options are for the commander or for the principal and with what justification he can make arguments about. Got it. Well, why don't we dive into it? Because we have kind of an ambitious agenda today. We want to talk about the three thinkers you just named, Mahan, McKinder, and Spickman, three central figures in the history of Anglo-American strategic thinking and geopolitical thinking. To read them is to be reminded of the fact that something could be 100-plus years old and very

relevant today. And so we're going to talk about them. We're going to talk a little bit about their lives and what they thought. And then we are going to talk about their relevance today specifically or especially, perhaps, insofar as China and U.S.-China competition is concerned. But let's just kick off with Mahan, who I'm embarrassed to admit, you know, we're pushing up towards 100 episodes here in School of War, and we've yet to have a dedicated Mahan episode.

So tell us a bit about Mahan, who he was and what he wrote about. Sure, sure. Alfred Thayer Mahan. It's important to note for your listeners, we're moving in in chronological order. And actually all three of these thinkers, the latter ones are revising the former ones. So this entire podcast will end up being a panel obsessed of Mahan

because it's Mahan, revised by McKinder, revised by Smithman, right? So Mahan is born in 1840. He's the son of Dennis Hart-Mahan, himself, an important military strategist. He's born at West Point, where Mahan, his father is an instructor. He serves against his father's wishes, he joins the Navy. He serves in the Civil War, not auspiciously at all. He had quite a few collisions, and then in the kind of writing that will doom any fitness report, collisions with, quote, both moving and stationary objects is not what any captain of

a ship wants. So he's not much. He avoided sea duty. He didn't like the sea. he wanted to write. And after the Civil War, he is brought to the newly created Naval War College by its founder, Stephen B. Luce. And in 1885, he's charged with developing a maritime science for naval combat. He is told there are marvelous strategies and there is military sciences and principles that apply on land. There's Klaus Fitts, there's Jomene, there's all of these, do that for the

sea. And he does. He eventually will become the president of the Naval War College. And he's most famous for a series of writings called the influence of C-Power series. The most important is the influence of C-Power upon history. That's published in 1890. There's later one on Napoleon in the French Revolution and a study of Nelson. But the key work, the influence of C-power upon history, is a remarkable piece of writing that's done what very few pieces of writing can ever brag to do. He's writing about the age of sale exclusively. The time period is 1660 to 1783. he's trying to figure out how does Britain get command of the seas? How does it become dominant on the ocean? His theorizing from that historical record leads to principles of naval combat that

persist all the way to World War II. There is no question but that they change naval tactics all over the world and naval strategy all over the world. So he's really one of the first geopolitical thinkers who is looking at the world as a system. And he comes up with some critical principles that I'd like to walk you through. The first is in looking at all these wars between England and France and Habsburg, Spain in the 17th and 18th century, he concludes without any question that they were all won by decisive naval engagements. Some big naval battle, one side won, and thereafter, the balance of neighbor power was in one way and the minority power or the failing power could not keep up. So point one for Mahan is single decisive naval

engagements are how wars are won, so you should never divide your fleet. Your fleet must always be ready to fight another entire rival fleet because if you divide the fleet, it can be picked off, and once that engagement happens, you'll never recover. So that's point one, single decisive naval engagement. That will shape tactics all over the world all the way from Pearl Harbor to the Battle of Midway to the Battle of Jutland and World War I, to Latee Gulf at the end of World War II. Second, he noticed that in these rivalries between England, Spain, and France, that successful blockades were enormously determinative, but here too there was a problem. In the age of sail, blockades were conducted by sailing ships where everybody's using the same wind, and you could wait offshore while

you blocked in your enemy's commerce. You could prevent commerce for going to port. Well, once we get steamships, now ships can't wait offshore forever. They're not dependent on winds. They're not dependent on specific currents in the same ways, and they need many more facilities and infrastructure to conduct a blockade. They not just need coal, but coaling stations. They don't just need parts. They need machined parts.

So all of this convinces Mahan that there needs to be a change in how you control an enemy's commerce. So I'll give you a quote from Mahon, and then we'll explain it. This is his major point. It is not the taking of individual ships of convoys, be they fewer many,

that strikes down the money power of a nation. It is the possession of that overbearing power on the sea, which drives the enemy's flag from it. By controlling the Great Common, that was Mahan's word for ocean, one closes the highways by which commerce moves to and from the enemy's shores. So, Mahon realizes blockading,

or at least stopping commerce, is essential, but that it can't be done the same way anymore. And from that reality comes Mahon's, theory of interior lines on the ocean and sea lanes of communication. This is the major insight. It follows something of a formula. It's quite simply that in the modern world, great powers need strong economies. Those strong economies are based on trade. That trade is overwhelmingly and increasingly maritime. So once you need trade moving across oceans, then there has to be a way to control that trade. And Mahan takes note of just basic geography and then spells out.

its naval consequences. Quite simply, there are choke points all over the world. There are straits like Malacca, Gibraltar, the English Channel, the Persian Gulf. These are all areas through which a lot of trade has to move and which is so narrow that a rival navy could close it down. He then proceeds to reason, if you can close down the choke points, you can control the trade all over the world. So you don't need to blockade a nation at its shores.

you can have a pointillist approach to blockade by shutting down the choke points. If you do that, you control the sea lanes of communication. That gives you interior lines around the world, the ability to move your fleet quickly around the world to challenge any rival fleet and defeat it in that decisive engagement. So that's the big picture of idea. We can move as you like to its ramifications. Well, let me ask a question about the very first element that you identified, which is this quest for a decision at sea and the sort of requirements that come from that to not divide your forces and so on.

Was he right? Was Mahan right about that? I mean, this is a source of some dispute later with folks like Corbett. I guess so much of what you outlined seems in a way so reasonable. I mean, how could you argue against it? But I do wonder about that one. He was certainly right on the importance of Joe points to maritime trade. In fact, with all three of these thinkers, the geography is right.

the ramifications or the prescription one takes from that geography is where all three of them find themselves having to do some explaining. Yeah. No, I mean, on decisive engagements, though. Is it true that wars at sea will be resolved, should be resolved, and you should essentially focus your planning and energy on resolving wars through decisive engagements at sea? Yes and no. So, again, it's a historical approach.

So it was true about Britain in France in the 17th and 18th century. That's fair. Got it. Okay. And then, sure, there's always moments like the end of World War II, the Battle of Lately Gulf, a massive engagement where by the end of it, the Japanese have no Navy, more or less. So I guess you could say that was a decisive naval engagement, but any engagement by the end will be decisive when one side wins. So it isn't so much the idea that seek the giant battle at sea, whether that was right or wrong. It certainly proved false in World War I. The Battle of Jutland

is that effort and it doesn't do what it should. But more important than the pursuit of the single engagement is that what Mahan's proposing isn't possible for anyone but written. How do you never divide the fleet when you have a continental power like the United States where you need to defend three different coasts? Impossible, right? So there are a number of problems with Mahan and they mostly come in his technological solution for the problem he's explaining. So he says, hey, you've got these choke points. You've got to be able to seize those choke points. His solution for that ends up being dead wrong. His solution is battleships, quite explicitly battleships, only large capital ships with great throw weight that can shoot farther and larger shells

than the enemy will be able to seize these stationary points that navies want to hold, like say, Gibraltar. What flows from his prescription that you need these battleships to control the choke points is also Mahan pitches a full naval infrastructure. You need coaling stations. You need colonies. You need bases. You need stepping stones to move your Navy around the world because in the 1890s, for every thousand miles that a fleet traveled, it would lose about 10% of its ships through repair problems and just breakdowns. So Mahan got some things right and he got some things wrong. He definitely got right that maritime trade is the lifeblood of a nation in most cases and that choking off that trade proves advantageous to an enemy in war without a doubt. And that you don't

need to do it by blockading a shore, which is much harder to do. Got it. And so just to draw out, I think, an important implication of what you, what you've just said, if national power is going to be secured through this kind of, this navalist approach, and you're going to need the Navy, you're going to need the bases, et cetera, et cetera, it's, you are, you are sort of adopting a kind of imperialist approach, certainly an approach where you are heavily engaged, ashore abroad, in order to secure. in order to secure yourself. Those two things are going to have to go together if everything that you just outlined is correct. Is that right? That is absolutely right. Mahan is not an

ardent imperialist. He is slightly conflicted, but not much. And the thinkers that follow him will see more contradictions with what he's very comfortable with is, hey, to secure and produce national greatness, we need to control some things that may include controlling what he thought of as lesser civilized peoples. But most importantly, we need stepping stones through the Pacific. We need a way to move our fleet and a way to seize these joke points. And he is, importantly, great friends with Teddy Roosevelt. So Mahan is writing in 1890. We've already started our building program by then, but the decisions to take Guam, Saipan, and the Philippines and the Spanish-American War are at least influenced by Mahan's ideas. The decision to build the great white fleet and unbalanced

heavy cruiser battleship heavy fleet that Teddy Roosevelt creates and sails around the world, that's from Mahon. The many. naval occupations we both know about from Marine Corps history in the Caribbean. That's all TR's effort to create an American lake in the Caribbean where he has Mahan's interior lines, the ability to move throughout that water as if it were his own, create a Panama Canal, and therefore be able to ward off any rival navies before they even make it to the Caribbean. All of that is Mahan's influence on American foreign policy. Slightly conflicted about imperialism, but not much.

sounds like a pretty reasonable description of my own view of things for the record. Many things you and I disagree on my friend. So your mention of the Marine Corps is a good way to pivot, I think, to the present day. So I was struck some years ago and I wrote something short about the growth of the Chinese Marine Corps or Chinese Marines. I'm not sure the word Corps is in there. Because as you just, I think, very ably point out, you know, you don't need a Marine Corps unless you are engaged in these particular kinds of missions abroad. You know, you need a Marine Corps to do these things like seize or hold, rather, bases.

You know, you don't need Marine Corps for a more inward-looking, you know, more continental security approach. So I think it's a Kaplan who said that the Chinese are all Mahanians now. What about what the Chinese are up to seems reminiscent of Mahan to you? Oh, quite a lot. I think you will find, I think the big takeaway from this entire episode, the Chinese are not following any one of these three. They're following all three of them in different ways. And they certainly have read their Mahan. and it's clear in their naval building in the Spratleys,

that is all an explicit plan to do what TR did in the Caribbean, to turn the South China Sea into a Chinese lake where they have control over it, can actually make it through the choke points, the San Bernardito Strait, the Philippines, for example, and be able to break out of the containment mechanism that we have put on them since the end of World War II. So the 9-dash line is Mahanian, without a doubt,

not just the naval building, but indeed the fact that, all of China's vulnerabilities in maritime trade are in three major ports, right? Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, and then Singapore, which isn't theirs, but close by. This is where massive amounts of trade moved, and they understand quite well that the United States has effectively, has the military power to hold them in those interior lines and not let them break out of them. So any attempt to control maritime geography so that you can move in it better, you can move military or trade forces or prevent others from doing so,

that's Mahan effectively. And the Chinese certainly are doing that, albeit in a, in a, I think, a more limited way than the United States did in a previous generation. Well, so I'm curious about this comparison, because we are not the first, of course, to draw the comparison between the growth of American naval power and, you know, America's securing of the Caribbean and so forth and compare that to China's behavior in the east and south China seas. But it's always struck me that there is a very important difference between the two exercises, which if I were a Chinese strategist, I would be very concerned by the difference, which is that the United States enjoyed to a substantial degree, not a total degree. Obviously,

you have the Spanish-American War, you have Cuba, but a substantial degree of distance and sort of non-interference from European powers throughout the 19th century. I mean, it's the Monroe Doctrine's success to a point, but it's also because Europe is, is, you know, is too busy fighting itself, right, and chasing its own tail. And it does not seem to me, and I want to get your reaction to this, the Chinese are currently enjoying the same kind of lack of attention. And so I don't know if I'm a Chinese strategy, just how that affects my thinking.

To me, it seems like it would pose a big problem. Yes, they have a much more crowded neighborhood. I mean, the places where they are build, the areas they are seeking to obtain either informal or formal sovereignty over, it's contested by Vietnam, Philippines, some cases, Indonesia, It is a crowded neighborhood. And as we both know, there are quite a few treaty allies in the neighborhood as well. So it's not comparable.

The Chinese have a much more difficult strategic problem to solve there that we did not have with, say, the Dominican, Haitian and Nicaraguan intervention, not even remotely similar. Well, why don't we, let's move on. And as you pointed out, we're not really moving on because each thinker is revising and building on the last. So let's move on to Halford McKinder, who I've always, always, I released love since I first encountered him. He's an amazing writer. Of the three men we're talking about, I would make the assertion. I don't know if you would agree that he's the best prose stylist of the three.

I'll leave off with that he's the most interesting person by far. I mean, okay. Well, go ahead. Mahon didn't like to be at sea and wanted to sit and write. Spikeman not much different. Oh my gosh. McKinder is a scholar, a politician, an explorer. He found Salonid School of Economics.

He's the first director of the Oxford School of Geography. He's a founder of the field of geopolitics, though he hated the word and for good reason. He got in a bunch of trouble on an exploration to Mount Kenya where he either ordered or acquiesced to the summary execution of a bunch of porters. He, too, is a fairly ordant imperialist. He's a Brit, and he believes greatly in naval power. But he is seeking to update Mahan because his principal starting point

is that he feels what Mahan was explaining doesn't really hold true as much at the start of the 20th century, just 15 years after the publication of Mahan's most significant work. The first thing he notices is he has three major works. The one everyone likes to quote is the 1904 essay, the geographical pivot of history, which is a lecture to the Royal Geographic Society. But then he updates in that, he explains the idea of the world island, the heartland and the pivot state, which I'll get to in a minute. He then updates that idea right after World War I in 1919 and a book called Democratic Ideals and Reality, and then in the middle of World War II with a book, an essay called The Round World,

and the winning of the peace. His key point here is revolutions and land transportation make Mahan less relevant. He is writing at a moment where southern Siberia is beginning to be industrialized, and he sees the geographic features of the Eurasian continent and sees great, great danger from Russia. He's one of the few people. He was so suspicious of Russia that probably the only person you could compare him to as equally suspicious as Winston Churchill. And that's saying a lot. So in writing in this first essay in 1904, he looks around the world.

He says there are five world centers, England, France, Germany, Russia, U.S. Those are the only with the geographic and productive capacity to actually be a world power. And he is concerned that railroads are now making Mahan's sea land. of communication less relevant. He notes that for all of these great developments, there are these great ideas about how battleships can seize choke points. There are these new things called submarines. And submarines can do a pretty good job of taking out battleships.

He also notes that as soon as railroads make their way across the Eurasian step, you will have a very quick way to concentrate force almost anywhere in the heartland, basically the boundaries of the USSR, which does not exist yet, but he's writing about the geography. And he says, that poses a real problem because the heartland, this 8 million square mile land mass has not only more resources than anyone else in the world, but if connected by railroads, it's incredibly hard to invade into it, but it is easy to invade out of it. So he notes that it's the greatest natural fortress in the world, this thing called the heartland. It's bounded in by the Gobi deserts in the east, the Arctic Gitegid ice in the north,

the Zagros Mountains, the Himalayan Mountains in the south, and the Carpathian Mountains in the southwest. So it's hard to get in. But with all the iron and the bauxite and the aluminum, copper, cobalt, nickel, oil, gas, all the resources that the USSR will possess, he notes that they could move to any littoral, build a navy when they want, and become a naval or continental power. So that's the challenge as he sees it. Hey, it's not controlling the slocks, the sea lanes of communication.

It's making sure the heartland power, Russia, doesn't pivot. And by being that geographical pivot, it could break out and take over most of Eurasia. And if you do that, you can take over the world. Everybody likes to quote him very simply, that if you control Eastern Europe, then you control the heartland. If you control the heartland, then you control the world island. You control the world island. You control everything.

That's too simple. What he's simply saying is that there are enough technological developments that show that a land power will be able to challenge maritime powers and can do so in a way that if they control this world island, no one will be able to rival them. And of course, his focus on Russia and the Russian Empire, you know, it's reasonable just from the perspective of looking at a map, as you just pointed out. I mean, Russia is or is proximate to this heartland area that he's talking about. But of course, there's also, you know, we're towards the end of a century here of extensive, you know, British, Russian strategic competition across your Asia. So it makes perfect sense that McKinder would be thinking about them. But of course, you know, it's really the Germans who he sort of ought to be thinking about and start thinking about him, right? And this is true, both him and Mahan, is that they are both read in Germany, right?

Well, this one, yeah, so the reason that McKinder hated the term geopolitics is because it gets appropriated by perhaps the, you know, the guy you at least want it to be appropriated by. And that's, that's a man named Carl Haushofer, who was quite literally Hitler's tutor. So Househofer, a geographer, a general, and a man of some intellect visits Hitler and Russ and Hess in prison after the Munich Beer Hall push and schools them explicitly on the heartland. And it is he that gives Hitler the term Labens realm. And it is that law. that Hitler contorts to say that this is actually just the science of statecraft by which we have to seize the heartland before it seizes us. So that's not McKinder's fault, obviously, that this idea gets contorted. But in his later revisions, he will note exactly what you're saying when you said he should be worrying about Germany. One of the main revisions of McKinder that Spickman will hit upon is, hey, it's not really heartland power pushing out that explains most of the 20th century. It's Rimland or what what McKinder called intercrescent powers like Germany pushing into the heartland. So this idea is really a statement about the geographic potential

of Russia slash the Soviet Union. The predictions McKinder made were mostly quite wrong. But the principle one is he really had banked on railroads. He thought that his pivot, the area that he thinks is the center of the Eurasia is Siberia. It's north-central Eurasia. And he thought the step from Mongolia all the way to the fall to gap would eventually be criss-crossed by industrialized railroads. And that did not happen. Yeah.

So that part, he missed. Well, we'll talk about Spickman and Spickman's revisions here in a second, but to just kind of skip over Spickman for a second and come up to the present day. Is there a way in which McKinder was wrong for a long time, but actually here in 2023, parts of it are seeming that the heartland, the centrality of the heartland specifically is seeming more and more plausible for any number of reasons. I mean, that's an impoverished and not particularly well-developed part of the world for most of the 20th century.

But today you actually do have, in part because a lot of Chinese investment improved transportation infrastructure, you have apparently the warming of the climate is creating more opportunity for land use in Siberia than ever there has been before, which will come. with all sorts of problems as well, apparently, but also obvious upsides. You've got the Arctic less frozen in than it used to be, which I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing for McKinder's theory. I'd have to think about that for a second. But is there a way in which actually 100 years later, he turns out to be more right, perhaps than he was at the time? Yes, I think that's fair. I mean, if you, again,

if you restrict the main point to look at the resources and the defenses of the geographic territory of Russia and then expanded to the Soviet Union, That is a very serious problem. So China's pursuit of those resources is practical, reasonable, makes excellent sense. And McKinder would say, I told you so. Why wouldn't they be going for those resources? That's where they all are. But the idea there was this notion in McKinder, even after he revised it to account for Germany being the threat, he writes the last revision in 43 and he's no longer claiming that it's Russia. He's now saying it's Germany. But even as he makes those revisions, He is clear that the ability of that heartland power to control Eurasia is the central threat.

I guess we could talk about that ideologically. The Cold War recycles or works within that paradigm to a degree. But doesn't the Russia-Ukraine war at least give some indication that the ability of the heartland to push out is deeply constrained? And that I think has to do. One of the themes you'll hear throughout is that all three of these guys got the geography right. But they all said, oh, sure, sure, national politics matters too or culture matters to or the leaders matter to. But that's it. They only gave them as caveats in most cases. And anybody watching Russia and Ukraine would be quite foolish to say, well, the character of the Russian regime isn't affecting how its military it's fighting or the nature of Putin isn't affecting how the military.

Of course it is. So I think that he is right of that enormous potential. I still don't see the geographical pivot as a likely prediction of military actions. anywhere on the Eurasian continent for the next 50 to 100 years. That doesn't make sense. Right. Well, and the book of McInders that I think is the sort of summation of a lot of what we're

discussing is actually called, Democratic ideals and reality. The underlying reality. Exactly. The upshot of which is like focused more on the reality and less on the ideals. He's quite crazy writing this after the war, right, after the first war. During the Paris peace. Right.

And he's very critical of the League of Nations. And yeah, yeah. Strategy is what matters, not all this nonsense. I mean, you didn't say nonsense. but not all of this idealistic stuff, I guess he would say, that's happening. Yeah. Okay. So we have with China today, I guess you could make a kind of flip an observation and say something

like if Mahan is the belt, then McKinder's approach is sort of the road. That is to say the Belt and Road initiative sort of nicely takes the work of both Mahan and McKinder and applies it. Is that fair? Yes, that's fair. And let me add one other of McKinders' terms because it will help elucidate this point. outside the heartland, he identified an inner crescent and an outer crescent. The outer crescent is the U.S., Australia, South Africa, literally the farthest away that could

muster productive power to have a Navy and move in. But the inner crescent is everything under the heartland, which looks exactly like the road of the Belt and Road. I mean, it actually extends all the way to Spain, but the, but McKinders inner crescent was Western Europe all the way through the Middle East, all the way up to Crimea, then India, then China. And the idea was, these are the states that can hold the heartland in, if properly supported by the outer crescent, the United States. And McKinder correctly predicted that it would be in this inner crescent where most of the conflict would be. He thought it would

be the heartland pushing out, but he is right that where, where the war has been fought since the writings of Sir Halford, McKinder? They have been in his inner crescent, which specifically. will later call the Rimlands. Well, let's, why don't we, why don't we bring Spickman into it then? So we are coming up to someone writing around the time of the Second World War. A Yale man, you, you, of course, spent time at Yale getting your PhD when, and he was essentially the founder of security studies as we know it today. Is that, is that fair?

That is somewhat fair. He founds an institute called Institute of International Studies at Yale. The Grand Strategy Program and Yale's International Security Studies is an outgrowth. sort of. It's a cousin of that program. But yes, he is one of the first international relations scholars. He is a founder of the field of international relations. He's a political scientist by training born in Amsterdam. So it's important to mention the scholarly fields here. McKinder is a geographer who talks about the political effects of geography. Mahan is a historian who derives lessons from that history to explain geography. Spightman is a political scientist and he's

trained in the United States and comes to Yale, where he, you know, stays until his death at a young age, sadly, from cancer. And he's thought of to a degree as one of the godfathers of containment. Containment, the Cold War strategy devised by George Kennan owes a lot to Spickman, but also to McKinder. And Spickman's major contributions came in two books, one called American Strategy and world politics published during World War II in 1942, and the latter published posthumously. After he died of cancer, in 44, his second book, The Geography of Peace comes out. So what he, too, as McKinder wanted to improve Mahan Spickman wants to improve McKinder, he notes all the things that McKinder said.

He endorses the notions of the five centers of world power, but notes that that McKinder got it somewhat wrong, that the railroads didn't develop, the central step didn't develop as he said it would. And as a, as somebody who's published a book, I've got to say, I've been very impressed with this fact. In 1942, Speckman publishes American world politics where he predicts, not just that the U.S. will win, but that Japan and Germany are not the real threats. It's China and Russia. And after the war, we will side with Germany or should side with Germany and Japan in order to contain that threat. And today we say, of course, that's containment, right? But there's a wonderful book review from 1942 of a scholar saying,

who were these eminent scholars at Yale? And what were they thinking about when they let such an idea loose that the U.S. might be German and Japanese power after the war? So it was bold. It was brave and bold in 42 to say, never mind Germany and Japan. It's really, it's Russia and China. And it's sort of ruthless just to the point of the common sort of smaller realism of all three men. A kind of a very ruthless thing to say in 19.

And he, and I think probably that Spickman is one of the, you know, Dutch-born, so very direct, right? This guy is a realist. I'd probably say he's more of a classical realist than a structural realist, but because there's so much geography, he often gets lumped in with the structural realists of just saying, oh, it's all about how many divisions, how much oil, how much coal, nothing else, right? But he definitely believed that everything moved around the imperatives of force. Even in his more optimistic book, the Geographic piece, he writes, and this is a quote,

that force is manifestly and indispensable instruments, both for national survival and for the creation of a better world. So he has no qualms with using force to police or make the world better. He just wants to do it prudently, and he feels, as I still do today, that most of his students are geographically illiterate and illiterate to the awareness of how sheer and raw numbers of power shape decision-making.

So he's trying to update McKinder and Mahon in so doing, And he does so with a simple and sort of logical proposition. The littorals are where it's at. Let's look at where the population growth has occurs. Let's look at what air power has done to geography. Let's look at how modern economies are dependent on petrochemicals. These are all things in 42 that are apparent that weren't, say, apparent to Mahan or to McKinder. And so he says nonsense with this heartland pushing out business.

The key is the rimlands, the latourals, that same inner crescent that McKinder wrote about. And the key will be to form workable, pragmatic relations with those states in order to hold back the productive potential and potential aggression of China or Russia. Just quickly on this question of regime type and realism and how these men thought, this is more an observation on McKinder than on Spickman, and we can skip around here a little bit. But just as we're talking, it comes to mind that McKinder does have a fair amount to say about leadership and regime types and what he's, what he, what he, the point he's making, repeatedly in democratic ideals and reality is that actually democracy is a problematic regime type

for for exercising power in the world because it fails to appreciate the nature of power. And meanwhile, you have men like the Kaiser who because of their regime type have a more intimate familiarity with power from an earlier age and sort of shaped and formed in ways that make them more dangerous and make democracies vulnerable. I don't know where Spickman comes into the argument. Yeah. Halper definitely believe that. I find it shocking, shocking, I say, that a British monarchist would be extolling the benefits of

centralized control. You're right. And even Mahan, Mahan offers six characteristics that shape national power. And the characteristic of the regime is one of those. None of these men are saying those things don't matter. But what happens is, I effectively think that there's a warning here, that people get fascinated with theory, and particularly if that theory has a map, and particularly there's arrows on the map, or a concept of the thesis. two parties joined together, they'll be unstoppable. People love that. Because they love it, they become overly deterministic about geography and war fighting specifically, where emotion, passion, and non-quantifiable matter so much. Yeah. And among the things that tie these three men

together is that all three of them produced books with great matters. If you're, if you're a, kind of person who I certainly am, certainly was as a young person, you're into that. These, these authors are for you. Okay. So the littorals, the Rimland. How does this idea affect American policy? Dramatically. It is, let us walk through what containment is after the winning of the Second World War. And you will see, you'll see these thinkers all over it, but you'll see Spickman's focus on the littoral's explicitly.

We decide under the, under the, the council of and the writing and thinking of George Cannon, to not attempt to move into the heartland to remove this aggressive power, but to hold it in place so that its own internal contradictions will cause. to collapse. That is done economically, diplomatically, and militarily. There is attempts for a ring of treaty nations, Cento and Cito, that go exactly along the littoral that Spickman told us to focus on. We obviously have succeeded in East Asia and doing that with treaty powers with South Korea, treaty alliances with South Korea and Japan and the Philippines. So all of these are efforts to create that littoral pact or partnership that will originally hold in the

Soviet Union and now is proving quite smart and helpful in some cases in holding in or at least presenting challenges and alternatives to China. So it certainly affected how the United States pursued foreign policy. It also, I think, has the Chinese have clearly paid attention to the littoral's too, right? There's no shortage of ways in which China is seeking to increase its leverage in the littorals. They have one base outside of China. It's in Djibouti. They have a security pact in the Solomon Islands, Guadalcanal. Now, you and I, I think, both remember quite well from time in the Marine Corps that Guadalcanal is the first ground operation in World War II in the Pacific. Why? Why is it the first ground operation? Because as soon as once the Japanese can put an

irstrip on there, they can threaten our line of communications to Australia. They can attack the line of communications between the United States and Australia. So it's not surprised. that China now has an economic partnership and cooperation agreement with a tiny, tiny island in the southwestern Pacific that allows them to cut the lines of communication in an event of war. The debt trap with Sri Lanka and the Hambanto de Port. That is also an attempt to a secure access to the littorals, the negotiations of a Guadatat port in Pakistan. These are all attempts by China to make sure they have access to littorals. And that's, that's, that's, that's, that's Spickman par excellence.

So let's talk about the legacy of these thinkers in a slightly different way. So it kind of comes into focus a little bit with McKinder, then especially with Spickman, that there is a way in which the relationship of the British Isles to the continent of Europe and everything that flowed from that in terms of the British history and the history of British strategy, if you then zoom out and look at the world map, there is something about America and North America in particular. relation to Eurasia that seems strikingly similar, and that is the scale of things increases, the speed of travel and communication and so forth, the kind of incidents or episodes that could play

out on the European scale in past centuries could play out at a global scale and maybe some of the same principles would apply. So I guess to put all this in the form of a question, what specifically is the American role and how does it develop for kinder to Spickman. And where do the Brits fit into all of this? Do they just sort of fade from the scene? What happens to these littoral nations that are going to need to be organized by America? Right, right. I like the way you frame that. And I think you're right that the benefits, the advantages and strategies of a small offshore island of Great Britain are the same advantages and strategic problems that the United States has a continental island has when facing these

rival powers on a global stage. All, you'll answer your question. now, how does the role of the United States change between these three thinkers? Mahan is the only, well, Mahan's not the only American. It's American, too, as naturalized. But Mahon is writing specifically for the U.S. Navy. He's trying to craft an approach for the U.S. Navy. So it's, even though his historical writings are focused on England and France, he is mindful of this is a prescription for how the U.S. can achieve national greatness. So he is, he is quite optimistic and bullish that America can join the great powers and have all the naval strength to overtake them eventually. McKinder is, you know, is reacting to the loss of British sea power. It is 1904 when he is writing

his first one. And so it's already quite evident that there are serious challenges with Russia in the great game. And in fact, that there are changes in technology that are making the ships not the only dominant weapon of war that Britain should entertain. So he, He regards the United States as having enormous productive potential. First and foremost, just the resources and its geography mean it's safe and powerful. And then he regards it as the crucial offshore balancer. Both Specman and McKinder want the United States to partner with and cooperate with the friendly Rimland or Intercrestant powers in order to hold in the dangers from the heartland. Again, it starts with just Russia, but later it's Russia and China.

under Spickman. So all three of them recognize that the United States will do this through partnerships. And even though they're all realists, they are not stupid about that. They are not isolationists. Spickman is writing explicitly to kill isolationism. He thinks the notion of hemispheric defense is nonsense. And so all three really do want an engaged United States, one that recognizes that partnerships are beneficial and frankly the best way to win a war. or survivor contest is to get your friends to do it for you. So I think that that notion of partnerships and of engagement in Eurasia as opposed to isolationism, all three of them share that notion. And I think I think all three would shake their heads sadly at the state of this debate

in the United States today, where there's still quite a lot of disagreement over whether the United States should be engaged in world affairs. Yeah. And the way in which we touched on this, but just to draw it out a bit, the way in which partnerships or alliances or however you want to rank them or phrase them, the role in which those play out, that issue plays out in these three authors is also, I think it's obviously both relevant today, but also back to our comparison of the British relationship with the European continent, you know, British will be a naval power. They can find, you know, a sort of natural British strategy, if you like, is finding continental partners to wage war on the continent.

And this goes, of course, very wrong in World War I with this very negative effects, I think, for the British Empire, that that in a way plays out today as well, that the United States has a kind of natural strategic role performing certain kinds of strategic functions. And then it should have, per Spickman's thinking and the thinking in a way of all three men, partners in the littorals who have their own roles to play. And indeed, you know, as you pointed out, this is what you see in the Cold War and in containment. and you see competitions over control in these rimlands and the use of partner forces. And to this day, the same thing is happening. Is that fair? It is fair. I think a good way to sort of do a thought experiment on it is even though Mahan's writing in 1890

in Spickman, 1942 and 44, if we could bring them all here now and ask them, hey, there was this idea of the Trans-Pacific Partnership whereby we'd have a set of trade relationships with like-minded nations all around these littoral's. It's not a good idea or a bad idea? even someone as realist as Spickman and his skepticism of alliances to overcome great power factors, I think they all three would have said yes without a doubt. That's an excellent idea. So they all had Catholic understandings of power. It isn't just geographic determinism. And maybe the greatest lesson for any of your listeners that want to go read Spickman and Mahan

Mahan and McKinder, please go do. Don't walk away with a one-stop shop geographical explanation. for why things happen. Because if you do, if you do sort of think in this kind of calculus method of this much power over here and this much capacity and this possibility, then you end up thinking that, you know, fighting a 10-year war in Vietnam is absolutely necessary for American national security because a choke point or because the spread of a rimland and the heartland pushing out. So these are all useful theories, but they must not be taken as gospel. And really, they shouldn't be taken too rigidly. You've got to be flexible as you think about it. Aaron O'Connell, author of Underdogs, professor at the University of Texas, brilliant guy, my old friend. Thank you so much for doing this.

This is a great conversation. Thanks, Aaron. It's always great to talk to you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.