Kissinger, Brzezinski and the Grand Chessboard He thought the Anglo-Saxons faced certain disaster from their militant opponents. Lea believed that while Japan moved against Far East and Russia against India, the Germans would strike at England, the center of the British Empire. Homer Lea, in The Day of the Saxon (1912), asserted that the entire Anglo-Saxon race faced a threat from German (Teuton), Russian (Slav), and Japanese expansionism: The "fatal" relationship of Russia, Japan, and Germany "has now assumed through the urgency of natural forces a coalition directed against the survival of Saxon supremacy." It is "a dreadful Dreibund". Therefore, he found it necessary for the Anglo-Saxon "sea power" to resist Russia. Mahan was impressed by Russia's transcontinental size and strategically favorable position for southward expansion. Of the two monsters – Britain and Russia – it was the latter that Mahan considered more threatening to the fate of Central Asia. Mahan regarded those countries, located between Britain and Russia, as if between "Scylla and Charybdis". In this zone independent countries still survived – Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, China, and Japan. Mahan distinguished a key region of the world in the Eurasian context, namely, the Central Zone of Asia lying between 30° and 40° north and stretching from Asia Minor to Japan.
United States Alfred Thayer Mahan and sea power Īlfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914) was a frequent commentator on world naval strategic and diplomatic affairs. 3.3 Disciplinary differences in perspectives.3.2 The association of German Geopolitik with Nazism.1.3 Kissinger, Brzezinski and the Grand Chessboard.Īccording to Christopher Gogwilt and other researchers, the term is currently being used to describe a broad spectrum of concepts, in a general sense used as "a synonym for international political relations", but more specifically "to imply the global structure of such relations" this usage builds on an "early-twentieth-century term for a pseudoscience of political geography" and other pseudoscientific theories of historical and geographic determinism. There are some works that discuss the geopolitics of renewable energy. Critical geopolitics deconstructs classical geopolitical theories, by showing their political/ideological functions for great powers.
Topics of geopolitics include relations between the interests of international political actors focused within an area, a space, or a geographical element, relations which create a geopolitical system. In particular, territorial waters and land territory in correlation with diplomatic history. Geopolitics focuses on political power linked to geographic space. These include area studies, climate, topography, demography, natural resources, and applied science of the region being evaluated. While geopolitics usually refers to countries and relations between them, it may also focus on two other kinds of states: de facto independent states with limited international recognition and relations between sub-national geopolitical entities, such as the federated states that make up a federation, confederation or a quasi-federal system.Īt the level of international relations, geopolitics is a method of studying foreign policy to understand, explain, and predict international political behavior through geographical variables. Geopolitics (from Greek γῆ gê "earth, land" and πολιτική politikḗ "politics") is the study of the effects of Earth's geography (human and physical) on politics and international relations.