This article is a pre-release from the Winter 2024 print issue of FP. The full issue will be available on Jan. 3, 2024.
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Alexander Dugin is a bit of a madman. The Russian intellectual made headlines in the West in 2022, when his daughter was killed, apparently by Ukrainian operatives, in a Moscow car bombing likely meant for Dugin himself. Dugin would have been targeted because of his unapologetic, yearslong advocacy for a genocidal war of conquest in Ukraine. “Kill! Kill! Kill!” he screeched after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first invasion of that country in 2014, adding: “This is my opinion as a professor.” Even at his daughter’s funeral, Dugin stayed on message. Among her first words as an infant, he claimed, were “our empire.”
Alexander Dugin is a bit of a madman. The Russian intellectual made headlines in the West in 2022, when his daughter was killed, apparently by Ukrainian operatives, in a Moscow car bombing likely meant for Dugin himself. Dugin would have been targeted because of his unapologetic, yearslong advocacy for a genocidal war of conquest in Ukraine. “Kill! Kill! Kill!” he screeched after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first invasion of that country in 2014, adding: “This is my opinion as a professor.” Even at his daughter’s funeral, Dugin stayed on message. Among her first words as an infant, he claimed, were “our empire.”
True or not, the comment was a window into the rabid nationalism that shapes Putin’s foreign policy. It was also a window into a much-misunderstood tradition: geopolitics. Often used simply as a synonym for power politics, geopolitics is in fact a distinctive intellectual approach to international relations that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—and one whose insights and perversions have profoundly shaped the modern age.
Dugin made a name for himself in the 1990s by arguing that a down-and-out Russia could reclaim its greatness by rebuilding a Eurasian empire to compete with the United States. This was a bizarro-world version of the thesis advanced in 1904 by Halford Mackinder, a British geographer who argued that the coming era would be defined by clashes between Eurasian aggressors and offshore balancers. Mackinder’s article helped establish the discipline of geopolitics. As Dugin’s rantings and Putin’s crimes demonstrate, it influences intellectuals and leaders even today.
Geopolitics is the study of how geography interacts with technology and the ceaseless struggle for global power. It came to prominence in an era of titanic clashes to rule the modern world by controlling its central theater, Eurasia. And if geopolitics seemed passé in the post-Cold War era, its relevance is surging now that vicious strategic rivalry has been renewed. Yet understanding the arc of the 20th century and the strategic imperatives of our era requires understanding that there is not one tradition of geopolitics but two.
There is a democratic tradition of geopolitics, represented by Mackinder and his intellectual brethren, that is grim but hardly evil because it aims to understand how liberal societies can thrive in a ferociously anarchic world. And there is the autocratic school of geopolitics, symbolized by Dugin, which is often poison pure and simple. The autocratic school is well represented in the policies of Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Democratic policymakers must rediscover their own tradition of geopolitics if they are to shape the emerging age.
If economics is the dismal science, geopolitics isn’t much cheerier. The field emerged in the 1890s and 1900s—a time when competition between empires was intensifying, revolutions in transportation and communication were making the world a single battlespace, and strategists were trying to divine the imperatives of survival in a dangerous, interconnected world. The study of geopolitics has always placed a special focus on Eurasia, a supercontinent whose fate was becoming central to the fate of freedom around the globe.
As Mackinder explained in his article, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” technology was making Eurasia’s geography a hothouse of conflict. The spread of railways was hastening the movement of armies and previewing an epoch in which ambitious states—particularly fast-modernizing autocracies—could seek hegemony from one edge of that landmass to another. Once those states subjugated a resource-rich supercontinent, they would turn their attention to building navies without peer.
Mackinder’s grim forecast was that continental powers—he worried most about Russia—would try to rule Eurasia en route to ruling the world. So an offshore, liberal superpower—for Mackinder, the United Kingdom—must thwart this global despotism by keeping Eurasia divided: It must hold endangered “bridge heads” around its margins while harassing aspiring hegemons on land and at sea.
The democratic school of geopolitics saw a supercontinent run by illiberal powers as a nightmare to be avoided, whereas the authoritarian school saw it as a dream to be achieved.
Alfred Thayer Mahan was Mackinder’s American alter ego. An evangelist of sea power, he spent his intellectual career encouraging the United States to build a canal across the Central American isthmus, construct armadas of battleships, and amass unassailable maritime strength. But like Mackinder, Mahan eyed the supercontinent nervously: In an age of steam, Eurasian consolidation could threaten countries an ocean away. Perhaps tsarist Russia would bust through the Middle East and South Asia to warmer waters and broader horizons. Or perhaps Japan and Germany, after dominating their home regions, would look farther across the seas.
If Mackinder believed preeminent land power led to preeminent sea power, Mahan believed that controlling dangers within Eurasia required controlling the waters around it. So he set his sights on a maritime alliance between the United States and Britain, in which two ocean-going democracies would police the seas and preserve a global system suitable to their traditions of liberty. In “unity of heart among the English-speaking races,” he wrote in 1897, “lies the best hope of humanity in the doubtful days ahead.”
The third member of the geopolitical pantheon was Nicholas Spykman, a Dutch American strategist who made his mark amid the global chaos of World War II. Spykman modified Mackinder: The sharpest challenges came not from a desolate Russian “heartland” but from dynamic, industrialized “rimland” nations—Germany and Japan—that could cut deep into Eurasia while also striking across its adjoining seas. And if the railroad fascinated Mackinder and the battleship transfixed Mahan, it was the bomber that vexed Spykman. Once totalitarian states seized Europe and Asia, he believed, their long-range airpower would control the New World’s oceanic approaches, while blockades and political warfare weakened the United States for the kill. The country’s strategic frontiers thus lay thousands of miles from its coastlines; only by ruthlessly playing the balance of power within Eurasia would Washington avoid an isolation that might prove fatal.
Today, analyzing these thinkers feels depressing, even retrograde. Mahan proudly called himself an “imperialist”; Mackinder labeled China the “yellow peril.” All accepted the dual determinism on which geopolitics rests: that geography powerfully shapes global interactions and that the world is a harsh, unforgiving place. “[S]tates can survive only by constant devotion to power politics,” Spykman wrote in 1942—an attitude that led some to accuse him of promoting a soulless American militarism.
That was unfair. Mackinder, Mahan, and Spykman were trying to navigate an era of global confrontations made more terrifying by new technologies and the dawn of new, more virulent forms of tyranny. All three men were ultimately concerned with whether democratic societies—those that honored “the freedom and rights of the individual,” as Mahan put it—could survive the challenge from those that practiced “the subordination of the individual to the state.” So all three were trying to determine what strategies—and what “combinations of power,” in Mackinder’s phrasing—could underpin a tolerable global order and prevent Eurasian consolidation from ushering in a new dark age.
This democratic school of geopolitics saw a supercontinent run by illiberal powers as a nightmare to be avoided. The authoritarian school saw it as a dream to be achieved.
Nash Weerasekera illustration for Foreign Policy
If geopolitics leavened by traditions of liberty was an Anglo-American creation, geopolitics with a harsher, autocratic ethos arose in continental Europe. The latter tradition originated with Swedish academic Rudolf Kjellen and German geographer Friedrich Ratzel in the late 19th century. These thinkers were products of Europe’s cramped, cutthroat geography, and they channeled some of the time’s most toxic ideas.
Kjellen and Ratzel were influenced by social Darwinism: They saw nations as living organisms that must expand or die, and they defined nationhood in racial terms. Their school of thought prioritized the quest for Lebensraum, or “living space,” a term Ratzel coined in 1901. Although this tradition sometimes drew inspiration from the success of the United States in conquering and settling a continent, it blossomed most fully in countries, such as imperial Germany, where expansionist visions and illiberal, militaristic values went hand in hand. And as the history of the subsequent decades would demonstrate, geopolitics with this reactionary, zero-sum bent was a blueprint for unprecedented aggression and atrocity.
The epitome of this approach was Karl Haushofer, a World War I-era artillery commander who took up the cause of German resurrection after that country’s defeat in 1918. For Haushofer, geopolitics was synonymous with expansion. Germany had been mutilated by the Allies after World War I; its only response was to explode “out of the narrowness of her present living space into the freedom of the world,” he wrote. Germany must claim a resource-rich, autarkic imperium across Europe and Africa. He believed that other oppressed, have-not countries—namely Japan and the Soviet Union—would do likewise across the remainder of Eurasia and the Pacific.
Only by consolidating what Haushofer called “pan-regions” could the revisionist states outmatch their enemies; only by working together could they prevent those enemies, namely Britain, from playing divide-and-conquer. The goal of this geopolitics was a Eurasia ruled by an autocratic axis. What Mackinder had warned about, Haushofer—who borrowed liberally from his work—was determined to realize.
There was no pretension that this could be accomplished without mayhem and murder. The world, Haushofer wrote, needed “a general political clearing up, a redistribution of power.” Small countries “have no longer a right to exist.” Haushofer would endorse Germany’s murderous acquisition of “living space” in the late 1930s and early 1940s—he even helped inspire this ghastly campaign.
Haushofer had counseled Adolf Hitler while the latter was imprisoned in the 1920s. Central arguments of Hitler’s treatise, Mein Kampf—such as the importance of eliminating European rivals and the need for resources and space in the east—were pure Haushofer, historian Holger Herwig argued. Hitler’s advocacy of a vast Eurasian land empire as the answer to Anglo-American sea power drew, likewise, on Haushofer’s ideas. History’s most brazen land grab owed to Hitler’s megalomania, pathological racism, and epic thirst for power. It was also underpinned by a geopolitics of evil.
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Clashes of countries are clashes of ideas. And one way of interpreting the 20th century is that the democratic school of geopolitics defeated the autocratic one.
In World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, radically revisionist states ran versions of Haushofer’s playbook. Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union seized vast tracts of Eurasia and contested its neighboring oceans. In areas they controlled, they sometimes governed with homicidal brutality. Yet they were ultimately defeated by global coalitions that were helmed by liberal superpowers and guided by the democracies’ best geopolitical insights.
One way of interpreting the 20th century is that the democratic school of geopolitics defeated the autocratic one.
Per Mackinder, these offshore powers cultivated onshore allies to keep Eurasian predators from overrunning the supercontinent and turning their attention fully toward the seas. As Mahan had foreseen, the United States and Britain forged an alliance to control the Atlantic and bring Washington’s overwhelming power to bear. And as Spykman recommended, the United States would eventually commit to keeping Eurasia fragmented by establishing alliances spanning its Atlantic and Pacific rimlands and—in true power political fashion—using reformed enemies, Japan and Germany, to contain an erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union.
Indeed, there were moral compromises aplenty in these struggles. The Western democracies forged devil’s bargains with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in World War II and Chinese leader Mao Zedong in the late Cold War. They used tactics—blockades, firebombing, coups, and covert interventions—that could only be justified by their contribution to some higher good. “All civilized life rests … in the last instance on power,” Spykman wrote. The democracies wielded power ruthlessly enough to prevent the world’s worst aggressors from ruling its most vital regions.
The reward for these victories—which culminated with the strategic defeat and dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991—was a thriving liberal order and a sense that perhaps globalization and democratization had rendered geopolitics passé. Alas, the world has now entered a new era of rivalry, in which autocratic challengers are weaponizing old geopolitical ideas.
Consider Putin’s neoimperial program. Beginning in the 1990s, Dugin gained renown within Russia’s security elite by arguing that the country was existentially threatened by a hegemonic “Atlanticist” coalition. Like Haushofer, he found recourse by inverting Mackinder: Moscow’s best strategy was to make a “great-continental Eurasian future for Russia with our own hands,” Dugin would write in 2012. By reclaiming former Soviet republics and forging ties with other dissatisfied states, Russia could build a bloc of Eurasian revisionists. “The heartland of Russia,” he had written in 1997, was the “staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution.” Although the ties between Putin and Dugin have often been exaggerated in the West, the writings of the latter aren’t a bad guide for what the former has done.
Putin’s Russia has vivisected neighboring countries—Georgia and Ukraine—that sought to escape its grip while using poisoning, strategic corruption, and other tactics to suborn and subordinate other post-Soviet states. It has stoked political instability in the West—another tactic Dugin advocated to break down that community—while trying to build up Eurasian institutions that could serve, in Putin’s words, as “one of the poles of the modern world.” Meanwhile, Putin has forged quasi-alliances with China and Iran in hopes of making Eurasia a redoubt for autocratic, anti-American powers. Putin, again drawing on Dugin, has said Russia must create a “common zone” stretching “from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” The Eurasian supercontinent, he said, is a haven for the “traditional values” Russia defends and a source of “tremendous opportunities” it must exploit.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was meant to accelerate this program by conquering the country that links the spacious Eurasian heartland to the dynamic European rimland. Here, Putin pursued Dugin’s “great-continental Eurasian future” for Russia with the bloody ethos the latter prescribed. Torture, rape, murder, castration, mass abductions, and systematic efforts to erase the Ukrainian national identity mark the return of a geopolitics of Eurasian expansion, inflected with the cruelty of a tyrannical regime.
Chinese statecraft is also following a familiar arc. By undertaking the biggest naval buildup since World War II, Beijing is developing the strength to take Taiwan and control what Spykman called the vital “marginal seas” of the Western Pacific. Achieving that goal would make China supreme within Eurasia’s most vibrant region. It would also help make it, in Xi’s words, a “great maritime power” by freeing it to invest in a blue-water navy with bases around the globe. Mahan, surely, would take note.
A twist on Mackinder informs Chinese strategy, too. Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative, as well as several programs that have succeeded it, are meant to wrap countries from Southeast Asia to Southern Europe and beyond in Chinese influence—economic, technological, diplomatic, and perhaps someday military. If it works, China will have a commanding position vis-à-vis a Europe trying to cling to the periphery of a Sino-centric supercontinent and possibly even relegate the United States to second-tier status in a system managed by Beijing. “Access to Eurasia’s resources, markets, and ports could transform China from an East Asian power to a global superpower,” scholar Daniel S. Markey wrote in his book China’s Western Horizon. Xi’s China has resolved, as People’s Liberation Army Gen. Liu Yazhou recommended in 2004, to “seize for the center of the world.”
Yet if Chinese statecraft employs the insights of Mahan and Mackinder, its implications are more in line with the autocratic tradition. Chinese diplomats have promised to “reeducate” Taiwan’s population after the island is united with China, a threat that evokes memories of some of the worst crimes of the 20th century. China’s Eurasia would be an authoritarian pan-region to make Haushofer proud. Autocracy will be secure because democratic impulses are stifled; Beijing and Moscow have worked together, sometimes through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to thwart potential color revolutions in Central Asia and hunt down dissidents who flee across international frontiers. Meanwhile, the modernization of tyranny continues with Beijing’s active assistance: China’s Digital Silk Road fortifies illiberal governments by equipping them with state-of-the-art surveillance gear.
The clearest example of how expansion interacts with repression is found within China’s own borders. Xi’s government has turned the Xinjiang region into a humanitarian horror show by herding Uyghurs into concentration camps and enforcing relentless digital repression. Beijing must use the “organs of dictatorship” and show “absolutely no mercy,” Xi directed in 2014. Geopolitics infuses the rationale for this policy: “Xinjiang work possesses a position of special strategic significance,” Xi has said, because the region sits astride critical transportation routes to China’s Eurasian hinterland. It’s a premonition of the atrocities that could proliferate with Chinese power.
The heirs of Haushofer are seeking a Eurasia safe for illiberalism and predation. The democratic world needs to revive its own geopolitical lineage to meet the test.
Don’t take this too literally; Washington doesn’t need a Mahanian fleet of battleships right now. Innovation modifies rivalry’s rhythms, if not its essence: Today’s competitions feature new capabilities and new domains of warfare that make it easier to strike enemies across vast distances than ever before. Yet some realities endure: The stability of global order requires averting a malign hegemony at its center. The democratic school of geopolitics thus offers a mental map—and a set of principles—to navigate a world that is always changing yet never as novel as we think.
First, geopolitics and liberal values aren’t antithetical. Mastering the former is essential to defending the latter. The liberal world exalts reason, morality, and progress, whereas the geopolitical tradition stresses struggle and strife. But the precondition for the West’s liberal order was the creation, in two world wars and a cold war, of combinations of power that crushed or contained freedom’s most fearsome foes. Given that the world no longer seems as safe from catastrophic war or autocratic ascendancy as it appeared only a few years ago, the flourishing of liberal values will require fluency in power politics once again.
Students of geopolitics would also understand a second insight: It is better to balance early than to balance late.
Students of geopolitics would also understand a second insight: It is better to balance early than to balance late. Spykman wrote his defining works in the early 1940s, when Eurasia was nearly overrun by the Axis. That nadir of liberal power informed his calls for a strategy to prevent the next war by keeping the Eurasian equilibrium from crumbling anew.
Thanks to the historic achievements of the strategy Spykman inspired, the West can now balance Russia deep in Eastern Europe by providing vital aid that keeps Putin from steamrolling Ukraine. Washington and its allies can check Beijing’s power in the Taiwan Strait instead of the Central Pacific. The military and diplomatic demands of sustaining these positions are heavy—yet surely less than the demands of balancing from a weaker position once the revisionists have gotten a head of steam.
Holding forward positions requires heeding a third principle: Geopolitics is alliance politics because fights for Eurasian supremacy are contests in coalition-making and coalition-breaking. As Spykman, Mackinder, and Mahan grasped, overseas powers—even superpowers—can regulate Eurasia’s affairs only with help from front-line allies. Aspiring hegemons, conversely, can subdue their neighbors only by isolating them from support from abroad.
The Eurasian balance thus hinges on whether the United States preserves the sovereign military advantages necessary to intervene around the Old World’s periphery. But even that won’t matter if Washington doesn’t adapt and fortify the alliances and security networks that give it access, influence, and added capabilities on faraway continents—against adversaries that use coercion, bribery, election interference, and other tactics to pry those coalitions apart.
As Mackinder would remind us, the type and location of those partners also count. The struggle against China is primarily a maritime matter. But—and this is a fourth lesson—land power and sea power complement each other, even if their relative merits are endlessly debated. Unless Washington wants to face an undistracted foe in the Pacific, it will need friends, such as Vietnam and especially India, that create dilemmas along China’s vulnerable land borders.
Neither Vietnam nor India is an ideal partner, which underscores a fifth principle: Strategy, for the United States, is the art of blending democratic solidarity with sordid compromises. The liberal democracies that ring Eurasia’s Atlantic and Pacific margins are the core of Washington’s coalition. But holding the balance has always involved illiberal actors and illiberal acts.
Containing this generation of revisionists will entail buttressing an arc of friendly—or simply ambivalent—authoritarians from Singapore to Saudi Arabia to Turkey. And don’t be shocked if intensifying rivalry causes Washington to engage in covert skullduggery, economic sabotage, and proxy warfare. Fights for supremacy lead relatively respectable democracies to do some ugly things.
They shouldn’t, however, forget a sixth precept: Eurasian struggles aren’t mono-dimensional, or mono-regional, affairs. Mahan, Mackinder, and Spykman all saw Eurasia as a huge, interconnected theater. More recently, some analysts have taken the more reductionist view that Taiwan is the only place that really matters to the United States and that military might is the only type of power that truly counts. The consequences of losing a war to China in the Western Pacific would surely be epochal. But that’s not the only problem the free world faces.
The outcome of today’s non-hypothetical war in Ukraine will shape the strategic balance from the Baltic to Central Asia, as well as the balance of advantage between the Eurasian autocracies and the liberal democracies opposing them. That’s why calls to cut Ukraine loose are rarely heard from Washington’s most vulnerable allies in the Western Pacific.
Moreover, as Mackinder wrote in his 1904 article, China can expand inward as well as outward: By pushing into Eurasia, it would “add an oceanic frontage to the resources of the great continent.” And as Spykman might add, political warfare—the use of trade, technology, and other nonmilitary tools—can soften up enemies as surely as warfare itself. So these thinkers would grasp that containing Beijing’s economic and technological influence is as important as checking its military power—and that Washington can’t simply focus on one part of Eurasia to the exclusion of the rest.
Much of this makes a grim outlook for the future. But if a democratic school of geopolitics requires expertise in the cold calculus of power, it cannot be limited to it. A final insight, then, is that global crises are opportunities for creation.
During the 20th century, Eurasian challenges evoked unprecedented cooperation among the world’s democracies. In throwing back programs of aggression, they also laid the foundations for the liberal order that brought unprecedented prosperity and well-being to so much of the globe. A coalition that succeeds in the present rivalries will, likewise, be one in which a globe-spanning group has addressed the era’s most pressing challenges by pulling together—militarily, economically, technologically, and diplomatically—as never before. “A repellent personality” has the virtue of “uniting his enemies,” Mackinder wrote. The goal of a democratic geopolitics should be to provide the security that permits another era of creation today.
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