Amidst the rise of great power competition, the Russo-Ukrainian War, and increasing tensions between Taiwan and China, the United States faces a crisis of confidence. The grand strategy it has pursued since the end of the Second World War has become disputed among national security practitioners and academics. Whether the United States should stay engaged with the world or turn inward to focus exclusively on its own problems has become a frequently asked question. Those on the isolationist wing of this dilemma challenge the premises outlined in Nicholas Spykman’s America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power, a book which has served as the foundational basis for the grand strategy the United States has followed for the past eighty years.
As the arguable founder of U.S. foreign policy realism, Spykman transcends the time during which he was writing – the height of the Second World War – to inform readers of the essential theory that has led the United States to achieve the dominant position it holds today. Spykman, who is a balance-of-power theorist, outlines a foreign policy for peace built upon the basic reality of power politics and both the recognition of the critical value of geography and the implications of the United States’s geographic position in the world. While numerous scholars have provided memorable quotes about the U.S. position, the credit goes to Spykman for crafting the central argument that ought to be the basis of any U.S. foreign policy: power resides in geography, and great powers that understand and develop a strategy around this idea will dominate the affairs of their region and possibly the world.
A student of classical geopolitics, Spykman joins the ranks of Alfred Thayer Mahan and Halford John Mackinder in providing a compelling argument for geography’s role in international affairs. Yet it is Spykman’s realism that predominates his work, which devotes considerable attention to the theory of power politics. The world is anarchic; force must compel or coerce; and capabilities are disproportionate across the globe. Through this framework, Spykman arrives at the primacy of the balance of power: peace can only be secured by the threat or use of force, making states coalesce around one another to balance against greater powers that threaten domination. [1] Maintaining the balance of power is thus the only way to achieve order in the world, and the recognition of this fact by succeeding generations of U.S. policymakers has allowed the United States to rise to the rank of great power and beyond.
As Europe was embroiled in war throughout the initial rise of the United States, the stage was set for the United States to gradually assert its authority over the entirety of the New World. Policies like the Monroe Doctrine, cooperation with Britain following the War of 1812, and hemispheric defense show that the United States understood from its early days the advantages of becoming a power with access to two oceans and the abundant natural resources of North America. [2] Some scholars of international relations have interpreted these boons as being protection against a potential European or Asian hegemon. Proponents of offshore balancing, supporters of offensive realism, and advocates of ‘restraint’ like Barry Posen all argue that the United States has the unique benefit of geographic security through the stopping power of water, positing that the Atlantic and Pacific act as buffer zones against foreign military invasions.
While Spykman’s argument is foundational to those schools of thought, his position on the stopping power of water has garnered scant interest among those same scholars. Spykman believed that oceans are not barriers but rather are highways between continents. Contemporary scholars must understand this and realize that the New World is not isolated due to its oceans. It is the maintenance of a balance of power in Europe and Asia, not the Atlantic and the Pacific, that prevented foreign interference in the United States. The United States should therefore continue to concern itself with the balance of power abroad to prevent the rise of a European or Asian hegemon. Moreover, Spykman wrote his book at a time when the idea of hemispheric defense was prominent. His position was not only to argue in favor of U.S. engagement with the world but to refute the narrative that the United States could sufficiently defend the Western Hemisphere without concern for world politics elsewhere. [3] Contrary to isolationists, Spykman argues that the political integration of the New World and U.S. self-sufficiency are nearly impossible to achieve, since “the Western Hemisphere is dependent on the products of the Old World for the strategic raw materials for its war industries, and the same applies to many of the articles necessary to preserve its standard of living.” [4] Promoting balanced power in the Old World is the only policy that makes sense, being truly in accordance with U.S. values. The Founders themselves were, after all, “impressed with the value and importance of balanced power.” [5]
While writing his book, Spykman felt that the United States faced a grave danger. If a hegemonic power arose in Eurasia, the United States would be effectively encircled and left with no realistic defense. [6] The hegemon could potentially control the entire landmass of Eurasia, boasting enormous resources and capabilities that rival and even surpass those of the New World. The United States would thus become trapped in a pincer movement coming from both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Although Germany and Japan were the powers on Spykman’s mind at the time of writing, his words and ideas were not meant to be solely applicable to this scenario; they were rather a universal assessment of a mortal danger the United States faces if it is not active in the world.
How should the United States act to prevent this? Spykman proposes a foreign policy tied to the geographic reality of power politics: utilizing the Rimland. While Spykman does not fully develop the concept of the Rimland in this book, he does so in his 1944 follow-up, The Geography of the Peace. The Rimland refers to mainland Europe and all the coastal regions stretching from the Middle East to East Asia. This is the only zone in Eurasia from which potentially hegemonic states may emerge due to the immense number of resources present in the region and the coastal access any aspiring hegemon could exploit for economic and military purposes. This area is distinct from Mackinder’s Heartland, which is centered largely in Siberia. The Rimland would thus be the source of any upset to the balance of power in the Old World.
In Spykman’s view, the only way to combat a budding Eurasian hegemon is by both aligning with maritime and continental allies that have the same interests in balanced power on the mainland and maintaining U.S. presence in the Rimland. The United States failed to do this after the First World War, choosing instead isolationism and detachment in peacetime and allowing the balance of power to break down. The country was then unprepared when great power conflict broke out in Europe and faced strategic weakness in the Pacific against Japan, another great power aspiring to become the hegemon of its region.
The situation of Spykman’s time is similar to what the United States faces today. While many modern realists propose that the United States should rely on other powers through a process like offshore balancing, Spykman discounted this perspective decades before it became popular in contemporary grand strategy discourse. Continuing a policy of retrenchment or offshore balancing while relying on maritime powers is not preferable or rational, he argued. Such an approach would result in an alliance of continental powers against maritime powers stemming from the fear of encirclement. [7] Thus, direct engagement with the littoral states – the Rimland – is integral to any successful U.S. foreign policy.
Today, while the United States has not sought to pull back from the world stage fully, it has flirted with the idea and now faces two powers seeking regional hegemony: Russia in Europe and China in East Asia. Spykman accurately predicted this. The same material conditions contributing to his view of power politics accurately describe the post-war world, which will continue to operate under fundamental power patterns. By understanding and appropriately responding to these patterns, the United States can forestall the rise of a Eurasian hegemon. The United States must therefore maintain a permanent presence in Europe and Asia to safeguard its security and protect its interests. Only through reading Spykman’s work can one understand both the basis for the United States’s overarching grand strategy since the Second World War and the formula for future U.S. success.
Gerrit Kleerekoper ’24 served as the President of the AHS chapter at Texas A&M University, where he earned an M.A. in International Affairs.
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Notes:
[1] Nicholas J. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007), 23.
[2] Spykman, 59-64.
[3] Spykman, 444.
[4] Spykman, 451.
[5] Spykman, 472.
[6] Spykman, 472.
[7] Spykman, 459.
Image: “Geopolitical conceptualization of the world according to the Heartland and Rimland doctrines” by Nicholas J. Spykman, retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Хартленд_и_Римленд.jpg. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
