Geopolitics and the Western Pacific

China, Japan and the US

Leszek Buszynski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351105101
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the development of China's national ambitions under its current leader Xi Jinping and the dilemma they present for the United States and also Japan. It emphasises the importance of geopolitics, that is the way national strategies and policies are shaped and in some cases determined by geographic location. Focusing especially on China's national rejuvenation and its rapidly growing military capability and navy, and on the likely impact on the region of China regaining the status and influence it enjoyed in dynastic times, the book highlights the hard choices faced by the United States as it seeks to protect its geopolitical position in the Western Pacific, particularly in the South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan straits. How far should the United States confront China or accommodate China, possibly at the risk of undermining its geopolitical position and its alliance relationships with Japan, Australia and South Korea? The book also discusses the degree to which issues of institution building and economic interdependence can overcome or constrain geopolitical calculations.

1 Geopolitics

Introduction

Often used and frequently abused, the term “geopolitics” is regularly taken for granted and its meaning considered obvious. Publications may include the word in their titles without mentioning it or referring to in the text. Authors may use it without elaboration or definition expecting that the meaning will be understood. For a long time it was banished from the lexicon of international relations because of its associations with power, realpolitik and expansion; however, geopolitics continues to be invoked and used in learned articles, conference presentations, newspaper op eds, blogs and the popular media. Critics claim that its frequent use has shaped the discourse in international politics in an undesirable way around war and conflict. It has also been regarded as having little meaning, one of those words that seem weighty and important, but which actually conveys little of value. Few terms are as ubiquitous and yet as loosely used in international politics as geopolitics.

Geopolitics has gone through many permutations of meaning. When first created in the nineteenth century it was associated with power and served as numinous justification for the expansionism of the German state. Later, in the twentieth century it was associated with maritime power and control of the seas, the geographical context of Britain’s imperial rivalry with Russia, the allied coalition to contain Germany and America’s global positioning to ensure the freedom of the seas. It has also been associated with classical realism in that it focuses on the state, the means adopted to promote its interests and to ensure security. It has been related to grand strategy, which is the ultimate policy direction of a state, and the coordination of diplomatic, military and non-material means to attain its objectives. It may embrace what is understood as strategic geography, which is an assessment of the physical geographical context for security, and strategic studies, which is the study of the strategies, political, diplomatic as well as military, adopted by a state to position itself against possible threats and potential rivals.

Ultimately, geopolitics identifies the relationship between security policy and geography, and how diplomatic and military strategy including the deployment of military is undertaken by a state within a particular geographic situation. In this sense, it refers to the security of the state in its geographical setting and the factors and influences that bear upon it. It refers to the geographic constraints that impact on decision makers, shaping the policies they devise to ensure security or to promote further their goals and ambitions. Geography indeed is unchanging, and over time gives rise to certain persistent responses and policies that become enshrined in doctrines or traditions. These policies become axiomatic for the state and its leadership, and are passed on through generations of policy makers as geopolitical doctrines. Geopolitics has been reviled for its focus on the state and its security, and as an obstacle to cooperative relations that may overcome conflict. However, one way or another, geopolitics cannot be ignored or discarded because it informs us about the motives behind state behaviour and activity, particularly those of the major actors. It is a term that has become more relevant as we seek to understand the competition and rivalry that has emerged between the major players in the present international order as American power and influence recedes.

Classical geopolitics

Initially, geopolitics was understood to mean “power politics”, or “the struggle for power”, an association that continues to cling to the concept. The early classical geopoliticians, such as the Swede Rudolf Kjellen, who coined the term “geopolitics” in 1899, Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer, were proponents of geographic determinism and interpreted the struggle for power between states in terms of a geographically determined social Darwinism.¹ Geopolitics acquired an almost mystical dimension that was characteristic of many German thinkers of the time in which the state was a living organism that had to expand or die.² For Ratzel, the state required territory to survive and in this context he devised a theory of struggle between states for lebensraum.³ Karl Haushofer, professor of geography at the University of Munich (1921–1939), president of the German Academy (1934–1937) and a friend of Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess, adopted the term geopolitik from Rudolf Kjellen, although he never defined the concept clearly. Haushofer borrowed from Friedrich Ratzel the term lebensraum, which he popularised in his many publications. For Haushofer, lebensraum was Germany’s future, although he did not specify in what direction that would take it, unlike Hitler who saw Germany’s future in eastern expansion. Under the influence of Halford Mackinder, Haushofer called for construction of a Eurasian block that would bring together Germany, Russia and Japan to counter British sea power. Although in his lectures and publications Haushofer justified and supported Nazi Germany’s policies and gave them a veneer of academic respectability, his influence on specific policies was overestimated by the allies.⁴ Haushofer had a high regard for Japan and advocated a strong relationship between Germany and Japan, where he served as an artillery instructor to the Japanese army for two years and an observer for the German army. He wrote eight books on Japan between 1913 and 1941 and many Japanese attended his lectures in his institute in Munich.⁵ He also influenced the thinking of Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose, and Britain’s fascist leader Oswald Mosley.⁶

As a concept, geopolitics was contaminated by its association with Nazism and German expansion. Writing in 1942, the American Charles Hagan opined that geopolitics was an attempt to find a “deterministic principle” in the behaviour of states based on geography and was largely materialistic. In his view, the geopoliticians of the German school fused geography with national psychology, history and military strategy, the ultimate goal of which was German domination. Geopolitics he believed was a “contemporary rationalization of power politics. A believer in democracy and a peaceful international order can find little comfort in this world outlook”.⁷ Writing in 1944, Russell Fifield and Etzel Pearcy noted that Haushofer may have regarded his theory as applied science but they argued that German geopolitik was far from scientific as it ignored facts that did not fit into its conceptual scheme.⁸ In later decades, critics regarded geopolitics as a “pseudo-science” that adopted the language of confrontation and hovered somewhere between the “sinister and the ludicrous”.⁹ Brian W. Blouet was prompted to argue that the history of geopolitics is the history of “bad ideas-sometimes mad ideas-that have led countries to wars and recessions”.¹⁰ Tainted by its association with Nazi expansionism and its unscientific quasi mystical basis, American and British scholars avoided geopolitical studies and the term geopolitics. Hepple noted that there was no book title in English with the title of geopolitics from the 1940s until the publication of Colin Gray’s Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era in 1977.¹¹ Instead, geopolitical analysis in the sense of an examination of the impact of geography on policy and strategy continued under the rubric of strategic studies or political geography.

Three theorists of strategy from the Anglo-American School have left an indelible mark on the study of the concept and have influenced strategic thinkers up until today. The first was Alfred Thayer Mahan who in his seminal work The influence of sea power upon history, 1660–1783¹² explained the importance of sea power in history, and argued that great powers require powerful navies to protect their maritime commerce, and to ensure control of the sea.¹³ In Mahan’s view, America was an island continent that had to ensure command of two oceans, the Atlantic through which America’s trade to Europe flowed, and the Pacific which connected its west coast to the China/Japan trade. Russia was the major land power of the time, and because of its dominance of the Eurasian land mass it could extend its reach and threaten India, China and the Persian Gulf. Mahan believed in the supremacy of sea power and thought that a coalition of sea powers could counter Russian expansion, although he included the land power Germany in this coalition together with Britain, the US and Japan. Mahan’s mission was to awaken Americans to the importance of sea power and the necessity of command of the sea to ensure the open trade, freedom of navigation and commerce upon which the US depended. Many of Mahan’s ideas are now outdated and his thoughts on sea power incongruously related to the age of the sailing ship. Nonetheless, maintaining maritime security and freedom of navigation remain an important operating principle for America today. Mahan’s influence on the naval lobbies of other countries that sought to develop sea power as the basis of a great power role was extensive. Mahan had adherents and disciples in Wilhelmine Germany, in Japan before the Pacific War, the Soviet Union and now China.

The second theorist was Halford Mackinder, who influenced generations of strategic thinkers on the importance of global geography and geographic space as the context for strategy and the deployment of military power. Mackinder’s division of geographic space into vital positional points and zones of interaction and activity was a model for later thinkers to follow during the Cold War. Mackinder had a varied career, having studied Zoology as an undergraduate and later joined the school of geography at Oxford when it was first established in 1897. He then joined the newly established London School of Economics and became its second director from 1903 to 1908. In 1910 he became a member of parliament, although he always regarded himself as a geographer. In 1903 he wrote to The Times arguing for a “league of democracies” to bind Britain and her colonies.¹⁴ Of greater import, however, was Mackinder’s contribution to global geopolitics in which the continents served as an arena for implementation and execution of grand strategy. In January 1904 he outlined his view of the “geographical pivot of history” to the Royal Geographical Society, which was subsequently published in the Society’s journal.¹⁵ Mackinder outlined his concern with Russia, which, he claimed, had replaced the Mongol empire in the pivot area of Eastern Europe/Western Russia. With control of the pivot area, Russia could control the world because it could pivot in all directions, towards the East, the South and the West, in a way that would be difficult for a sea power such as Britain to prevent without extending its line of communications. Mackinder’s concern was that a land power in control of the pivot would threaten British imperial power in various places where it had the advantage of proximity and shortened communications. He later refined his ideas and in 1915 adopted the idea of the “heartland” from Sir James Fairgrieve in place of the pivot area.¹⁶ In 1919 he published Democratic ideals and reality, in which he introduced the concept of the “world island”, which included both Europe and Asia. The idea of the heartland had replaced the notion of the pivot area. The heartland was in Mackinder’s words “the region to which, under modern conditions, sea-power can be refused access”. It was, as he claimed, the strongest “natural fortress on earth”. In this book he introduced his dictum that “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island controls the world”, a maxim often quoted today as a historical curiosity more than anything else.

Mackinder’s anxiety at the end of the First World War was Germany, as he thought “that the devil in Germany” should “never again get its head up and must die by inanition”. His purpose was to demonstrate how the heartland power, by which he meant Russia, and the “amphibious” powers, America, Britain and France, could combine to prevent Germany from engaging in militaristic adventures as it would come under the threat of immediate war on two fronts.¹⁷ Nonetheless, his preoccupation with Russia, which had just come under the rule of the Bolsheviks, never left him. He was appointed as British High Commissioner to South Russia in October 1919 by Lord Curzon and proposed that Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan be freed from Russian rule and joined together in a coalition to weaken Bolshevik power.¹⁸ His 1943 article in Foreign Affairs reiterated these ideas, while he also stressed that the idea of the heartland was more important than ever. He wrote that the Soviet Union was coterminous with the heartland and if it emerged victorious in the Second World War, he predicted that it would be the strongest land power on Earth.¹⁹ Mackinder initially regarded Russia as a rival, but by 1943 as the Soviet Union it had become an ally against Nazi Germany. Revising his focus, he argued that world peace could be maintained by cooperation between the heartland power and the three amphibious powers. Mackinder was most concerned with exorcising the German mind of its “black magic”, and he gave little thought to the ideas that had preoccupied him earlier, including the ambitions of the heartland power and how they may threaten British or American maritime power.

The third theorist was Nicholas Spykman, who was professor of International Relations at Yale University. Spykman was strongly influenced by Mackinder and was regarded as a “geographic determinist” because of his comments on the impact of geography on policy. In an article in the American Political Science review in 1938, he stressed that states have to cope with their geography “for geography does not argue. It simply is”. He added that “geography is the most fundamental factor in foreign policy because it is the most permanent”. Spykman understood that there were other influences on policy, but his interest was to identify the impact of one of those influences – geography. In the same article he noted that there were two “systems of reference for states, geography and history”, and that “although the entire policy of a state does not derive from its geography, it cannot escape that geography. Size, shape, location, topography, and climate posit conditions from which there is no escape”.²⁰ Spykman could be regarded as a strategic geographer who focussed on one factor in policy making, one that he thought was neglected and in need of explanation. He did not deny the relevance of other factors, history in particular, but assumed the task of analysing the impact of geography for American polic...