Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
And Mahan clearly seeks to influence human choice. In his thumping topic, propitiously
published the same year that the U.S. Army consolidated the American continent with a
virtual final (if hideous) victory in the Indian Wars, and only a few years before the United
States would gain, as a result of war, Spain's empire in the Western Pacific as well as dom-
inance in the Caribbean, Mahan issues a call to arms through global sea power. Mahan is
not so much a geographer as a historian and tactician. He represents an imperialistic sens-
ibility which carries with it obvious geographical implications. This is the decisive explan-
ation for Spykman's high regard for him. Not that Spykman was an enthusiast of conquest;
only that he intuitively grasped, as Mahan did, that America would have no choice but to
engage in worldwide power struggles because of its own geographically privileged posi-
tion in the Western Hemisphere, which gave it influence in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Mahan, as one would expect, had enemies. Sir Norman Angell, in an engaging and spir-
ited defense of pacifism,
The Great Illusion
, published in 1909, condemns Mahan's writ-
ings as “very mischievous moonshine.” This British journalist and politician, who to his
credit was hated by Haushofer, denounces Mahan's assertion that the “extension of national
authority over alien communities” can be a dignified enterprise: for “like individuals, na-
tions and empires have souls as well as bodies.” Mahan is, in Angell's view, absurdly deny-
ing the very tangible reality of the individual and replacing him with the comparatively
intangible reality of the state. As Angell argues, “Does anyone think of paying deference
to the Russian
moujik
because he happens to belong to one of the biggest empires territori-
ally? Does anyone think of despising an Ibsen … or any educated Scandinavian or Belgian
words, Mahan, and by inference Spykman, Mackinder, and the other geographer-geopol-
iticians, are determinists and essentialists all. Their warlike tendencies emerge from their
seeing, as Isaiah Berlin complained, nations and empires as more real than the individuals
who encompass them. Again, we can offer only the Haushofer defense: if Mahan and the
others did not engage in the sort of determinism which Angell condemns, they would leave
the field of grand strategy to those who are truly evil. Alas, we require the moral imperfec-
tions of the likes of a Mahan.
In fact, Angell's treatise on why war and great power competition are illogical suffered
the misfortune of being published only a few years before World War I, which initiated a
century of unprecedented war and conflict in Europe. Angell, unfairly, became a laughing-
stock in many quarters. I say unfairly because his topic, in and of itself, is compulsively
readable, as well as brilliantly argued. And his topic might have proved clairvoyant were
human nature a bit less base than it is. It is because of the flaws in human nature, amplified
by divisions imposed by geography, that a writer like Mahan wears so much better over the
decades than one like Angell.
