THE RIMLAND THESIS - The Revenge of Geography - page 69

THE RIMLAND THESIS
Robert Strausz-Hupé was not the only naturalized American to be warning his fellow cit-
izens during the war about the need to take geopolitics out of Nazi hands, restore its repu-
tation, and employ it for the benefit of the United States. Nicholas J. Spykman was born
in 1893 in Amsterdam. During the First World War, when the Netherlands was neutral, he
traveled extensively as a foreign correspondent in the Near East (1913 to 1919) and in the
Far East (1919 to 1920). Following the war, he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees
at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also taught, and then went to Yale, where
he founded the Institute of International Studies in 1935. 1 He imbued his students with an
awareness of geography as the principal means to assess the dangers and opportunities that
his adopted country faced in the world. He died of cancer in 1943 at the age of forty-nine,
but not before publishing the prior year America's Strategy in World Politics: The United
States and the Balance of Power , a topic that even more than the work of Mackinder gives
us a framework for understanding the Post Cold War world. Spykman, who lived later, in
some senses updates Mackinder.
In the vein of Strausz-Hupé, Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, and other European immig-
rants in the middle decades of the twentieth century, who brought realism to a country that
had given them refuge but which they felt was dangerously naive, Spykman would have
none of the idealism and sentimentalism that was a characteristic of much American think-
ing. Geography is everything, he argues. The United States was a great power less because
of its ideas than because, with direct access to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it was “the
most favored state in the world from the point of view of location.” 2 With Spykman there
is no respite from the heartlessness of the map and the consequent struggle for space. He
writes, “International society is … a society without a central authority to preserve law and
order.” It is in a state of anarchy, in other words. Thus, all states must struggle for self-pre-
servation. Statesmen can strive for the universal values of justice, fairness, and tolerance,
but only so far as they do not interfere with the quest for power, which to him is synonymous
with survival. “The search for power is not made for the achievement of moral values; moral
values are used to facilitate the attainment of power.” Such a statement could almost have
been made by Karl Haushofer, and there is much tragedy in that realization. But that should
not blind us to the fundamental difference between the two men. Spykman, like Mackinder
and Strausz-Hupé, believes in the “safety” of “balanced power,” not in domination. From
that difference flows all the others. For the “balance of power,” Spykman is careful to say,
corresponds with the “law of nature and Christian ethics” because it preserves the peace. 3
While Strausz-Hupé focuses down-and-in on Nazi geopolitical theory and in the process
defends Mackinder, Spykman focuses up-and-out on the world map to assess the prospects