Geopolitics and the Age of Air Power

In September 1942, as the United States fought Japanese forces in the Solomon Islands and prepared to launch the invasion of North Africa, the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences sponsored the publication of George T. Renner’s Human Geography in the Air Age. Renner at the time was Professor of Geography at the Teachers College, Columbia University. His book, mostly forgotten today, was an effort to update the understanding of the impact of geography on global politics in the air age.

The American naval historian and strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, in numerous articles and books, including The Problem of Asia (1902) and The Interest of America in International Conditions (1910), had explained global geopolitics from a sea power perspective. Halford Mackinder, the British geographer and statesman, in “The Geographical Pivot of History” (1904) and Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919), had reviewed world history largely as a struggle for power between continental land powers and insular sea powers. Renner in his book sought to add an air power perspective to global geopolitics.

Renner began the book by stating that the airplane had “created a new world geography,” and it was necessary for the United States to “think ideas which are historical, geographical, and aeronautical.” The U.S., he lamented, had neglected geography, a subject that was “necessary to make us understand the changes which man’s new machines have brought about in our world.” Distances have been shortened, he wrote, “old barriers broken down, old isolations cancelled out, and new relations imposed.”

World geography, he explained, had evolved from the time of Homer (900 B.C.) who depicted a world where Greece stood at the center of lands abutting the Mediterranean Sea; to Herodotus (440 B.C.) when some lands beyond the Mediterranean, including islands in the Atlantic, became known; to Ptolemy (160 A.D.) whose map included the Indian Ocean and much of Asia; to the Italian geographer Toscanelli (1474) whose map inspired Columbus and other explorers who filled in most of the remaining blanks on the global map.

In 1923, University of Chicago geography professor J. Paul Goode developed the ocean-basin homolographic world map that identified 12 “gateways” or strategic chokepoints that served as entrances and exits to the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean basins: the Cape of Good Hope, southeast Australia, the Strait of Malacca, the Strait of Bab el Mandeb, the Suez Canal, the Falkland Islands, Scapa Flow, Gibraltar, Port Stanley, the Panama Canal, the Timor Sea, and the Sunda, Lombok and Macassar Straits. Renner noted that prior to the air age “[t]he entire flow of world trade and the entire strategy of naval power came to hinge upon the control of these twelve vital points.”

In the 1930s, according to Renner, the increased efficiency of the airplane presented strategists with a “three-dimensional world,” and an “entirely new geography—an aviation created geography.” Whereas the First World War involved an attempt to wrestle control of the sea from Britain and America, the Second World War represented “an attempt to gain complete control of the globe through a combination of air power, mechanized land power, and undersea power.” “The nations which make the best geography for themselves,” he predicted, “will control the world.”

Thinking geographically, Renner explained, meant appreciating the significance of geographical location, “which ebbs and flows with the tides of men’s affairs, with the streams of human ideas and values.” Geographic location, he continued, “must underlie a nation’s thinking, its trade, its public improvements and works, its international relations.” Importantly, geographic location “must create and guide” a nation’s national defense.

Renner’s air age geopolitical map identified the region of Eurasia containing Russia, Siberia, Turkestan and western China as “a world core or heartland,” which is land-based, inaccessible to sea power, but “centrally located in an air world.” “Whoever holds this area in the future,” he wrote, “must therefore play a dominant role in world affairs.”

Western Europe, the Near East, the Mediterranean, India, Southeast Asia and the Orient occupy what Renner termed a “fringeland.” Meanwhile, portions of the eastern and central United States and Canada formed a “second but smaller heartland,” which had its own fringeland consisting of Alaska, British Columbia, the far western United States, the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic seaboard, maritime Canada and Newfoundland. Finally, South America, Australia, and Africa constitute the “Detached Southern Lands.”