In the mid-to-late 1930s, Yale University Professor of International Studies Nicholas J. Spykman believed that the Franklin Roosevelt administration was “ignoring the geographic factor” of U.S. national security policy to the country’s detriment. Spykman’s colleague at Yale, Frederick Dunne, explained that the more Spykman “studied the location of this country in relation to the rest of the world, the more he became convinced that our security policy was unrealistic and inadequate.”
Spykman, in an effort to awaken America to the gathering storm, wrote two articles in the American Political Science Review followed in 1942 with one of the most important books on U.S. national security policy, "America’s Strategy in World Politics."
Spykman’s articles and book established a geopolitical framework within which to understand our security interests at stake in the Second World War and, equally important, sketched the emerging security environment of the postwar world. And, remarkably, 80 years later, "America’s Strategy in World Politics' remains relevant to the post-Cold War struggle for power between the United States and China for regional and global preeminence.
Spykman understood that the oceans that separated America from Eurasia were not by themselves a sufficient barrier to strong, hostile, expansionist powers based on the shores -- what he later called the “rimland” -- of Eurasia. “Hemispheric defense,” he wrote, “is no defense at all.” Instead, U.S. foreign policy in times of peace and war must ensure a “balance of power in the transatlantic and transpacific zones” from which a Eurasian great power could threaten America. He foresaw that Russia after the war would pose a geopolitical threat to the United States similar to that posed by Nazi Germany. And he predicted that China would one day become a “continental power of huge dimensions” and that China’s size, geographic location, natural resources, and manpower would force the U.S. to align with Japan to preserve the Asian balance of power.
'Asiatic Mediterranean' at center of power struggle
In the Second World War, the struggle for power in the Asia-Pacific between Japan and the United States was centered in bodies of water that Spykman grouped together and called the “Asiatic Mediterranean.” “The Asiatic Mediterranean,” he explained, “lies between Asia and Australia and between the Pacific and the Indian Oceans,” and he outlined its geography as follows:
This middle sea has a rough triangular shape with corners at Formosa [Taiwan], Singapore, and Cape York on the Torres Strait near the northern tip of Australia. The rim includes the Philippines, Halmahera, New Guinea, the north coast of Australia, the dutch East Indies, British Malaya, Siam, French Indo-China, and the southern coast of China up to Amoy, as well as Hong Kong.
Spykman compared the geopolitical significance of Singapore and the Strait of Malacca which control the passageway from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, to the Panama Canal which controls the passageway from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The Asiatic Mediterranean includes what we know today as the Sea of Japan, the East China Sea, the South China Sea, the Sulu Sea, the Celebes Sea, the Gulf of Thailand, and the Timor Sea. He described the Asiatic Mediterranean as “an insular world par excellence.” Though Japan with its powerful navy and militaristic state was then the major power in the Asiatic Mediterranean, China as “the littoral state with the largest population” had the potential to exercise command of the region, especially if it developed economic and naval power, as it has today.
Spykman prescient in predicting alliances
At the end of "America’s Strategy in World Politics," Spykman envisioned the United States aligning with a defeated Germany in Europe to balance Russia, and also aligning with a defeated Japan in the Asia-Pacific to balance a rising China. U.S. policy, Spykman wrote, should not “surrender the Western Pacific to China or Russia.” The “power potential” of China, Spykman wrote, is infinitely greater than that of [Japan].” And consider the prescience of this paragraph written 80 years ago:
A modern, vitalized, and militarized China of 400 million people, is going to be a threat not only to Japan, but also to the position of the Western Powers in the Asiatic Mediterranean. China will be a continental power of hhuge dimensions in control of a large section of the littoral of that middle sea. Her geographic position will be similar to that of the United States in regard to the American Mediterranean [Gulf of Mexico-Caribbean Sea region]. When China becomes strong . . . [i]t is quite possible to envisage the day when this body of water will be controlled . . . by Chinese air power.
Today, we face a struggle against China in that Asiatic Mediterranean where the PLA has deployed naval and air power and aggressive tactics in an effort to achieve effective political control of Taiwan and supplant the United States as the predominant power in the western Pacific region and beyond. In the late 1930s, Spykman sensed the “unrealistic and inadequate” foreign policy of FDR that had us woefully unprepared for the coming war.
Today, he would undoubtedly sense the unrealistic and inadequate foreign policy of the Biden administration whose national security team alternately shifts from “engagement” of China to “competition” with China and back again, on a weekly basis. Meanwhile, the PLA navy grows, China expands its nuclear weapons force, and its military exercises near Taiwan and its belligerent rhetoric dangerously increase the chance of war in the Asiatic Mediterranean.
Read Full Article »
