Recommended reading: Geopolitics Reborn

Colin Dueck has an insightful E-Note over at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, where WOTR contributor Mike Noonan strategizes on a daily basis and comes up with clever headlines like this.  Dueck argues that we must start taking geopolitics seriously once more and closes his essay with these thoughtful words:

A central insight of Mahan, Mackinder, and Spykman alike is that without robust balances of power in the Old World, the liberties of the New World cannot be maintained.  It has often been characteristic of liberal opinion in Anglo-American countries to assume either that such balances are self-executing, or that they are no longer necessary, given advances in multilateral interdependence.  But this periodic and blasé lack of interest in long-term security threats is itself possible only because of the basic geopolitical condition undergirding American liberal democracy, namely, a physical separation from typical dangers by two great oceans.  If the balance of great powers within Eurasia is not monitored and preserved with genuine vigilance from the outside, this will eventually have concrete implications for U.S. prosperity and security – perhaps sooner rather than later.  In other words, you may not be interested in geopolitics, but geopolitics is interested in you; American freedoms, in the long run, quite literally rest upon a fragmentation of power in the Old World.  This country’s founders understood as much, and recognized it in their words and actions as they navigated the treacherous waters of international power politics with both the wisdom of serpents and the innocence of doves.  Geopolitical thinking can provide some of the necessary wisdom of serpents, as Americans continue to navigate those treacherous waters today.