The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

“Geopolitik.”
Kjellén, an intense Swedish nationalist, feared Russian expansionism in quest of
the relatively warm waters of the Baltic Sea. He wanted an expansionist Sweden
and Finland to counter Russia’s designs. While Kjellén found support for his
views with members of the aristocracy and upper middle classes, nostalgic for
Sweden’s past grandeur under kings such as Gustavus Adolfus and Charles XII,
there was ultimately too little public support for his views. The appetite for great
power preoccupations in Scandinavia, even by the late-nineteenth and early-
twentieth centuries, was long past. Kjellén transferred all his hopes to a Greater
Germany—to stand forth against Russia and England, both of which he
especially detested. Kjellén’s German empire-of-the-future, as he cataloged it,
included all of Central and Eastern Europe as well as the Channel ports along the
French coast, and the Baltic provinces of Russia, Ukraine, Asia Minor, and
Mesopotamia (to be connected to Berlin by a great railway). Employing Ratzel’s
ideas, Kjellén categorized human societies in racial, biological terms, conceiving
of the state in terms of the 
Volk
, which, if sufficiently virile and dynamic, would
require an especially large amount of living space. It is the very glibness and
windiness inhabiting the thought of Ratzel and Kjellén that a later generation of
murderers would make use of to justify their acts. Ideas matter, for good and for
bad, and hazy ideas can be especially dangerous. Whereas legitimate geography
shows us what we are up against in the challenges we face around the world,
Ratzel’s and Kjellén’s is an illegitimate geography that annihilates the individual
and replaces him with the vast racial multitude.
This is all but prologue to the life of Karl Haushofer, the geopolitician of
Nazism and steadfast admirer of Mackinder. The tragic perversion of
Mackinder’s work by Haushofer, as well as the danger posed by Nazi 
Geopolitik
,
is elegantly told in a largely forgotten but classic work of political science,

---

Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power
by Robert Strausz-Hupé,
published in 1942. Strausz-Hupé, an Austrian immigrant to the United States,
was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and a U.S. ambassador
to four countries (including Turkey) during the Cold War years. In 1955 in
Philadelphia, he founded the Foreign Policy Research Institute, with which I
have been loosely affiliated for two decades. Strausz-Hupé’s book, written
before the tide turned in the Allies’ favor in World War II, was a clear-cut
attempt not only to explain the danger of Nazi 
Geopolitik
to the fellow citizens
of his adopted country, but to explain what geopolitics is and why it is important,
so that the forces of good can make use of it in a much different way than the
Nazis were doing. Strausz-Hupé thus rescues the reputation of Mackinder and
the discipline itself, while performing an act of individual agency in doing his
intellectual part to win the war.
Major General Professor Doktor Karl Haushofer was born in 1869 in Munich.
His grandfather, uncle, and father all wrote about cartography and travel. Thus
was his life marked. Haushofer joined the Bavarian army and in 1909 was
appointed artillery instructor to the Japanese army. He became infatuated with
the military rise of Japan, with which he advocated a German alliance.
Haushofer fought in World War I as a brigade commander, and had as his aide
the Nazi Rudolf Hess, to whom he would later dedicate several books. After the
war Haushofer was appointed to the chair of geography and military science at
the University of Munich, where Hess followed him as a disciple. It was through
Hess that Haushofer met the “rising agitator” Adolf Hitler, whom Haushofer
would visit and provide academic briefings on geopolitics while Hitler was
imprisoned at Landsberg fortress, following the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch
of 1923. Hitler was writing