PERSPECTIVE

JOHN AGNEW
September 2012
Since the Cold War there has been no single geopolitical template that assigns
meaning to world politics. This has led to the search for new geopolitical structures,
often based on questionable empirical evidence and interpretations. Critical geopo-
litics is suspicious of such geopolitical narratives and scrutinizes their assumptions
and impact on policies.
The recent debate about a pivoting of US security policy from the trans-Atlantic
to the Asia-Pacic makes no sense. The notion implies an overstatement of the
trans-Atlantic axis and a substantial narrowing of the recent reshaping around the
ChinaUS relationship. Recent efforts to replace the term pivoting with that of
rebalancing may more accurately reect what is taking place.
The notion of a shift of US security policy towards the Asia-Pacic also risks over-
simplication: Experts and politicians should avoid a narrow focus on the bilateral
ChinaUS relationship. They must not neglect the complex realities of the region
when framing the story about Asia-Pacic in world politics.
Part of the problem is the overemphasis on Great Powers at the expense of more
lowly actors. It also reects an obsession with grand turning points in history
versus slower transitions. The surprise that China, long viewed as backward and
stuck with a state-based political economy, should have become such an important
global actor so quickly makes it a ready candidate for wild speculation uninformed
by local knowledge.
Is US Security Policy Pivoting
from the Atlantic to Asia-Pacic?
A Critical Geopolitical Perspective
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JOHN AGNEW | IS US SECURITY POLICY PIVOTING FROM THE ATLANTIC TO ASIA-PACIFIC?
Table of Contents
1. Critical Geopolitics

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2. The Trans-Atlantic Starting Point

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3. The Supposed Pivot to Asia-Pacic

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4. Blind Spots

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5. Conclusions and Recommendations

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JOHN AGNEW | IS US SECURITY POLICY PIVOTING FROM THE ATLANTIC TO ASIA-PACIFIC?
Much has been made by pundits and politicians of the
so-called pivoting of US security policy and military
planning since 2010. The United States has turned
towards Asia-Pacic and presumably away from the
trans-Atlantic focus that had, on these accounts, previ-
ously dened the overall US global geopolitical posture
since the 1940s. Magazines such as Foreign Affairs and
Foreign Policy have led the rush to see a fundamen-
tal geographical shift signaled by what can seem to be
much more modest proposals for adjusting US foreign
policy in recent speeches by President Barack Obama,
speeches and a major article written by Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton, and the new Defense Strategic
Guidelines. Exaggerating the scope of this shift ts in
with the view popular in the United States that the
twenty-rst century will be an Asian Century (almost
entirely because of the economic rise of China) and
that Europe is destined for global peripheral status as its
project of unication falters. American primacy, even if
now nervously asserted more than genuinely believed,
remains the one certainty in ofcial quarters. The main
threat now comes from the Asia-Pacic, hence the
need for the geopolitical tilt.
1. Critical Geopolitics
A critical geopolitical perspective is deeply suspicious of
such nostrums. The academic eld of Geography was
scarred badly in the early twentieth century, not least in
Germany and Japan, by its association with a geopoli-
tics which provided geographically determinist claims for
pivots emerging as a result of the coming of the rail-
way, its challenge to sea power, and, as a direct result,
control over the steppes of central Asia giving the global
geopolitical edge to local land powers. Apart from such
idiosyncratic gures as Robert Kaplan in the US, some
Eurasianists in Russia, and enthusiasts for Haushofers
Geopolitik in China, reading security policy from physi-
cal geography is not central to contemporary discussions
about foreign and military policy. But the language of
pivoting and the idea of wholesale shifts in the center of
gravity of world politics are part of the enduring legacy
of classical geopolitical arguments. Beyond that, the
practical reasoning involved is based on geographical as-
sumptions and labels that should be investigated rather
than simply asserted. The entire narrative about a shift
in US security policy from the trans-Atlantic to the Asia-
Pacic world needs close scrutiny.
Critical geopolitics is about providing such scrutiny.
Towards the close of the Cold War, some academic
geographers and political theorists in a number of coun-
tries became concerned about how the Cold War and
conicts that erupted around that time, such as the
Contra war in Nicaragua and the rst Gulf War, were
represented by political elites and in mass culture and
how this had affected their character and longevity. The
main idea was that geography did not have direct
effects on foreign-policy making and the dynamics of
conicts, but that these were always practically medi-
ated through the ascription of meaning to places and
peoples: from the relative signicance of different world
regions to national interests to the use of metaphors
and analogies from other places and times used to com-
municate and justify given courses of policy and action.
Think, for example, of the putative shift in US foreign
policy from Europe to the Middle East in the early 1990s
and the recycling of Munich and Hitler analogies in
both Gulf Wars.
A specic set of insights characterizes the approach as it
has developed since the early 1990s. The rst is a concep-
tual matrix for a geographical analysis of world politics
based on ideas about geographical representations
and socio-economic resources. This refers, respectively,
to how the world is structured geographically from
certain geographical vantage points and the rela-
tive capacity to spread such notions and, if need be,
enforce them. Another is an emphasis on the role of
vision and geographical imagination in how the world
is structured and acted on by political agents of various
sorts. Cartographic representations that come into pop-
ular use are of particular interest as sources of informa-
tion about the nature of places and the linkages and
ows that connect them. A third is how important the
fusion between territory and national identity has been
in modern nationalism and how its role in dividing up
the world still remains at work. So, much geopolitical dis-
course is not surprisingly directed at maintaining a clear
sense of domestic difference and superiority. Excep-
tionalism is the rule. Our identity is always at stake in
this or that conict. Finally, I would identify its stress on
the elite-based statecraft that has long lain at the heart
of geopolitical reasoning and its necessary denial of the
multidimensional qualities of different places in pursuit
of an overriding Weltpolitik. Thus, foreign places lose
their rich physical-cultural character as they are plugged
in to overriding geostrategies that reect the narrow
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JOHN AGNEW | IS US SECURITY POLICY PIVOTING FROM THE ATLANTIC TO ASIA-PACIFIC?
security and economic objectives of dominant groups in
national politics. Critical geopolitics resists the tendency
to separate out the domestic and the foreign or
international as separate realms. They are in fact com-
pletely bonded together.
For policymakers, particularly in countries other than
those where the scripts of global geopolitics are rst
written, there are a number of analytic virtues to the
approach. One is to encourage a suspicion of grand
geopolitical narratives based on relatively limited textual
sources that t into the overall Zeitgeist. Another is to
beware of beguiling metaphors and terms such as piv-
oting that provide the simple language and sound bites
that are the stock-in-trade of contemporary politics. Like
advertising jingles, they bamboozle even as they seem
to clarify. A third is to link new geopolitical narratives to
the anxieties of domestic politics from where they often
emanate. In other words, why did this discussion and the
way it is posed arise now rather than previously and how
does this relate to the electoral cycle, elite succession or
dominant issues in domestic politics? Finally, what are
the historical resources upon which the narrative effec-
tively relies? What I have in mind here are the map im-
ages, place stereotypes, and cultural attributes inherited
from accounts of the past that inform the narrative. How
are these mobilized and to what effect?
2. The Trans-Atlantic Starting Point
The pivoting narrative relies on a seemingly solid ge-
opolitical starting point: that hitherto US security policy
was oriented to containment of and competition with the
former Soviet Union and that this in turn was anchored
in the US relationship with Western Europe. Of course,
after 1991 this orientation had weakened somewhat as a
result of the very success of this security policy but had not
fundamentally shifted the focus of US foreign and mili-
tary policies. The terrorist attacks of September 11 2001
pushed the focus of the Bush Administration eastwards to
Afghanistan and Iraq because of the way that it construed
those attacks. Even then, NATO was the main instrument
for the war in Afghanistan although the US invasion of
Iraq divided the US from many of its European allies.
There is obviously some basis to this storyline. The Cold
War mentality has not entirely disappeared from US for-
eign policy. This is not surprising given the fact that few
people anywhere ever expected it to end. In addition,
the weakness of the European Union in creating its own
foreign policy left the default of a certain residual attach-
ment to the US. Of course, the presidency of Vladimir
Putin has helped keep the trans-Atlantic focus on life
support. Beyond this, however, the purported starting
point claim has a number of problems. The rst is that
it presumes that during the Cold War US governments
had a singular focus on Europe. This was by no means
the case: from the Korean War and through the Viet-
nam War and down to the various conicts in Central
America, the Caribbean, and Africa in the 1970s and
1980s, the Cold War tended to go hot in places at
some distance from Europe. The US alliances with Japan
and South Korea suggest that China has long loomed
large in US foreign and military policy.
There is also an idealization of a supposedly united
trans-Atlantic world suddenly challenged by a rift as
the US gaze moves elsewhere. Even before the Bush
Administration essentially abandoned any sort of mul-
tilateral geopolitical strategy based in the North Atlan-
tic Alliance in relation to global terrorist networks, the
trans-Atlantic alliance had taken on a mythic quality.
Not only had France long ago gone its own way, but the
Cruise-missile siting crisis of the 1980s and the process
of extending NATO membership to former Soviet/Rus-
sian allies in the 1990s had opened up serious seams
in the alliance. Rhetorically healed by Barack Obama
in 2008, many of these seams have long been well be-
yond substantive repair.
Finally, the end of the Cold War encouraged a triumphal
attitude in Washington towards hitherto valued allies. If
the allies put down the Soviet collapse to the exhaustion
of the Soviet political-economic model, in the US it was
seen as a victory for its model. Pronouncements about
a New World Order based on a Unipolar World
reected this sense of a completely new global regime.
Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, not only did
this lead to increased tension between the US and its Eu-
ropean allies but also to a US foreign policy increasingly
driven by domestic political concerns. These related to,
among other places, Israel, India, and Cuba, and to is-
sues such as loss of manufacturing industry, immigration,
oil supplies, human rights, and elections, rather than to
any overriding geopolitical strategy. A patchwork quilt of
distinctive foreign policies towards different parts of the
world became the effective leitmotif of the New World
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JOHN AGNEW | IS US SECURITY POLICY PIVOTING FROM THE ATLANTIC TO ASIA-PACIFIC?
Order. Absent the Soviet threat, foreign allies could drift
away, and domestic politics could no longer be as readily
contained by a common fear of an ideological foe.

The idea of a stable trans-Atlantic focus to US foreign
policy before a recent tilt to Asia-Pacic, therefore, is se-
riously misleading.
3. The Supposed Pivot to Asia-Pacic
Following on from speeches by President Obama and
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (2011), the latter pro-
vided a substantive written argument for a reorientation
of US foreign policy away from Iraq and Afghanistan
towards Asia-Pacic. Europe appears substantively only
three paragraphs from the end where it is referred to as
vitally important, home to most of our allies, part-
ner of rst resort, and so on. Yet, the article is titled
Americas Pacic Century, so a cursory review or skim
could give the impression of a dramatic turning point.
Perhaps the crux of the article in the present context lies
about one-third of the way in where Secretary Clinton
writes: By virtue of our unique geography, the United
States is both an Atlantic and a Pacic power. We are
proud of our European partnerships and all that they de-
liver. Our challenge is to build a web of partnerships and
institutions across the Pacic that is as durable and as
consistent with American interests and values as the web
we have built across the Atlantic. That is the touchstone
of our efforts in all these areas.
The proposal, then, is to give some geopolitical shape
to US foreign policy beyond the global war on terror
of the Bush years and the previous counterpunching
approach of an Obama Administration facing down the
worst global economic crisis since the 1930s. Interest-
ingly, China is not singled out for much particular at-
tention. Indeed, the tone of the piece requires China to
be included along with other Asian countries in broad
statements such as, with respect to Asia-Pacic, It is
home to several of our key allies and emerging powers
like China, India, and Indonesia and One of the most
prominent of our emerging partners is, of course, Chi-
na. At the same time, the article emphasizes the role
of existing alliances with Japan, Australia, and other
countries: They have underwritten regional peace and
security for more than half a century, shaping the envi-
ronment for the regions remarkable economic ascent.
They leverage our regional presence and enhance our
regional leadership at a time of evolving security chal-
lenges.
In her rst sentence, however, Secretary Clinton does use
the term pivot point to describe the winding down
of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the need to pay
renewed attention to Asia-Pacic. Much of the commen-
tary misses this fairly specic use of the term pivot
without any reference to Europe or the Atlantic world.
Furthermore, commentators also gave Secretary Clin-
tons argument (and the supposed geopolitical reorien-
tation behind it) an emphasis, at least on my reading,
that it lacks: that Asia-Pacic is really code for China and
that this focus on China involves reinforcing existing re-
gional alliances to contain China.
Since writing the article, Secretary Clinton has seem-
ingly been more oriented towards China than the article
would lead one to expect. Her trips to Chinas neighbor-
ing countries and to Africa in summer 2012 have result-
ed in speeches that have been much more critical of Chi-
nese economic and foreign policies than the pivoting
speeches and the article examined previously ever were.
Arguably, this reects the electoral cycle in the US and
the presumed role of Chinas economic development in
US economic decline. But does it speak to a fundamental
geopolitical reorientation of US security policy?
Two pieces of evidence can be used to give this interpre-
tation. One is the increasingly combative tone towards
China in US domestic politics. The 2012 Republican Party
presidential primaries, for example, were lled with Chi-
na bashing. From this viewpoint, China is, among other
things, a currency manipulator, a thief of intellec-
tual property, a source of cyber-terrorism, and guilty
of predatory pricing. Candidates promise all sorts of
retribution if elected. Not surprisingly, this affects the
entire tone of US politics towards China. The second
is the Pentagons new (or sort of new) AirSea Battle
strategy towards Asia, geared specically to denying
huge swaths of ocean to potential adversaries. China is
nowhere named in the documents associated with this
plan. The plans naming, of course, brings to mind the
famous 1980s US predecessor plan for Europe: AirLand
Battle, intended to meet Soviet forces if they invaded
Western Europe. It is simple extrapolation to see this as
one plan replacing the other after the Iraq-Afghanistan
interlude.
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JOHN AGNEW | IS US SECURITY POLICY PIVOTING FROM THE ATLANTIC TO ASIA-PACIFIC?
Three points indicative of a less dramatic interpretation
need to be borne in mind. The rst is that hyperbole
has long characterized the American view of China in
both positive and negative registers. The volume of such
hyperbole increases at election time to distract attention
from the role of US capital and multinational businesses
in hollowing out the US economy and priming the pump
of Chinese export-led economic growth. In the nine-
teenth century, China was seen as a frontier for US
missionaries and businesses because no single European
power had conquered it. Films like Oil for the Lamps
of China in the early 1930s presented China as a huge
potential market for US goods. When China was lost
to Communism in 1949, there was hell to pay for those
Americans who had betrayed its destiny. So, more re-
cently the pendulum has swung the other way because
instead of being a dependent or supplicant, China has
become a major supplier of consumer goods to the
United States and creditor for the US government. This
strategy helps to identify a foreign entity against which
to articulate Americas continuing difference and ex-
ceptional identity.
The second point is that the US has done little to shift
around its military assets. So far at least there has been
no reorientation of military forces towards AirSea Bat-
tle. This reects the fact that in real terms China is still
a relatively minor sea power compared to the US. It also
is revealing of the fact that the US has long had China
contained militarily though its alliances from Japan and
South Korea to the north, and to Thailand and the Philip-
pines in the south. From this perspective, AirSea Battle
is a paper formalization of a fait accompli.
Third, and nally, the Chinese government is not the sin-
gular actor that so much of the discourse about pivot-
ing alleges. A plurality of visions and articulations of
foreign policy are at work in China as in the US and else-
where. Secretary Clintons original formulation implicitly
captures this point. Apart from the question of Taiwans
status, Chinese governments have never ofcially identi-
ed any specic foreign policy orientation other than ba-
nally safeguarding the interests of sovereignty, security,
and development. There is certainly no Chinese Grand
Strategy in evidence beyond a single-minded focus on
national economic development. In a recent 2012 arti-
cle, I argue that at least four distinct narratives are in
competition among Chinese elites: the Pacic Rim, the
Orientalist, the nationalist geopolitik, and international
relations with Chinese characteristics. The focus on the
three goals of sovereignty, security, and development is
precisely the interest that Secretary Clinton identies
as potentially mutual rather than competitive between
the US and China. Within China today a number of nar-
ratives drawing on Chinese historical experience could
serve as potential templates for a coherent foreign
policy but none of these, save perhaps the Orientalist
one which emphasizes Chinas victimization and humili-
ation at the hands of foreigners in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, currently has much ofcial or
popular resonance. This privileges defense of territorial
sovereignty and the integrity of Chinas borders, essen-
tially defensive orientations, over anything particularly
expansive.
4. Blind Spots
The appeal of totalistic turning points has not dissipated.
Just as the English geographer Halford Mackinder in
1905 saw the coming of the railway as totally upending
the Columbian Age in which naval power had allowed
European empires to subjugate the rim of Eurasia, so to-
day with the seemingly irreversible and unending rise
of China within the world economy, the relatively mod-
est proposal of the Obama Administration to provide a
better shape to a foreign policy has been interpreted
as signaling a much more profound reorientation of US
foreign policy. Secretary Clintons most recent speeches
have tended to reinforce this over-identication of Asia-Pa-
cic with China, when restating the original formulation
and clarifying the continuities in US policy would have
served to communicate better with both domestic and
foreign constituencies.
The economic and cultural instability of the global
present encourages a burgeoning community of geopo-
litical seers. Since the end of the Cold War there has been
no single geopolitical template that assigns meaning to
world politics. Allied to the effects of globalization and
the revolution of rising expectations around the world
this has led to the search for new geopolitical struc-
tures to give meaning and direct policies. That these
are often based on slim empirical evidence and simple-
minded interpretations is no bar to their proliferation.
The world is a much messier and more complex place
than the available frameworks tend to presume.
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JOHN AGNEW | IS US SECURITY POLICY PIVOTING FROM THE ATLANTIC TO ASIA-PACIFIC?
The idea that world politics is driven by Great Powers and
all other actors are only their pawns needs challenging.
The narrow focus on the bilateral relationship between
China and the US in the pivoting narrative removes all
of the other actors, such as Chinas neighboring states
and global organizations, alliances, regulatory agen-
cies, and businesses, from the story about Asia-Pacic
in relation to world politics as a whole. Banks operat-
ing between China and the US, for example, play an
important role in political as well as economic relations.
Increasingly, small states such as North Korea seem to
drive policy responses from other actors, including Great
Powers, rather than vice versa.

The term Asia-Pacic lends itself to the refocus around
bilateral relationships such as the US-China one be-
cause it is not readily dened in a coherent theoretical
manner except for linking the US to Asia. One of the
weaknesses of the term Pacic Rim, popular in the
1990s, was a similar vacuity. It at least had the virtue of
embedding China into its immediate geopolitical milieu
and emphasized the importance of Chinese diasporas in
Chinese politics. The term Asia-Pacic seems to serve pri-
marily to anchor the United States in Asia by using the
trans-Pacic connection in a manner similar to how the
trans-Atlantic links the US to Europe. Asia-Pacic is not a
term with much academic tradition behind it. It seems to
derive from usage in APEC (Asia-Pacic Economic Com-
munity) and the US Pacic Commands usage in the title
of its center for security studies in Honolulu.
The seemingly sudden explosion of China as an emerg-
ing Great Power runs up against the historic tendency
in the US (and in Europe) to see China (and Asia in gen-
eral) as eternally backward and quintessentially despotic.
These cultural images need serious revision. Although
hyperbole about opening up China was a powerful
refrain beginning in late-nineteenth century America,
negative cultural stereotypes have long characterized
China as static, backward, or immobile. The incredible
rapid growth of China since the 1980s contradicts the
cultural explanations of economic growth favored by
Americans, particularly given that the state has played
such a key role. This contrasts with the popular US view,
not necessarily very accurate, that economies grow best
when left to the magic of the marketplace. Parallel-
ing the static image of Chinese economy and society has
been its strong association with the political tradition of
oriental despotism. The image of China as governed
by a succession of despotic regimes without internal dis-
agreements still operates powerfully within Washington
and in other Western capitals. Notwithstanding the au-
tocratic imperatives of the current and previous regimes,
however, they have always run up against factionalism,
power struggles and competing narratives about the
best direction for the country. Foreign geopolitical posi-
tions based on a totalitarian conception of the Chinese
state completely miss the fact that different government
agencies and political factions within China often take
distinctively different viewpoints about such issues as
territorial disputes, UN votes, and economic decisions.
Outcomes are not always very predictable.
5. Conclusions and Recommendations
The idea of a pivoting of US foreign policy from the
trans-Atlantic to the Asia-Pacic over the past few
years makes no sense. I have deconstructed the two
main elements in the argument: an overstatement of
a formerly dominant trans-Atlantic axis to US foreign
policy added to a substantial narrowing of the Obama
Administrations reshaping of US foreign policy around
the bilateral China-US relationship. I compare this to
the clean break geopolitical hyperbole characteristic
of the early twentieth century. But there are a series
of other blind spots that mar the pivoting narrative.
These reect the search for meaning and insight at a
time of global instability, the diminution of the role of
actors other than putative Great Powers, and the dif-
culty of tting China in particular, and Asia in gen-
eral, into a cultural matrix that has always seen them
as backward and despotic compared to an enlightened
and developed West.
From this viewpoint, there are a number of immediate
implications for how better to think about current US
security policy, particularly in relation to China and Asia.
The rst is to recognize that the US government is not
alone in the world as an exceptional actor but is faced
with a complex array of other actors with overlapping
identities and interests. Second, the world is in a period
of change in which military and economic power simply
do not overlap in the ways they once did, and the world
is less territorially organized, particularly in nancial and
cultural respects, than at any time since the eighteenth
century. Proponents of seeing the world as increasing-
ly organized around a world-city system tap into this
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JOHN AGNEW | IS US SECURITY POLICY PIVOTING FROM THE ATLANTIC TO ASIA-PACIFIC?
conception of the contemporary world. Third, foreign
policy rhetoric is increasingly hostage to domestic po-
litical considerations. Fourth, foreign policy making
around the world is increasingly labile because of the
range of actors now involved and the scope of the is-
sues addressed. Security discourse is no longer conned
to moving aircraft carriers and setting out war plans.
Economic and nancial concerns can no longer simply
be dismissed as secondary. Fifth, and nally, we need to
put behind us the geopolitical imagination that divides
the world into civilized and barbarian, backward and
modern. These designations were always more ideolog-
ical than empirical. They are now positively misleading
and dangerous whether expressed by US, Chinese or
any other governments.
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JOHN AGNEW | IS US SECURITY POLICY PIVOTING FROM THE ATLANTIC TO ASIA-PACIFIC?
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Sources
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About the author
John Agnew is Professor of Geography at the University of
California, Los Angeles. He is best known for his central role
in the re-invention of geopolitics from a critical perspective.
Challenging classical notions of geopolitics, he has written wi-
dely on how the views of international actors on place, borders
and territory and the relationship of those concepts to politi-
cal power can help in understanding trends in world politics.
Amongst his most known books are Mastering Space (with S.
Corbridge, 1995) and Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World Politics
(2003). In 2004, he won the Guggenheim Fellowship for his
work.
The views expressed in this publication are not necessarily tho-
se of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.
This publication is printed on paper from sustainable forestry.
ISBN 978-3-86498-258-3
Global Policy and Development
The department Global Policy and Development of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung fosters dialogue between North and South an-
dpromotes public and political debate on international issues in Germany and Europe. In providing a platform for discussion
andconsultation we aim at raising awareness of global interdependencies, developing scenarios for future trends and formulating
policyrecommendations. This publication is part of the working line Global Peace and Security Policy. Contact: Marius Mller-Hennig,
Marius.Mueller-Hennig@fes.de.
Dialogue on Globalization
Dialogue on Globalization contributes to the international debate on globalization through conferences, workshops and publica-
tions as part of the international work of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES). Dialogue on Globalization is based on the premise
thatglobalization can be shaped into a direction that promotes peace, democracy and social justice. Dialogue on Globalization
addressesmovers and shakers both in the global South and in the global North, i. e. politicians, trade unionists, government
ofcials, businesspeople and journalists as well as representatives from NGOs, international organizations, and academia. Dialogue
on Globalization iscoordinated by the head ofce of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Berlin and by the FES ofces in New York and
Geneva. The programmeintensively draws on the international network of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung with ofces, programmes and
partners in more than100 countries. Read more at http://www.fes-globalization.org.