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American Security Discourse: The Persistence of Geopolitics

Article  in  Political Geography Quarterly · April 1990

DOI: 10.1016/0260-9827(90)90017-5

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POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY QUARTERLY, Vol. 9, No. 2, April 1990, 171-188

American security discourse:

the persistence of geopolitics

SIMON DALBY

Department o fGeopaphy, Vancouver Community College, 100 W. 49th Ave.,

Vancouver, BC VJY 226, Canada

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the relationship between geopolitics and security
in post Second World War American political discourse. Geopolitics is one of four
security discourses (the others being sovietology, strategy and the realist approach
in international relations) which American ‘security intellectuals’ have drawn on
in constructing the ‘Soviet threat’. America’s predominant ‘Other’ in the last
four decades. The ‘Soviet threat’ is the rationale used in the US foreign policy of
containment militarism designed ultimately to ensure US national security. Using
a formulation of geopolitics in terms of discourse this paper widens the con-
ventional understanding of geopolitics to show how geopolitical conceptions
operate ideologically. Focusing on the practices of the discourses of security shows
that a broader understanding of geopolitics in terms of discourse reveals a per-
sistence of geopolitical thinking in US discussions of security. A final section
briefly suggests how the concept of security can be reformulated and outlines the
role of a critical geopolitics in revealing how geopolitical discourse operates.

Security and geopolitics

In contemporary international political discourse the maintenance of ‘national security’ is

usually the highest stated value of the apparatus of state. The concept of security is widely
prevalent in policy discussions and in academic writings in particular in American inter-
national-relations theory and strategic studies. Despite, or perhaps because of this, the
concept is rarely subjected to the detailed scrutiny it clearly warrants. Buzan’s (1983.
1984) ambitious attempt to reformulate international relations theory in terms of security
leads ultimately more to a recognition of the difficulties with the concept. rather than to its
theoretical refurbishment. The frequency with which the term is now qualified to ‘common
security’ or ‘mutual security’ shows that the current formulations of the concept are very
limited in terms of their potential for providing the possibility of a stable or just world-order.
The critical literature suggests that as a concept it is essentially empty (Walker, 1988a), or
defined in negative terms (Paggi and Pinzauti, 1985).
Despite the salience of the term security in discussions of international politics few
political geographers have so far investigated its formulation. This paper is a preliminary
contribution to this theme, starting the process by critically analysing the link between
security and geopolitics. More specifically this paper investigates American security

0260-9827190102 0171-18 0 1990 Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd

172 American security discourse a~~ge~~o~i~~cs

discourse since the Second World War in terms of geopolitics, a word that is back in vogue in
US policy-making circles after a long silence (Zoppo and Zorgbibe, 1985; Brzezinski. 1986;
Gray, 1988). The argument suggests that, although they are often not discussed as such,
geopolitical themes are essential to the formulation of American ‘national security’ and in
particular to its cold-war policy of military containment of the Soviet Union.
While geopolitics is a term understood and used in many senses and contexts. three of its
traditional themes are im~rtant to this discussion. First is the general sense of the term
which refers to the relationship of power to the control of territory. Second is the traditional
focus on the importance of the arrangements of the continents to matters of global power
(Mackinder, 1904, 1919, 1943; Spykman, 1942, 1944; Parker, 1985). Third is the use
of the term to refer to the process of superpower rivalry. This paper argues that American
foreign policy draws on the first two themes to formulate its strategies for the conduct of the
(geopolitical) rivalry with the Soviet Union. But geopolitics is about more than these
themes. The policy of containment, at least in its overtly militarized versions has had
explicitly spatial pre~cupations ever since its initial clear formulation in the April 1950
secret National Security Council document, Report by the Secretaries of State and Dejknce
on United States Obljectives and Progmmsfor NationalSecurity (NSC 68). The spatial pre-
occupation was also clearly present in US war-plans during the first cold-war period (Cave-
Brown, 1978).
This theme of spatial protection has often related to attempts to render the US invulner-
able to external threats (Chace and Carr, 1988). Since the Second World War this has
usually meant invulnerable to ‘the Soviet threat’, an invulnerability sought by containment
and military power. The formulation of US security policy in terms of containment and
deterrence of the Soviet threat in the late 1940s and in particular in the early 1950s during
the Korean war in military terms, is appropriately termed ‘containment militarism’ by
Sanders (1983). The term is used in this paper because it accurately encompasses both the
geopolitical dimensions of geographical encirclement, as well as the use of military alliances.
bases. and the continuous US military mobilization which marked the following two decades
of US security policy.
The American understanding of security is connected to a whole constei~ation of cultural
and political concerns relating to perceived threats to the US ~litical~~~~~~q~u; containment
was also a domestic US political and cultural policy containing internal moral decay (May,
1988). This was linked to the subversion theme, most obvious in McCarthyism, where the
boundaries of acceptable American political and cultural behaviour were defined against the
unacceptable behaviour of the subversive (interior to the United States) activities of
communists. But these were in turn related to the external communist menace in the form
of the Soviet Union (Miliband et al., 1984). Geopolitics is thus also about stifling domestic
dissent: the presence of external threats provides the justification for limiting political
activity within the bounds of the state. The creation of the external threat is also used to
justify militarization and the expansion of the ambit of secret government justified in terms
of espionage and the need to protect state secrets.
Rather than following the traditional approach to the history of ideas that tries to trace the
direct lineage of geopolitical texts to formulations of containment (Hepple, 1986; Blouet,
1987). this paper argues that by focusing on the discursive practices of geopolitics (Agnew
and O’Tuathail, 1987; Ashley, 1987), the often overlooked significance of geopolitical
reasoning to containment militarism can be shown. It investigates the geopolitical practices
of security discourse and the American policy of containment militarism, in terms of the
construction of security in spatial terms as well as in terms of their use of classical geo-
political themes. In doing this it draws attention to the frequent ideological operation of
 SIMONDALEXY 173

foreign policy as a process of, in Shapiro’s (1988) terms, ‘making foreign’; creating exotic
‘Others’ and disciplining domestic ‘selves’. Geopolitics is about this ideological process of
constructing spatial, political and cultural boundaries to demarcate the domestic space as
separate from the threatening Other: to exclude Otherness and simultaneously to discipline
and control the domestic political sphere (Ashley, 1987).
In American political discourse this ‘security as spatial exclusion’ theme, loosely a ‘dis-
sociative’ security strategy in O’Loughlin and van der Wusten’s (1986) terms, is
complicated by the presence of numerous ‘associative’ strategies, in particular by notions of
detente, peaceful co-existence and arms-control which run through discussions of national
security and US foreign policy. The political nuances of policy pronouncements mean that
formulations vary in emphasis with both time and context, and usually in relation to the
fluctuation of the perceptions of the Soviet threat (Wolfe, 1984). Policy discussions are also
complicated by their repeated invocation of the theme of American ‘moral exceptionalism’
(Agnew, 1983) to justify foreign interventions, claiming that the US operates on idealistic
principles rather than in power-political terms.
This paper argues that through all the conflicting policy positions and competing
interpretive frameworks a geopolitical understanding of US national security repeatedly
recurs. This geopolitical theme is related most closely to explicitly military formulations of
foreign policy and national security. This paper does not offer a comprehensive history of
this theme (see Walters, 1974; Parker, 1985; Zoppo and Zorgbibe, 1985; Trofimenko,
1986; Sloan. 1988), but argues that the spatial preoccupation is revealing both in under-
standing the ideological dimensions of US security discourse, and in suggesting themes par-
ticularly pertinent to investigation by political geographers. It concludes with some
comments on the possibilities of rethinking the theme of security and the potential for
further contributions by a critical geopolitics.

American hegemony ...

At the end of the Second World War the US military, economic and political capabilities
were globally pre-eminent. Much of the rest of the world lay devastated; industrial pro-
duction was seriously disrupted by wartime requirements, where not destroyed by military
action. The political arrangements of the pre-war era were outdated by the emergence of
Soviet and American military power. Major tasks of reconstruction had to be faced world-
wide, and new political arrangements devised under the shadow of the American possession
of the atomic bomb.
Within the US itself numerous adjustments were made in defence postures and the
bureaucratic administration of foreign policy was revamped as part of the demobilization
process. Despite detailed planning during the war by the Council on Foreign Relations, in
conjunction with the State Department (Shoup and Minter, 1977). there was no clear
consensus on what role the US was to play in the post-war world, and how the economic
system was to be reconstructed. Some supporters of isolationist policies were reluctant for
the US to play an active international role, but the Atlanticist and internationalist positions
won out (Nathanson, 1988); US capital and military power dominated the post-war world.
With this reorganization came the emergence of the ‘National Security State’, a permanent
militarization of politics justified in terms of the protection of national ‘security’ (Yergin,
1977).
The overall direction of American foreign policy crystallized out of these debates around
the two key themes of Atlanticism and containment. Atlanticism refers to the global
economic system built by the US and its multinational corporations in alliance with Western
174 American security discorrrseu~~~eo~o~itics

hope, which asserted the supremacy of the Euro-American political, cultural and
economic arrangements, loosely the political economy of liberal capitalism, through the
Bretton-Woods arrangements, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the
various agencies of the United Nations (Klein, 1986). One aspect of this involved extensive
intervention in what became known as ‘the Third World’ to promote ‘development’ or
‘modernization’. This was nearly universally accompanied by ‘security assistance’, and the
construction of alliance systems such as CENT0 and SEATO designed to incorporate the
military structures of Third-World states into some form of alliance with the US in their self-
proclaimed global political and military campaign to ‘contain’ the USSR and more generally
‘communism’ within the geographical boundaries that demarcated the ‘Second World”.
NATO and the other military alliances were to provide the military power to ‘deter’ any
aggressor from upsetting the smooth functioning of Atlanticism or the ‘western system’ of
international capitalism. Deterring aggressors requires, so the logic of nuclear strategy says,
a convincing military capability to either destroy the aggressor’s invading forces or, at least,
do damage dispropo~~onate to any possible gains that the aggressor might hope to achieve as
a result of military action. Thus security is gained by deterrence, which requires perpetual
military preparedness, and the ever-present political will to counter the external antagonist,
in this case the Soviet Union and its ‘satellites’, with all means up to and including global
nuclear war. But what has often tended to get lost in subsequent discussion of nuclear war is
that what was being deterred in these formulations is any spatial expansion of the Soviet area
of inff uence, be it by military conquest or by indigenous revolutionary developments; which
were almost invariably viewed from Washington as Soviet-inspired (Landau, 1988).

. . . and security discourse

The US accession to global hegemony required a reconceptualization of the US role on the

world-stage. It required a political re-orientation away from pre-war isolation and in favour
of global intervention. and the combined formulation of a series of new political discourses
which provided ways of structuring the debates concerning the US role (Nathanson, 1988).
The cold-war period produced many experts on these matters termed, ‘security intel-
lectuals’ in Luckham’s (1984) apt phrase, in various fields. zany of these people were
involved in consulting and research for military agencies, the air force’s RAND corporation
being only the most famous of the new institutions. In the public realm these experts often
dominated, or attempted to dominate, public debate using their supposedly superior expert,
and often classified, knowledge to specify the ‘issues’ in ways that maintained the militarist
themes of containment, and nuclear deterrence of the Soviet threat. Their discourses inter-
linked to portray the world as a dangerous military competition in which nuclear weapons
were essential to the protection of US national security.
As understood in the contemporary post-modem social theory and as used here,
discourses are more than simply systematic ways of speaking or knowing the world. They
are linked to specific claims to speak legitimately or correctly about the world. They act to
exclude other ways of thinking and specifying the world. Discourses also create and then
specify the relationship of the speaker to the object of knowledge, the external ‘Other’ of the
discourse, and in the process, delegitimize other forms of this relationship. As such
discourses are political resources which can be mobilized and used to justify particular
political arrangements in the world. Particular discursive practices can transcend single
disciplines and operate in a multiplicity of contexts, without their origins necessarily being
clear.
In particular four more or less discrete, but often interconnected and mutually supporting
 SIMON DALBY 175

academic ‘security discourses’ have dominated much of the policy debate on ‘national
security’ and the ‘Soviet threat’ since the early 1950s (Dalby, 1988). These discourses of
‘strategy’, ‘sovietoloty’, ‘realism’ and ‘geopolitics’ were mobilized to describe, explain
and legitimate the doctrines of ‘containment’, ‘ deterrence’ and the provision of ‘national
security’ around the portrayal of the Soviet Union as a dangerous antagonistic Other. The
discourses of sovietology, nuclear strategy and a ‘realist’ approach to international relations,
were mobilized within an often implicit geopolitical framework to create the categories of
security which dominate political discourse within the ‘western system’.
Realism, with its prime focus on the importance of power and war-making capabilities in
international politics, dominated discussions of international relations in the post-war
period; its key theme of interest understood in terms of power is omnipresent in post-war
political discourse. As Ashley (1987) has argued, the realist discourse also acted to limit the
possibilities for critical political intervention precisely by its definitions of community and
anarchy; by how it specified the realm of power. Interests are intimately related to security,
understood in the sense of preventing a potential adversary invading one’s territorially-
understood space, which in turn relates to physical protection and political alliances at, in
the American case, the global scale. The emergence of this security regime simultaneously
involved the expansion of the arena of state security to the level of alliance security, and the
expansion of the understanding of security in terms of the technological military control of
precisely demarcated areas of territorial space.
This enlargement of the importance of military considerations is clear in the emergence
of a distinctive nuclear strategic discourse which specified the superpower contest in terms of
nuclear coercion and the policy of deterring an aggressive totalitarian Soviet Union. The
complex, and at times, arcane discussions of this discourse, premised their analysis on the
eternal enmity of the two systems. They supplemented these assumptions with a series of
worst-case analyses, where it is always assumed that the other side will do their worst. This
form of analysis coupled to the widespread popular fear and awe of nuclear weapons
supported the continued rapid expansion of nuclear weapons and their ‘delivery systems’.
The scenarios for the possible use of these weapons in warfare drew on the abstract calcula-
tions of game theory much more than detailed socio-political analysis (Freedman, 1983;
Kaplan, 1983; Herken, 1987; Kaku and Axelrod, 1987).
Such input as was sought concerning the make-up of the Soviet enemy was drawn from
the literature of the then-emergent field of sovietology. The methodological consensus of
this discourse theorized the Soviet Union as unchanging, driven by internal geopolitical
factors as well as the expansionist logic of totalitarianism to expand and hence to threaten US
interests around the globe (Cohen, 1985). The totalitarian assumption that the polity was
completely dominated by the central-party elite, whose ultimate goal was global domination
precluded the possibility of serious or long-term co-operation between the superpowers
(Griffiths, 1985). It also reinforced the realist theme of states struggling for domination in an
international anarchy.
These discourses usually involved understandings of political power in spatial terms. As
Sloan (1988) notes, American security discussions are full of ‘lines’, ‘points’, ‘dominos’
and ‘security complexes’, within an implicit division of political space into territorially
demarcated states. These states in turn are strategically important because of their location
in terms of geopolitics. The presence of geopolitics here is clear; the geographical occupation
of the MacKinderian heartland and the potential Soviet domination of the Eurasian land-
mass are persistent themes of American security discourse, even if the term geopolitics is
rarely mentioned. Foreign policy was structured through an implicit geopolitical under-
standing of global events in which the motive force is the bilateral competition of the USSR
176 American security discourse and geopolitics

and the ‘free world’ led by the US. This competition, and with it deterrence as the key to
Western survival, necessitates a global militarization to contain the expansion of the totali-
tarian sphere led by the USSR. AI1 the principal aspects of the US post-war pohtical discourse
on the Soviet ‘threat’ are present here. In combination they acted to limit the fields of
discourse, asking ultimately ‘but what about the Russians?’ to close off potentially challeng-
ing political discussions.
But, as noted above, the ascendence of the containment militarist position was not uncon-
tested, it was a deliberate political creation in the Truman administrations. In subsequent
decades it has been challenged; in particular in the early 1970s its premises were seriously
questioned. This process in turn led to the formation of groups like the Committee on the
Present Danger to reassert the containment militarist position (Sanders, 1983). By 1987
this position was once again slipping as arms-control and superpower summits dominated
the potiticai agenda, and as some of the most ardent containment militarist advocates left the
Reagan administration. But the power of these security discourses should not be under-
estimated. Their practices have shaped the formulation of US foreign and defence policy for
nearly four decades.

American geopolitics

These security discourses are geopolitical in the sense that they all understand security as a
negative process of the spatiai exclusion of threats. Further, classical geopolitics with its
concern over control of the Eurasian heartland, is also present in these discourses, but the
term geopolitics, and direct references to Mackinder and Spykman are usually missing.
Thus the geopolitical dimension is often not clearly rendered as such in the security
discourses of containment militarism, although the major military textbook on strategy of
the time (Earle, 1944) is replete with geo~litica~ themes.

Geopolitical discourse

There are a number of pertinent points here in explaining the apparent silence of geopolitics
and its eclipse by realism. The term geopolitics was tainted by the association with Nazism,
and Haushofer in particular. Hence there was, and still is, some reluctance to use it. Geo-
politics is also associated with the cruder forms of realpolitik, and balance-of-power politics
which were blamed for the repeated European wars into which the US became embroiled
(Kristof, 1960). In addition the territorial control focus, central to the geopobtical
conception of power in spatial terms, is reminiscent of imperial policies which the idealist
and moral exceptionalist tendencies in the US foreign-policy discourse denigrated (Agnew,
1983). Explicitly talking of post-war politics in terms of geopolitics was thus, at least in the
early Truman years, potentially politically risky. Subsequently, as Chomsky’s (1982)
trenchant critiques reveal, in many cases the language of US moral exceptionalism has been
used to justify US interventions in the Third World against what are portrayed as the real-
politik machinations of the Soviet Union. Political idealism is often used as an ideological
gloss on the power-politics calculations of the realists.
Within the discipline of geography, concern with geopohtics declined for these reasons
and in addition because of the competing attractions of new quantitative preoccupations.
Also, the worst excesses of US wartime geopoliticians discouraged scholars from exploring
the field in ways that would link them to the literature ofgeopoiitik (Kristof, 1960). The
taints of determinism were also suspect in this period. But as Walters (1974), Deudney
(1983), Parker (1985), Trofimenko (1986) and Sloan (1988) make clear, the geopolitical
 SIMON DALBY 177

understanding of international relations remains a powerful influence. It underlies strategy

and sovietology. It shapes the international-relations understanding of the US ‘national
interest’. The doctrine of containment was explicitly formulated in spatial and territorial
terms.
The arguments for containment, drawn from various disciplines and political discourses
understood security as a matter of spatial limitation of other powers. It can be argued that
this resulted from the then recent US experience in its 1941-1945 war against the Axis
powers. The US came to world predominance in this war by military conquest (Ambrose,
1985). The Second World War was marked by the continuous front line and success in
military campaigning was related to the conquest of territory. ‘Liberation’ from the Axis
was a spatial process of the advance of US power, a process given frequent cartographical
support in the popular-press coverage of military actions (Henrickson, 1975). In the process
of cartographically representing military events, whole new regions were created by the
military operations (Emmerson, 1984).
Coupling this understanding of the representation of US power in terms of the control of
territory. with the concerns in the post-war period over the necessity of preventing the possi-
bility of a repeat of a Pearl-Ha&our-type surprise attack, led to the formulation of ‘national
security’ in terms of forward military defence, understood in territorial terms. Thus the
relations of space and power came to be understood in terms of distance providing security.
and influence requiring the military occupation of territory. These were widely taken for
granted as the premises for discussing post-war security matters. It can also be argued that
geopolitics did not lose favour simply because of the taints of Nazism. but rather that its
discursive practices became widespread and so commonly qmderstood, in Gramsci’s terms.
‘hegemonic’. that reference to them in the explicit terms of geopolitics was simply
redundant. Power was understood in terms of the filling of political spaces which are
organized in specific territorial configurations. Hence Gaddis (1982) can discuss contain-
ment in terms of ‘geopolitical codes’. wherein American foreign policy is understood. but
correctly reject assumptions that Mackinder was the direct source of containment ideas. In
Sloan’s (1988) terms, prior to Kissinger’s restatement of American foreign policy explicitly
in geopolitical terms. containment thinking was implicitly geopolitical.
But in addition to understanding security as spatial exclusion, the containment theme has
more distant resonances in the realist concerns with the recurrent theme of the balance of
power in Europe. This theme is important in the rationales provided for American inter-
vention in international affairs. and the debates between the isolationists and the inter-
ventionists that permeate US diplomatic history (Williams, 1959; Agnew and O’Tuathail,
1987). Also involved in this traditional concern of US foreign policy is the idea of a
‘Western Hemisphere’ (Whitaker. 1954). Geographical considerations were important in
the assessment of the threat posed to the US by the rise of fascism in Europe: the argument
for supporting Britain in particular was often related to the spread of fascist influence in Latin
America in the late 1930s and early 1940s (Haglund, 1984). As discussed above, realism
came to dominate many discussions of international relations in the post-war period, and the
key concept of interest understood in terms of power is important in the post-war political
discourse. Interests are intimately related to security, understood in the sense of preventing
the adversary invading one’s territorially-understood space, which in turn relates to
physical protection and political alignments at, in the American case, the global scale. And
at the global scale this involves consideration of matters of classical geopolitics.
178 American security discourse and geopolitics

The discourse o/geopo fitrcs

In 1950 NSC 68. the key document in the initial formuIation of the military variant ot
containment policy, put the threat to US national security in these terms:

On the one hand, the people of the world yearn for relief from the anxiety arising
from the risk of atomic war. On the other hand, any substantial further extension
of the area under the domination of the Kremlin would raise the possibility that no
coalition adequate to confront the Kremlin with greater strength could be
assembled. it is in this context that this republic and its citizens stand in their
deepest peril. (NSC 68 as quoted in Etzold and Gaddis, 1978: 368).

Note that the Kremlin*s power is directly related to area that it ‘dominates’. This reiteration
of Spykman’s and Mackinder’s concerns with the domination of Eurasia by a single power
was to recur repeatedly. Thus in a major statement on the post-war role of the US, Wait
Rostow (1960) defined the term of national interest in an explicit statement of geopolitics. In
it Rostow argues that the US has been in danger since the late eighteenth century because of

. , the simple geographic fact that the combined resources of Eurasia, including
its military potential, have been and remain superior to those of the United States
-Eurasia being here defined to include Asia, the Middle East. and Africa as well
as Europe. The United States must be viewed essentially as a continental island off
the greater land mass of Eurasia. (Rostow, 1960: 543).

There are two threats that Rostow identifies as stemming from these facts of global
geography. First:

Since the combined resources of Eurasia could pose a serious threat of military
defeat to the United States, it is the American interest that no single power or
group of powers hostile or potentially hostile to the United States dominate that
area or a sufficient portion of it to threaten the United States and any coalition the
United States can build and sustain. (Rostow, 1960: 544).
Second, because of modern communications technologies:

Whatever the military situation might be. a Eurasia coalesced under totalitarian
dictatorships would threaten the survivai of democracy both elsewhere and in the
United States. It is, therefore, equally the American interest that the societies of
Eurasia develop along lines broadly consistent with the nation’s own ideology;
for under modern conditions it is difficult to envisage the survival of a democratic
American society as an island in a totalitarian sea. (Rostow, 1960: 544).
This statement reflects the classical geopoliticai concerns of Spykman (1942, 1944) with
global domination based on the supposedly inaccessible heartland of Eurasia, updated to
include the opposition to ‘totalitarian’ communism. Rut the term geopolitics itself does not
appear, it has no need to do so, its premises are understood.
In the 1970s the geopolitical arguments were often disregarded. Kissinger’s geopolitics
had blurred the formu~tion of containment into a US role as a power-balancer in a more
complex global-power scheme. The SALT process in particular, and arms-control in
general, focused political attention on the technical arcana of nuclear-weapons systems
rather than the geopolitical contexts of their potential usage in global confrontation.
Preciseiy because of these shifts in the nuclear discourse, Gray (1977) set about re-
interpretjng the geo~litical context for American military policy. In Gray’s estimation,
Spykman’s modifications of Mackinder’s scheme over-estimated the power of the Rimlands
to resist Heartland power. However,

Iooking at the world of the late 1970s the theories of Mackinder and
Spykman yield a common logic for policy. The United States cannot afford to
 SIMON DALBY 179

tolerate the effective control of Eurasia-Africa by the Soviet Union. It must serve.
in its own vita1 interests, as the functional successor to Great Britain as an active
balancer of power on, and bearing upon, the Rimlands of Eurasia. Such a geo-
political task is as essential as it should-given steadiness of purpose and an appro-
priate popular understanding of that purpose-be successful. (Gray, 1977: 28).

These ideas were to reappear in a number of forms in the literature of the Committee on the
Present Danger in the late 1970s a number of whose members gained important policy-
making posts in the Reagan administration. These geopolitical themes are very persistent; as
O’Tuathail (1988: i) notes the Reagan administration’s January 1988 National Security
Strategy of the United States defines the US situation in very similar terms:

The first historical dimension of our strategy is relatively simple, clear cut, and
immensely sensible. It is the conviction that the United States’ most basic national
security interests would be endangered if a hostile state or group of states were to
dominate the Eurasian landmass-that area of the globe often referred to as the
world’s heartland. We fought two world wars to prevent this from occurring.
And, since 1945. we have sought to prevent the Soviet Union from capitalising
on its geostrategic advantage to dominate its neighbours in Western Europe, Asia
and the Middle East, and thereby fundamentally alter the global balance of power
to our disadvantage.
The implications of these typical passages are clear. The maintenance of US national
security. the highest value of state requires a long-term geopolitical strategy to ensure that
the Soviet Union never dominates what Spykman termed the ‘Rimlands’ of Eurasia. All
policies of international cooperation, arms control etc. are secondary to this objective, and
will be carried out only in so far as they work to secure the geopolitical objectives.

Bipolar worlds

At its simplest the post-war American geopolitical view of the global situation is one of
bipolar competition within which ‘the free world’ attempts to prevent, deter, dissuade the
expansion of the Soviet bloc into the Rimlands of the Eurasian land-mass through its policy
of containment. Thus territorial expansion is the key to the geopolitical viewpoint, control of
the resources and military potential of these areas as well as the potential for hostile ‘bases’ is
the ‘prize’ for which the superpowers are supposedly struggling in these arenas. Crucial in
all this is that the key terms of containment and deterrence are widely understood in spatial
terms. The formulation of the overall plan for the conduct of US foreign policy in NSC 68
advocated a military build-up to forestall the military expansion of the USSR (Wells, 1979).
Containment is a spatial metaphor. and it was understood in those terms in the explicit
formulation of the Truman Doctrine in NSC 68 as well as in the widely-used theme of the
domino theorv.
The domino theory argues that due to political and military pressure, often in the form of
‘subversion’ and guerrilla warfare. states adjacent to existing ‘communist’ states will ‘fall’
to the ‘communists’ unless military intervention on the part of the ‘free world’ occurs to
support ‘democratic’ regimes. The domino theory originated explicitly in the first cold war
and has influenced subsequent political thinking (O’Sullivan, 1982, 1985). It has
influenced most subsequent presidential administrations in the US despite repeated
criticisms which argue that mere proximity is not an adequate indication of the potential for
a domino to ‘fall’. The idea of dominoes is related to the view of an expansionist Soviet
Union. and a totalitarian system which once it has gained control will not relinquish it. It is
usually seen as the mechanism whereby the USSR expands its control without direct
military invasion, although that is always a possibility.
180 American security discourse and geopaiiticJ

The domino theory is a geographically explicit form of geopolitical reasoning. Other

forms include discussions of political will and determination, essential parts of the formula-
tion of deterrence doctrine and the more overt propaganda war that never ceases between
the superpowers. To these the language of ‘geopolitics’ gives a ‘credibility’ by supposedly
providing intellectual justification by appealing to the ‘objective’ (because geographically
established) facts of power politics. But they explain the superpower confrontation in spatial
terms. if ‘they’ gain control over territory. then they become stronger. This is not the place
for yet another summary of the failings of the dcqino theory (see O’Sullivan, 1982). The
crucial point is that security discourse is spatial. The domino theory is just the most expiicit
statement of an overall pattern of thinking that emphasizes security as spatial exclusion.
security involves distance and spatial observation, containment or exclusion of dangerous
Others.
This theme is also related to the attempted maintenance of US economic global
hegemony. ‘The national security eiite never debated whether or not an area (nation state or
states) had to be controlled in order to be suitable for future development: it was assumed’
(Landau. 1988: 95). The legacy of ‘grand area’ planning by the Council for Foreign
Relations during the Second World War (Shoup and Minter, 1977) is clear in the amalgama-
tion of these themes in the geopolitical specification of security and its rationalizations for
military interventions.

Space, security, hegemony

The significance of this persistence of security discourse understood in spatial terms can be
seen in the central concerns of contemporary literature both in American foreign-policy dis-
cussions and in the discipline of international relations. in terms of the relations of security,
hegemony, empire and territorial control. In particular it is clear in discussions of possible
emergent global orders in the wake of the declining US hegemony [Oye, 1983; Cox, 1984;
Keohane, 1984; Goldstein, 1985; Gill, 1986; Caileo. 1987: Kennedy, 1987). Of par-
ticular concern to this theme is the focus OR the factors involved in the decline of a
i~~~emon’s control and the role that the increasing costs of empire play when a l/qgemon
attempts to maintain control over the global system by using territorial strategies. in Gill’s
( 1986) terms, the attempt is to define and then enforce hegemony in realist terms of military
power and direct political control over specific areas.
This argument suggests that attempts by a declining hegemonic power to ensure its
c~~ntinued dominance in global affairs will be made by imposing direct political and military
control over colonies or territories. Thompson and Zuk (I%%) show how this is the case in
terms of the relative decline of British hegemony in the 19th century. While the problems of
leadership in a world where economic innovation may be occurring faster outside the
~~~~mon’s domestic economy, than internally, are more than just matters of imperial costs,
nonetheless these costs are important. In the late 20th century, security understood in terri-
torial terms involves the application of advanced technologies to ‘defend’ that territory.
Many of these high-technology weapons are exorbitantly expensive which aggravates these
economic tendencies.
In terms of the inevitable US decline from its hegemonic position in the post-Second-
World-War world following European and Japanese reconstruction, this is of some signifi-
cance. It is possible to interpret the US fixation on territorial matters and the current re-
interpretation of geopotitics (Brzezinski? 1986; Gray, 19S8). as an ideoiogical statement of
the attempt to re-instate the US hegemony by the classic imperial device of imposing
 SIMONDALBY 181

political control over territorial units, and doing so by means of a military build-up. It is
possible to interpret the early 1980s debate over nuclear modernization and theatre nuclear
missiles in Europe in precisely these terms (Johnstone, 1984). Further it can be argued that
one of the key political challenges to the Green movement in Europe, and particularly in
Germany, has been to unravel the ideological assumptions of Western European complicity
in an American world (Hulsberg, 1988).
However, the economic costs of military build-up, particularly when it involves large
expenditures on technologically sophisticated military hardware, aggravates the long-term
economic difficulties facing the begemon (Kaldor, 1982). Thus the US build-up in armed
forces, advocated by the Reagan administration, which has drained the US economy and
probably reduced its long-term economic competitiveness by diverting capital into military
expenditure, is, in fact, aggravating the long-term security of the US. as well as inflicting
serious economic hardship on the Third World (Kaldor, 1986; Markusen, 1986). Thus the
attempt to re-assert a realist hegemony in military terms, is in the long-run. counter-
productive in that it exhausts the economic resources of the power attempting to maintain a
military hegemony (Kennedy, 1987). Nonetheless, the first Reagan administration
attempted to re-assert American domination in precisely these terms, and repeatedly
provided ideological rationales for doing so in geopolitical terms (McMahan, 1985).
This recurrence of explicitly geopolitical thinking may be a harbinger of attempts to
present the increasingly severe US economic crisis in terms of the other traditional geo-
political theme of access by European powers to colonial resources (Haglund, 1986).
Updated in the context of renewed emphasis on interventionist conventional military forces
like the much-discussed rapid-deployment force, the expansion of the US Navy with new
theories of maritime strategy, the emphasis on low-intensity warfare (Klare and Kornbluh,
1988) and ‘discriminate deterrance’, this may lead to geopolitical theorizing as rationale for
military action in the Third World. The activities of the US Navy in the Persian Gulf in the
late 1980s suggest this tendency, although the dramatic shifts in international politics in
Europe and NATO in the era of glasnost and perestroika, coupled to the growing US-debt
situation, may act to ensure that the Bush administration curtails the attempt to re-assert
hegemony by military means.
In the early 1980s the USSR also seemed to be trapped in a cycle of expanding imperial
costs which were aggravating its internal economic difficulties (Wolf, 1985) as it attempted
to ensure its security through perpetual high military expenditures. The Soviet pre-
occupation with military security as spatial exclusion has shifted in the era of &snost and
perestroika where serious re-thinking of security policies are underway (Evangelista, 1986:
MccGwire, 1987). But in Rosecrance’s (1986) terms, the superpowers are still territorial
states in a world of trading states. The relationship between territory and power is thus not
one in which more territory means more power, as the spatial preoccupation might suggest.
(See also O’Sullivan, 1986).
This argument suggests also the possibility of understanding the geopolitical perspective
as an ideological representation of imperial drives in a period of declining hegemony. The
spatial representation reflects, in addition to the desire for territorial control, an attempt in
psychological terms to corral the usurper, and in so doing to lessen the threat from that
usurper and thus re-assert hegemony. As noted above, Gray (1977) was explicit in stating
that his reiteration of the classical geopolitical themes was necessary precisely because this
perspective was no longer widely accepted as the essential basis of US security thinking.
Thus the ‘silence’ of geopolitics in the period of containment might be understood in the
sense of its discursive practices having a key structuring role rather than it disappearing from
the stage as some histories of political geography suggest (Brunn and Mingst, 1985; Hepple,
182 American security discourse andgeopolitics

1984). From this perspective. focusing on the discourses of security as inherently spatial.
there is n o need to try to trace the details of the lineages of geopolitics from Mackinder to
Kennan, links which cannot be found directly (Blouet, 1987). What is more important is
that in its militarized versions containment was understood as geopolitical. in O’Tuathail’s
( 1988) terms, the foreign policy of the period was replete with exercises in geopolitical ‘geo-
graphing’.
In the classical geopolitical formulation, power was in terms of military control of terri-
tory: autarchy implied invulnerability, although this was complicated by the extensive
communication difficulties of empire (Parker, 1985). The resources for war came from the
territories under one’s control; the more territory the more power. The key to American
geopolitics since NSC 68 has been the prevention of the Soviet domination of Eurasia which
would allow their control over more resources than the Americans could then muster.
Underlying these were the key factors of a complex societal organization on the basis of a
technological mode of the domination of nature, and a series of mutually-exclusive terri-
torially-defined states with absolute sovereignty over that territory.
In the nuclear period the t~hnologization of political control has accelerated the
technical means for asserting centralized state control and developed technologies of
information-gathering with tremendous power (Virilio and Lotringer. 1983; Virilio, 1986).
But simultaneously with this ‘transparency revolution’ in Deudney’s (1983) phrase,
nuclear weapons have shifted the geopolitical situation into a position where the ultimate
levels of this technological force are not utilizable in combat situations: this is the point of
mutual assured destruction, of nuclear weapons as deterrents to their own use. The whole
recent enterprise of nuclear-war-fighting strategies is an attempt to circumvent these restric-
tions (Kaku and Axelrod, 1987). But what is often overlooked in the discussions of new
nuclear-weapons systems is that they are designed for particular geopolitical roles in nuclear-
war fighting and deterrence. Gray’s (1981) lengthy argument of the case for the MX missile
in a multiple-protectiv~shelter-basing arrangement is linked into his discussions of the need
for nuclear superiority to ensure escalation dominance at tactical and theatre levels of
nuclear confrontation. This is necessary, he argues. to allow for US regional interventions in
potential Third-World conflicts.
The most recent proposed addition to the panoply of military technology, which was the
linchpin in Reagan’s ideological argument for securing American hegemony, is the dis-
cussion concerning space-based anti-ballistic missile systems and the Strategic Defence
Initiative (SDI). The formulation of security in terms of spatial exclusion is here once again
linked to the technological solution of political problems. Technology can allow the US to
eliminate the military danger from the Soviet usurper, and hence to re-assert its geopolitical
dominance. Nowhere is the spatial-exclusion formulation of security clearer than in its
formulation of the SD1 as a ‘peace shield’ that would keep out incoming Soviet missiles.
This time the aggressor is kept out by high-technology weapons of mind~gglin~
complexity, but the premise is once again of spatial demarcation as the key to security; the
technological sophistication of the weaponry holds out, once again, the promise of absolute
security-‘America invulnerable’ (Chase and Carr, 1988). In ‘star wars’, power is once
again technologically divorced from practical politics. The ‘rationality’ of these techno-
logicai developments is premised on the specification of the Other as dangerous, as in this
case, ‘the evil empire’.
This metaphysical structuring of the world into ‘Them‘ and ‘Us’, with ‘Us’ as superior,
and ‘Them’ as a permanent threat to that superiority, functions to ensure that militarization
continues. Given the technological innovations in military-equipment capabilities, security
understood as force has bred more insecurity for both the possessor of the technology of
 SIMON DALBY 183

violence, and more directly for its intended victims. These formulations simultaneously act
to incorporate ideologically disparate elements in a common ‘Us’ versus an excluded
‘Other’. They do so by using a series of geopolitical discursive practices, representing
security in terms of absolute technological control over territorially-demarcated sections of
geopolitical space. Others are spatially excluded, to be feared, ostracized, and ultimately
rendered harmless by being reduced to extensions of an imposed identity, being made more
like ‘Us’.
These are powerful ideological moves; they raise questions of how the concept of security
might be re-formulated in ways that shift the emphasis from force, exclusion and geopolitical
boundaries. They also raise questions about how critical geopolitics might counter these
discursive practices. In other words they raise questions of the ‘geopolitics of geopolitical
space’ (Ashley, 1987); and of how the discourses limb possible ways of speaking, writing
and acting re issues of war, peace and security.

Security ...

It is clear that reformulations of security have to involve more than military and geopolitical
concerns. Indeed much of the task of reformulating security is precisely to re-define security
in ways that shift the priority away from a primary concern with military capabilities, and
with the control of territory. In challenging the discourses of security, reformulations have
to argue that there is more to international politics than the realist preoccupation with
military power; there is more to strategy than considerations of nuclear-weapons’ capa-
bilities; the sovietological focus on the Soviet Union as a totalitarian power is a serious
misrepresentation of the political situation in the Soviet Union; geopolitics is about more
than just two superpowers playing zero-sum power-projection games on a relatively empty
territorial chessboard.
Reformulations involve the economic and social existence of people in specific political
circumstances. A critical geopolitics can suggest some lines of reconceptualization of the
theme of security although obviously not any precise blueprint (Stephenson, 1988). To
recognize the multiplicity and diversity of political, economic and cultural situations is to
preclude such a totalizing strategy. The conventional reformulations of security include
three broad themes.
First, security is often reconceptualized in terms of common security or mutual security
(Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, 1982; Kaldor, 1983); in
O’Loughlin and van der Wusten’s (1986) terms ‘associative’ security strategies. Arms-
control and disarmament initiatives are sometimes couched in these terms but it is
important to note that the American geopolitical formulation of national security is often
brought to bear on these discussions. Arms-control proposals are usually justified in terms of
their enhancing the national security in terms of operating to reduce external threats by
reducing the military capabilities of potential opponents. Sometimes security is understood
in terms of mutual vulnerabilities, and the recognition that, in the nuclear age, warfare
threatens all combatant states and not a few potentially neutral states with annihilation.
Hence the necessity to consider security in terms of mutual assured destruction and the
consequent possibilities for detente. Additional recent variations on this theme are
European reformulations of deterrence and national security in terms of non-offensive
defence, shifting military-force composition to emphasize clearly defensive technologies to
render the cost of an attack extremely high to a potential attacker (Alternative Defence
Commission, 1983, 1987; Sharp, 1985).
Second, security can be expanded and re-defined in terms of economic criteria. These
 184 American security discourse and geopolitics

themes are related to the concerns in the international-relations literature with matters of
global interdependence (Barnet, 198 I}. In part this concern entered the policy process in the
1970s in the US in the aftermath of the OPEC oil embargo when the ~~u~nerabiIity of the US
to non-military threats to its economy was clearly realized. Energy and resource-security
policies included enhanced domestic-resource extraction, diversification of offshore
suppliers and stockpiling, and the potentially far more important strategy of conservation
(Lovins and Lovins, l?82). However. the converse of these developments was a series of
new proposals for constructing military forces equipped to intervene in Third-World states
where ‘unfriendly’ regimes were seen to be restricting resource supplies (Haglund. 1986).
Third, and important more recently, in light of scientific discussions of nuolear winter,
greenhouse effects, the dangers of ozone depletion and other global ecological hazards.
American national security has been discussed in terms of redefining its parameters to
incorporate ecological concerns (Mathews, 1989). The links between climatic change.
economic development and environmental degradation are focused on here. Dramatic
climatic fluctuations produce droughts or floods, and other meteorological fluctuations that
hinder agricultural productivity and render economic planning very difficult. These directly
impact on populations that require the food, and indirectly impact on other populations that
may have to deal with refugees or conflicts triggered by these environmental disturbances.
In particular with regard to the poor in the Third-World countries. and Africa in particular.
militarization is directly part of their problem of security.

1 . . and critical geopolitics

Each of these re-formulations broadens the ambit of security but there remains an important
political consideration in deaiing with this Literature on rethinking national security. Each
of these re-formulations is still often constrained by its focus on the state as the agent of
power and policy. The more penetrating political analyses presented by the critical social
movements are potentially a much more interesting approach for critical scholarship
(Walker, 1988b). The critical social movements often focus on the necessity of recon-
ceptualizing security in ways that challenge the role of the state as the provider of security.
Many of the activities of the social movements are directed towards changing the nature of
the state, and at the larger scale challenging the political monopoly of the ‘blocs’ in matters
of ‘security provision’ (Konrad, 1984: Mendlowitz and Walker, 1987; Smith and
Thompson, 1987; Mackay and Thompson, 1988; Melman, 1988).
The military and geopolitical formuIations of security provision are increasingly under-
stood as undermining the security of the people of the states with these military organiza-
tions. In Latin America in particular but also elsewhere the military is often precisely the
organization that directly renders populations insecure. The militarization of politics and the
repeated interventions by military organizations in the political life of states whether in
terms of coups. reigns of terror and disappearances justified in terms of nationa security,
operate to impoverish and terrorize the populations subject to these forms of rule. In Europe
and the United States massive military and ‘intelligence’ institutions justified in terms of
providing protection from the external threat are seen as undermining democratic politics by
their intrusion into domestic politics and their restriction of information, a secrecy anti-
thetical to democratic pohtics (Falk, 1987). Re-defining security thus requires the formula-
tion of the question of security for whom? (Walker, 1988a). Who is the political subject of
this security? Here security is linked to matters of justice and human rights, not to matters
of military control.
Raising these concerns with re-defining security also challenges the political monopoly
 SIMON DALBY 185

held by the ‘security intellectuals’ in matters of defining war and peace, and in particular the
explicit limitation of security to matters of technological and military responses to military
threats. Alternative security strategies assume a reduction of the monopoly over military
matters by a military technological elite and ‘expert’ strategists: ‘The most basic question is
obviously whose security should be guaranteed, and herepeoples and their cultures should
take priority over states and borders. Military threats must, of course, not be forgotten but
relevant issues here are defence by whom and with what methods’ (Hettne, 1988: 192).
Here security is broadened to include the politics of security provision.
These challenges to the geopolitical practices raise the question of alternative discourses
of security, discourses which require a refusal of the negative specification of Otherness.
This involves recognition of the reality of the social existence of other cultures as legitimate
rather than as inferior; an identification that operates in ways other than the coercive
(Todorov, 1984). In other words what is needed is the separation of security from identity.
the recognition of a plurality of cultural realities, each requiring their formulation in their
own spaces (Esteva, 1987). Doing this inevitably challenges the geopolitical creation of
boundaries, the ideological moves that separate ‘Them’ from ‘Us’ and in the process render
‘Them’ a threat to ‘Us’.
Critical geopolitics clearly has a role here to investigate the discursive structures of
security and reveal the ideological formulations of geopolitical discourse (Walker, 1986). By
asking questions such as ‘security for whom ?‘, the structures of power implicit in the con-
ventional formulations of security can be exposed. In doing so space is opened up for critical
geopolitical inquiry that does not presuppose the state as the provider of security. It then
becomes possible to ask critical questions of how geopolitical discourse functions politically
(O’Tuathail, 1988; Dalby, 1989). How do the hegemonic discourses construct their
boundaries and their specifications of political terrain, and hence how are the possibilities for
acting politically defined? Discourses limit what it is possible to talk of and about, the
agendas of research in political geography will in turn limit what it is we talk of and about,
and how we proceed to conduct our research and writing. By starting from a critical recog-
nition of the role of geopolitical discourse, and then exploring the possibilities of alternative
formulations of security with a potential for social transformation, a critical geopolitics can
offer useful critical contributions to the quest for survival, peace and justice.

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