Ira Straus: After the initial Atlantic geopolitics of Mahan and Mackinder, geopolitics was talked about less in the Atlantic than by the Germans and Russians

Ira Straus, Founder and U.S. coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO.

Comment on the article by Andrei Kortunov: The Splendours and Miseries of Geopolitics

'Twas a pity that, after the initial Atlantic geopolitics of Mahan and Mackinder, geopolitics was talked about less in the Atlantic than by the Germans and Russians, where it took on the characteristics you discuss of being too static and eternal. Probably there is too much of that in Mackinder too. What most people didn't realize was that that was not the case of what most Atlantic geopoliticians were saying.

Mahan was about the progressive leavening role of sea power in history, not about eternal fixed conditions. It was presumably the defensive conservative character of German geopolitics that led it to talk as if the differences were eternal, while Mahan talked more about how the seafaring countries were leading the world in its development. Lionel Curtis attributed to Mahan a statement that the role of force is to give time for moral development to do its work, he and Mahan corresponded about this and neither of them could find the quote but Mahan said it was a fair representation of his thinking anyway; the point was that they both believed in Atlantic strategic leadership of the world -- and in its organization on the trans-Atlantic level -- as something that would give time for other countries to develop along increasingly modern or Atlantic lines. This is a perspective that that is opposite to the idea of a static opposition between the Atlantic leaders and the others, it is an idea of an expanding Atlantic space organized on the meta-national level; but something that also is very different from the idea that all countries will immediately become like the Atlantic countries or that the West should try to impose such a hasty modernization on them. The 1991 Fukuyama is close to the latter idea, so is immediate democracy-promotion everywhere, and it is logically opposites in some basic respects to the Atlantic geopolitics of Mahan and Curtis; it telescopes evolution and forgets the roles of leadership and mediation. Fukuyama 1991 is the abandonment of history and of geopolitics, it is the near-immediate assimilation of all countries to Atlantic ways, scrapping the need for Atlantic organization and leadership to play a mediating role in this development. Well, history didn't end that way. I may have been polite in my rejection of Fukuyama in my unipolarity article, but I definitely rejected his view (and I wrote a sharper refutation of it long before I wrote that article). My Atlantic unipolarity is along the central Atlanticist lines of Mahan and Curtis, and Fiske and Streit, not Mackinder or Fukuyama, who are the two opposite extremes. Among today's theorists, Modelski is, in his original work, a continuation of Mahan's line of thought (tho after 1991 he may have veered somewhat under the influence of the seeming vindication of universal democratism and may sound sometimes more like the 1991 Fukuyama than like his old self).

Fiske by the way was the great popularizer of Darwinian evolutionary theory and its application to society and the cosmos. This made it only natural that his Atlanticism would be the opposite of a theory of static eternal differences among countries. Mahan and Streit were both greatly influenced by Fiske. Fiske was part of a trans-Atlantic trend of thinking among Anglo and American elites after the US civil war; Mahan didn't come out of nowhere, he came out of this same trend, and Th. Roosevelt, a great navalist and Atlanticist himself, helped spur Mahan to write his stuff.

In reality it seems pretty obvious that all countries are in some degree trading and seafaring, but all are in primary degree land-based and internally developed. The way Schmitt wrote, as if these are complete and fixed opposite kinds of countries, and as if the Atlantic countries are all about the sea and have no internal stabilized character, was silly. The opposite would be more logical: that the more seafaring countries are better balanced between their primary conservative land-based characteristics and their secondary interchange-oriented sea characteristics, compared to the more purely land-based countries. All societies are fundamentally conservative; seafaring gives the Atlantic societies more of the readiness to change that all countries need more of as technology develops, it plays a leavening role within the fundamental conservatism that our society shares with all other societies, therefore it makes us more stable and continuously developing, compared to the excessively conservative eastern countries, which are more prone to sudden crises of development. Curtis' comrade Lord Lothian made a similar argument about the relatively liberal and adaptive Atlantic societies being more stable than the more purely conservative societies in the fast-changing modern world, but without reference to seafaring. Union of the Atlantic countries, which is the main thing Atlanticism is about, is on balance a mildly conservative corrective trend within the liberal Atlantic world, arguing that the pace of change requires a more consolidated system of regulation of change on the international level, therefore it required dynamic changes in an evolutionary integrative direction on the international level in order to stabilize the processes of global change. Dugin's equation of Atlanticism with radical liberalism is wrong. I am afraid my friend Ionin at VShkE made a similar mistake, basing himself on Panarin at MGU, since he wrote about it as if Atlanticism was about comparative politics and thus a static comparison of the liberal Atlantic countries to conservative Russia, when it's actually mainly about the evolving international relations structure of the Atlantic world, and its relation in turn to the evolution of the global system and the other countries of the world. The bulk of the literature on modernization and Westernization is indirectly a part of Atlanticist geopolitics, understanding the Atlantic as a space that grows as countries Westernize; a few of the writers in that field, such as Theodore von Laue, were consciously Atlanticist, as was his teacher, the intellectual historian Hans Kohn, they both wrote about the crises of modernization in the eastern countries and the role of Euro-Atlantic integration as a way of transcending the propensity to crisis. Few of their readers had any idea that this was what they were talking about; academia churned them into the comparative politics industry rather than international relations. Kohn in particular was misunderstood as just talking about a static comparative politics of East and West, Eastern bad ethnic nationalism and Western good civic nationalism — and on this assumption, triumphantly "refuted" in recent decades by advocates of Croatian and Ukrainian ethno-nationalism.

This is all a small corrective footnote to your article, where you write as if all geopolitics assumes a static opposition of sea and land countries, or other climatic determinants. That is probably true of continental geopolitics, but the opposite is true of the vast bulk of Atlantic geopolitical writings.

And of course, in-between static geopolitics and universal-deterministic globalization — which you call on all us theorists to combine — there is Atlanticism, which is a strategic perspective on how the world could be enabled to evolve from here to there. As a perspective, it has strong objective premises but requires interactive completion on the international level and is far from complacent that the interactive steps will be taken in good time; it assimilates the thoughts of both the universal evolutionary theory and the theory of geopolitical differences, while avoiding the abstract progressivist determinism of the first and the static pessimist determinism of the second. As such, it lays claim to being, if not the whole synthesis, at least a core part of the synthesis for which you call.