Nicholas Spykman - Americas Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power

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Americas
Strategy
in
World Politics

Americas
Strategy
in
World Politics

The United States
and the Balance of Power

Nicholas J. Spykman

With a New Introduction by
Francis P. Sempa

Originally published in 1942 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.

Published 2007 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2007 by Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2006053027

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Spykman, Nicholas J. (Nicholas John), 1893-1943.
Americas strategy in world politics : the United States and the balance ThirThir of power / Nicholas J. Spykman; with a new introduction by Francis P. Sempa.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York : Harcourt, Brace, and Co., [1942].
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-1-4128-0631-2 (alk. paper).
1. United StatesForeign relations. 2. World politics1933-1945. 3. United StatesForeign relations1933-1945. 4. United States Foreign relationsPhilosophy. I. Title.

E183.7.S7 2007

327.73009045dc22 2006053027

ISBN-13: 978-1-4128-0631-2 (pbk)

Contents

PART ONE
THE UNITED STATES AND THE
BALANCE OF POWER

PART TWO
THE STRUGGLE FOR SOUTH AMERICA

Maps

Hemisphere Defense

Encirclement of the Old World

Encirclement of the New World

Strategic Raw Materials in Latin America

Pacific Defense

Atlantic Defense

Acknowledgments

In the preparation of this volume I have received generous aid from the staff of the Institute of International Studies. George H. E. Smith and Dr. Abbie Rollins Caverly assisted in the early research. Ruth Olmsted Truex and Helen R. Nicholl helped me in the later stages and to them I owe a special debt of gratitude for their editorial assistance. It is a pleasure to mention the encouragement and co-operation received from my colleagues at Yale University. Professor Samuel Flagg Bemis has made valuable suggestions. Professor Arnold Wolfers has read the entire manuscript and has given helpful criticism and wise counsel. A special word of acknowledgment is due to Professor Frederick S. Dunn, the director of the Institute. With inexhaustible patience he has read not only the manuscript but also the proof and has saved me from many an error. This study owes much to his careful, but sympathetic, scrutiny.

NICHOLAS JOHN SPYKMAN

Introduction to the Transaction Edition

The Geopolitical Realism of Nicholas Spykman

Prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Americans and their leaders debated what role, if any, the United States should play in what were then commonly considered distant European and Asian conflicts. Similarly, at the end of the Second World War, Americans debated whether and to what extent they should participate in the emerging postwar international order. In the first instance, the United States mobilized its industrial might and manpower to wage total war in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and on the worlds oceans to help defeat Nazi Germany, Italy, and Imperial Japan. In the latter instance, the United States gradually assumed the leadership of a forty-five-year global effort to contain and, ultimately, defeat the Soviet Empire.

In both instances, U.S. policy hewed to realistic geopolitical moorings that had been brilliantly analyzed and explained in 1942 in Nicholas Spykmans masterful book, Americas Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power. This book, along with two articles written in the late 1930s in The American Political Science Review and a subsequent book published posthumously in 1944, earned for Spykman a prominent and lasting place in the field of geopolitical thought alongside such intellectual luminaries as the American naval strategist and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan and the great British geographer and statesmen Sir Halford Mackinder.

Spykman, at the time he wrote Americas Strategy in World Politics, was the Sterling Professor of International Relations at Yale who had founded the colleges Institute of International Studies in 1935. He taught at Yale until his untimely death at the age of 49 in 1943. Prior to his work in the field of international relations and geopolitics, Spykman was best known for his pioneering work in the study of the sociological theories of Georg Simmel.

According to Frederick S. Dunne, Spykmans colleague and friend at Yale who later directed the Institute of International Studies, Spykman perceived that U.S. national security policy in the mid-to-late 1930s was ignoring the geographic factor to its detriment. The more he studied the location of this country in relation to the rest of the world, explained Dunne, the more he became convinced that our security policy was unrealistic and inadequate. Spykman grasped, according to Dunne, that the early geopoliticiansbrought to light many pertinent facts which our policy makers were ignoring. This perception resulted, initially, in Spykman writing two lengthy articles in 1938 and 1939 in The American Political Science Review on the relationship of geography to foreign policy.

Spykman wrote these articles at a time when Japan had been waging war on the Asian mainland since the early 1930s, Germany and Soviet Russia had intervened on opposite sides in the Spanish Civil War, and German expansionism in Europe and Italian conquests in North Africa had been met by the Western democracies ineffectual policy of appeasement. Spykman sensed that the world was lurching toward another great war, and he sought in these articles to explain the fundamental factors that condition the policies of states in the international arena.

President Franklin Roosevelt clearly sensed the danger to U.S. security posed by aggressive totalitarian powers, but he was unwilling to get too far ahead of American public opinion. FDR denounced Japanese and German aggression, and later, once the war in Europe began, cautiously circumvented the Neutrality Act by sending material aid to Great Britain and China. But as late as the election campaign of 1940, Roosevelt still promised the American people that he would not send their sons to fight in another foreign war.

Spykmans articles in The American Political Science Review were not shrill warnings, like those then being sounded by Winston Churchill, about the growing German and Japanese threats to global security. Instead, Spykman took a political scientists approach to the world situation, examining the geopolitical factors that influenced the behavior and affected the security of all great powers.

In the first article, Geography and Foreign Policy (1938), Spykman discussed the effect of size, world location, and regional location on the foreign policies of nations. Geography, he believed, was the most important factor conditioning the policy of states because, the geographic area of the state is the territorial base from which it operates in time of war and the strategic position which it occupies during the temporary armistice called peace.

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