Geoffrey Sloan - Geopolitics, Geography and Strategic History

This volume examines geopolitics by looking at the interaction between geography, strategy and history.

This book addresses three interrelated questions: why does the geographical scope of political objectives and subsequent strategy of states change? How do these changes occur? Over what period of time do these changes occur? The theories of Sir Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman are examined in order to provide an analytical narrative for five case studies, four historical and one contemporary. Taken together they offer the prospect of con verting descriptions of historical change into analytic explanations, thereby highlighting the importance of a number of commonly overlooked variables. In addition, the case studies will illuminate the challenges that states face when attempting to change the scope of their foreign policy and geo-strategy in response to shifts in geopolitical reality. This book breaks new ground in seeking to provide a way to understand why and how the geographical scope of political objectives and subsequent strategy both expands and contracts.

This book will be of much interest to students of geopolitics, strategic studies, military history, and international relations.

Geoffrey Sloan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading, UK. Formerly he was Head of the Strategic Studies and International Affairs Department at Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, and a Defence Fellow at St Antonys College, Oxford.

General Editors: Geoffrey Sloan and Leonard Hochberg

This new series has two objectives. First to facilitate an understanding of global politics that is grounded in the geopolitical realities. Second, to outline the strategic options that policy makers face in a number of geographical regions. These two objectives will be fulfilled by revisiting the classical geopolitical theories of the twentieth century, and the publication of new work on geopolitical theory. Taken together they will attempt to illuminate the geographical perspective of the twenty-first century.

1 Global Geostrategy: Mackinder and the Defence of the West

Brian Blouet (ed)

2 The Geopolitics of Great Power Politics in the Twenty-First Century: The Return of Multipolarity

Dale Walton

3 Geopolitics, Strategy and the Transformation of Civilisations

Leonard Hochberg

4 Geopolitics, Geography and Strategic History

Geoffrey Sloan

In this important and readable book Geoff Sloan brings Geography back into focus. He shows and explains Geographys relationship to the formulation and execution of strategy and thus the exercise of political power. Now that the geopolitical tectonic plates, unfrozen at the end of the Cold War, are on the move, understanding these relationships has never been more important.

General Sir Rupert Smith KCB DSO OBE QGM

For too long international relations and politics have been dominated by trendy academic methods that inevitably reflect more about the theorist and the theories than about the issues at hand that effect all our lives. Even worse, most contemporary works of that sort are inaccessible and downright unreadable one thinks perhaps a point of pride for the authors at times! Professor Sloan has written a necessary corrective to this condition. Geopolitics, Geography and Strategic History re-connects the actual experiences of the human condition with the principle forces that shape the world in which we live. Sloans shrewdness in using geopolitical approaches to explain the rise of domestic strategic cultures and the reasons for the differences between them does much more to explain the world in which we live than the narrow theoretical approaches of modern political theorists. With its emphasis on the dynamism and interrelation between history, geography, and power, this book enlightens and explains much that seems to befuddle modern policy makers and political spinmeisters. Students of the field and anyone interested in charting a way through the morass of todays thorny international relations scene would do well to heed Sloan and the geopolitical approach.

The Honorable Dr. John Hillen, Former US Assistant Secretary of State

Geoffrey Sloan has given us a magisterial account of the intellectual value of geopolitics understood, as it should be, as the empirical study of the inter-relation of history, geography and strategy. Ranging from Britains abortive intervention in South Russia in 1920 to the geopolitical thinking discernible in Chinas policy today, he reminds us that geopolitical understanding is an indispensable tool as much for the historian as for the contemporary policy maker and neglected at their peril.

Professor John Darwin, University of Oxford, UK