ABSTRACT
Geopolitics, is first and foremost, about practice and not discourse; it is about actions taken against other powers, about invasions, battles and the deployment of military force. It is through discourse that leaders act, through the mobilization of certain simple geographical understandings that foreign-policy actions are explained and through ready-made geographically infused reasoning that wars are rendered meaningful. The first part attempts to sketch a theory of geopolitics by employing the concept of discourse. The second part addresses the question of American geopolitics and provides an account of some consistent features of the practical geopolitical reasoning by which American foreign policy has sought to write a geography of international politics. It is the anti-geographical quality of geopolitical reasoning that this paper seeks to illustrate. European discourses on colonialism, have already noted, found their way into US foreign-policy practice not only in Theodore Roosevelt's time but even in determining the shape of the postwar world.
