Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book stresses geopolitics' importance in understanding state behaviour and rivalry in the Western Pacific. Geopolitics identifies the impact of geography on policy and how geographic location impacts upon security and foreign policy. Geopolitics involves power, which is a relational concept and is understood as the ability and capacity to control or set the terms of relationships with other states, or to get others to do one’s bidding. China has brought back geopolitics into the Western Pacific as it competes with both the United States and Japan and attempts to shape a regional order that would accommodate its ambitions and its sense of status. In the US there has been much discussion about making way for China or granting it geopolitical space to prevent conflict between a rising power and a status power according to power transitional theory.