Why Teach Geopolitics

In 1977, the strategic analyst Colin Gray lamented the fact that the great geopolitical authors—such as Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman—had appeared on very few university book lists in the 1970s. Ten years later, in an article in Strategic Review, this author noted “the virtual eclipse of geopolitics in the American academic realm beginning in the late 1960’s.” ¹ No single factor was responsible for the decline of geopolitics as a separate and important course of study in our colleges and universities, but two factors appear preeminent: domestic reaction to the war in Southeast Asia and Soviet attainment of strategic nuclear parity with the United States. These two developments led, respectively, to a growing disdain for “power politics” and a preoccupation with the nuclear arms race—attitudes particularly pronounced in academia, whose members played so large a role in protesting our involvement in the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in promoting disarmament throughout the 1970s up to the present.