Why Geography Doesn’t Decide Power

Claire Brooks

In nineteen hundred and four, Halford Mackinder stood before the Royal Geographical Society and essentially told the world that whoever rules East Europe commands the Heartland, and whoever commands the Heartland commands the global island... and ultimately the entire world.

Oliver Hart

Nineteen four! Talk about a... massive, sweeping claim. Just raw landmass as destiny.

Claire Brooks

It was the ultimate formula, right? It made geography look like this, um, this master chessboard where the physical dirt dictates who wins and who loses. But it gets much darker than Mackinder. In eighteen ninety seven, Friedrich Ratzel pushes this concept of the organic state, claiming nations are like living organisms that literally need Lebensraum... living space... to survive.

Oliver Hart

And then Karl Haushofer takes Ratzel's Lebensraum ideas in the nineteen twenties and thirties, weaves them into Nazi expansionism, and gives theoretical backing for aggressive war. That... that whole toxic history is precisely why academic geographers completely abandoned the very word geopolitics for almost fifty years after World War Two.

Claire Brooks

Nearly five decades! The word was practically toxic in university departments. Yet, you look around today, Oliver, and modern political commentators still fall back on those same nineteen four style geographic maps. Why do you think that simple determinism is still so addictive?

Oliver Hart

Because it feels clean! It gives you a reassuring illusion of predictability. If a river or a mountain range or a deep water port automatically dictates power, then you do not have to untangle messy human motives or political decisions. But as Colin Flint points out right in Chapter One of his textbook, geopolitics is not a set of rigid physical laws. It is a human construct, built on agency, shifting power relations, and contested representations.

Claire Brooks

I have to admit, I, I, I used to fall for that exact trap myself. For years, I genuinely thought that physical features, like, say, impassable mountain ranges or access to warm water ports, were immutable truths of state survival. I thought, you know, geography is the one fixed variable in foreign policy.

Oliver Hart

Right, the dirt never changes, so the strategy never changes.

Claire Brooks

Exactly! But then you start looking at actual history and technological shifts, like long range missiles or modern cyber warfare, or even just bold diplomatic choices, and you see leadership decisions rewrite those so called geographic rules all the time. The geography only matters because of how human agents interpret it and act on it.

Oliver Hart

The dirt is just the stage, Claire. It is not the script.

Claire Brooks

Which brings us right to how states actually navigate that stage. In Chapter Three, Flint introduces what he calls geopolitical codes. These are not static blueprints. They are the dynamic, operational calculations that governments and non state actors run every single day to figure out their foreign policy options.

Oliver Hart

Operational calculations, okay. So, how does a government actually build one of these codes?

Claire Brooks

Flint breaks it down into five fundamental questions that every single geopolitical code must answer. One, who are your current and potential allies? Two, who are your current and potential enemies? Three, how do you maintain your existing alliances? Four, how do you counter identified threats? And five... this is the big one... how do you justify all of this to your domestic public and the international community?

Oliver Hart

That fifth question, justification. That is where so many grand strategies completely fall apart, isn't it?

Claire Brooks

It really is. Look at the United States after September eleventh, two thousand and one. Washington radically recalculated its geopolitical code, redefining threats globally and forming new security coalitions. But as the wars dragged on, the framing started to clash with public perception and domestic identity. If a government fails to align its geopolitical code with national identity and satisfy that fifth requirement, the whole foreign policy code collapses from the inside.

Oliver Hart

Hmm. Let me see if I can rederive this whole framework in plain terms, because it sounds a lot like managing a high stakes neighborhood. You are living in a house, and your survival and comfort do not depend on the physical wooden fence around your yard. It depends on five active choices. Who are the neighbors you trust? Who are the ones you keep an eye on? How do you keep your good neighbors happy? How do you protect your front porch if someone gets hostile? And, crucially...

Claire Brooks

...how do you convince everyone sitting at your own dinner table that your neighborhood strategy actually makes sense!

Oliver Hart

Precisely! If the people inside your house stop believing in your neighborhood alliance, the fence will not save you. You cannot just point to the map and say, look, the geography made us do it.

Claire Brooks

That is what Flint makes so clear. Maps do not make policy. People make policy, code by code, choice by choice.

Oliver Hart

And that is a much harder, but far more realistic, way to view the world. Good chat today, Claire.

Claire Brooks

Yeah, good chat!