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Imperialism, Domination, Culture: The Continued Relevance of CriticalGeopoliticsSimon Dalby a

a Department of Geography, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

To cite this Article Dalby, Simon(2008) 'Imperialism, Domination, Culture: The Continued Relevance of CriticalGeopolitics', Geopolitics, 13: 3, 413 — 436To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14650040802203679URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14650040802203679

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Geopolitics, 13:413–436, 2008Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 onlineDOI: 10.1080/14650040802203679

FGEO1465-00451557-3028Geopolitics, Vol. 13, No. 3, Jul 2008: pp. 0–0Geopolitics

SPECIAL SECTION: CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS AFTER TWENTY YEARS

Imperialism, Domination, Culture: The Continued Relevance of Critical Geopolitics

Imperialism, Domination, CultureSimon Dalby

SIMON DALBYDepartment of Geography, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Twenty years ago Gearóid Ó Tuathail called for an approachwithin Political Geography that made geopolitical culture andthe formulation of foreign policy the object of analysis. He specifiedthe task of what subsequently became critical geopolitics as theneed to expose the complicity of geopolitics with domination andimperialism. After the cold war there was a decade when militarymatters declined in importance and globalisation confused thegeographical designations of danger. In the aftermath of 9/11 theutility of force has been reasserted by a neo-Reaganite Americanforeign policy using military force in the global war on terrorand the invasion of Iraq. Now the geopolitical culture is a matterof debates about empire and the appropriate geopolitical desig-nation of danger, whether in Thomas Barnett’s non integratedgap on “the Pentagon’s New Map” or in the complex geographiesof Alain Joxe’s “Empire of Disorder”. This re-militarisation ofglobal politics clearly suggests the continued relevance ofÓ Tuathail’s specification of the need for critical geopolitics tograpple with the culture that produces imperial attempts atdomination in distant places.

But in order to conduct ourselves properly, decently, we need toset ourselves against the unbridled arrogance that assumes that “We”have the monopoly of Truth and that the world is necessarily orderedby – and around – Us.1

Address correspondence to Simon Dalby, Department of Geography, Carleton University,Ottawa, ON, Canada K1S 5B6. E-mail: [email protected]

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414 Simon Dalby

How did our oil get under their sands?2

La Géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre.3

THEN AND NOW

Gearóid Ó Tuathail started his 1986 paper on the “Language and Nature ofthe New Geopolitics”, which can fairly be said to be the first explicit attemptto posit the scholarly agenda which subsequently has become known ascritical geopolitics, commenting that there were two approaches then in thediscipline dealing with geopolitics. First was the traditional Mackinderianapproach which emphasised policy recommendation; practitioners who“wish, in essence, to practice geopolitics.”4 Second was a more critical andmaterialist framework drawing from political economy and world systemtheory, but one that he argued had yet, at that time, to explicitly tackle the“new geopolitics” of the 1980s and the American foreign policy of theReagan administration with its explicit attempts to shore up a declininghegemony through the use of military force.

Where twenty years ago Ó Tuathail’s initial concern was with El Salvador,now force and violence are more obviously involved in Iraq, Afghanistanand elsewhere in South West Asia. Given the stimulus to geopoliticalthought that the re-militarisation of politics in the 1980s provided then,5 it isnoteworthy that the “war on terror” and the attack on Iraq in particular, hastriggered another extension of disciplinary concern twenty years later.6 Butthe parallel with that period, of the Reagan administration, military buildupsand nefarious military doings in peripheral places, and the current periodtwenty years later, is no accident. The neo-conservatives who have eitherdirected the war on terror, or provided advice and policy from their thinktanks in Washington, actively sought the reinvention of a neo-Reaganiteforeign policy when they were out of power in the 1990s, and set aboutimplementing it after 9/11.7 Insofar as critique of such policies and thegeographical thinking that legitimates them was a key part of getting criticalgeopolitics started, then tragically, it is still all too relevant two decadeslater.

Since Ó Tuathail first wrote, both the geopolitical and intellectual terrainwithin which critical geopolitics operates has changed fundamentally. Theend of the Cold War has reshaped the imagination of danger, andspecifically the terrains whence threats originate, as well as the relateddiscussions of appropriate security responses. As the rest of this papersuggests, the respecification of the appropriate strategic geography in theaftermath of the Cold War suggested numerous possibilities. But the codifi-cation of the appropriate geo-graph in the mappings of the war on terrorhad to wait for the events of 9/11 when the geography of danger coalescedinto an explicitly imperial imaginary of a war against a ‘global’ threat. In the


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interim geography’s engagement with feminism, cultural studies, post-structuralism and post-colonial studies has generated numerous theoreticalresources and a wealth of empirical material to inform critical geopolitics.8

Given the richness of these intellectual possibilities in the new geopoliticalcircumstances, the question posed by the editors of this journal in theirinvitation to contribute to this special issue, concerning the continued utilityof the approach, might be read as a question concerning the specificity ofcritical geopolitics in this changed context.

In the rest of this paper I will argue that there remains a necessity toengage with the spatial framing of politics and the geographical tropes usedin security, defence and foreign policy thinking, a specific intellectualterrain that still justifies the moniker “critical geopolitics”. Where Ó Tuathailwas concerned in the 1980s to tackle the culture that supported “interven-tions” the vocabulary of geopolitics has now changed and the imperialthemes that he specified as being in need of criticism have proliferated inthe current decade, the link between geographical specifications of culturalidentity, and the invocation of specific geographies of danger linked tomatters of military strategy, remains an important venue of contestation.Although that said, it is important to note Matthew Sparke’s much broaderinvocation of the responsibility of geography as a discipline to challenge thetaken-for-granted specifications of the political world, in which geographyas a discipline then becomes critique in a post-foundational ethic.9 In thissense at least Sparke suggests that critical geopolitics should effectively besubsumed in the larger critical enterprise. While this author clearly supportsSparke’s aspirations there is a military, and more specifically a strategic,dimension to contemporary geopolitical thinking that is an important matterworthy of continued attention; empire isn’t only about military force, neitheras Agnew reminds us, is contemporary hegemony primarily a matter ofmilitary force or territorial conquest.10 But much blood and treasure is stillinvolved in military conflict, and many wars are justified in language struc-tured in explicitly geographical terms. As such the initial focus in criticalgeopolitics in the 1980s on directly tackling the reasoning practices of state-craft remains compelling even though the geopolitical circumstances andthe intellectual resources available in geography have changed.

The use of imperial language in Ó Tuathail’s initial formulation turnsout to be especially appropriate now when discussions of warfare and theimbroglios in Afghanistan and Iraq investigate matters in terms of counterin-surgency warfare and hearken back to the history of imperial rule. They doso in part because traditionally military forces of empire have had twoprimary functions: first, patrolling the peripheries against external threatsand second, internal pacification, administration and policing. The latter hascome to prominence once again in the war on terror, and insofar as it hasshaped the geographical imaginary of commentators, it is useful to contrastthis to the previous Cold War period where the focus was much more on


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the spatial struggles for power and influence between great power protago-nists whose militaries were primarily designed to fight each other.11 Thecultural dimensions of all this have likewise been an important theme in thediscussions of popular geopolitics, in American culture, movies andelsewhere where imperial themes are once again central to the discussionof American masculinity and the role of its military in producing identity.12

Because of this contemporary context the rest of this paper argues forthe continued relevance of the initial problematic sketched out in the 1980s,despite the changed intellectual and geopolitical circumstances two decadeslater; indeed it suggests precisely that the much more explicit evocation ofimperial themes is related to the military dimensions of the war on terrorand needs to be understood as such. The links between neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism and the Bush doctrine, and in particular the work of ThomasBarnett have been dealt with by Matt Sparke in particular and elsewhere insome detail by this author;13 the discussion below of Barnett, and the com-parison with Joxe, is intended to focus on the mappings of empire ratherthan an engagement with political economy. Neither can this paper ade-quately deal with the huge literature now detailing the cultural practices ofempire. Likewise the remilitarisation of culture, and not least its genderedconsequences in the Reagan period, and once again subsequent to 9/11,cannot be engaged in detail here. Nor is this an attempt to engage in an his-torical summary of the debate so far.14 Instead this paper makes someobservations on military geographies, strategic representations of empire,the cartographies implicit in the technothriller genre and the mappings ofAmerican virtue in the face of geopolitical danger to reassert the continuingimportance of the key discussions of culture and discourse in the earlycritical geopolitics literature. It concludes by linking themes of consumptionculture which empire supposedly secures, to matters of political economyand suggests that there is considerable further potential for critical geopoli-tics to engage the contemporary religious tropes in American culture inparticular.

CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS

To take on his self-imposed task Ó Tuathail argued in 1986 that it wasnecessary to directly tackle geopolitical language, and the practices of for-eign policy making that invoked geographical terminology, but that such ananalysis must not abstract the language from the context of its production.This needed to be complemented by a focus on the formulation of foreignpolicy and the nature of the state system. In short, he suggested the neces-sity of engaging directly with geopolitical culture, a theme that reflectedother debates in the 1980s about culture and ideology, and about how the“discourse of dissent” to use Rob Walker’s contemporaneous term, could



effectively challenge the militarism of the times.15 These questions have notgone away, although two decades later very different enemies are beingproduced through geopolitical discourses that render Islamic extremists asthe enemy. Another generation of activists has emerged to struggle with theconsequences of military power, and as the epigraph to this paperreproducing the slogan from the placards used at numerous protests againstthe invasion of Iraq in 2003 suggests, geographical formulations are part ofthis discourse too.

Ó Tuathail went on to argue that “the concept of a culture (in its broad-est, all pervasive, not narrow sense) of geopolitics is a much sounderontological position for it reifies neither the ‘economic’ nor the ‘political’ butpostulates a dialectical (interconnected) relationship between the twowithin the historical context of particular signifying practices.”16 Using thisconcept of geopolitical culture makes possible a mode of analysis thatovercomes the wariness that geographers had about geopolitics after WorldWar Two. “Contemporary geographers should be just as wary of thephenomenon, for it is premised on the reality as well as the assumption ofimperialism and domination. Mackinder (1904) understood this andendorsed it. Contemporary social scientists should understand this andexpose it.”17

Although Ó Tuathail’s paper did not use the term “critical geopolitics”,it did directly link foreign policy formulation, signifying practices, language,geography and culture with an explicit rejection of imperialism and domina-tion. What has followed since under the label of “critical geopolitics” sharesthese concerns, and the explicit political stance that it is not the task of thegeographer to provide state policy makers with rationales for foreignpolicies that promote imperial power or coercion. The analytical gaze isturned precisely on these activities, and in the process becomes an explic-itly critical practice. While the discipline had to wait a decade for ÓTuathail’s book called Critical Geopolitics in which he elaborated a series oftheoretical concerns which showed that matters of representation and textrequired a more sophisticated understanding of power, knowledge andidentity, than that specified earlier in terms of a simple “exposure” ofdomination, here in this initial formulation are the key themes that weresubsequently to mark the intellectual terrain of critical geopolitics.18

But refusing the temptations to practice geopolitics and instead engag-ing its culture to understand how geopolitics works has not proven easy inthe decades since. Many writers have grappled with the matter of culture; ÓTuathail has returned to it recently to spell it out in more theoretical detailand also to make it a key theme in teaching undergraduates critical geopolitics.19

The numerous discussions elsewhere in academia about post-coloniality, posi-tionality, and post-modernism on the one hand, and the not entirely unre-lated discussions of method on the other, have shaped the discussions incritical geopolitics too. So while the achievements of a vibrant discussion of


418 Simon Dalby

geopolitics in a number of critical registers has been clear, the difficulties ofcritique have persisted and the debate about method and purposecontinue.20 But there is little doubt that the themes that Ó Tuathail sketchedout in 1986 have been remarkably persistent; imperialism is at least asrelevant today as it was then, even if Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan are nowmore in the news than El Salvador.

While it is certainly an oversimplification, nonetheless it is not too farfrom the mark to suggest that critical geopolitics is what happened whenpost-structuralism, post-modernism, feminism and other variants of criticalsocial theory and the post-colonial debates in other disciplines, and espe-cially in international relations, met a revived political geography in the late1980s.21 Ó Tuathail’s focus on the culture of foreign policy making suggeststhis very clearly; his work with John Agnew in this period, and in particulartheir crucial paper on “Geopolitics and Discourse” which finally appeared inPolitical Geography in 1992, years after its initial circulation as a conferencepaper, emphasises the multiple forms of geopolitical reasoning and theintertexts between more formal thinking, practical articulations in politicalpractice and popular culture.22 Edward Said’s Orientalism, perhaps the keytext in crystallising what subsequently became post-colonial studies, wasespecially influential in formulations of discourse and the geographicalimagination.23

It was so because (a point not elaborated in Ó Tuathail ’s 1986 paper,but prominent in 1992) of the importance in geopolitical culture of theconstruction of threats to American national security, how these threats aremapped, and how such mappings structure strategic thinking, specifyingimportant places and marginal places, and in turn the justifications forcertain kinds of military forces best suited for dealing with dangers in thesespecific places. The Soviet Threat was the dominant danger through theCold War period, and its specification drew on the classical geopoliticalwriting of Mackinder and Spykman in constructing its Manichean cartographyof hostile otherness.24 Much more recently Derek Gregory has once againused Said as his point of departure in criticising The Colonial Present andthe architectures of enmity that structure imperial hubris.25

AFTER THE COLD WAR

Hugh Gusterson wrote in 1993 that “the end of the cold war has destroyedour maps”.26 Precisely by removing the dominant Other in the Americangeopolitical imaginary the end of the Cold War did destroy the cartographyof fear and the neat division of the world into geopolitical blocs. In theearly 1990s this produced a plethora of arguments and suggestions as tohow the world was to be specified in geopolitical terms. In particularFrancis Fukuyama suggested that the end of history had been reached and



the triumph of liberalism was at hand so blocs were effectively over;Edward Luttwak thought that geo-economics was about to overtake geopol-itics, so blocs would be reconstructed on different premises; SamuelHuntington announced an imminent clash of civilisations with yet anotheralbeit highly contested geography.27 O’Loughlin and Heske noted the returnof Spykman’s writings as an important theme in geopolitical discussions, butmuch of the grand strategy literature of the time passed with little commentin the critical geopolitics genre.28 “Globalisation” soon emerged as bothbusiness aspiration and the name of the age. Disarmament agreements andreductions of nuclear weapons were more in vogue than the rivalries ofsuperpower realpolitik. There were other languages of international politicsavailable to discuss the future of global politics. Debt crises and trade imbal-ances, economic blocs and free trade agreements also provided additionalvocabulary for diplomats. Various “liberal/internationalist” perspectives werein circulation in books and in the pages of the Washington policy journals.29

In some spheres economic issues and global threats to the ecosphereloomed larger than military considerations; the Earth Summit happened in1992 but even there the dominant script was one of great powers, rivalryand international prestige.30

Despite calls at the time to “disenthrall” American thinking aboutpolitics from Cold War themes, or more fundamentally rethink Americansecurity policies, the geopolitical mode of reasoning about security was farfrom a spent force.31 The first Bush administration was quick to redefineAmerican identity as a military superpower in the Gulf crisis. Superpowerstatus was defined in realist terms and specifically in terms of the Americanability to intervene militarily in the Third World. Despite the rhetoric ofUnited Nations involvement military power once again defined the US asthe supreme actor in international affairs, “the world’s policeman”, the onlysuperpower at a “unipolar moment”.32 Despite the numerous new perspec-tives on security in the latter years of the 1980s and in the 1990s,33 thedominant discourse of post–Cold War political discussion in Washingtonremained one of military strategy and the classical geopolitical themes ofgreat power rivalry. While the themes of the discourse may have beenstretched to refer to “geo-economic” rivalries,34 the important point thatÓ Tuathail emphasised was that the language and the policy planningpremised on it was still of states and power.35 Despite the processes thatwere then becoming known as globalisation, in much of the geoeconomicdiscourse economic developments were once again referred to in terms ofterritorial strategies and the language of realpolitik.

In the early 1990s the geographical specification of likely future threatswas a matter of very considerable disagreement. Stephen Van Evera’scogently argued case for drastically reduced US military capabilities is espe-cially interesting precisely because he argued that the Third World is effec-tively irrelevant to US security because its industrial potential is too small to


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present a military threat and the US is not dependent on its resources.36 Onepotential danger that might threaten American prosperity is a majorEuropean war and hence the logic for maintaining an American presencethere. Van Evera’s argument led to a response that completely contradictedhis specification of the appropriate geography of concern.37 In light of thencurrent economic growth both by Japan and the German-led EuropeanCommunity, critics argued that the US should concentrate its military, tradeand foreign policy on areas of immediate concern for its own economicinterests. Recognising the perils of “overstretch” expounded on at length inPaul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of Great Powers a few years earlier,38 theseauthors suggest prioritising American commitments in an explicitlygeographic formulation, an American “zone of cooperation” with a newstrategic focus on the Pacific and Latin America; US military power can bereconstituted and its long-term strategic future assured in this completelydifferent geography.

Many of these themes spilled over into the genres of popular geopol-itics. The shifting popular understandings of “discourses of danger” wererepresented clearly in the plot lines of Tom Clancy’s “technothriller”novels.39 Against the backdrop of the second Cold War in the early 1980sand the subsequent emphasis of “third world” dangers and in the light ofGrenada, Libya, and Panama, not to mention Iraq, his themes incorpo-rated US security concerns in a highly accessible manner. First (in TheHunt for Red October), came the concern with technological innovation inthe strategic arms race and the potential for Soviet technical progress tocounteract US naval supremacy. Concern with internal troubles in theSoviet Union triggering an attack on NATO in Western Europe was dealtwith in Red Storm Rising (1986), an interesting plot irony given that internaltroubles a few years later in the Soviet Bloc lead to glasnost, perestroikaand the Sinatra doctrine instead. Irish terrorism in Britain and the USprovided the somewhat unlikely plot line for Patriot Games (1987). Thedangers of the expansion of the war in Afghanistan and the potential for“Star Wars” weapons systems to change the strategic balance showed upin The Cardinal in the Kremlin (1988). The dangers of narcoterrorism andpolitical subversion in Latin America followed in Clear and PresentDanger (1989). Then came fears of Palestinian nuclear terrorism andthe potential for “physist proliferation” to provide various groups with the know-how to construct nuclear weapons. This was the theme in the significantlytitled The Sum of All Fears (1991). In the novel one of those weapons,ironically a lost Israeli nuclear weapon, goes off in the United States pre-saging events of a decade later with hijacked airplanes instead of anuclear weapon. As Tom Clancy makes clear threats were dealt with byupper middle-class white American males applying the reasoning prac-tices that take for granted and reproduce the dominant understanding ofhow politics is scripted. These were very much the “manly virtues” praised



in the narratives of the Gulf war early in 1991 as feminist critics in particularpointed out.40

The crisis in the Gulf in 1990 after the Iraqi invasion was quicklydefined in military terms, and the resultant war perpetuated the policies ofmilitary solutions to political difficulties. The “New World Order” proclaimedin conjunction with the mobilisation and deployment to the Gulf provided aunique opportunity for a show of force and international solidarity against aquickly branded “pariah” state. Working in the Pentagon under Secretary ofDefense Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and others drafted a blueprint for thefuture of the American military, one that was leaked to the press in 1992,suggesting that this victory gave America the opportunity to extend its leadover all potential and putative military competitors. They argued that thiscommanding presence on the world stage should be maintained into theindefinite future so that never again could another state mount a threat tothe United States on the order of the Soviet challenge. Indeed theysuggested that an American dominance in military affairs would act to deterother states from even trying, hence ensuring a pax Americana based onmilitary pre-eminence, into the distant future.41

Security was once again understood in terms of external threats issuedfrom someplace beyond the sphere of political action to which military orpolitical management strategies should be applied to impose solutions. Thegeopolitical understandings of inside and outside are in play here, in theprocess militarising security matters. The domestic political order was takenas an unproblematic given; the danger of subversion or corruption comesfrom an external source. The preeminent protector of this “security” is seenby many in the Western world, and nearly all “security intellectuals” inWashington, as the American military. The overarching trope for all this wasthe simple sense, articulated by the widespread adoption of Fukuyama’sphrasing of the end of history, that the United States had won the Cold War.But it was not at all clear what kind of peace had resulted, or how it mightbe mapped.

GLOBALISATION AND GRAND STRATEGY

Military actions in the Gulf did not ensure George H. W. Bush’s re-election;the Clinton administration came to power, elected on a campaign themeimmortalised as “it’s the economy stupid”. While the military forces werereduced somewhat and budget deficits brought under control major foreignpolicy initiatives didn’t include military actions abroad initially. The adminis-tration took criticism over its failure to intervene in Rwanda and the botchedintervention in Somalia. But it did intervene in Bosnia, and Kosovo, repeat-edly bombed Iraq, and used cruise missiles on Sudan and Afghanistan in afailed effort to kill Osama bin Laden. Peace attempts were made in the


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Palestine-Israel conflict, and while military matters were not ignored, clearlythey were much less of a priority than in the Reagan years. The removal ofthe Soviet threat also produced a serious doctrinal gap in the Americanmilitary; its role was suddenly much less clear. But institutional inertia main-tained numerous Cold War programmes despite the new geopoliticalcircumstances. The argument codified as “the Powell doctrine”, whichsuggested that Vietnam-type imbroglios should be avoided by the applica-tion of overwhelming force to achieve specific objectives supported bypolitical backing at home, and with a clear exit strategy at the end of thecombat period, was widely accepted by many commentators who argued itwas vindicated by the Gulf War.42

The doctrinal discussions about how to extend the technologicalcapabilities of American armed services however continued to focus onlarge-scale military competition, the near peer competitor most frequentlyconsidered was China, understood in this logic as the next potential enemyfor American forces. The revolution in military affairs linked guidancesystems and information systems in a whole new series of technologicalcapabilities that meant that the American forces could bomb Bosnia in 1995,and subsequently Serbia in 1999 with near impunity. But the military effec-tiveness of such operations remained in doubt to the critics, despite therhetoric of Shock and Awe in the military textbooks and Wesley Clark’ssubsequent manual on how to use air power.43 The need to transform theground forces for lighter faster movement to take advantage of the newtechnology in combat ran up against the traditional organisation of the armyinto large heavily equipped divisions.44

The 1990s also involved an explicit attempt to extend the remit ofdemocratic regimes as a strategy of enlargement, a direct reversal of theprior spatial direction of American policy in terms of containment. The viewfrom Washington during the Clinton administration shifted focus a numberof times with attention paid to the dangers of collapsing states, genocidesand environmental threats. New emphasis on such matters contributed to afocus on key pivotal states in the South, those whose political stability wasjudged to be essential to regional stability, and hence a matter of priority forsecurity planners given the threats these regions might potentially pose toglobal order.45 But themes of multilateralism and trade arrangements tofacilitate the booming American national economy, and issues such as“managing” the Asian financial crisis of 1997 were paramount. Economicmatters took precedence, and to the alarm of the neo-conservatives, militarymatters were seen to be of less importance. Globalisation was more impor-tant than pax Americana; trade liberalisation and financial matters were theorder of the day. The political protests of the 1990s were about thesematters, the economic dislocations and inequities of neo-liberalism dis-cussed in terms of an anti-globalisation movement, not a matter for eitherpeace or critiques of imperialism.



The confusion among policy makers about how to specify the dangersAmerica faced in these times lingered through the 1990s; in Ó Tuathail andLuke’s terms deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation were the order of theday, although they did point to an overarching concern with a mapping ofthe world into “wild zones” of danger and tame zones in need of protectionfrom threats from the wild zones.46 This sense of drift in military terms, thelack of a clear focus on dealing with the threats supposedly presented byIraq, galvanised the neo-conservatives into calling for rearmament, and explic-itly for a neo-Reaganite foreign policy where military force could be used toshape the future.47 Cooling their heels out of power the neo-conservativesreinvented themselves as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC),and wrote their criticisms of the Clinton years in terms of both the lack ofpriorities given to military spending in general reducing America’s ability toproject power, and more specifically in terms of a failure to engage moreviolently with the Iraqi regime.48 But PNAC, in its catalogues of threats andits demands for military expansion, downplayed the threats from terroristattacks or insurgent movements; states and their apparatuses remained thegeopolitical lens through which the world was viewed and through whichthey thought military planning should be organised.49 An imperial formula-tion of geopolitics if ever there was one. But not one understood quite assuch at the time. Candidate George W. Bush repeatedly suggested quiteclearly in the 2000 campaign, prior to his appointment to the presidency bythe supreme court, that America simply wasn’t in the nation-buildingbusiness.

IMPERIAL GEOPOLITICS

In the aftermath of 9/11 and the crucial decision by the Administration todefine the response as a “war on terror”, much of the discussion of Americanforeign policy, and in particular the invasions of Afghanistan and subse-quently Iraq was suddenly discussed in imperial tropes. Niall Ferguson’sEmpire, Andrew Bacevich’s American Empire, Chalmers Johnston’s Sorrowsof Empire all use the term in their titles; so do numerous other authors.50

From the left came concerns about oil in all this; so too from self-confessedconservatives concerned that imperial adventures are eroding what remainsof the republican form of government that supposedly rules in Washington.51

While this doesn’t necessarily make America an empire, it certainly suggeststhat at least as far as the military attempts to dominate many parts of theglobe are concerned, it is acting in an imperial manner.

In part the designation imperial is a matter of appearances; the globalwar on terror and American power coercing Pakistan into cooperating in itsinvasion of Afghanistan, certainly looked imperial. Likewise when the inva-sion of Iraq was launched in 2003 in disregard for much of world opinion


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these actions looked imperial too. The Bush doctrine documents, with theirexplicit statements about pre-eminence, preventive war, the strategy offorcible regime change, interventions to deal with rogue and failed states,and subsequently the formulation of a long war against Islamic extremismcontributing to the ultimate foreign policy objective of eliminating tyrannyon the planet, made it clear that military coercion was back on the agendain a manner that suggested an explicitly imperial agenda.52 Ó Tuathail’s ini-tial 1986 juxtaposition of domination and imperial power is tragically aptonce again. So too is the longstanding concern in critical geopolitics aboutthe construction of enemies, and the geographical language used to portraythe terrain of international conflict as requiring military “interventions”.53

But crucial to the emergence of the theme of empire is the simple pointthat empires engage in wars against militarily weak peripheral politicalorganisations in distant lands. The Cold War was a struggle between bigstates, with Europe as the potential battleground in the imaginary war.54 Incontrast, the new war is about pacification operations, expeditionary forces,asymmetric conflicts and bringing local rulers into line with metropolitanpriorities, a matter that frequently involves subjugating local populations inthe messy geographies of the new wars. Ironically, but consistent with therepresentations of geopolitical culture, just as the troops were becominginvolved in ever more conflicts with complicated geographies Americanpower was being represented in clear moral cartographies, and a singleoverarching geopolitical division between what Thomas Barnett wouldquickly dub the “integrated core” and the “non-integrated gap” in the globaleconomy.55 Finally the military preoccupations of the neo-conservativeswith state power were explicitly linked to dangers wrought by globalisation;enemies could be anywhere and everywhere in a “global” war on terror,although at least initially they were most likely to be found in the wildzones of South West Asia. Once again Manichean division applies: “with usor with the terrorists”.

US special forces in Afghanistan do have all sorts of parallels withBritish military adventures there in the nineteenth century. The invasion ofIraq likewise; the 2003 intervention by British forces after all was the fourthtime they had done this in ninety years and part of a long-term pattern ofgrowing Western influence after the collapse of the Ottoman empire.56

Reading the Quadrennial Defense Review Report of 2006 makes it clear thatPentagon planners are building an infrastructure to quickly move troopsand air power to any corner of the globe that may require the use ofmilitary force.57 The system of roads for which Rome is famous allowed forthe movement of the legions of heavy infantry from one part of the empireto another relatively quickly. But much of the scouting and many of thecavalry formations used in Roman wars were mercenaries or local leviesbrought under imperial command to conduct specific tasks. Rome concen-trated on the decisive element in pitched battles, the flexible heavy infantry



of the legions, and on engineering and siege warfare techniques. Thispattern of power is replicated by the current dominance of the Americannavy in many parts of the world but airpower, space surveillance and com-munication are now also part of American strategic power whose globalreach is clearly unrivalled by any other military.

The analogies with Rome and with nineteenth-century Britain alsosuggest the limits of military manpower and the necessity of using localauxiliary troops for imperial pacification and policing operations. Just as theUS is aiming to maintain strategic superiority in key areas of smart weap-onry, stealth technologies and global mobility, the Roman empire empha-sised the importance of strategic domination in heavy infantry and siegeweaponry.58 The British empire relied on local troops for many functions inthe empire but in the process maintaining dominance in the crucial technol-ogy that ensured strategic superiority where it mattered most in the nineteenthcentury, on the oceans.59 The Royal Navy in its victories over Napoleon, inparticular at Trafalgar, established the conditions for the success of Britishimperialism much of which was of an indirect nature related to trade ratherthan direct conquest.

Simply looking at where American troops are situated outside what isnow interestingly called the “Homeland” (“national security” is apparentlynow no longer an adequate formulation) and how they have moved in thelast few decades is instructive. The scale of the American basing effort isworth emphasising as is the persistence of American military presence invarious parts of the world since the 1940s.60 But it is also important to notethat the facilities used by the American forces change through time and arearranged in numerous treaty and rental agreements through the differentmilitary services as well as through commercial arrangements. Looking atthese impressive facilities which reproduce substantial parts of Americansuburbia complete with movie theatres and restaurant chains, the parallelswith Roman garrison towns built on the Rhine, or on Hadrian’s wall inEngland, where the remains are strikingly visible on the landscape, areobvious. This is partly a matter of enclave geographies where outposts ofmetropolitan power are imposed from afar into various hinterlands as partof the globalising patterns of spatial change of our times.61 In ChalmersJohnston’s terms these bases are for all practical purposes colonies.62 Lessvisible is the sheer scale of the logistics to keep garrison troops in residencein the far-flung reaches of empire.63 The imposition of order is related tolong-term military presence. That presence literally builds the cultural logicof the garrison troops into the landscape, a permanent reminder of imperialcontrol.64 But the extent of these facilities should not be exaggerated; theoverall numbers of troops are still relatively small. The global reach of thesefacilities is more impressive than the actual number of troops present.65

In addition the carrier task forces that the US Navy operates effectivelyact as mobile bases able to sail the high seas with little opposition that is


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likely to thwart their moves. But local auxiliaries will still have to be avail-able to do the local policing and the ensure that the resources continue toflow from the peripheral wild zones to the metropoles, ones that might bemuch more frequently located in Asia in the coming decades. The coalitionsof the willing that American leaders have attempted to construct whether inKosovo, Afghanistan or Iraq clearly show the utility of auxiliaries. The diffi-culties that American recruiters face, given the insurgencies in Iraq, inensuring the necessary numbers of soldiers are available in the volunteerAmerican army emphasise the point that while the American military has aglobal reach it does not have the ability to keep substantial garrisons on theground for extended periods. Neither does it have the ability to do “nationbuilding” in most places; in these places it is practicing what Michael Ignatieffcalled Empire Lite.66

Contemporary American strategy, and the Rumsfeld innovations ofemphasising mobility and firepower at a distance in particular, is clearlyrelated to the reorganisation of its military bases around the world. Both theQuadrennial Defense Review Report of 2006, and the 2006 National SecurityStrategy of the United States are explicit about the need to transformthe basing system from a garrison posture to facilitate the rapid surging ofthe newly configured expeditionary forces.67 Understood as an empire thenthe questions of terror in the periphery appear as arguments over theadministration of the extraction of resources from the remote provinces forexport to, literally in the case of the Middle East, fuel consumption in themetropoles.68 All of which suggests the continued utility of critical geopoli-tics in challenging these formulations, making explicit the geographies thatgeopolitical discourse elides in its formulations of enemies and its rationalesfor military action.

DISORDERLY EMPIRES AND DISCONNECTED GAPS

The specific geographies of power become clearer in contrasting two verydifferent commentators on contemporary American power. Alain Joxe, aleading French strategic thinker, published a small volume in 2002 inEnglish called simply Empire of Disorder.69 In it he makes the argument thatAmerican hegemony is imperial in a negative sense. In line with GeorgeBush’s phrase from the January 2003 State of the Union speech, that America“exercises power without conquest”, Joxe suggests that American power isuninterested in territorial control. Rather its mode of imperial rule definesthe terms and conditions of trade and disciplines local regimes that do notfollow policies broadly congruent with American financial and security inter-ests. This is entirely consistent with the lack of large numbers of Americantroops available for permanent garrison and administration duties. InvokingMachiavelli as the epigram for the main text, and specifically the argument



that it is in the interests of a conqueror to enrich that which is conquered, inprovocative style Joxe suggests that

this power which refused to conquer the world, only seeks to fill itsown pockets. We are confronted with a global power that takesinfinitely varied local forms while refusing to think of local varietyexcept in terms of temporal uniformity; and it succeeds thanks to itsability to establish norms, not to conquer. It is now trying to sustain thisunconquered empire by shirking the requirements that Machiavelli out-lined: the obligation to enrich the conquered peoples as much as theconquerors.70

Key to the argument about American influence here is the assumptionthat America is the telos of history; all states that do not measure up to theAmerican way of doing things are understood to be underdeveloped, butgiven appropriate policies and support from American power, all local idio-syncrasies can be relegated to the past; development leads to one form ofmodernity which the appropriate norms of neo-liberalism will eventuallyensure renders primitive others into clones of the modern US. Joxe goes onto discuss numerous American policies and military interventions in placesfrom Bosnia to Columbia to make the argument that America is shirking itsimperial responsibilities to ensure their enrichment and in the process effec-tively ensuring that disorder remains in many parts of the world. It does soby using military power and security assistance to maintain friendly elites incharge in many places, but does not usually involve itself in the detailedadministration or reconstruction of satellite powers. In this at least bothAfghanistan and Iraq are fairly unusual.

Ironically, with an important notable exception, such thinking neatlyparallels Thomas Barnett’s thinking in The Pentagon’s New Map, and in thesequel called Blueprint for Action, which extends the case for reconstruct-ing the American military to enforce the expansion of globalisation.71

Barnett’s logic is fairly simple. Globalisation is the future, liberal economiesconnected into the circuits of capital and the circuits of cultural communica-tion are peaceful states most of the time. They treat their peoples with rea-sonable regard for human rights and personal freedom. Dangers come fromthe remote parts of the world, not the globalised core of the economy, andthey do so because of a lack of connectivity, enforced either by lawlessremoteness or the deliberate design of local tyrants and dictators who denytheir peoples the benefits and opportunities of connectivity. This leads to a for-mulation of the planet into a zone of danger in the form of the non-integratedgap which is external to the integrated core of the world economy.

Note this is not empire, because connection into the larger globalisedworld is in this understanding something that everyone desires and willbenefit from, and not a matter of direct administration. More specifically:


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America does not shrink the Gap to conquer the Gap, but to invite twobillion people to join something better and safer in the Core. Empiresinvolve enforcing maximal rules sets, where the leader tells the led notjust what they cannot do but what they must do. This has never beenthe American way of war and peace, and does not reflect our system ofgovernance. We enforce minimum rule sets, carefully ruling out only themost obviously destructive behavior. We push connectivity above allelse, letting people choose what to do with those ties, that communica-tion, and all those possibilities.72

Thus Barnett is advocating the extension of globalisation, by force if neces-sary on the clear geographical assumption that the wild zone’s violencethreatens the core and as such must be civilised, for its own good ofcourse.73

The difference between Joxe’s formulation and Barnett is preciselyaround the theme of connectivity. Joxe argues that in many case America istechnically unconnected with the populations of parts of the world, but notwith many of the elites. In these terms the patterns of investment and theconnections with local rulers who ensure the export of key resources, andwho are willing recipients of military aid and security assistance to maintaintheir rule, does connect them with the empire; its just all the rest that are“disconnected”.74 Thus by narrowly defining empire in terms of conquest,the more complex political economies of informal empire are denied. Thebenefit of Joxe’s formulation is precisely the specificity of these interconnec-tions and how he notes that there is a long history of such interconnections.One of the most important patterns of connection with the elites has beenwith those who oversee the production and export of raw materials, andpetroleum in particular. While this is a long-time theme in the literature ofgeopolitics, it has recently been updated to emphasise the connectionsbetween the international markets for commodities and the violence ofwhat are now called resource wars.75

This literature has made it clear that there are patterns of violence inthe periphery that relate fairly directly to struggles to control resource reve-nues in poor economies. While the empirical generalisations have to becarefully qualified with the specifics of particular cases, it is nonethelessclear that the violence in the periphery is frequently related to the export ofkey commodities.76 This being the case the assumption of disconnectionthat is the premise of Barnett’s cartographic specification of global danger isincomplete in a misleading way. Alain Joxe’s formulation seems especiallyapt in the case of petroleum where the relationships between internationaloil companies and local elites is indisputable, and also frequently related topersistent patterns of violence and human rights violations.77

But Barnett explicitly rejects the strategy of running an empire of disor-der, or operating in “empire lite” mode. Instead he argues that American



forces need to be expanded to add a large component of “system adminis-trators” who can reconstruct societies in the wild zones of the gap andconnect them into the circuits of the global system. Not content with inter-mittent policing actions, which Barnett thinks fail to weed out the dangersin the non-integrated gap, he explicitly suggests (temporary) conquest toremake societies as was done in Germany and Japan in the aftermath of theSecond World War. This isn’t imperialism he argues, just the bringing offreedom to the world’s impoverished. Nowhere does he suggest that thishas been tried before by other European powers who did indeed claim theburden of empire was taken up on behalf of the conquered, to civilise andpacify them.

The other fascinating point in Barnett’s argument is that he includesboth China and India within the integrated core suggesting that they toowill benefit from shrinking the gap, reducing the spaces where terror, drugsand political instability grow. Even more than this Barnett thinks that boththese states are far more interested in trading and growing their economiesthan in behaving as rivals to American power. But if American strategydoesn’t deal with the zones of instability then he fears that precisely thatinstability may lead to violence, arms races, rivalries and once again globalwarfare.

Formulating matters in terms of empire has the huge advantage ofputting the precise geography of the United States into question. It is nolonger so easy to follow the standard international relations device of speci-fying the United States as just another great power if its status as such ischallenged by imperial formulations which greatly emphasises the primusover the inter pares. It also focuses on the functions of empire, in imposingpeace but doing so in the context of an arrangement that enriches those inthe metropoles. In Joxe’s terms of course it’s the failure to impose an effec-tive peace that is the most damning indictment of pax Americana. InThomas Barnett’s formulation this clearly requires that America make amuch larger effort to finally subjugate all to the rule of the global economyof the integrated core; an imperial hubris entirely consistent with the long-standing theme of American exceptionalism, of America as the best hope ofhumanity, a people with a manifest destiny, and a mission for the future tosave humanity from itself.

EMPIRE, HEGEMONY AND RESISTANCE

But looking closely at this discussion suggests two important things aboutthe formulations of empire and the gap. Specifically it suggests that the useof military power is now related to the fringes of what Agnew calls the mar-ketplace society; military force has not, as Agnew argues, built the globalorder of the market.78 If one looks at the location of the violence, the places


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where American power has been most directly exerted is in peripheralregions, and especially those where valuable resources are to be found, orin places where instabilities are a threat to larger political arrangements.American involvement in “civil wars” recently also suggests a pattern ofintervention that might be called imperial, but it is also important to notethat American foreign policy is usually more frequently conducted by coop-erative ventures, suggesting some kind of hegemony rather thandominance.79 The pattern of violence related to resources suggests not thatAmerican power is used to actively incorporate parts of the gap, but per-haps it simply operates to ensure that the essential supplies continue toflow to the manufacturing centres, without whose production activities thewhole edifice of consumption culture would collapse, and with it anyclaims to hegemony.80 All of which suggests that some precision is neededin the geography of all this; in some places the American military acts in animperial manner, even if strictly speaking America is not an empire in terri-torial terms, nor is it the direct controller of many economic and politicalmatters outside its borders. But nonetheless the military gets used fre-quently.

Thus to follow David Harvey’s rendition of the question Iraq is symp-tomatic of a much larger imperial ambition, one that he poses as “whoevercontrols the Middle East controls the global oil spigot and whoever controlsthe global oil spigot can control the global economy, at least for the nearfuture.”81 But more so than this it is important to note that the military oper-ations in the Middle East are also tied into a particular part of the Americanpolitical economy, what Nitzan and Bichler call the weapon-dollar petro-dollar complex: arms companies and logistics firms that provide both mili-tary and oil field services and security.82 But, and here the argument onceagain supports Agnew’s case that these recent attempts to assert militarycontrol are against the long-term thrust of American practice, it is fairly easyto say that this is fraction of capital that has had its day, new innovations inhigh tech, biotech and renewable energy systems are nonetheless delayedand thwarted by this backward looking policy of trying to maintain controlover petroleum in the Middle East. In Bichler and Nitzan’s terms, war in theMiddle East facilitates differential accumulation in this sector of the econ-omy. Thus the struggles within the United States about climate change andthe adoption of new energy strategies, are also an important part of thelarger matter of resisting imperial domination in its more overt militaryforms in South West Asia.

Focusing on the debate about empire suggests in part that the resis-tance to the foreign exercise of American military power in America itself isdriven by a combination of political motives in addition to the strugglebetween fractions of capital that Nitzan and Bichler discuss. First is therevulsion at such practices at Abu Graib and Guantanamo, the applicationof American power in ways that do not fit well with its supposed civilised



qualities, its claims to support human rights, etc. Supporting the house ofSaud and other dictatorial rulers in the Middle East simply is not the Americanway. America is not supposed to be an empire after all! Second, many argu-ments criticise the immense waste of resources on military adventures in theMiddle East, especially in the aftermath of the disaster that befell so manypeople when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. With deficits mountingthere are compelling economic arguments against the application of theBush doctrine. Some of this is very reminiscent of the latter days of theReagan administration too, where budget deficits coincided with militaryadventures and the discussion of The Rise and Fall of Great Powers.83 Onlythen it was great powers, not empires.

There are also technical arguments about the application of militaryforce in both Iraq and Afghanistan which are especially damning; but it isnoteworthy that until quite recently the finer points of these have rarelybeen engaged beyond the technical journals. Except, that is, in the eloquentstatements and columns of the few experts who are familiar with the finerpoints of military thinking and understand the arguments within geopolitical-strategic discourse. Most of the discussion has been about more or lesstroops, not about the practices of anti-insurgency violence versus counterin-surgency political strategies, although this has begun to change.84 But asRob Walker argued back in the 1980s, such arguments, while very effectiveon the finer technical points, don’t in and of themselves provide adequategrounds to tackle the culture of militarism and its larger geopolitical pre-suppositions of a hostile world in need of the application of Americanmilitary power.85 These arguments still need to be linked to larger under-standings of culture and political economy if political strategies to reduceviolence and simultaneously produce more ecologically sensible modes ofliving are to be effective. Critical geopolitics can surely have a useful role toplay here.86

But the critical geopolitics engagement in popular culture perhapsneed some further extension too to continue to challenge imperial subjec-tivities. By way of a conclusion this paper offers but one suggestion for anadditional contribution. Now that the overarching evil in the Cold War, theSoviet Union, has been replaced by a theological enemy, albeit one under-stood as a perversion of a proud religion, American rhetoric of Christianrectitude frequently sneaks into the official scripts. Orientalism, with itsconstruction of an omniscient we with the geopolitical truth, as Gregorynotes, once again pervades political discourse.87 While Tom Clancy increas-ingly focused on the role of special forces in his novels in the 1990s, andthe necessity for undercover violence to police matters of political orderinternationally, he has most recently extended this line of argument in TheTeeth of the Tiger (2003) to examine the logic for American assassinationsquads operating entirely beyond any state oversight.88 Clancy’s vision ofthe rightness of the cause justifying the extrajudicial murder of those whom


432 Simon Dalby

well-meaning Americans judge to be “terrorists”, links up with the parallelarguments in the scripts of the relatively new genre of religious “thrillers”.The popularity of books about the last days, the imminence of the rapture,battles of Armageddon through the last quarter of a century have longengaged with the military dimensions of geopolitics. American exceptional-ism is given divine sanction where political violence in America and Israel’ssupposed interest meets prophesies predicting the end of the world.89 Nowthis literature has met up with the technothriller genre to provide chillingjustifications for American “Christians” to kill with impunity because therules of diplomacy or morality do not apply to the saved. Joel Rosenberg’sbest-selling geopolitical technothriller of end times The Ezekiel Option isexemplary.90 Here once again American exceptionalism, this time with theauthority implicit in divine blessing, grants a license to kill “Others”, and ifthis happens to precipitate the extreme violence of end times, divine inter-vention and the rapture of the faithful, so much the better.

Which leads back again to the geographical parallels with Rome andthe question the religious basis of the legitimating discourses of the Bushadministration.91 The parallels are beginning to be discussed by theologiansinterested in Christianity, and Pauline versions thereof, in terms of resistanceto imperial Rome with its god-cult of Caesar and its practices of invokingimperial justice as part of pax Romana. The links between Roman forms ofsecurity and the appropriation by Constantine of many Christian themes,into what much later became doctrines of state sovereignty and just wartheories, are part of this intellectual rethinking.92 The more radical interpre-tations of Christianity as forms of opposition to the imposition of Romanrule, or Jesus of Nazareth as a proponent of non-violent resistance to theoppression and impoverishment of the poor in these imperial arrangements,are once again being discussed as a counter to the contemporary invocationof Christianity to justify military intervention in Iraq and elsewhere. IfAmerica is the new Rome, rather than the new Jerusalem, the potential forvery different interpretations of American foreign policy arises whereWashington is seen as the oppressor rather than the vehicle of salvation.93 Itall depends on the geographical analogy invoked.

All of which suggests the potential for considerable contestation of theterms of contemporary hegemony precisely where secular social scientistsmight be most reluctant to look. But drawing the explicit parallels betweenthe two empires opens up precisely this political possibility. These themesare now part of political discussion, and for those who remember the his-tory of religious wars in Europe, which are not unrelated to the founding ofthe American states in the first place, this may be a very worrisome thought.But challenges to hegemony are about contesting the taken for grantedassumptions about the context within which geopolitical language isshaped; and if the assumption that America is a secular society within whichpolitical debate can only be a matter of eighteenth-century liberal and



scientific categories mapped onto nineteenth-century imperial ambition, isrelaxed, then other terrains of discussion may yet become available in thedisputation of American geopolitical culture.

NOTES

1. Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Blackwell 2004) p. 262.2. Slogan on placards used by demonstrators in many places at protests against the imminent

American invasion of Iraq early in 2003.3. Yves Lacoste, http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Lacoste.>4. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, ‘The Language and Nature of the “New Geopolitics” – The Case of US-El

Salvador Relations’ Political Geography Quarterly 5/1 (1986) p. 73.5. As in David Pepper and Alan Jenkins (eds.), The Geography of Peace and War (Oxford: Basil

Blackwell 1985); R. J. Johnston and P. J. Taylor (eds.), A World in Crisis? Geographical Perspectives(Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1986, 1989); Nurit Kliot and Stanley Waterman (eds.), The Political Geographyof Conflict and Peace (London: Belhaven 1991).

6. Stanley D. Brunn (ed.), 11 September and its Aftermath: The Geopolitics of Terror (London:Frank Cass 2004); Stephen Graham (ed.), Cities, War and Terrorism: Towards and Urban Geopolitics(Oxford: Blackwell 2004); Colin Flint (ed.), The Geography of War and Peace: From Death Camps toDiplomats (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005); Derek Gregory and Allan Pred (eds.), Violent Geographies:Fear, Terror and Political Violence (New York: Routledge 2007).

7. See in detail James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York:Viking 2004); Stefan Halper and Jonathon Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the GlobalOrder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004); Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatismand the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge 2004).

8. See for instance the breadth of contributions in Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby (eds.),Rethinking Geopolitics (London: Routledge, 1998); Klaus Dodds and David Atkinson (eds.), GeopoliticalTraditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought (London: Routledge 2000).

9. Matthew Sparke, ‘Geopolitical Fears, Geoeconomic Hope and the Responsibilities of Geography’,Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97/2 (2007) pp. 338–349.

10. John Agnew, Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power (Philadelphia: Temple UniversityPress 2005).

11. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2007).12. See Simon Dalby, ‘Warrior Geopolitics: Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and The Kingdom of

Heaven,’ Political Geography 27/4 (2008) pp. 439–455.13. Matt Sparke, ‘Geopolitical Fears’ (note 9); Matthew Sparke, In the Space of Theory: Post-Foundational

Theories of the Nation State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2005); Simon Dalby, ‘Regions, Strate-gies, and Empire in the Global War on Terror’, Geopolitics 12/4 (2007) pp. 586–606.

14. On the first decade see Klaus Dodds, ‘Political Geography III: Critical Geopolitics after TenYears’, Progress in Human Geography 25/3 (2001) pp. 469–484.

15. R. B. J. Walker, ‘Contemporary Militarism and the Discourse of Dissent’, Alternatives 9/3(Winter 1983–1984) pp. 303–322, reprinted in R. B. J. Walker (ed.), Culture, Ideology, and World Order(Boulder: Westview 1984) pp. 302–322.

16. Ó Tuathail, ‘The Language and Nature of the “New Geopolitics”’ (note 4) p. 8317. Ibid., p. 84, citing Halford J. Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, The Geographical

Journal 23 (1904).18. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press 1996).19. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, ‘Geopolitical Structures and Cultures: Towards Conceptual Clarity in

the Critical Study of Geopolitics’, in Lasha Tchantouridze (ed.), Geopolitics: Global Problems andRegional Concerns (Winnipeg: Centre for Defence and Security Studies 2004) pp. 75–102; Gearóid ÓTuathail, ‘General Introduction: Thinking Critically about Geopolitics’, in Gearóid Ó Tuathail, SimonDalby, and Paul Routledge (eds.), The Geopolitics Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge 2006) pp. 1–14;See also Simon Dalby, ‘Geopolitics and Global Security: Culture, Identity and the “Pogo Syndrome”’,


434 Simon Dalby

in Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby (eds.), Rethinking Geopolitics (London: Routledge 1998)pp. 295–313.

20. Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics (note 18); J. Sharp, Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digestand American Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2000); J. Sharp, ‘RemasculinizingGeo-Politics? Comments on Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics’, Political Geography 19/3 (2000)pp. 361–364; M. Sparke, ‘Graphing the Geo in Geo-Political: Critical Geopolitics and the Revisioning ofResponsibility’, Political Geography 19/3 (2000) pp. 373–380; G. Ó Tuathail, ‘Dis/placing the Geo-PoliticsWhich One Cannot Not Want’, Political Geography 19/3 (2000) pp. 385–396; G. Ó Tuathail, ‘CondensingCritical Geopolitics: Reflections on Joanne Sharp’s Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest andAmerican Identity’, Geopolitics 8/2 (2003) pp. 159–165; J. Sharp, ‘Indigestible Geopolitics: The ManyReadings of the Digest’, Geopolitics 8/2 (2003) pp. 197–206.

21. James Der Derian and M. J. Shapiro (eds.), International/Intertextual Relations: Post ModernReadings of World Politics (Toronto: Lexington Books 1989); David Campbell, Writing Security: UnitedStates Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press 1992);R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press 1993).

22. Gearóid Ó Tuathail and John Agnew, ‘Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical GeopoliticalReasoning in American Foreign Policy’, Political Geography 11/2 (1992) pp. 190–204.

23. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage 1979).24. Simon Dalby, ‘Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union as Other’, Alternatives: Social Trans-

formation and Humane Governance 13/4 (1988) pp. 415–442; Simon Dalby, Creating the Second ColdWar: The Discourse of Politics (London: Pinter, and New York: Guilford 1990).

25. Gregory, The Colonial Present (note 1).26. Hugh Gusterson, ‘Realism and the International Order After the Cold War’, Social Research 60

(1993) pp. 279–300, at 279.27. Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History’, The National Interest 16 (1989) pp. 3–18; Edward Luttwak,

‘From Geopolitics to Geo-Economics: Logic of Conflict, Grammar of Commerce’, The National Interest 20(1990) pp. 17–23; Samuel Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’, Foreign Affairs 72 (1993) pp. 22–49.

28. J. O’Loughlin and H. Heske, ‘From “Geopolitik” to “Geopolitique”: Converting a Discipline forWar to a Discipline for Peace’, in N. Kliot and S. Waterman (eds.), The Political Geography of War andPeace (London: Pinter 1991) pp. 37–59.

29. J. S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic 1990);N. X. Rizopoulos (ed.), Sea Changes: American Foreign Policy in a World Transformed (New York:Council on Foreign Relations 1990).

30. Simon Dalby, ‘Reading Rio, Writing the World: The New York Times and the “Earth Summit”’,Political Geography 15/6&7 (1996) pp. 593–614.

31. T. L. Deibel, ‘Strategies Before Containment: Patterns of the Future’, International Security 16/4 (1992) pp. 79–108.

32. C. Krauthammer, ‘The Unipolar Moment’, in G. Allison and G. F. Treverton (eds.), RethinkingAmerica’s Security: Beyond the Cold War to a New World Order (New York: Norton 1992) pp. 295–306.

33. Ken Booth (ed.), New Thinking About Strategy and International Security (London: Harperand Collins 1991); M. T. Klare and D. C. Thomas (eds.), World Security: Trends and Challenges atCentury’s End (New York: St. Martins 1991).

34. J. Agnew and S. Corbridge, ‘The New Geopolitics: The Dynamics of Geopolitical Disorder’, inR. J. Johnston and P. J. Taylor (eds.), A World in Crisis? Geographical Perspectives (London: Basil Black-well 1989).

35. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, ‘Japan as Threat: Geo-Economic Discourses on the U.S. Japan Relationshipin U.S. Civil Society, 1987–1991’, in C. Williams (ed.), The Political Geography of the New World Order(London: Belhaven 1993) pp. 181–209.

36. Stephen van Evera, ‘Why Europe Matters, Why the Third World Doesn’t: American Grand Strategyafter the Cold War’, Journal of Strategic Studies 13/2 (1990) pp. 1–51.

37. V. M. Hudson, R. E. Ford, D. Pack with E. R. Giordano, ‘Why the Third World Matters, WhyEurope Probably Won’t: The Geoeconomics of Circumscribed Engagement’, Journal of Strategic Studies14/3 (1991) pp. 255–298.

38. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House 1987).39. Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press 1984); Red Storm

Rising (New York: Putnam 1986); Patriot Games (New York: Putnam 1987); The Cardinal in the Kremlin



(New York: Putnam 1988); Clear and Present Danger (New York: Putnam 1989); The Sum of All Fears(New York: Putnam, 1991).

40. Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press 1993).

41. Department of Defense, Defense Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years 1994–1999,(Washington: Department of Defense 1992). The history of these themes and their subsequentre-emergence in the Bush doctrine is recounted in Simon Dalby, ‘The Geopolitical and StrategicDimensions of U.S. Hegemony under George W. Bush’, in Charles Philippe David and David Grondin(eds.), Hegemony or Empire?: The Redefinition of American Power under George W. Bush (Aldershot:Ashgate 2006) pp. 33–49.

42. H. G. Summers, On Strategy II: A Critical Analysis of the Gulf War (New York: Dell 1992).43. H. K. Ullman and J. P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (National Defence

University Press 1996); Wesley Clark, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo and the Future of Combat(New York: Public Affairs 2001).

44. Douglas A. Macgregor, Breaking the Phalanx: A New Design for Landpower in the 21st Century(Westport, CT: Praeger 1997).

45. Robert Chase, Emily Hill, and Paul Kennedy, ‘Pivotal States and U.S. Strategy’, Foreign Affairs75/1 (1996) pp. 33–35; Robert Chase, Emily Hill, and Paul Kennedy (eds.), The Pivotal States: A NewFramework for U.S. Policy in the Developing World (New York: Norton 1999); Daniel Esty et al., ‘StateFailure Task Force Report: Phase II Findings’, Woodrow Wilson Center Environmental Change and Secu-rity Project Report 5 (1999) pp. 49–72.

46. Gearóid Ó Tuathail and T. W. Luke, ‘Present at the (Dis)integration: Deterritorialization andReterritorialization in the New Wor(l)d Order’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84/3(1994) pp. 381–398.

47. William Kristol and Robert Kagan, ‘Toward a neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy’, Foreign Affairs75/4 (1996) pp. 18–32.

48. Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century (Washington:The Project for the New American Century 2000).

49. Robert Kagan and William Kristol (eds.), Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in AmericanForeign and Defense Policy (San Francisco: Encounter Books 2000).

50. Niall Ferguson, Empire (New York: Basic 2003); Andrew Bacevich, American Empire (HarvardUniversity Press 2002); Chalmers Johnston, Sorrows of Empire (New York: Holt 2004).

51. M. T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependencyon Imported Petroleum (New York: Metropolitan Books 2004); Andrew Bacevich, The New AmericanMilitarism: How Americans are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005).

52. Dalby, ‘Regions, Strategies, and Empire’ (note 13).53. G. Falah (ed.), ‘Forum on the War on Iraq’, Arab World Geographer 6/1 (2003) pp. 1–60.54. Mary Kaldor, The Imaginary War: Understanding East-West Conflict (Oxford: Blackwell 1990).55. Thomas P. M. Barnett, ‘The Pentagon’s New Map’, Esquire (March 2003) pp. 174–179, available

at <www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets/ThePentagonsNewMap.htm>.56. The theme of Robert Fisk’s book The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle

East (London: Harper Perennial 2006).57. Dalby, ‘Regions, Strategies, and Empire’ (note 13); Quadrennial Defense Review Report

(Washington: Department of Defense, Feb. 2006).58. Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire From the First Century AD to the

Third (Baltimore MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1976).59. Arthur Herman, To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World (New York:

Harper Collins 2004).60. See Tim Kane, Global U.S. Troop Deployment, 1950–2003 (Washington: Heritage Foundation

Center for Data Analysis Report #04–11, 2004), available at <http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/cda04–11.cfm>.

61. See Tim Bunnell, Hamzah Muzaini, and James Sidaway, ‘Global City Frontiers: Singapore’sHinterland and the Contested Socio-political Geographies of Bintan, Indonesia’, International Journal ofUrban and Regional Research 30/1 (2006) pp. 3–22.

62. Chalmers Johnston, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Metropolitan2007)

63. See William Langewiesche, ‘Peace is Hell’, Atlantic Monthly (Oct. 2001) pp. 51–80.


436 Simon Dalby

64. Mark Gillem, America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press 2007).

65. Chalmers Johnston, ‘America’s Empire of Bases’, TomDispatch.com (15 Jan. 2004). See also‘U.S. Military Bases and Empire’, Monthly Review 53/10 (2002) pp. 1–14.

66. Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan (New York:Viking 2003).

67. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America 2006 (Washington: The WhiteHouse, Feb. 2006); Quadrennial Defense Review (note 57).

68. See Simon Dalby, ‘Geopolitics after the Cold War: Rethinking the Theme of Empire’, in LashaTchantouridze (ed.), Geopolitics: Global Problems and Regional Concerns (Winnipeg: Centre for Defenceand Security Studies 2004) pp. 103–119.

69. Alain Joxe, Empire of Disorder (New York: Semiotexte 2002).70. Ibid., p. 81.71. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map (note 55); Thomas P. M. Barnett, Blueprint for Action: A

Future Worth Creating (New York: Putnam’s 2005).72. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map (note 55) p. 355.73. For a detailed critique see Simon Dalby, ‘The Pentagon’s New Imperial Cartography: Tabloid

Realism and the War on Terror’, in Derek Gregory and Allan Pred (eds.), Violent Geographies: Fear,Terror and Political Violence (New York: Routledge 2007) pp. 295–308.

74. See Susan Roberts, Anna Secor, and Matthew Sparke, ‘Neoliberal Geopolitics’, Antipode 35.(2003) pp. 886–897.

75. Philippe le Billon, ‘The Geopolitical Economy of Resource Wars’, Geopolitics 9/1 (2004) pp. 1–28.76. Ian Bannon and Paul Collier (eds.), Natural Resources and Violent Conflict: Options and

Actions (Washington: The World Bank 2003).77. Michael Watts, ‘Antinomies of Community: Some Thoughts on Geography, Resources and

Empire’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 29 (2004) pp. 195–216.78. Agnew, Hegemony (note 10).79. John O’Loughlin, ‘The Political Geography of Conflict: Civil Wars in the Hegemonic Shadow’,

in Colin Flint (ed.), The Geography of War and Peace (Oxford: Blackwell 2005) pp. 85–110.80. These connections which are especially clear to environmental critics of the commodity flows

that keep globalised consumption moving; see Richard Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States andthe Degradation of the Tropical World (Rowman and Littlefield 2007).

81. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003) p. 19.82. Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, ‘Dominant Capital and New Wars’, Journal of World

Systems Research 10/2 (2004) pp. 255–327.83. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (note 38).84. Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin 2006).85. Walker, ‘Discourse of Dissent’ (note 15).86. A case made in detail prior to 9/11 in Simon Dalby, Environmental Security (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press 2002).87. Gregory, The Colonial Present (note 1).88. Tom Clancy, The Teeth of the Tiger (New York: Putnam 2003).89. Tristan Sturm, ‘Prophetic Eyes: The Theatricality of Mark Hitchcock’s Premillennial Geopoli-

tics’, Geopolitics 11 (2006) pp. 231–255. More generally on the importance of religion in scripting currentforeign policy see Nick Megoran, ‘God On Our Side? The Church of England and the Geopolitics ofMourning 9/11’, Geopolitics 11 (2006) pp. 561–579.

90. Joel C. Rosenberg, The Ezekiel Option (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale 2005).91. Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm; Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire

(London: I.B. Tauris 2004).92. Miguel deLarrinaga, Alterity, Social Order, and the Meaning(s) of Security, unpublished PhD

dissertation, University of Ottawa, Canada, 2002.93. John Dart, ‘Up against Caesar: Jesus and Paul versus the Empire’, Christian Century (8 Feb.

2005) pp. 20–24.


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