The Godfather of American Foreign Policy Realism Speaks to Today’s World

It’s a good bet that most Americans have never heard of Nicholas Spykman. He was born on October 13, 1893, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He attended Delft University and during the First World War served in Dutch diplomatic posts in Cairo and the Dutch East Indies. In 1920, he came to the United States, and three years later earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, writing about the theories of the sociologist Georg Simmel. His first book, The Social Theory of Georg Simmel, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1925. That same year, he joined the faculty of Yale University, where in 1928 he became a professor of international relations. In the 1930s, he headed Yale’s Institute of International Studies, and in the lead-up to the Second World War wrote two articles for the American Political Science Review on the relationship of geography to American national security. Those articles formed the basis of his most important book, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (1942).

The first chapter of America’s Strategy in World Politics is titled “Power Politics and War,” and Spykman begins it with a quotation from Thucydides: “We both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice only enters where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.” Spykman posits that “All civilized life rests . . . in the last instance on power,” which he regretted has the “connotation of evil” in the United States. Though Spykman acknowledged that the uses of power should be subjected to moral judgments, he maintained that “to hope for a world that will operate without coercion and to decry man’s desire to obtain power is an attempt to escape from reality into a world of dreams.”

Spykman advised American statesmen that in conducting foreign policy they should concern themselves with justice, fairness, and tolerance “only to the extent that they contribute to or do not interfere with the power objective.” Such moral values, Spykman continued, “can be used instrumentally as moral justification for the power quest, but they must be discarded the moment their application brings weakness.” (If only Jimmy Carter had read Spykman).

Spykman’s lodestar was the balance of power. “Experience has shown,” he wrote, “that there is more safety in balanced power than in a declaration of good intention.” In international relations, “states are always engaged in curbing the force of some other state” because “states are interested only in a balance which is in their favor.” The security of the United States, Spykman wrote, depended on Western hemispheric dominance and the balance of power in Europe and East Asia—at that time the key power centers of the Old World.

Spykman’s last book, The Geography of the Peace, supplemented America’s Strategy in World Politics by using maps and projecting the structure of world politics based on the anticipated outcome of the Second World War. The book’s essence is foreign policy realism informed by geopolitics. Spykman’s most important contribution to global geopolitical analysis was the concept of the Rimland, the crescent-shaped geographical region adjacent to the Eurasian core that included Great Britain, Western Europe, the Middle East, India and southwest Asia, China and East Asia, and Japan. “If there is to be a slogan for the power politics of the Old World, it must be ‘Who controls the rimland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.’” “The United States must recognize once again, and permanently,” he wrote, “that the power constellation in Europe and Asia is of everlasting concern to her, both in time of war and in time of peace.”

From 1945 to 1991, the Soviet Union threatened the balance of power on the Eurasian landmass; today, China poses that same threat. Realism—the realism of Nicholas Spykman—dictates that the United States shift its geopolitical focus from Europe to East Asia. Russia, for all its troublemaking in Eastern Europe, does not seriously threaten the balance of power in Europe’s portion of the Rimland. China, however, does threaten to upset the balance of power in the Asian portion of the Rimland.

The Trump administration has followed Spykman’s realist geopolitical playbook. It has used diplomacy and some force to consolidate the U.S. position in the Western Hemisphere. It is using a military buildup and diplomacy to maintain the balance of power in East Asia and the western Pacific. Spykman would approve.

Francis P. Sempa is the author of “Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century” and “America’s Global Role.”