The first interesting fact I learnt as a teenager was that, in Russian, the word ‘safety’ means ‘not in danger’. The second interesting fact I learnt as a teenager was that the traditional goal of British foreign policy was to make sure that the European continent remained divided. The third interesting fact I learnt as a teenager was that Napoleon Bonaparte had been foolish to invade Russia – especially during the winter.
In the 2010s and 2020s, these three facts – along with the rare insight that Germany became a unified country in 1871, and was not so beforehand – would, amazingly, have allowed me to sustain a reputation as an educated man of letters for the rest of my life.
I knew these things; I could say them; I could recite them on request. Everyone was suitably impressed.
But why? In the 2010s, these historical facts seemed somehow timely. There was a savvy to them, and a smirk. It wasn’t a coincidence that kids and adults alike started to come out with these facts around the time that the failure of liberal interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan had – rightly or wrongly – become universally acknowledged. Factoids, or anecdotes, or tropes like these seemed to speak to the deep grooves in human history that liberal internationalism had forgotten in its hubris. Ties of religion, ties of nationality; deep historical grudges; deep strategic imperatives – these hinted at what could, wincingly, be referred to as an old spirit of ‘Blood and Iron’ that had more staying power than many would have liked to admit.
The basic idea was that ‘history’ had been forgotten, and it was now taking its revenge on us in the heedless present. This worldview also came with a new slogan. This was: That in light of recent events, Francis Fukuyama had been wrong to pronounce the end of history in 1989. You didn’t need to be clever to say this, or even to have read Fukuyama’s book. After the mid-2010s, this was joined by another slogan: ‘Liberal international order’, and its antagonists.
The new realism has spawned a new type of public intellectual. The typical aesthetic of a consciously post-Fukuyama commentator is someone who is pained by forbidden knowledge. They seem to carry the weight of returned ‘history’ on their shoulders. They are able to see past the liberal pieties, and this makes them uniquely capable of showing us how things really are. One example is Ian Bremmer, whose cynical, monoglot, Bill Maher-style gave him the air of a jaded Foggy Bottom insider, who can dispense pearls of hotel bar wisdom. Another is Bruno Macaes, a true sphinx without a riddle. Also part of the new realism was the return of Henry Kissinger to public life. His books and leading articles became ever more frequent, as did his trips to the Oval Office. To observers there was something slightly arch about consulting Dr. Kissinger – but it was assumed, after an era of liberal overreach, that his dark insights could no longer be done without.
Clearly, there was a need for a new way to look at international affairs. Enter ‘geopolitics’. Geopolitics is premised on the idea that a country’s foreign policy, and even its forms of political and social order, can be extrapolated from its topography. Liberal ideas had proven an insufficient means to make sense of the world; hills, rivers, mountains, gorges and straits would evidently do so much more.
Geopolitics was an attractive school of thought in the middle of the 2010s. It had a frisson of pragmatism, and a hard edge. It claimed to deal in objective reality, not big ideas. At times it almost resembled a science. To its proponents, geopolitics was a cold corrective slap after the hubris of the 1990s and early 2000s.
Geopolitics offers us hard and perennial truths about states and their interests. These truths do not change, and outlast mere diplomacy. Unfortunately, in the hands of incurious people, this was just an invitation to a new kind of intellectual complacency. And so it proved. In the 2010s, supposed perennial truths of geopolitics quickly devolved into a series of folksy just-so stories. “Don’t start a land war in Asia.” “Russia is a riddle wrapped inside an enigma.” “Britain has lost an Empire, but has not yet found a role.” “Russia’s search for a warm-water port.” “The Eastern concept of ‘face’.” Popular geopolitics in the 2010s has created the kind of educated person who is reasonably clued-up on the Suwałki Gap, but cannot – for example – tell you what happened in England in 1688, or who Talleyrand was.
In hands like these, it’s no surprise that the concept underwent, not so much a semantic drift, but a collapse into complete mush. Here’s how the Times recently used the term:
This is a serious risk for universities, and Britain. For universities’ [reliance on foreign students] makes their income dependent on geopolitics.
And here’s a line from its idiot cousin, the Evening Standard:
This is the geopolitics of AI that we should be getting. Instead, the geopolitics of AI we are about to get is the exact opposite.
None of this has anything to do with mountain ranges, or rivers or geographic choke points. What these authors mean here is ‘foreign policy’, or, even, ‘diplomacy’. But this scarcely matters. The term is being used because of its vague air of worldliness. This is geopolitics as an aesthetic; as a lifestyle choice.
Nor is geopolitics being applied consistently as a method. The rivers and mountains keep popping in and out of the story. China’s dash for the first island chain is a geopolitical necessity, but Britain’s fear of a united Europe – a very old fear – can safely be dismissed as a sad example of imperial nostalgia. Indeed, the modern United Kingdom virtually discredits the entire field of geopolitics. Britain has sat mouse-still as its geopolitical position has completely fallen apart. In the 2020s, the two old strategic fears have been realised: the ‘backdoor’ of Britain – Ireland – is now controlled by a Government with designs on British territory; this Government is in turn being encouraged by a European continental superstate which has its capital in the Low Countries – a part of the world that Britain had fought for centuries to keep neutral.
To its fans, geopolitics is deliciously dark. It is svelte, and lean. It is old-school cool. It carries something of Nixon in China, or of the drawing rooms of the Congress of Vienna. Ideology is left at the door, and people are free to get down to brass tacks. How odd, then, that this kind of performative cynicism would come into fashion in the 2010s and ’20s. No period in human history has been so lacking in diplomatic suave. This is, after all, the age of the big red reset button, and of pot-banging ‘wolf warrior’ press releases that offend everybody, mostly by mistake. Diplomatic negotiations seldom occur at all, and when they do they are to construct plodding new systems of global rules – not to cut deals.
Geopolitics and liberal international order; these two terms are ever more allied. But they are in many ways opposites. One feature of liberalism is a basic faith in the idea that people can be reasoned with. Geopolitics – or at least the crude essentialist tropes that wear its guise – does not concede anything of the sort. According to popular geopolitics, the verdict of geography means that Russia will always be an aggressive power, and therefore cannot be reasoned with. Russia has been driven mad by insecure frontiers – and Putin is the maddest of them all. This does not inform negotiations; it is an excuse to not negotiate. Geopolitics does not temper the liberal international order with realpolitik, but drives its worst impulses on. Conflict is no longer something contingent and negotiable, but is now an expression of the immovable currents of history. This all owes more to tarot cards than to Talleyrand, and we shouldn’t let its practitioners claim the mantle of realism and suave.
J. Sorel is a pseudonym.
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The youth of today seem more troubled than those of the past despite all the safeguards put in place for them.
Our should that read “because of all the safeguards”?
Moronphobia!!
Nice to see some new names popping up in the comments.
Tell your friends!
Cracking name
Try telling them to read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Less trigger, more atom bomb.
Get rid of these people and their patronising ways, pandering to the worst sides of human nature.
BE TOUGH – BECAUSE LIFE IS!
The only things that need trigger warnings are the bloody trigger warnings.
I suggest to discontinue the use of terms like snowflakes for the victims of all these intellecutal safety procedures, namely, the students, who have no way of opting out of them and keep being told/ taught that this would be necessary by people who are at least as clever as the majority of students and have much more real-world experience. This is obviously outrageous nonsense but it’s really just university administration health and safety teams on autopilot. Their job is to attach trigger warnings to stuff and given enough time (and money for salaries) they’ll eventually have all of the world covered with them.
Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and Orwell’s ‘1984’ must have left the syllabus long ago.
More bombardment of inconsequential woke rubbish to distract us.
Meanwhile, the ruling elites work in the background on the stuff that really matters.
I just wonder how many of these snowflakes play/ed violent games on line or watched violent movies?
Trigger warnings will be attached to these in due course. That’s just a matter of busy people finally getting around to that.