During the past year, numerous pundits and politicians have proclaimed the eclipse of a ‘rules-based global order’ and a ‘return to geopolitics’. Greenland, which Trump wants to acquire from Denmark, is now seen ‘in a geopolitical light’. On television channels, experts explain the importance of the Arctic region with the help of an electronic map of the entire polar area, almost as if we were living through a remake of the Cold War classic Dr Strangelove. Commentators also refer to the geopolitics of Russia’s war in Ukraine, previously considered only as a battle between ‘freedom’ and ‘autocracy’. To paraphrase The Communist Manifesto, ‘a spectre is haunting the world – the spectre of geopolitics’.

What is geopolitics? For many in the commentariat, the concept is just a soundbite, a shorthand for inter-state conflicts about borders and territories. They do not explain why some places on the map loom large in international affairs, while others do not. Many new converts to the geopolitical lingo know little about its troubled intellectual and historical baggage.

‘Geopolitics’ emerged as a field of political thought created by geographers and military thinkers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the time, the peak of European imperialism and colonialism, it offered a template for global strategising when a struggle between great powers seemed to be inevitable. In 1904, the Director of the London School of Economics, the geographer Halford Mackinder, came up with a grand scheme that helped to anchor volatile facts of global politics to the world map. His theory reflected the anxieties of the British Empire, which had reached its apogee and faced too many challenges. The empire’s survival, according to Mackinder, depended not just on traditional balance among great powers, but on finding a geographical focus. He found one in a competition between what he called the ‘Heartland’ and the ‘Rimland’. The former was the place in Eurasia that could be dominated only by militarist authoritarian empires, such as Germany or Russia. The latter were zones accessible to maritime trade, dominated at the time by the Royal Navy.

Mackinder’s vision resonated with the Social-Darwinist ideas of the time and was reinforced by other ‘theories’. In the United States, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote that the rise and fall of great powers was directly linked to their ability to control sea lanes. In Sweden, Rudolf Kjellen coined the terms ‘geopolitics’, ‘ecopolitics’ and ‘demopolitics’ as the guardrails for a modern state to maximise its chances of survival in any world struggle. And in Germany, General Karl Haushofer, frustrated by the fall of the Second Reich in 1918, came up with a ‘Geopolitik’ that saw the world as an arena of struggle between big blocs of countries for ‘living space’ (Lebensraum).

There is debate among scholars over the extent to which Haushofer’s views influenced Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess and inspired the Nazi and Japanese aggression of the late 1930s. In any case, the carnage and atrocities of Nazi Germany in Europe and Japan in Asia utterly compromised ‘Geopolitik’: it came to be viewed as a radical and dangerous teaching for extreme imperialism, warmongering and crimes against humanity. Geopolitics was banished from respectable public discourse and academic studies, along with some other formerly influential ‘theories’, such as ‘scientific’ racism and eugenics.

The geopolitical way of security thinking and strategising, however, did not die. In the United States, it was utilised for defeating American isolationism after the Second World War and became a crucial twin of the Wilsonian mission of making the world ‘safe for democracy’. The US isolationist conviction, on the other hand, was that America’s business should be limited to the Western Hemisphere, not to the promotion on a global scale of ‘freedom’ and democracy. Yet the writings of Mackinder and Mahan claimed otherwise; they appealed to those in the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon who believed that, after the war, America must take over the control of global maritime commons from weakened British hands.

At the same time, the development of strategic aviation and the atom bomb convinced US military that they should have bases all around the world. When Churchill made his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Missouri in March 1946, and when Truman proclaimed his foreign policy doctrine, aimed at containing Soviet influence, in March 1947, this could be easily read as geopolitical struggle between western, maritime ‘Rimland’ and Russian, landbound ‘Heartland’. The panic over ‘the loss of China’ and the Truman Administration’s decision to send troops to Korea fell into the same category. The experience of the Korean War led to the infamous Eisenhower doctrine of ‘falling dominoes’, a slippery path that pitted the United States against national-communism in Indochina. Although the terms ‘geopolitics’ or ‘geostrategy’ were not often used, they remained part of powerful unspoken assumptions in Washington and London.

The quagmire in Vietnam and European détente dealt a blow to American arrogance and militancy. However, they also provided room for strategists to search for alternative, more prudent visions. For Henry Kissinger, who helped Richard Nixon to manage the world at the time of the Vietnam debacle, geopolitical thinking was linked to ‘realism’ in foreign policy. His rival geostrategist, Zbigniew Brzezinski, did the same in the Carter administration. Both Kissinger and Brzezinski understood the Soviet Union was no longer an ideological threat but rather a geopolitical rival. They were determined to deny the Soviets’ access and influence to crucial parts of ‘Rimland’: the Middle East, China and, of course, Latin America beyond Cuba. Brzezinski also actively promoted the use of nationalism and human rights in Eastern Europe, and political Islam in Central Asia, to undermine Soviet control over the Eurasian ‘Heartland’.

The critics of Kissinger’s détente and the perceived ‘softness’ of the Jimmy Carter administration rallied around a more muscular version of US foreign policy. The key driving motives of Ronald Reagan’s Republican right were mainly domestic and ideological, rather than geopolitical. Nonetheless, geopolitics experts in the Western community of security experts saw the ‘crusade against communism’ as a great opportunity to return to the fundamentals of the Mackinderian vision. One such expert, Colin S. Gray, opined in the 1980s that ‘Mackinder was the intellectual father of US containment policy after World War II’. Just like for geostrategists of the early 20th century, the stakes for their Western followers of the early 1980s were no less than a struggle for world domination. They trumpeted about dangers of Soviet expansionism as a zero-sum geopolitical game. At the same time, following Brzezinski, they began to view the Soviet ‘empire’ vulnerable, because of a declining faith in communism, its murderous past, and the apparent flaws in the Soviet Union’s economic model.

Still, what happened next caught everyone, including the geostrategists, by surprise. Mikhail Gorbachev flaunted all expectations: he sacrificed Soviet control over Eastern Europe, and then agreed to the reunification of Germany as a NATO member. This was something fundamentally contrary to geopolitical logic. In the absence of credible answers to Gorbachev’s enigma, western strategists decided to claim they had been ‘right’ all along. Gorbachev did what he had to do under pressure of western policies of ‘containment’ and other structural and institutional conditions that had been the product of western civilisational superiority, capitalism and freedom.

The 1990s ushered an epic decline of geopolitical realism in the victorious West. The scale of western triumph, the disappearance of the Soviet power, and the launching of economic reforms in China, seemed to have relegated the old geostrategic concerns to the past. NATO fell into an existential crisis and had to invent new missions, based not on national interest but on ‘common values’. The future seemed to belong to the European Union, a new kind of international community with purely socio-economic functions. Bill Clinton’s victory in the November 1992 US presidential election marked the emergence of new consensus: an era of ‘eternal peace’, ‘a flat world’ and irreversible democratisation had finally arrived. The experienced team of Cold Warriors, including George W.H. Bush, James Baker, Dick Cheney and Brent Scowcroft, lost an electoral battle. For the first time since the 1930s, the US tiller was in the hands of the people who had rather fuzzy notions about how the world should and should not work – and emphatically renounced geopolitical thinking.

During the 1990s, the geopolitical notions disappeared from the headlines in western media and public commentariat on international security, and even from popular culture. Instead of ‘arcs of insecurity’ and ‘axis of evil’ came the concern for ‘rogue states’ – a few marginal tyrannies, like Libya, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Cuba and North Korea, that were dangerous primarily for their ability to foment and arm non-state terrorism. The language of heartland and rimland lingered on in the remote corners of the national security apparatus and the military academies. Brzezinski, in his articles and books, continued to peddle sweeping geopolitical schemes – only to be dismissed by the new liberal mainstream as outdated and outmoded.

Or so it seemed. Just like after 1945, political control over space could not be fully ignored. And there were always a few sensitive areas, where high stakes and uncertainty about the future opened the door to geostrategic thinking. One obvious case concerned the mapping and territoriality of energy supplies. The Middle East, the Persian Gulf and the shipments of oil through the Strait of Hormuz remained crucial localities for western energy security and strategy. The map of pipelines from Siberia to Eastern and Western Europe remained important, too, as well as the possible construction of future pipelines between Central Asia and Europe across the troubled Caucasus, to avoid Iran and Russia.

Another big case was Russia’s future place in European and Eurasian ‘security architecture’. Even though the western pundits claimed that the world had become ‘flat’, and that all countries should be treated as fully sovereign and equal in their choices, post-Soviet Russia remained an awkward geographic giant that did not quite fit into Europe, and remained a looming threat to its small neighbours. Even for those western politicians, diplomats and military figures who genuinely wanted to engage with a post-communist Russia and wished to promote democracy there, the lack of certainty and Cold War memories fed geopolitical anxiety about the future of Eurasia. Would a resurgent Russia seek its sphere of influence, particularly in the Caucasus and Ukraine? Would it once again be a strategic threat to the West? Those questions sat uncomfortably on some minds in Brussels and London.

Bravely, the Clinton administration ignored all those concerns and proceeded with a revolutionary idea of an ‘open-ended’ NATO enlargement. For Clinton himself, his friend Strobe Talbott, and some others in Washington, the new NATO project was dictated not so much by geopolitical calculations but rather by historical and ideological optimism about democratisation, and the sense of a moral debt to Eastern Europeans. This idealist impulse was buttressed by the uniqueness of American ‘unipolar moment’. It was not so for others. The project of NATO enlargement, as its old-age critics and all Cold War historians warned, was bound to wake the geopolitical demons: a renewed competition over spheres of influence, humiliation of Russia over its loss of territory and control over its neighbourhood, and, ultimately, political tension and confrontation. The Clintonian NATO project found eager support in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland, where geography had been a curse for centuries. Fearing being ‘wedged’ once again between the West and a resurgent Russia, Eastern Europeans provided NATO enlargement with a momentum that was unstoppable.

The jury is still out on why Russia turned to the path of war. Today the vast majority of Western commentators point their fingers at Russia’s failed experiment with democracy, the descent into another authoritarianism, and Putin’s personality, including his fear of a democratic Ukraine. On the other side were critics of the NATO enlargement, including the late George F Kennan, who had warned that the advancement of the bloc to Russia’s borders would end up in a military conflict. Those who reject the causal link between NATO policies and Putin’s attack on Ukraine argue that the western alliance, even with Eastern Europe in it, could not possibly present a security threat to Moscow. They also argue that Putin himself had been inconsistent on NATO enlargement, most recently when Finland and Sweden joined the alliance. Those authors make valid points yet underplay Russia’s experience with geography, its traumas after the end of the Cold War and the Soviet collapse, and the widespread nationalist resentment linked to the loss of great power status.

A more historical approach argues that Russia’s war in Ukraine is a new episode in the long history of ‘perpetual’ insecurity and uphill competition with the West. ‘For half a millennium’, writes Stephen Kotkin, ‘Russian foreign policy has been characterised by soaring ambitions that far exceeded the country’s capabilities.’ Burdened by the sense of ‘impossible’ mission, chained to its great power identity, Russian elites and the majority of Russian people could not just accept a status of equality with Eurasian neighbours. As a result, after a brief romance with the West under Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, Russia predictably returned to perennial geopolitical competition in pursuit of its great power status.

While the long-term patterns of Russian insecurity matter, this approach is too cyclical and circular: Russia would remain messianic as long as it was big, and vice versa. The only exit would be, Kotkin argued, for Russian rulers to ‘come to terms’ with the impossibility of their mission and to stop ‘seeking to dominate Eurasia.’ The problem is posed in geopolitical terms, yet its resolution is detached from geography. Instead, it is linked to the gradual change of Russian collective identity, which would presumably occur after repeated defeats and perhaps further decomposition of the country.

In my view, Russia’s experience with political geography should not be reduced to cycles and path dependency. What Kotkin calls Russia’s ‘perpetual geopolitics’ is not a curse, but rather one of many possible choices made by a minority in the Russian political class against the backdrop of rather unique structural realities after the Soviet collapse.

One should start with history: Russian imperial and Soviet encounters with Europe and the West have been more diverse than it is acknowledged today. From the times of Catherine the Great to the years of Nicholas II, Russia was a full member of ‘the concert’ of European great powers, a participant in its imperialist schemes, rivalries and cooperation. Lenin and Stalin, despite their revolutionary schemes, quickly realised they should join the European security system for their own needs. After 1945, Stalin reacted to the unexpected advent of American power to the European continent by hastily solidifying Soviet control over Eastern Europe.

It was during those times that the common Russian belief emerged that an immense space provided protective depth and security comfort. It became a central part of Russian national identity and supported its claim to greatness. It was also comforting that all potential enemies realised that Russia’s geographic size made it practically unconquerable. This realisation, however, paired uncomfortably with the shock of the German invasion in 1941. This traumatic experience was total and left a deep impression on two generations after 1945, who either lived through the invasion or grew up scarred by it. And it was this collective trauma that explains public support for Soviet domination in East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

At the same time, some major policies of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union were formulated independently of major geographic factors. Nicholas II doomed his dynasty and his empire by plunging into European war in 1914. His motives included loyalty to the Russo-French alliance, pan-Slavist ideas and protection of Serbia. Expansionist designs in the Balkans and access to ‘warm seas’, despite allegations of some historians, hardly played a major role. Stalin acted as an imperialist and was probably the only Soviet leader with a systematic approach to expansion and territorial control. Yet he disastrously misread Hitler’s obsession with ‘living space’ in the East. Nikita Khrushchev, influenced by thermonuclear and missile technology, renounced the USSR’s bases in Finland, Denmark, and China. He withdrew the Soviet army from Austria, indicating his preference for a non-aligned Europe. He was still reluctant to lose Berlin and East Germany, yet impulsively broke with China – an irreparable blow to the ‘heartland’ unity that western geostrategists had dreaded so much. His missiles in Cuba were a reckless personal gamble, in defiance of geographical realities, that predictably backfired. Leonid Brezhnev’s overextension in Africa, as well as a ‘special operation’ in Afghanistan owed more to mindless bureaucratic inertia than any plans of geostrategic expansion.

In the 1970s, the German Ostpolitik, the European détente and the signing of the Helsinki Final Act accelerated the erosion of Soviet ‘perpetual’ insecurities and prepared the ground for the reforms of Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’, a truly revolutionary turn. The Kremlin leadership not only renounced the ideological baggage of communism, but rejected the entire legacy of imperialism, the balance of power, and the use of force. Remarkably, Gorbachev and his reform-minded advisers, some of them combat veterans of the Second World War, had overcome the trauma of German invasion and other geopolitical fears. Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s foreign policy adviser, argued that the Soviet Union had a nuclear shield and no longer needed Eastern Europe as a buffer against a potential western threat. Even more surprisingly, many in the Soviet elites and bureaucracies agreed with Gorbachev that a reunified Germany would become a natural partner of Russia, rather than a bulwark for an American military presence in Europe.

Neither Russian nor Soviet policy makers had used the tropes of geopolitics in their public language and in strategic thinking. There were other dominant discourses, such as the religious (‘Third Rome’), the civilisational (‘pan-Slavic’ and ‘Eurasian’), and the ideological (‘world revolution’ and ‘communist internationalism’). The writings of geopoliticians from Mackinder to Haushofer were dismissed and ignored (except by Stalin) as reactionary attempts to justify imperialism and the Nazi’s genocidal policies. In fact, Soviet ideological censorship of those ideas was nearly absolute. In early 1989, Gorbachev dismissed Kissinger’s concerns about coming instability in Eastern Europe. The Soviet leader clearly viewed geopolitics as a bizarre artefact from the past.

The Soviet collapse changed everything overnight. The post-Soviet Russian Federation, much smaller and weaker, found itself in a space and with a geography that it had never encountered before. Rather than a new phase in an historical cycle, it was a truly unprecedented ‘geopolitical catastrophe’ – not only for young Vladimir Putin, but for many others. Suddenly, Russian elites, even convinced liberal democrats, discovered what it means to have a disintegrating state and army, open and penetrable borders in the South, including with Afghanistan and Iran, and a circle of new and potential violent conflicts in their country’s new near abroad, from Moldova to the Caucasus and Central Asia. In November 1990, Gorbachev signed the Charter of Europe in Paris with all western leaders lionising him. Yet one year and a couple of months later, President Boris Yeltsin and his advisers agonised over how to prevent a Russian-Rumanian war in Transnistria, the string of secessions in Northern Caucasus, and the spread of militant Islamism from Afghanistan.

New problems came in a torrent, and then a flood. The new Russia had no experts, structures and forces that could handle the onset of new problems so much closer to home. What confounded the new rulers of Russia even more was a failure of cooperation schemes with other post-Soviet states, above all with Ukraine. The Commonwealth of Independent States, that Yeltsin and the Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk created to replace the Soviet Union, turned into a ‘divorce-managing’ institution. Any Russian attempts to model it after European integration encountered the accusations of ‘neo-imperialism’ from Ukrainian and other non-Russian politicians. Superficial agreements papered over old and new grievances. The Soviet-made borders between the new independent states, recognised by the United Nations, remained subject to contestation by many inside and outside Russia.

The Yeltsin government counted on western leaders to assist Russia’s resurgence as a democratic nation, but also as a great power, with responsibilities and interest in the country’s ‘new abroad’, now the site of numerous bloody conflicts. While there was much good will in Washington, London and Germany in the early 1990s, the prevalent vision there was of ‘a Weimar Russia’, a highly unstable and unpredictable entity. Russian reformers quickly noticed that the US political class had other domestic and international priorities. Western money and investments did not come to Russia – instead they poured into the communist China. United Nations peacekeeping forces were deployed in Yugoslavia, but not to Transnistria, Caucasus and Central Asia, to relieve the Russian budget and troops. While paying lip service to Russia’s identity as a great power, the US government and its western allies did not want to legitimise Russia’s role in its new abroad. And nationalists in Ukraine, the Baltic States, and the Caucasus saw Russia, democratic or not, as a former colonial master and potentially a future hegemon. Their preference was to join Poland and other Eastern European states in their ‘travel to the West’, into the European Union and NATO.

Almost nobody in the West acknowledged the uniquely acute geopolitical predicament that a still liberal and pro-western Russian government faced in the early 1990s. Initially, Russian foreign policy had been based upon the premise that old geopolitics had no place in the new post-Cold War Europe. Russia’s great power identity, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev argued, would be reformed in the process of joining the West. Yet the idea of NATO enlargement began to undercut this logic. Instead, it gave credence to those in Russia who had ‘discovered’ old geopolitical ‘theories’ and began to argue in their terms.

In the Spring of 1994, Brzezinski published an article in Foreign Affairs in which he claimed that Russia could be either an empire or a democracy. In his view, this precluded any attempts at reintegration of post-Soviet space around Russia. In fact, even preserving Russia’s integrity within its new borders was suspicious. The United States, Brzezinski argued, should shed its illusions of a democratic partnership with Russia and instead shield the West and Eastern Europe against its ‘imperial impulses’. Brzezinski wrote: ‘It cannot be stressed strongly enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.’ This geopolitical scheme was too rigid and Manichean, yet was embraced in Eastern Europe. After a while, Brzezinski’s argument made an indelible imprint on security discussions in the Clinton administration, as well as on the freshly-minted ‘geostrategists’ in Moscow.

The years 1993-94 marked the genesis of Russian obsession with geopolitics. Just as the consequences of the Russian Revolution in 1917 produced ‘Eurasianism’, the disastrous fallout from the Soviet collapse taught some parts of Russian political and security elites to think and argue in geopolitical terms. This turn to geopolitical mental mapping may be viewed as an outcome influenced by Russian history, yet it was not predetermined. At the moment when many in the United States and Western Europe gave up on ‘geostrategies’ and learned to speak in the language of Immanuel Kant, anti-Western Russian thinkers began to formulate Russia’s interests and future in the language of Mackinder, if not Thomas Hobbes. A host of paragons followed, and soon courses and textbooks on ‘geopolitics’ became standard at Russian universities. In 1997, Brzezinski published his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, where he designated Ukraine as a geostrategic pivot of Eurasia, and called for containment of Russia in the post-Soviet space. The same year, Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin produced his The Geopolitical Future of Russia, where he posited that Russia’s only possible form of existence is as a Eurasian empire. Both books became highly influential readings in the Russian general staff and security-related bureaucracies.

In Moscow, the continuation of NATO enlargement, the NATO use of force in Yugoslavia, and continuing tensions between Russia and its near abroad countries kept eroding the appeal of liberal internationalism and enhanced the power of geopolitical ideas. By the time Putin became the Russian president in 1999, abstract geopolitical schemes became an established fashion that corrupted flexible and pragmatic diplomacy. Five years later, Putin, in his speech to the Federal Assembly, the upper house of the Russian parliament, spoke about the collapse of the Soviet Union as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century’. Those words, that shocked so many in the West, surprised nobody in the Russian political class. While many more factors and contingencies still had to occur to prepare the ground for Putin’s war against NATO and Ukraine, the language and structured conceptual thinking for this had already been there at the beginning of the 21st century.

The point of explaining this historical process is not to argue that geopolitical abstractions justify imperialism and lead to a conflict. Instead, it is to assert that geopolitical mental maps should be historicised and understood as products of specific situations. Every state tends to think about security in the context of space and geography. This is why the language and notions of geopolitics often make a comeback in new forms when it is least expected. Those politicians, military figures and strategy pundits who ignore this phenomenon risk being caught by brutal surprises. International rules and liberal values cannot erase a long history of conflicts and rivalries over territory. Like nationalism and imperialism, ‘geopolitics’ cannot be banished or deconstructed. Instead, it should be understood and carefully managed. At the same time, one should not develop the opposite fallacy, which claims that any country or people are doomed by their history, neighbourhood or ‘geopolitical culture’ to revert to the same international conduct again and again.

Political scientist Alexander Wendt once wrote that ‘anarchy’ is what states make of it. Like other big, loose concepts in international relations, geopolitics should be treated as an intellectual, but also social construct. Thinking about borders and space is an inevitable ingredient in forming national interests, as is consideration of economics, security, human rights and climate concerns. These are all the threads that leaders must use to craft their foreign policies. Democracy and free media often help leaders to find a balance – but not always. In a crisis, with war going on nearby or an acute sense of threat, passions, power arrogance and selective historical memories make democratically-elected governments look at geography and proximity differently, and much less rationally. The follies of the US in Indochina, Afghanistan and Iraq testify to this tendency. The current gambles of the Trump administration in both hemispheres are a disgrace to responsible foreign policy. And the current difficulty experienced by the EU in forming a credible and balanced security strategy towards Putin’s Russia is another case of the challenge of matching security with geographic realities.

The interaction between geographical space, security challenges and world politics is both an inevitable and sometimes inflammatory process. For millennia, maps and territories have been an essential part of collective imaginaries, identities and security perceptions. Denial of this factor, characteristic of the post-Cold War years, was an exercise in ideological illusions. We are now living in a fundamentally different period, when ‘geopolitics’ is once again rearing its head as a default way of mapping out strategies in an age of new uncertainties and anxieties. We should treat new geopolitical schemes with extreme care, against the light of comprehensive historical experience of international relations. Hopefully, this ‘experiential geopolitics’ will cause less harm than preceding versions did in the past.