Imperialism, Domination, Culture

Geopolitics, 13:413436, 2008 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 online DOI:
: 10.1080/14650040802203679
Geopolitics, Vol. 13, No. 3, Jul 2008: pp. 00 1557-3028 1465-0045 FGEO Geopolitics
SPECIAL SECTION: CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS AFTER TWENTY YEARS
Imperialism, Domination, Culture: The Continued Relevance of Critical Geopolitics

Downloaded By: [University of Colorado, Boulder campus] At: 20:28 20 February 2009
Imperialism, Simon Dalby Domination, Culture
SIMON DALBY
Department of Geography, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Twenty years ago Gearid Tuathail called for an approach within Political Geography that made geopolitical culture and the formulation of foreign policy the object of analysis. He specified the task of what subsequently became critical geopolitics as the need to expose the complicity of geopolitics with domination and imperialism. After the cold war there was a decade when military matters declined in importance and globalisation confused the geographical designations of danger. In the aftermath of 9/11 the utility of force has been reasserted by a neo-Reaganite American foreign policy using military force in the global war on terror and the invasion of Iraq. Now the geopolitical culture is a matter of debates about empire and the appropriate geopolitical designation of danger, whether in Thomas Barnetts non integrated gap on the Pentagons New Map or in the complex geographies of Alain Joxes Empire of Disorder. This re-militarisation of global politics clearly suggests the continued relevance of Tuathails specification of the need for critical geopolitics to grapple with the culture that produces imperial attempts at domination in distant places.
But in order to conduct ourselves properly, decently, we need to set ourselves against the unbridled arrogance that assumes that We have the monopoly of Truth and that the world is necessarily ordered by and around Us.1
Address correspondence to Simon Dalby, Department of Geography, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1S 5B6. E-mail: sdalby@gmail.com 413
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How did our oil get under their sands?2 La Gographie, a sert, dabord, faire la guerre.3
THEN AND NOW

Gearid Tuathail started his 1986 paper on the Language and Nature of the New Geopolitics, which can fairly be said to be the first explicit attempt to posit the scholarly agenda which subsequently has become known as critical geopolitics, commenting that there were two approaches then in the discipline dealing with geopolitics. First was the traditional Mackinderian approach which emphasised policy recommendation; practitioners who wish, in essence, to practice geopolitics.4 Second was a more critical and materialist framework drawing from political economy and world system theory, 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 the Reagan administration with its explicit attempts to shore up a declining hegemony through the use of military force. Where twenty years ago Tuathails initial concern was with El Salvador, now force and violence are more obviously involved in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in South West Asia. Given the stimulus to geopolitical thought that the re-militarisation of politics in the 1980s provided then,5 it is noteworthy that the war on terror and the attack on Iraq in particular, has triggered another extension of disciplinary concern twenty years later.6 But the parallel with that period, of the Reagan administration, military buildups and nefarious military doings in peripheral places, and the current period twenty years later, is no accident. The neo-conservatives who have either directed the war on terror, or provided advice and policy from their think tanks in Washington, actively sought the reinvention of a neo-Reaganite foreign policy when they were out of power in the 1990s, and set about implementing it after 9/11.7 Insofar as critique of such policies and the geographical thinking that legitimates them was a key part of getting critical geopolitics started, then tragically, it is still all too relevant two decades later. Since Tuathail first wrote, both the geopolitical and intellectual terrain within which critical geopolitics operates has changed fundamentally. The end of the Cold War has reshaped the imagination of danger, and specifically the terrains whence threats originate, as well as the related discussions of appropriate security responses. As the rest of this paper suggests, the respecification of the appropriate strategic geography in the aftermath of the Cold War suggested numerous possibilities. But the codification of the appropriate geo-graph in the mappings of the war on terror had to wait for the events of 9/11 when the geography of danger coalesced into an explicitly imperial imaginary of a war against a global threat. In the
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interim geographys engagement with feminism, cultural studies, poststructuralism and post-colonial studies has generated numerous theoretical resources and a wealth of empirical material to inform critical geopolitics.8 Given the richness of these intellectual possibilities in the new geopolitical circumstances, the question posed by the editors of this journal in their invitation to contribute to this special issue, concerning the continued utility of the approach, might be read as a question concerning the specificity of critical geopolitics in this changed context. In the rest of this paper I will argue that there remains a necessity to engage with the spatial framing of politics and the geographical tropes used in security, defence and foreign policy thinking, a specific intellectual terrain that still justifies the moniker critical geopolitics. Where Tuathail was concerned in the 1980s to tackle the culture that supported interventions the vocabulary of geopolitics has now changed and the imperial themes that he specified as being in need of criticism have proliferated in the current decade, the link between geographical specifications of cultural identity, and the invocation of specific geographies of danger linked to matters of military strategy, remains an important venue of contestation. Although that said, it is important to note Matthew Sparkes much broader invocation of the responsibility of geography as a discipline to challenge the taken-for-granted specifications of the political world, in which geography as a discipline then becomes critique in a post-foundational ethic.9 In this sense at least Sparke suggests that critical geopolitics should effectively be subsumed in the larger critical enterprise. While this author clearly supports Sparkes aspirations there is a military, and more specifically a strategic, dimension to contemporary geopolitical thinking that is an important matter worthy of continued attention; empire isnt only about military force, neither as Agnew reminds us, is contemporary hegemony primarily a matter of military force or territorial conquest.10 But much blood and treasure is still involved in military conflict, and many wars are justified in language structured in explicitly geographical terms. As such the initial focus in critical geopolitics in the 1980s on directly tackling the reasoning practices of statecraft remains compelling even though the geopolitical circumstances and the intellectual resources available in geography have changed. The use of imperial language in Tuathails initial formulation turns out to be especially appropriate now when discussions of warfare and the imbroglios in Afghanistan and Iraq investigate matters in terms of counterinsurgency warfare and hearken back to the history of imperial rule. They do so in part because traditionally military forces of empire have had two primary functions: first, patrolling the peripheries against external threats and second, internal pacification, administration and policing. The latter has come to prominence once again in the war on terror, and insofar as it has shaped the geographical imaginary of commentators, it is useful to contrast this 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 protagonists whose militaries were primarily designed to fight each other.11 The cultural dimensions of all this have likewise been an important theme in the discussions of popular geopolitics, in American culture, movies and elsewhere where imperial themes are once again central to the discussion of American masculinity and the role of its military in producing identity.12 Because of this contemporary context the rest of this paper argues for the continued relevance of the initial problematic sketched out in the 1980s, despite the changed intellectual and geopolitical circumstances two decades later; indeed it suggests precisely that the much more explicit evocation of imperial themes is related to the military dimensions of the war on terror and needs to be understood as such. The links between neo-liberalism, neoconservatism and the Bush doctrine, and in particular the work of Thomas Barnett have been dealt with by Matt Sparke in particular and elsewhere in some detail by this author;13 the discussion below of Barnett, and the comparison with Joxe, is intended to focus on the mappings of empire rather than an engagement with political economy. Neither can this paper adequately deal with the huge literature now detailing the cultural practices of empire. Likewise the remilitarisation of culture, and not least its gendered consequences 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 historical summary of the debate so far.14 Instead this paper makes some observations on military geographies, strategic representations of empire, the cartographies implicit in the technothriller genre and the mappings of American virtue in the face of geopolitical danger to reassert the continuing importance of the key discussions of culture and discourse in the early critical geopolitics literature. It concludes by linking themes of consumption culture which empire supposedly secures, to matters of political economy and suggests that there is considerable further potential for critical geopolitics to engage the contemporary religious tropes in American culture in particular.
CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS
To take on his self-imposed task Tuathail argued in 1986 that it was necessary to directly tackle geopolitical language, and the practices of foreign policy making that invoked geographical terminology, but that such an analysis must not abstract the language from the context of its production. This needed to be complemented by a focus on the formulation of foreign policy and the nature of the state system. In short, he suggested the necessity of engaging directly with geopolitical culture, a theme that reflected other debates in the 1980s about culture and ideology, and about how the discourse of dissent to use Rob Walkers contemporaneous term, could
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effectively challenge the militarism of the times.15 These questions have not gone away, although two decades later very different enemies are being produced through geopolitical discourses that render Islamic extremists as the enemy. Another generation of activists has emerged to struggle with the consequences of military power, and as the epigraph to this paper reproducing the slogan from the placards used at numerous protests against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 suggests, geographical formulations are part of this discourse too. Tuathail went on to argue that the concept of a culture (in its broadest, all pervasive, not narrow sense) of geopolitics is a much sounder ontological position for it reifies neither the economic nor the political but postulates a dialectical (interconnected) relationship between the two within the historical context of particular signifying practices.16 Using this concept of geopolitical culture makes possible a mode of analysis that overcomes the wariness that geographers had about geopolitics after World War Two. Contemporary geographers should be just as wary of the phenomenon, for it is premised on the reality as well as the assumption of imperialism and domination. Mackinder (1904) understood this and endorsed it. Contemporary social scientists should understand this and expose it.17 Although Tuathails 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 domination. What has followed since under the label of critical geopolitics shares these concerns, and the explicit political stance that it is not the task of the geographer to provide state policy makers with rationales for foreign policies that promote imperial power or coercion. The analytical gaze is turned precisely on these activities, and in the process becomes an explicitly critical practice. While the discipline had to wait a decade for Tuathails book called Critical Geopolitics in which he elaborated a series of theoretical concerns which showed that matters of representation and text required a more sophisticated understanding of power, knowledge and identity, than that specified earlier in terms of a simple exposure of domination, here in this initial formulation are the key themes that were subsequently to mark the intellectual terrain of critical geopolitics.18 But refusing the temptations to practice geopolitics and instead engaging its culture to understand how geopolitics works has not proven easy in the decades since. Many writers have grappled with the matter of culture; Tuathail has returned to it recently to spell it out in more theoretical detail and also to make it a key theme in teaching undergraduates critical geopolitics.19 The numerous discussions elsewhere in academia about post-coloniality, positionality, and post-modernism on the one hand, and the not entirely unrelated discussions of method on the other, have shaped the discussions in critical geopolitics too. So while the achievements of a vibrant discussion of
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geopolitics in a number of critical registers has been clear, the difficulties of critique have persisted and the debate about method and purpose continue.20 But there is little doubt that the themes that Tuathail sketched out in 1986 have been remarkably persistent; imperialism is at least as relevant today as it was then, even if Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan are now more in the news than El Salvador. While it is certainly an oversimplification, nonetheless it is not too far from the mark to suggest that critical geopolitics is what happened when post-structuralism, post-modernism, feminism and other variants of critical social theory and the post-colonial debates in other disciplines, and especially in international relations, met a revived political geography in the late 1980s.21 Tuathails focus on the culture of foreign policy making suggests this very clearly; his work with John Agnew in this period, and in particular their crucial paper on Geopolitics and Discourse which finally appeared in Political Geography in 1992, years after its initial circulation as a conference paper, emphasises the multiple forms of geopolitical reasoning and the intertexts between more formal thinking, practical articulations in political practice and popular culture.22 Edward Saids Orientalism, perhaps the key text in crystallising what subsequently became post-colonial studies, was especially influential in formulations of discourse and the geographical imagination.23 It was so because (a point not elaborated in Tuathail s 1986 paper, but prominent in 1992) of the importance in geopolitical culture of the construction of threats to American national security, how these threats are mapped, and how such mappings structure strategic thinking, specifying important places and marginal places, and in turn the justifications for certain kinds of military forces best suited for dealing with dangers in these specific places. The Soviet Threat was the dominant danger through the Cold War period, and its specification drew on the classical geopolitical writing of Mackinder and Spykman in constructing its Manichean cartography of hostile otherness.24 Much more recently Derek Gregory has once again used Said as his point of departure in criticising The Colonial Present and the 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 destroyed our maps.26 Precisely by removing the dominant Other in the American geopolitical imaginary the end of the Cold War did destroy the cartography of fear and the neat division of the world into geopolitical blocs. In the early 1990s this produced a plethora of arguments and suggestions as to how the world was to be specified in geopolitical terms. In particular Francis Fukuyama suggested that the end of history had been reached and
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the triumph of liberalism was at hand so blocs were effectively over; Edward Luttwak thought that geo-economics was about to overtake geopolitics, so blocs would be reconstructed on different premises; Samuel Huntington announced an imminent clash of civilisations with yet another albeit highly contested geography.27 OLoughlin and Heske noted the return of Spykmans writings as an important theme in geopolitical discussions, but much of the grand strategy literature of the time passed with little comment in the critical geopolitics genre.28 Globalisation soon emerged as both business aspiration and the name of the age. Disarmament agreements and reductions of nuclear weapons were more in vogue than the rivalries of superpower realpolitik. There were other languages of international politics available to discuss the future of global politics. Debt crises and trade imbalances, economic blocs and free trade agreements also provided additional vocabulary for diplomats. Various liberal/internationalist perspectives were in circulation in books and in the pages of the Washington policy journals.29 In some spheres economic issues and global threats to the ecosphere loomed larger than military considerations; the Earth Summit happened in 1992 but even there the dominant script was one of great powers, rivalry and international prestige.30 Despite calls at the time to disenthrall American thinking about politics from Cold War themes, or more fundamentally rethink American security policies, the geopolitical mode of reasoning about security was far from a spent force.31 The first Bush administration was quick to redefine American identity as a military superpower in the Gulf crisis. Superpower status was defined in realist terms and specifically in terms of the American ability to intervene militarily in the Third World. Despite the rhetoric of United Nations involvement military power once again defined the US as the supreme actor in international affairs, the worlds policeman, the only superpower at a unipolar moment.32 Despite the numerous new perspectives on security in the latter years of the 1980s and in the 1990s,33 the dominant discourse of postCold War political discussion in Washington remained one of military strategy and the classical geopolitical themes of great power rivalry. While the themes of the discourse may have been stretched to refer to geo-economic rivalries,34 the important point that Tuathail emphasised was that the language and the policy planning premised on it was still of states and power.35 Despite the processes that were then becoming known as globalisation, in much of the geoeconomic discourse economic developments were once again referred to in terms of territorial strategies and the language of realpolitik. In the early 1990s the geographical specification of likely future threats was a matter of very considerable disagreement. Stephen Van Everas cogently argued case for drastically reduced US military capabilities is especially interesting precisely because he argued that the Third World is effectively 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 One potential danger that might threaten American prosperity is a major European war and hence the logic for maintaining an American presence there. Van Everas argument led to a response that completely contradicted his specification of the appropriate geography of concern.37 In light of then current economic growth both by Japan and the German-led European Community, critics argued that the US should concentrate its military, trade and foreign policy on areas of immediate concern for its own economic interests. Recognising the perils of overstretch expounded on at length in Paul Kennedys Rise and Fall of Great Powers a few years earlier,38 these authors suggest prioritising American commitments in an explicitly geographic formulation, an American zone of cooperation with a new strategic focus on the Pacific and Latin America; US military power can be reconstituted and its long-term strategic future assured in this completely different geography. Many of these themes spilled over into the genres of popular geopolitics. The shifting popular understandings of discourses of danger were represented clearly in the plot lines of Tom Clancys technothriller novels.39 Against the backdrop of the second Cold War in the early 1980s and the subsequent emphasis of third world dangers and in the light of Grenada, Libya, and Panama, not to mention Iraq, his themes incorporated US security concerns in a highly accessible manner. First (in The Hunt for Red October), came the concern with technological innovation in the strategic arms race and the potential for Soviet technical progress to counteract US naval supremacy. Concern with internal troubles in the Soviet Union triggering an attack on NATO in Western Europe was dealt with in Red Storm Rising (1986), an interesting plot irony given that internal troubles a few years later in the Soviet Bloc lead to glasnost, perestroika and the Sinatra doctrine instead. Irish terrorism in Britain and the US provided the somewhat unlikely plot line for Patriot Games (1987). The dangers of the expansion of the war in Afghanistan and the potential for Star Wars weapons systems to change the strategic balance showed up in The Cardinal in the Kremlin (1988). The dangers of narcoterrorism and political subversion in Latin America followed in Clear and Present Danger (1989). Then came fears of Palestinian nuclear terrorism and the potential for physist proliferation to provide various groups with the knowhow to construct nuclear weapons. This was the theme in the significantly titled 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 presaging events of a decade later with hijacked airplanes instead of a nuclear weapon. As Tom Clancy makes clear threats were dealt with by upper middle-class white American males applying the reasoning practices that take for granted and reproduce the dominant understanding of how politics is scripted. These were very much the manly virtues praised
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in the narratives of the Gulf war early in 1991 as feminist critics in particular pointed out.40 The crisis in the Gulf in 1990 after the Iraqi invasion was quickly defined in military terms, and the resultant war perpetuated the policies of military solutions to political difficulties. The New World Order proclaimed in conjunction with the mobilisation and deployment to the Gulf provided a unique opportunity for a show of force and international solidarity against a quickly branded pariah state. Working in the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and others drafted a blueprint for the future of the American military, one that was leaked to the press in 1992, suggesting that this victory gave America the opportunity to extend its lead over all potential and putative military competitors. They argued that this commanding presence on the world stage should be maintained into the indefinite future so that never again could another state mount a threat to the United States on the order of the Soviet challenge. Indeed they suggested that an American dominance in military affairs would act to deter other states from even trying, hence ensuring a pax Americana based on military pre-eminence, into the distant future.41 Security was once again understood in terms of external threats issued from someplace beyond the sphere of political action to which military or political management strategies should be applied to impose solutions. The geopolitical understandings of inside and outside are in play here, in the process militarising security matters. The domestic political order was taken as an unproblematic given; the danger of subversion or corruption comes from an external source. The preeminent protector of this security is seen by many in the Western world, and nearly all security intellectuals in Washington, as the American military. The overarching trope for all this was the simple sense, articulated by the widespread adoption of Fukuyamas phrasing 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 might be mapped.
GLOBALISATION AND GRAND STRATEGY

Military actions in the Gulf did not ensure George H. W. Bushs re-election; the Clinton administration came to power, elected on a campaign theme immortalised as its the economy stupid. While the military forces were reduced somewhat and budget deficits brought under control major foreign policy initiatives didnt include military actions abroad initially. The administration took criticism over its failure to intervene in Rwanda and the botched intervention in Somalia. But it did intervene in Bosnia, and Kosovo, repeatedly bombed Iraq, and used cruise missiles on Sudan and Afghanistan in a failed 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, clearly they were much less of a priority than in the Reagan years. The removal of the Soviet threat also produced a serious doctrinal gap in the American military; its role was suddenly much less clear. But institutional inertia maintained numerous Cold War programmes despite the new geopolitical circumstances. The argument codified as the Powell doctrine, which suggested that Vietnam-type imbroglios should be avoided by the application of overwhelming force to achieve specific objectives supported by political backing at home, and with a clear exit strategy at the end of the combat period, was widely accepted by many commentators who argued it was vindicated by the Gulf War.42 The doctrinal discussions about how to extend the technological capabilities of American armed services however continued to focus on large-scale military competition, the near peer competitor most frequently considered was China, understood in this logic as the next potential enemy for American forces. The revolution in military affairs linked guidance systems and information systems in a whole new series of technological capabilities that meant that the American forces could bomb Bosnia in 1995, and subsequently Serbia in 1999 with near impunity. But the military effectiveness of such operations remained in doubt to the critics, despite the rhetoric of Shock and Awe in the military textbooks and Wesley Clarks subsequent manual on how to use air power.43 The need to transform the ground forces for lighter faster movement to take advantage of the new technology in combat ran up against the traditional organisation of the army into large heavily equipped divisions.44 The 1990s also involved an explicit attempt to extend the remit of democratic regimes as a strategy of enlargement, a direct reversal of the prior spatial direction of American policy in terms of containment. The view from Washington during the Clinton administration shifted focus a number of times with attention paid to the dangers of collapsing states, genocides and environmental threats. New emphasis on such matters contributed to a focus on key pivotal states in the South, those whose political stability was judged to be essential to regional stability, and hence a matter of priority for security planners given the threats these regions might potentially pose to global order.45 But themes of multilateralism and trade arrangements to facilitate the booming American national economy, and issues such as managing the Asian financial crisis of 1997 were paramount. Economic matters took precedence, and to the alarm of the neo-conservatives, military matters were seen to be of less importance. Globalisation was more important than pax Americana; trade liberalisation and financial matters were the order of the day. The political protests of the 1990s were about these matters, the economic dislocations and inequities of neo-liberalism discussed in terms of an anti-globalisation movement, not a matter for either peace or critiques of imperialism.
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The confusion among policy makers about how to specify the dangers America faced in these times lingered through the 1990s; in Tuathail and Lukes terms deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation were the order of the day, although they did point to an overarching concern with a mapping of the world into wild zones of danger and tame zones in need of protection from threats from the wild zones.46 This sense of drift in military terms, the lack of a clear focus on dealing with the threats supposedly presented by Iraq, galvanised the neo-conservatives into calling for rearmament, and explicitly for a neo-Reaganite foreign policy where military force could be used to shape the future.47 Cooling their heels out of power the neo-conservatives reinvented themselves as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), and wrote their criticisms of the Clinton years in terms of both the lack of priorities given to military spending in general reducing Americas ability to project power, and more specifically in terms of a failure to engage more violently with the Iraqi regime.48 But PNAC, in its catalogues of threats and its demands for military expansion, downplayed the threats from terrorist attacks or insurgent movements; states and their apparatuses remained the geopolitical lens through which the world was viewed and through which they thought military planning should be organised.49 An imperial formulation of geopolitics if ever there was one. But not one understood quite as such at the time. Candidate George W. Bush repeatedly suggested quite clearly in the 2000 campaign, prior to his appointment to the presidency by the supreme court, that America simply wasnt in the nation-building business.
IMPERIAL GEOPOLITICS
In the aftermath of 9/11 and the crucial decision by the Administration to define the response as a war on terror, much of the discussion of American foreign policy, and in particular the invasions of Afghanistan and subsequently Iraq was suddenly discussed in imperial tropes. Niall Fergusons Empire, Andrew Bacevichs American Empire, Chalmers Johnstons Sorrows of 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-confessed conservatives concerned that imperial adventures are eroding what remains of the republican form of government that supposedly rules in Washington.51 While this doesnt necessarily make America an empire, it certainly suggests that at least as far as the military attempts to dominate many parts of the globe are concerned, it is acting in an imperial manner. In part the designation imperial is a matter of appearances; the global war on terror and American power coercing Pakistan into cooperating in its invasion of Afghanistan, certainly looked imperial. Likewise when the invasion 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 their explicit statements about pre-eminence, preventive war, the strategy of forcible regime change, interventions to deal with rogue and failed states, and subsequently the formulation of a long war against Islamic extremism contributing to the ultimate foreign policy objective of eliminating tyranny on the planet, made it clear that military coercion was back on the agenda in a manner that suggested an explicitly imperial agenda.52 Tuathails initial 1986 juxtaposition of domination and imperial power is tragically apt once again. So too is the longstanding concern in critical geopolitics about the construction of enemies, and the geographical language used to portray the terrain of international conflict as requiring military interventions.53 But crucial to the emergence of the theme of empire is the simple point that empires engage in wars against militarily weak peripheral political organisations in distant lands. The Cold War was a struggle between big states, with Europe as the potential battleground in the imaginary war.54 In contrast, the new war is about pacification operations, expeditionary forces, asymmetric conflicts and bringing local rulers into line with metropolitan priorities, a matter that frequently involves subjugating local populations in the messy geographies of the new wars. Ironically, but consistent with the representations of geopolitical culture, just as the troops were becoming involved in ever more conflicts with complicated geographies American power was being represented in clear moral cartographies, and a single overarching geopolitical division between what Thomas Barnett would quickly dub the integrated core and the non-integrated gap in the global economy.55 Finally the military preoccupations of the neo-conservatives with 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 wild zones of South West Asia. Once again Manichean division applies: with us or with the terrorists. US special forces in Afghanistan do have all sorts of parallels with British military adventures there in the nineteenth century. The invasion of Iraq likewise; the 2003 intervention by British forces after all was the fourth time they had done this in ninety years and part of a long-term pattern of growing Western influence after the collapse of the Ottoman empire.56 Reading the Quadrennial Defense Review Report of 2006 makes it clear that Pentagon planners are building an infrastructure to quickly move troops and air power to any corner of the globe that may require the use of military force.57 The system of roads for which Rome is famous allowed for the movement of the legions of heavy infantry from one part of the empire to another relatively quickly. But much of the scouting and many of the cavalry formations used in Roman wars were mercenaries or local levies brought under imperial command to conduct specific tasks. Rome concentrated on the decisive element in pitched battles, the flexible heavy infantry
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of the legions, and on engineering and siege warfare techniques. This pattern of power is replicated by the current dominance of the American navy in many parts of the world but airpower, space surveillance and communication are now also part of American strategic power whose global reach is clearly unrivalled by any other military. The analogies with Rome and with nineteenth-century Britain also suggest the limits of military manpower and the necessity of using local auxiliary troops for imperial pacification and policing operations. Just as the US is aiming to maintain strategic superiority in key areas of smart weaponry, stealth technologies and global mobility, the Roman empire emphasised the importance of strategic domination in heavy infantry and siege weaponry.58 The British empire relied on local troops for many functions in the empire but in the process maintaining dominance in the crucial technology that ensured strategic superiority where it mattered most in the nineteenth century, on the oceans.59 The Royal Navy in its victories over Napoleon, in particular at Trafalgar, established the conditions for the success of British imperialism much of which was of an indirect nature related to trade rather than direct conquest. Simply looking at where American troops are situated outside what is now interestingly called the Homeland (national security is apparently now no longer an adequate formulation) and how they have moved in the last few decades is instructive. The scale of the American basing effort is worth emphasising as is the persistence of American military presence in various parts of the world since the 1940s.60 But it is also important to note that the facilities used by the American forces change through time and are arranged in numerous treaty and rental agreements through the different military services as well as through commercial arrangements. Looking at these impressive facilities which reproduce substantial parts of American suburbia complete with movie theatres and restaurant chains, the parallels with Roman garrison towns built on the Rhine, or on Hadrians wall in England, where the remains are strikingly visible on the landscape, are obvious. This is partly a matter of enclave geographies where outposts of metropolitan power are imposed from afar into various hinterlands as part of the globalising patterns of spatial change of our times.61 In Chalmers Johnstons terms these bases are for all practical purposes colonies.62 Less visible is the sheer scale of the logistics to keep garrison troops in residence in the far-flung reaches of empire.63 The imposition of order is related to long-term military presence. That presence literally builds the cultural logic of the garrison troops into the landscape, a permanent reminder of imperial control.64 But the extent of these facilities should not be exaggerated; the overall numbers of troops are still relatively small. The global reach of these facilities is more impressive than the actual number of troops present.65 In addition the carrier task forces that the US Navy operates effectively act 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 available to do the local policing and the ensure that the resources continue to flow from the peripheral wild zones to the metropoles, ones that might be much more frequently located in Asia in the coming decades. The coalitions of the willing that American leaders have attempted to construct whether in Kosovo, Afghanistan or Iraq clearly show the utility of auxiliaries. The difficulties that American recruiters face, given the insurgencies in Iraq, in ensuring the necessary numbers of soldiers are available in the volunteer American army emphasise the point that while the American military has a global reach it does not have the ability to keep substantial garrisons on the ground for extended periods. Neither does it have the ability to do nation building in most places; in these places it is practicing what Michael Ignatieff called Empire Lite.66 Contemporary American strategy, and the Rumsfeld innovations of emphasising mobility and firepower at a distance in particular, is clearly related to the reorganisation of its military bases around the world. Both the Quadrennial Defense Review Report of 2006, and the 2006 National Security Strategy of the United States are explicit about the need to transform the basing system from a garrison posture to facilitate the rapid surging of the newly configured expeditionary forces.67 Understood as an empire then the questions of terror in the periphery appear as arguments over the administration of the extraction of resources from the remote provinces for export to, literally in the case of the Middle East, fuel consumption in the metropoles.68 All of which suggests the continued utility of critical geopolitics in challenging these formulations, making explicit the geographies that geopolitical discourse elides in its formulations of enemies and its rationales for military action.
DISORDERLY EMPIRES AND DISCONNECTED GAPS

The specific geographies of power become clearer in contrasting two very different commentators on contemporary American power. Alain Joxe, a leading French strategic thinker, published a small volume in 2002 in English called simply Empire of Disorder.69 In it he makes the argument that American hegemony is imperial in a negative sense. In line with George Bushs phrase from the January 2003 State of the Union speech, that America exercises power without conquest, Joxe suggests that American power is uninterested in territorial control. Rather its mode of imperial rule defines the terms and conditions of trade and disciplines local regimes that do not follow policies broadly congruent with American financial and security interests. This is entirely consistent with the lack of large numbers of American troops available for permanent garrison and administration duties. Invoking Machiavelli as the epigram for the main text, and specifically the argument
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that it is in the interests of a conqueror to enrich that which is conquered, in provocative style Joxe suggests that
this power which refused to conquer the world, only seeks to fill its own pockets. We are confronted with a global power that takes infinitely varied local forms while refusing to think of local variety except in terms of temporal uniformity; and it succeeds thanks to its ability to establish norms, not to conquer. It is now trying to sustain this unconquered empire by shirking the requirements that Machiavelli outlined: the obligation to enrich the conquered peoples as much as the conquerors.70
Key to the argument about American influence here is the assumption that America is the telos of history; all states that do not measure up to the American way of doing things are understood to be underdeveloped, but given appropriate policies and support from American power, all local idiosyncrasies can be relegated to the past; development leads to one form of modernity which the appropriate norms of neo-liberalism will eventually ensure renders primitive others into clones of the modern US. Joxe goes on to discuss numerous American policies and military interventions in places from Bosnia to Columbia to make the argument that America is shirking its imperial responsibilities to ensure their enrichment and in the process effectively ensuring that disorder remains in many parts of the world. It does so by using military power and security assistance to maintain friendly elites in charge in many places, but does not usually involve itself in the detailed administration or reconstruction of satellite powers. In this at least both Afghanistan and Iraq are fairly unusual. Ironically, with an important notable exception, such thinking neatly parallels Thomas Barnetts thinking in The Pentagons New Map, and in the sequel called Blueprint for Action, which extends the case for reconstructing the American military to enforce the expansion of globalisation.71 Barnetts logic is fairly simple. Globalisation is the future, liberal economies connected into the circuits of capital and the circuits of cultural communication are peaceful states most of the time. They treat their peoples with reasonable regard for human rights and personal freedom. Dangers come from the remote parts of the world, not the globalised core of the economy, and they do so because of a lack of connectivity, enforced either by lawless remoteness or the deliberate design of local tyrants and dictators who deny their peoples the benefits and opportunities of connectivity. This leads to a formulation of the planet into a zone of danger in the form of the non-integrated gap which is external to the integrated core of the world economy. Note this is not empire, because connection into the larger globalised world is in this understanding something that everyone desires and will benefit 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 two billion people to join something better and safer in the Core. Empires involve enforcing maximal rules sets, where the leader tells the led not just what they cannot do but what they must do. This has never been the American way of war and peace, and does not reflect our system of governance. We enforce minimum rule sets, carefully ruling out only the most obviously destructive behavior. We push connectivity above all else, letting people choose what to do with those ties, that communication, and all those possibilities.72
Thus Barnett is advocating the extension of globalisation, by force if necessary on the clear geographical assumption that the wild zones violence threatens the core and as such must be civilised, for its own good of course.73 The difference between Joxes formulation and Barnett is precisely around the theme of connectivity. Joxe argues that in many case America is technically unconnected with the populations of parts of the world, but not with many of the elites. In these terms the patterns of investment and the connections with local rulers who ensure the export of key resources, and who are willing recipients of military aid and security assistance to maintain their 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. The benefit of Joxes formulation is precisely the specificity of these interconnections 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 been with those who oversee the production and export of raw materials, and petroleum in particular. While this is a long-time theme in the literature of geopolitics, it has recently been updated to emphasise the connections between the international markets for commodities and the violence of what are now called resource wars.75 This literature has made it clear that there are patterns of violence in the periphery that relate fairly directly to struggles to control resource revenues in poor economies. While the empirical generalisations have to be carefully qualified with the specifics of particular cases, it is nonetheless clear that the violence in the periphery is frequently related to the export of key commodities.76 This being the case the assumption of disconnection that is the premise of Barnetts cartographic specification of global danger is incomplete in a misleading way. Alain Joxes formulation seems especially apt in the case of petroleum where the relationships between international oil companies and local elites is indisputable, and also frequently related to persistent patterns of violence and human rights violations.77 But Barnett explicitly rejects the strategy of running an empire of disorder, or operating in empire lite mode. Instead he argues that American
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forces need to be expanded to add a large component of system administrators who can reconstruct societies in the wild zones of the gap and connect them into the circuits of the global system. Not content with intermittent policing actions, which Barnett thinks fail to weed out the dangers in the non-integrated gap, he explicitly suggests (temporary) conquest to remake societies as was done in Germany and Japan in the aftermath of the Second World War. This isnt imperialism he argues, just the bringing of freedom to the worlds impoverished. Nowhere does he suggest that this has been tried before by other European powers who did indeed claim the burden of empire was taken up on behalf of the conquered, to civilise and pacify them. The other fascinating point in Barnetts argument is that he includes both China and India within the integrated core suggesting that they too will benefit from shrinking the gap, reducing the spaces where terror, drugs and political instability grow. Even more than this Barnett thinks that both these states are far more interested in trading and growing their economies than in behaving as rivals to American power. But if American strategy doesnt deal with the zones of instability then he fears that precisely that instability may lead to violence, arms races, rivalries and once again global warfare. Formulating matters in terms of empire has the huge advantage of putting the precise geography of the United States into question. It is no longer so easy to follow the standard international relations device of specifying the United States as just another great power if its status as such is challenged by imperial formulations which greatly emphasises the primus over the inter pares. It also focuses on the functions of empire, in imposing peace but doing so in the context of an arrangement that enriches those in the metropoles. In Joxes terms of course its the failure to impose an effective peace that is the most damning indictment of pax Americana. In Thomas Barnetts formulation this clearly requires that America make a much larger effort to finally subjugate all to the rule of the global economy of the integrated core; an imperial hubris entirely consistent with the longstanding theme of American exceptionalism, of America as the best hope of humanity, a people with a manifest destiny, and a mission for the future to save humanity from itself.
EMPIRE, HEGEMONY AND RESISTANCE

But looking closely at this discussion suggests two important things about the formulations of empire and the gap. Specifically it suggests that the use of military power is now related to the fringes of what Agnew calls the marketplace society; military force has not, as Agnew argues, built the global order 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 peripheral regions, and especially those where valuable resources are to be found, or in places where instabilities are a threat to larger political arrangements. American involvement in civil wars recently also suggests a pattern of intervention that might be called imperial, but it is also important to note that American foreign policy is usually more frequently conducted by cooperative ventures, suggesting some kind of hegemony rather than dominance.79 The pattern of violence related to resources suggests not that American power is used to actively incorporate parts of the gap, but perhaps it simply operates to ensure that the essential supplies continue to flow to the manufacturing centres, without whose production activities the whole edifice of consumption culture would collapse, and with it any claims to hegemony.80 All of which suggests that some precision is needed in the geography of all this; in some places the American military acts in an imperial manner, even if strictly speaking America is not an empire in territorial terms, nor is it the direct controller of many economic and political matters outside its borders. But nonetheless the military gets used frequently. Thus to follow David Harveys rendition of the question Iraq is symptomatic of a much larger imperial ambition, one that he poses as whoever controls the Middle East controls the global oil spigot and whoever controls the global oil spigot can control the global economy, at least for the near future.81 But more so than this it is important to note that the military operations in the Middle East are also tied into a particular part of the American political economy, what Nitzan and Bichler call the weapon-dollar petrodollar complex: arms companies and logistics firms that provide both military and oil field services and security.82 But, and here the argument once again supports Agnews case that these recent attempts to assert military control are against the long-term thrust of American practice, it is fairly easy to say that this is fraction of capital that has had its day, new innovations in high tech, biotech and renewable energy systems are nonetheless delayed and thwarted by this backward looking policy of trying to maintain control over petroleum in the Middle East. In Bichler and Nitzans terms, war in the Middle East facilitates differential accumulation in this sector of the economy. Thus the struggles within the United States about climate change and the adoption of new energy strategies, are also an important part of the larger matter of resisting imperial domination in its more overt military forms in South West Asia. Focusing on the debate about empire suggests in part that the resistance to the foreign exercise of American military power in America itself is driven by a combination of political motives in addition to the struggle between fractions of capital that Nitzan and Bichler discuss. First is the revulsion at such practices at Abu Graib and Guantanamo, the application of American power in ways that do not fit well with its supposed civilised
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qualities, its claims to support human rights, etc. Supporting the house of Saud and other dictatorial rulers in the Middle East simply is not the American way. America is not supposed to be an empire after all! Second, many arguments criticise the immense waste of resources on military adventures in the Middle East, especially in the aftermath of the disaster that befell so many people when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. With deficits mounting there are compelling economic arguments against the application of the Bush doctrine. Some of this is very reminiscent of the latter days of the Reagan administration too, where budget deficits coincided with military adventures and the discussion of The Rise and Fall of Great Powers.83 Only then it was great powers, not empires. There are also technical arguments about the application of military force in both Iraq and Afghanistan which are especially damning; but it is noteworthy that until quite recently the finer points of these have rarely been engaged beyond the technical journals. Except, that is, in the eloquent statements and columns of the few experts who are familiar with the finer points of military thinking and understand the arguments within geopoliticalstrategic discourse. Most of the discussion has been about more or less troops, not about the practices of anti-insurgency violence versus counterinsurgency political strategies, although this has begun to change.84 But as Rob Walker argued back in the 1980s, such arguments, while very effective on the finer technical points, dont in and of themselves provide adequate grounds to tackle the culture of militarism and its larger geopolitical presuppositions of a hostile world in need of the application of American military power.85 These arguments still need to be linked to larger understandings of culture and political economy if political strategies to reduce violence and simultaneously produce more ecologically sensible modes of living are to be effective. Critical geopolitics can surely have a useful role to play here.86 But the critical geopolitics engagement in popular culture perhaps need some further extension too to continue to challenge imperial subjectivities. By way of a conclusion this paper offers but one suggestion for an additional contribution. Now that the overarching evil in the Cold War, the Soviet Union, has been replaced by a theological enemy, albeit one understood as a perversion of a proud religion, American rhetoric of Christian rectitude frequently sneaks into the official scripts. Orientalism, with its construction of an omniscient we with the geopolitical truth, as Gregory notes, once again pervades political discourse.87 While Tom Clancy increasingly focused on the role of special forces in his novels in the 1990s, and the necessity for undercover violence to police matters of political order internationally, he has most recently extended this line of argument in The Teeth of the Tiger (2003) to examine the logic for American assassination squads operating entirely beyond any state oversight.88 Clancys vision of the rightness of the cause justifying the extrajudicial murder of those whom
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well-meaning Americans judge to be terrorists, links up with the parallel arguments 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 long engaged with the military dimensions of geopolitics. American exceptionalism is given divine sanction where political violence in America and Israels supposed interest meets prophesies predicting the end of the world.89 Now this literature has met up with the technothriller genre to provide chilling justifications for American Christians to kill with impunity because the rules of diplomacy or morality do not apply to the saved. Joel Rosenbergs best-selling geopolitical technothriller of end times The Ezekiel Option is exemplary.90 Here once again American exceptionalism, this time with the authority implicit in divine blessing, grants a license to kill Others, and if this happens to precipitate the extreme violence of end times, divine intervention and the rapture of the faithful, so much the better. Which leads back again to the geographical parallels with Rome and the question the religious basis of the legitimating discourses of the Bush administration.91 The parallels are beginning to be discussed by theologians interested in Christianity, and Pauline versions thereof, in terms of resistance to imperial Rome with its god-cult of Caesar and its practices of invoking imperial justice as part of pax Romana. The links between Roman forms of security and the appropriation by Constantine of many Christian themes, into what much later became doctrines of state sovereignty and just war theories, are part of this intellectual rethinking.92 The more radical interpretations of Christianity as forms of opposition to the imposition of Roman rule, or Jesus of Nazareth as a proponent of non-violent resistance to the oppression and impoverishment of the poor in these imperial arrangements, are once again being discussed as a counter to the contemporary invocation of Christianity to justify military intervention in Iraq and elsewhere. If America is the new Rome, rather than the new Jerusalem, the potential for very different interpretations of American foreign policy arises where Washington is seen as the oppressor rather than the vehicle of salvation.93 It all depends on the geographical analogy invoked. All of which suggests the potential for considerable contestation of the terms of contemporary hegemony precisely where secular social scientists might be most reluctant to look. But drawing the explicit parallels between the two empires opens up precisely this political possibility. These themes are now part of political discussion, and for those who remember the history of religious wars in Europe, which are not unrelated to the founding of the American states in the first place, this may be a very worrisome thought. But challenges to hegemony are about contesting the taken for granted assumptions about the context within which geopolitical language is shaped; and if the assumption that America is a secular society within which political debate can only be a matter of eighteenth-century liberal and
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scientific categories mapped onto nineteenth-century imperial ambition, is relaxed, then other terrains of discussion may yet become available in the disputation 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. Gearid 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 Geography of 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 to Diplomats (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 Bushs War Cabinet (New York: Viking 2004); Stefan Halper and Jonathon Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004); Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge 2004). 8. See for instance the breadth of contributions in Gearid Tuathail and Simon Dalby (eds.), Rethinking Geopolitics (London: Routledge, 1998); Klaus Dodds and David Atkinson (eds.), Geopolitical Traditions: 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. 338349. 10. John Agnew, Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 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. 439455. 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, Strategies, and Empire in the Global War on Terror, Geopolitics 12/4 (2007) pp. 586606. 14. On the first decade see Klaus Dodds, Political Geography III: Critical Geopolitics after Ten Years, Progress in Human Geography 25/3 (2001) pp. 469484. 15. R. B. J. Walker, Contemporary Militarism and the Discourse of Dissent, Alternatives 9/3 (Winter 19831984) pp. 303322, reprinted in R. B. J. Walker (ed.), Culture, Ideology, and World Order (Boulder: Westview 1984) pp. 302322. 16. Tuathail, The Language and Nature of the New Geopolitics (note 4) p. 83 17. Ibid., p. 84, citing Halford J. Mackinder, The Geographical Pivot of History, The Geographical Journal 23 (1904). 18. Gearid Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996). 19. Gearid Tuathail, Geopolitical Structures and Cultures: Towards Conceptual Clarity in the Critical Study of Geopolitics, in Lasha Tchantouridze (ed.), Geopolitics: Global Problems and Regional Concerns (Winnipeg: Centre for Defence and Security Studies 2004) pp. 75102; Gearid Tuathail, General Introduction: Thinking Critically about Geopolitics, in Gearid Tuathail, Simon Dalby, and Paul Routledge (eds.), The Geopolitics Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge 2006) pp. 114; See also Simon Dalby, Geopolitics and Global Security: Culture, Identity and the Pogo Syndrome,
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in Gearid Tuathail and Simon Dalby (eds.), Rethinking Geopolitics (London: Routledge 1998) pp. 295313. 20. Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics (note 18); J. Sharp, Condensing the Cold War: Readers Digest and American Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2000); J. Sharp, Remasculinizing Geo-Politics? Comments on Gearid Tuathails Critical Geopolitics, Political Geography 19/3 (2000) pp. 361364; M. Sparke, Graphing the Geo in Geo-Political: Critical Geopolitics and the Revisioning of Responsibility, Political Geography 19/3 (2000) pp. 373380; G. Tuathail, Dis/placing the Geo-Politics Which One Cannot Not Want, Political Geography 19/3 (2000) pp. 385396; G. Tuathail, Condensing Critical Geopolitics: Reflections on Joanne Sharps Condensing the Cold War: Readers Digest and American Identity, Geopolitics 8/2 (2003) pp. 159165; J. Sharp, Indigestible Geopolitics: The Many Readings of the Digest, Geopolitics 8/2 (2003) pp. 197206. 21. James Der Derian and M. J. Shapiro (eds.), International/Intertextual Relations: Post Modern Readings of World Politics (Toronto: Lexington Books 1989); David Campbell, Writing Security: United States 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: Cambridge University Press 1993). 22. Gearid Tuathail and John Agnew, Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical Geopolitical Reasoning in American Foreign Policy, Political Geography 11/2 (1992) pp. 190204. 23. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage 1979). 24. Simon Dalby, Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union as Other, Alternatives: Social Transformation and Humane Governance 13/4 (1988) pp. 415442; Simon Dalby, Creating the Second Cold War: 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. 279300, at 279. 27. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History, The National Interest 16 (1989) pp. 318; Edward Luttwak, From Geopolitics to Geo-Economics: Logic of Conflict, Grammar of Commerce, The National Interest 20 (1990) pp. 1723; Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, Foreign Affairs 72 (1993) pp. 2249. 28. J. OLoughlin and H. Heske, From Geopolitik to Geopolitique: Converting a Discipline for War to a Discipline for Peace, in N. Kliot and S. Waterman (eds.), The Political Geography of War and Peace (London: Pinter 1991) pp. 3759. 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. 593614. 31. T. L. Deibel, Strategies Before Containment: Patterns of the Future, International Security 16/ 4 (1992) pp. 79108. 32. C. Krauthammer, The Unipolar Moment, in G. Allison and G. F. Treverton (eds.), Rethinking Americas Security: Beyond the Cold War to a New World Order (New York: Norton 1992) pp. 295306. 33. Ken Booth (ed.), New Thinking About Strategy and International Security (London: Harper and Collins 1991); M. T. Klare and D. C. Thomas (eds.), World Security: Trends and Challenges at Centurys End (New York: St. Martins 1991). 34. J. Agnew and S. Corbridge, The New Geopolitics: The Dynamics of Geopolitical Disorder, in R. J. Johnston and P. J. Taylor (eds.), A World in Crisis? Geographical Perspectives (London: Basil Blackwell 1989). 35. Gearid Tuathail, Japan as Threat: Geo-Economic Discourses on the U.S. Japan Relationship in U.S. Civil Society, 19871991, in C. Williams (ed.), The Political Geography of the New World Order (London: Belhaven 1993) pp. 181209. 36. Stephen van Evera, Why Europe Matters, Why the Third World Doesnt: American Grand Strategy after the Cold War, Journal of Strategic Studies 13/2 (1990) pp. 151. 37. V. M. Hudson, R. E. Ford, D. Pack with E. R. Giordano, Why the Third World Matters, Why Europe Probably Wont: The Geoeconomics of Circumscribed Engagement, Journal of Strategic Studies 14/3 (1991) pp. 255298. 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
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(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: University of California Press 1993). 41. Department of Defense, Defense Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years 19941999, (Washington: Department of Defense 1992). The history of these themes and their subsequent re-emergence in the Bush doctrine is recounted in Simon Dalby, The Geopolitical and Strategic Dimensions 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. 3349. 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 Affairs 75/1 (1996) pp. 3335; Robert Chase, Emily Hill, and Paul Kennedy (eds.), The Pivotal States: A New Framework for U.S. Policy in the Developing World (New York: Norton 1999); Daniel Esty et al., State Failure Task Force Report: Phase II Findings, Woodrow Wilson Center Environmental Change and Security Project Report 5 (1999) pp. 4972. 46. Gearid Tuathail and T. W. Luke, Present at the (Dis)integration: Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization in the New Wor(l)d Order, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84/3 (1994) pp. 381398. 47. William Kristol and Robert Kagan, Toward a neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs 75/4 (1996) pp. 1832. 48. Rebuilding Americas 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 American Foreign and Defense Policy (San Francisco: Encounter Books 2000). 50. Niall Ferguson, Empire (New York: Basic 2003); Andrew Bacevich, American Empire (Harvard University Press 2002); Chalmers Johnston, Sorrows of Empire (New York: Holt 2004). 51. M. T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of Americas Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (New York: Metropolitan Books 2004); Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: 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. 160. 54. Mary Kaldor, The Imaginary War: Understanding East-West Conflict (Oxford: Blackwell 1990). 55. Thomas P. M. Barnett, The Pentagons New Map, Esquire (March 2003) pp. 174179, available at <www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets/ThePentagonsNewMap.htm>. 56. The theme of Robert Fisks 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, 19502003 (Washington: Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis Report #0411, 2004), available at <http://www.heritage.org/Research/ NationalSecurity/cda0411.cfm>. 61. See Tim Bunnell, Hamzah Muzaini, and James Sidaway, Global City Frontiers: Singapores Hinterland and the Contested Socio-political Geographies of Bintan, Indonesia, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30/1 (2006) pp. 322. 62. Chalmers Johnston, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Metropolitan 2007) 63. See William Langewiesche, Peace is Hell, Atlantic Monthly (Oct. 2001) pp. 5180.
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64. Mark Gillem, America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2007). 65. Chalmers Johnston, Americas Empire of Bases, TomDispatch.com (15 Jan. 2004). See also U.S. Military Bases and Empire, Monthly Review 53/10 (2002) pp. 114. 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 White House, Feb. 2006); Quadrennial Defense Review (note 57). 68. See Simon Dalby, Geopolitics after the Cold War: Rethinking the Theme of Empire, in Lasha Tchantouridze (ed.), Geopolitics: Global Problems and Regional Concerns (Winnipeg: Centre for Defence and Security Studies 2004) pp. 103119. 69. Alain Joxe, Empire of Disorder (New York: Semiotexte 2002). 70. Ibid., p. 81. 71. Barnett, The Pentagons New Map (note 55); Thomas P. M. Barnett, Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating (New York: Putnams 2005). 72. Barnett, The Pentagons New Map (note 55) p. 355. 73. For a detailed critique see Simon Dalby, The Pentagons 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. 295308. 74. See Susan Roberts, Anna Secor, and Matthew Sparke, Neoliberal Geopolitics, Antipode 35. (2003) pp. 886897. 75. Philippe le Billon, The Geopolitical Economy of Resource Wars, Geopolitics 9/1 (2004) pp. 128. 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. 195216. 78. Agnew, Hegemony (note 10). 79. John OLoughlin, 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. 85110. 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 and the 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. 255327. 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 Hitchcocks Premillennial Geopolitics, Geopolitics 11 (2006) pp. 231255. More generally on the importance of religion in scripting current foreign policy see Nick Megoran, God On Our Side? The Church of England and the Geopolitics of Mourning 9/11, Geopolitics 11 (2006) pp. 561579. 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. 2024.

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Geopolitics, 13:413436, 2008 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 online DOI:

SPECIAL SECTION: CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS AFTER TWENTY YEARS