Monsoon: the Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power.

• Author: Sempa, Francis P.
• Position: Book review

Robert D. Kaplan, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, New York: Random House, 2010, ISBN: 978-1-4000-6746-6, 367 pp. $28.00

Global geopolitical analysis had a rocky 20th century. In the first decade of that century, the British geographer Halford Mackinder and the American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote brilliant and prescient essays about the structure of world politics and the fundamental factors, most notably geography, that shaped international relations. Mahan's reputation suffered, however, from the revelation that Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany imbibed his writings during its quest to wrestle command of the seas from Great Britain; thereby, it was claimed, fueling a naval arms race that led to the cataclysm of the First World War. Mackinder's reputation and geopolitical conceptions likewise suffered from their subsequent association in the 1920s and 1930s with the German school of Geopolitik which, it was claimed, provided the intellectual justification for Nazi expansion, thereby producing the even greater cataclysm of the Second World War.

World War II and the early Cold War period revived interest in geopolitics, but for many observers, strategists, and statesmen, the advent of nuclear weapons and intercontinental delivery systems rendered geopolitics irrelevant. When events demonstrated that nuclear weapons did not mean the end of war or the struggle for power and hegemony, geopolitical analysis returned and scholars and strategists dared to "think the unthinkable," namely that a nuclear war could be fought and won.

Geopolitics suffered again in the 1960s and early 1970s, when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his successors surrendered U.S. nuclear superiority in deference to McNamara's theory of "mutually assured destruction" (MAD), the Vietnam debacle seemingly undermined the utility and morality of "power politics" on the international stage, and the pursuit of an imaginary detente with the Soviet Union fostered the impression that we no longer had an enemy to fear.

It took the loss of U.S. strategic superiority, a Soviet geopolitical offensive in the Third World, and the humiliating defeats suffered by the U.S. under the Carter administration (an administration that openly eschewed geopolitics in favor of "human rights") to bring about a resurgence in geopolitics in the late 1970s and 1980s.

The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the pacification of Europe, and the...