The Second Phase of American Geopolitics

I began this series with discussions of geopolitics and philosophy. I think it is useful now to attempt to show the practical impact of geography on politics and to continue using geography to explain the evolution of the United States. Last week, I showed how geography shaped America’s founding, both in terms of its foreign relations and its internal dynamics. A long coast and poor internal communications made the United States vulnerable to invasion from the sea. The Appalachians helped create two radically different social and economic systems, one based on plantations and slavery, the other based on small farms, crafts and finance that did not require nor support slavery. (Several readers have commented that slavery was not illegal in the North, which is true. But neither was it viable on the scale of the South.) I tried to explain the United States’ strategic problem facing the United States, which crystallized in the War of 1812, and the country’s social and economic divide, which exploded into the Civil War. Both wars obviously had other causes, but both were driven by geography. It was the Appalachians that had protected the Colonies from the French and Indian alliance, but it was now […]